Day 10

Woke up at 1am to watch the Superbowl. Watched all of the 2nd quarter, fell asleep at half time but woke up in time to watch the second half of the 3rd and all of the 4th. Great game, glad the Saints won! Back to sleep at around 3.45am the up at 7am for work. Definitely worth it.

[Note: from now on I’m going to use Italics to indicate work related stuff so it’s easier to skip over]

Monday at work started with the usual weekly team meeting. One on-call issue to review –unexpected LAN outage at Volvo IT data centre. Niklas gave a recap on the two Gartner seminars he attended last week. One on cloud computing (eg. our PIP and SEG services from ATT) and the future of Virtualisation (multiple solutions, hardware landscape changing to component per blade; impact is single vendor for all components, SAN, blades etc). Also discussed ITIL processes and SSC EMEA Wiki with Guido (from Netherlands) and Jens (back from leave).

Weekly catch up with AT&T, then spent a few hours with Guido and Magnus going through some more AD and Exchange stuff.

Lunch consisted of omelette with a creamy mushroom sauce. Given that it came out of a pre-prepared box it was actually quite good.

Flew to Stockholm from a little airport north of Helsingborg. Our plane was a twin propeller, the first plane that I’ve had to crouch while walking down the aisle to stop from hitting my head. There was one row of two seats and one row of single seats separated by the aisle. Flight was only 45 minutes and the plane was only half full, so anything bigger would have been a waste I suppose.

Made it to Stockholm safely. Checked in at the hotel then down to a traditional Swedish Irish sports bar for dinner. Had a great cheese burger with chipotle BBQ sauce and fries, washed down with a pint of Kilkenny. From there headed to the Stockholm Ice Bar – yep the bar made completely out of ice (well almost, the roof and floor were not ice). Had the customary Absolut vodka cocktail in an ‘ice glass’ and took some photos – they’ll have to wait until I get back to Landskrona since I forgot to bring the cable for my camera.

On the way back to the hotel we stopped in at the Stockholm casino and played some blackjack. I started off with two 'blackjacks' in a row and should have quit while I was ahead.  Ended up losing SEK 450 (about $70) before heading back to the room. It’s now 11pm and time for bed.