crafterm's weblog

Dresden!

Arrived this morning back in Frankfurt from another trip to Dresden, in the far east of Germany. This time Mum was with me, and we travelled from Auerstedt to Dresden on friday after Christmas, and spent the weekend touring Dresden, Meissen, and surroundings!

Rothenburg

Just arrived back from Rothenburg, in southern Germany, near Wuerzburg/Steinach! Rothenburg is where the famous Christmas shop Kaethe Wohlfahrt is with their Christmas Museum. Rothenburg is really beautiful, the old part of the city is enclosed by walls from the outside, with many little cobblestone streets and olden style German buildings inside.

The Kaethe Wohlfahrt shop was incredible, almost like the Tardis, with so many rooms and alleyways inside the shop itself, littered with Christmas decorations, presents and Nutcracker men! :)

Upcoming Travel!

In January I'll be starting my yearly return trip back to Australia again! This time I'll be flying back to Melbourne from Frankfurt via Cancun, Mexico.

I'm looking forward to the Carribean and Australasian warmth already! :) In Australia there's been days of 40 degree heat already!

I'll be staying in Melbourne for about 3.5 weeks once I arrive, and then will take some time off to spend with my family in Adelaide, hopefully touring all the nearby surfing beaches! :)

I'll also be in Australia for "Australia Day" which always promises to be a great long weekend too! Currently thinking about heading up to Airlie Beach again for some time in the Whitsunday's :)

Christmas is coming!

Christmas is only a few more sleeps away, before Santa will start his journey delivering presents around the world! :)

This year I'll be spending Christmas in a small village in eastern Germany called Auerstedt, where my girlfriend's parent's live and grew up.

This year will be particularly special as my Mum is over from Australia to have her first snow filled European Christmas, instead of having a 40 degree Australian one.

Wishing everyone out there a great Christmas break and New Years celebrations! :)

Steiff!

Yesterday Mum and I travelled from Frankfurt down to Giengen to visit the Steiff factory and museum. Steiff is a brand of Teddy Bears that are made in Germany and collected avidly throughout the world. Many of the bears are available as limited editions only and often attract value over time.

Aside from all that they also look cute :)

We spent several hours in Giengen (near Ulm, 3 hours train ride from Frankfurt) looking at the factory, museum and local shops, and at the end of the day we were 3 with a Stieff British Collectors 2003 edition Bear accompanying us on our way home :)

Groovy!

A new scripting language Groovy has just been released from Codehaus.org. It supports several nice features like closures, autoboxing, etc, and compiles down to normal Java bytecodes allowing it to easily interoperate with existing Java code.

Here's some example code from the Groovy website:

class Foo {
  doSomething() {
    data = ["name": "James", "location": "London"]
    for (e in data) {
      println("property ${e.key} is ${e.value}")
    }
  }
  
  closureExample(collection) {
    collection.each { println("value ${it}") }
  }
  
  static void main(args) {
    values = [1, 2, 3, "abc"]
    closureExample(values)
  }
}

Will have to take a deeper look into this, so far it looks quite cool! :)

Australian Capital Territory to adopt Open Source Software!

The Australian Capitol Territory (the state where Canberra and the Australian Federal Government are) is about to pass a bill stating that they "should, as far as practicable, consider the use of open source software when procuring computer software". More details here.

Stocks and Australia!

The Australian Reserve Bank raised interest rates by 0.25% for the second time in as many months. It's been interesting to watch the stock market's financial sector over this time.

The first raise caused many Australian bank stocks to decrease in value as (according to analysts) people thought the raise would slow down the high amount of loans being made in Australia at the moment due to the increased property market. I only read one article where an analyst actually pointed out that banks make more money in an increased interest rate environment than a low one.

The second raise actually caused the bank stocks to rally as (again according to analysts) people thought it would be the last raise till February next year and had hopes the lending spree would continue. Some bank stocks rose over a dollar in a single days trading!

To quote Warren Buffet - "No one knows exactly what the market will do" :)

Visitor coming!

Tomorrow morning at 5.15am, my Mum should be stepping out of QF5, all the way from Adelaide, in to Frankfurt aiport. She's coming over for a 4 week holiday in Europe, over Christmas as well which should be great.

We've already planned a few trips to do while she's here including visiting the various Christmas markets in Germany, and seeing some of the sights like Paris, Cologne, etc.

This will also be the first time my Mum has seen snow - Europeans find this amazing, but for us Australians snow is something we don't have a lot of :)

The flight is about 25 hours (Adelaide -> Melbourne -> Singapore -> Frankfurt) so I'm sure she'll be quite tired when she arrives - I think I'll probably be just as tired from getting up so early :)

In the meantime, I have to resist the urge to go out tonight to our favourite thursday night club, Unity :)

Update: Mum arrived safely at 5.47am this morning. I'm definitely tired now after getting up at 4.30am (and going to sleep last night at 1am!). It was amazing actually - Frankfurt airport was as busy as it is during the day at 5am!.. it's a mini-city :)