Sometimes perfection has to take a holiday

After an eventfull early summer, I’ll be gone for the rest of August on yet another vacation.

To put it in a nutshell:

- I bought myself a new camera (a Nikon D90 with a zoom lens that I forgot, but something like 18-108 mm)

- We’ll go to Italy tomorrow. By train (22 hours, yay!), to Lago Maggiore, or rather some village about 10 km from the lakeshore, in the Alps, with no bus connection and no supermarket, but hopefully a lot of beautiful countryside.

- Last weekend, we were at the Wacken Open Air, and – looking back – it was not bad at all.

- Some time before that, we went to the With Full Force festival, which had the better music (compared toWacken), but who cares about music anyway :D

More hopefully after Italy.

Oh so many wonderful things are happening here. Unfortunately, one of these things is called “f***ing lots of work”, so just a short overview (which probably will be longer than anything I’d write if I tried to write a long post):

• I had a birthday picknick. It was rather successful and yummy, there were no accidents and during the preparation I screamed only at a very few (handpicked) people. Some pictures you can see here.
• I got one thing for my birthday which I always wanted and never dared buy (it being so beautiful and so expensive) – a cubistic sugar box, designed by Pavel Janák.
• I spent the aftermath of my birthday with reading one the book sets I got (I won’t say which, because even I have to admit that it is really big – but very entertaining and relaxing – crap). But still, nine books in one week is not too bad.
• I spent another few days with my favorite co-workers at my favorite software testing site.
• I – acutally quite involuntarily – installed Windows 7 yesterday (you click the wrong button once, and there you go…)
• I bought some nice flowers for the balcony, and got some nice flowers for free for the windows facing West in our flat from the Prague City Council (some program to make Prague more beautiful, I suppose, but why only the windows facing the street, not the ones facing the rail tracks, I have no idea).
• Currently, I’m translating a very interesting project – subtitles for a movie. The interesting part of this is the fact that the movie is Russian, the “original subtitles” (that I’m translating into German) are Czech, and there is a rumor that they have been translated from the English subtitles for the movie. Unfortunately, those English subtitles have gone missing, so I am watching the movie in Russian, with the Czech subtitles (that are not timed and therefore cannot be used in the player) in a Word document, and guessing what belongs where. Not to mention that the movie is awfully depressing (I wonder if there are Russian comedies?), as is the weather here.
• My knee (I don’t know if I mentioned this here, but I had a little skiing accident back in March) is getting better, but it’s still not 100% fit :(
• I found a very useful little program/website which makes installing new systems so much easier (with the downloading issues I’m trying to fix, I wouldn’t call it faster, but you don’t have to sit in front of your computer for the installation, which is a good thing): www.ninite.com

After two weeks of  9 to 5 work (or rather, 8 to 6, because someone forgot that something like Easter exists), I really don’t know how people can do this kind of thing almost everyday of their live.  But at least the people there were nice, apart from the weird Brazilian one.

And after having survived this, I hope I will be able to blog some more, again. And I really don’t understand how someone can have Facebook, Twitter, Xing or LinkedIn, a blog and who knows what at the same time AND be active in all of them, AND have a life.

Oh, and I stumbled upon this (girl’s only).

I’m back in Prague, and managed to hurt my knee in a very unnice way, so I won’t be able to go climbing for the next two weeks :(

But France (and its mountains) are beautiful!

Praha z Letné

Originally uploaded by uruque

I’m kind of trying to figure out how to connect my flickr account to my blog in a way that makes sense, so enjoy this picture, there might be more coming :)

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Ich habe es (nach drei Wochen – gefühlten drei Monaten) endlich geschafft, ein paar neue Fotos auf Flickr hochzuladen, und irgendwann werde ich sicher auch mal lernen, wie man Bilder aus dem Fotostrom hier bei WordPress einfügt.

After about three weeks (felt three months), I finally managed to upload some new pictures on Flickr (why’s everybody using Picasa anyway???), and at one point in the future I might even learn how to integrate Flickr’s photostream into WordPress.

Dorts gibts ein paar mittelmäßige Fotos von einem Ausflug in die frisch zugeschneite Stromovka, von der Nachweihnachtsfeier von Magda & Martin in Tisnov und Umgebung und ein Ausflug ins winterliche Prag.

There, you’ll find some medium quality pictures of a trip to Stromovka park under a fresh, nice and clean snow coating, the trip to MaMaJaLu (Tisnov and surroundings) and a trip through winterly Prague.

Im Zuge des letztgenannten Ausflugs waren wir auch endlich im Teehaus U zlatého kohouta, das sehr nett ist und – praktisch im Winter – über einen offenen Kamin verfügt. Der Tee war auch gut, das Teegebäck auch, allerdings war die Bedienung etwas komisch.

In the course of this last mentioned trip, we also finally managed to pay a visit to the tearoom U zlatého kohouta, which is very neat and, very useful and cosy in winter, got a open fireplace in one of its rooms.

The last week was a bit annoying – I learned that I have to become a VAT payer, which, even though it is normal in the rest of Europe, is a catastrophe in the Czech Republic. I think it is quite telling that most people who have to become VAT payers according to the new Czech VAT law don’t actually know about it.  It is also interesting that – and I really don’t pretend that I understand what I am writing – you have to become a VAT payer if you send an invoice to someone in another EU country who is in this country a VAT payer (i.e. basically everyone), but – because logic is not on our side – you don’t invoice the VAT, because it is an EU-international transaction and therefore you just don’t.
Anyway, before I realized this, I had a little fun in Moravia – I borrowed Ondrasek’s snowshoes and went on a little walk with Martin (see here).

And I also found out that Magda’s cousin has a daughter that looks like the Dalai Lama :)

Today it became clear what exactly this police tape meant… So I suggest you don’t park in our street.