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The New World

Leon Meijer — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:29:16 GMT

CeBIT 2008 in Hannover, a photo overview

Leon Meijer — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:30:14 GMT

Yesterday I went together with Marvin to Hannover. The 362 kilometer drive to the CeBIT - world's largest IT and telecom fair in the world - was a nice way to test my new Peugeot 308 car ;-). This year was the 4th time I went to the CeBIT, but this time it was different then before. Less exhibitors. From 6.262 exhibitors in 2006, this year the number was only 3.344. I couldn't find many big companies and (huge) hall 1 was even closed.

This blog post is a photo overview of the photos I took during the day.

My street on Sunday at 6.45am in the morning. Some party guys blocked the road.

Some random pictures

The Fed Ex has their own booth for mailing and receiving packages. Cool!

Me at the Belkin booth

As always, you can't miss the Asians. Many companies are from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan. All looking for new partnerships, local dealer contracts and selling their cheap ass (low quality) products.

This year lots of Asian companies closed their booth early. Some of them even tried to sell their products for very low prices. I bought a 24-port Gigabit switch rackmountable (80 euro with free 1GB NIC) from TP-LINK and Wireless-N PCI-Card (20 euro). TP-Link is not so famous here, but it's the number 1 networking brand in China.

For a while I tried to become a Taiwanese sales guy... but without success...

The only really interesting company this year was Tobii. Tobii is world leader in eye-tracking solutions. Their solution is very cool. A sensor detects exactly where your eyes are looking at. Their customers are mainly marketing researchers and disabled people, but they hope their technology will be integrated in consumers products in the future.

Not sure whether I go or not the next year. I didn't see so much innovation and many products are reviewed and shown on internet sites.

LEAP 2008

Leon Meijer — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:15:31 GMT

Tomorrow morning I will travel for the second time to Redmond, Washington, USA. This time will be for LEAP (Lead Enterprise Architect Program), an initiative of Microsoft Netherlands. The LEAP program consists of 5 master classes (in Barneveld, Netherlands) and a week in Redmond to attend sessions at the Microsoft campus.

My monday is free so I think I will do some shopping

KPN bids to buy Getronics

Leon Meijer — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:38:25 GMT

The dutch telecom company KPN has made a €6.25 a share cash offer to take over the IT services group Getronics. Thats 766 million euros ($1.1 billion).

And today KPN announched that they already bought 10 percent of the shares.

Actually, the colors green (KPN), blue (Getronics) and pink (PinkRoccade) look beautiful together! :-)

VMWare is spamming me

Leon Meijer — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 11:29:54 GMT

Warning: Don't give VMWare your e-mail address!

From time to time I analyse the SPAM messages that pass my spam filter and get delivered into my inbox. I use a custom email address for each and every company. So microsoft@..... for Microsoft, facebook@.... for Facebook and.... vmware@... for VMWare.

I noticed that I get spam messages on the vmware-address on a daily basis! I'm pretty pissed off that such a big company is selling e-mail addresses to spammers.

This year's holiday: Germany, Czech and Switzerland

Leon Meijer — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 04:00:33 GMT

Last week I planned this year's holiday with a couple of friends. It became a small tradition that Dave and I go to Solothurn in Switzerland for a swim in the Aare-river. This year, Kevin (and maybe Lennert) join us.

The trip starts in Utrecht, Netherlands. We drive by car to Prague in Czech. We're going to stay there for a couple of days. From Prague we go south towards Switzerland, but we make a stop in Munich (München), Germany. I think the swimming event in Solothurn will be held in the weekend of Augstus 10. After this weekend, we drive north and stop in Cochem, Germany. Kevin's parents told us that this is a very interesting place to go. And from Cochem, we go back home.

Check out my WAYN profile ("Where Are You Now") for the latest updates.

Now officially MCTS BizTalk certified

Leon Meijer — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:45:59 GMT

Today I passed for the Microsoft 70-235 exam (TS: Developing Business Process and Integration Solutions Using BizTalk Server 2006) with a score of 1000 (maximum score). With 6 colleagues I attended an in-company course at Twice IT Training in Driebergen. And with a good result, we all succeeded in certification.

Now weekend, Sensation, here I come :-D

To the Ardennes this weekend!

Leon Meijer — Fri, 25 May 2007 14:14:05 GMT

Because of Pentecost weekend (pinksteren in dutch), the monday is a free day for most people. I go to the Ardennes with 3 friends. Its not exactly sure where we will go, but I think we go to Houffalize, a Belgium city in the province of Luxembourg. From my town in The Netherlands, its a 3 hour trip by car.

It will be an active holiday: Mountain biking, maybe Canoe, walking etc. We will sleep in tents on a scouting campsite. Oh and before I forget it... the idea is to visit the La Chouffe beer brewery.

Have a great weekend, I'll be back on monday!

Bought 1 TB of extra storage capacity

Leon Meijer — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:47:03 GMT

Today I bought 1 TB of extra storage for my software development projects. More and more software is being developed using virtual machines (VMware and Virtual PC). For example, the Orcas beta 1 release takes up to 17 GB of storage! So, I definitly needed more storage capacity.

The local Mycom store had a nice deal for me. Two external Western Digital drives of 500GB each for a combined price of 258 euro. I just plugged them in and now my laptop has 1.1TB of hard disk capacity .

Visited countries

Leon Meijer — Sun, 06 May 2007 21:56:40 GMT

With the 'Visited Countries' site you can create your own worldmap of visited countries. This is how my worldmap looks like:

Netherlands (born and live here)
Belgium (uhm 5x?)
Luxembourg (4x, only for fuel, its cheaper there)
Germany (4x)
UK (2x)
France (4x)
Spain (2x)
Turkey (3x)
Austria (1x)
Switserland (2x)
India (1x)