If you send me an email during the rest of February, you are highly unlikely to get an answer. However, I promise not to spam you with an “Out of office” auto reply. I dislike receiving those messages, as they seemingly have little correlation with when the person actually will reply to the email.

My excuse for not responding is that I won’t be around my laptop and that connectivity is bad in rural Tanzania anyway. I will make an attempt at conquering Kilimanjaro, one of the Seven Summits, and to twitter while doing it — to the extent there is sufficient SMS coverage, blood sugar and my fingers aren’t numb.

I also hope to take some pics, which will illustrate a blog hopefully titled “Over 14% of the Seven Summits …

Salle (MySQL EMEA Support Leader) just told me over IRC: “One has to be crazy to do the job Kaj is doing :)”. While it may not be mandatory, it does help. It also helps me in my free time, where I just climbed Mt Blanc with my fourteen year old son.

Die-hard marathoners or mountaineers I recommend to scroll towards the bottom. There, I have an account of the exact times and heights of ascent, how to survive Refuge Gouter etc. But let’s start from the beginning, in the spirit of the http://xkcd.com/77/ web comic “bored with the Internet”.

It all starts with a leisurely walk up the Gran Paradiso, 4061 m.

The usual sight is the heels of my son.

A MySQL cap protects me against excessive Sun.

It also helps when it’s snowy.

Valley panorama.

Specifically this view, of my son’s heels, was next to mandatory as I was …

On Saturday, I spent a couple of hours running with Alexander Stubb. No, Alex is not our newest recruit to the MySQL Support Team, he’s the Foreign Minister of Finland (the guy in the yellow T-shirt below).

But let me rewind to the beginning. I have been increasing my running to over 1200 km a year, and when I heard that the Münchner Stadtlauf half-marathon doesn’t crash with Finnish midsummer (something never to be missed), I registered for it and finished it in 1:45:58. And I calculated I would have a chance at going below four hours at a …

I hadn’t run a race since 2003, but I have improved upon my amount of running and thought it would be good to see whether it would show in my race time. It did!

Thumbs up after a half marathon finished in record time

“From a fat bastard to a running dynamo” was what a fellow member of the MySQL Running Club SMSed me when I had proudly announced my personal record of 1:46:05 (as measured “on the safe side” by my own watch; the organisers timed me at 01:45:58) on the Münchner Stadtlauf half marathon in Munich today.

Full of energy before the race

While I may never have fully qualified for the attribute “fat”, I certainly was very bad at sports at school. My average speed …

MySQLers share many hobbies. One of them is running. After the holiday season, I allowed myself to do some statistics on last year’s running, and add some personal reflections, only marginally related to work and MySQL.

Running is often a social event at MySQL, where a sizable portion of my 108 runs last year were with other MySQLers: Six times with Zack Urlocker (EVP Products), six times with Patrik Backman (Dir SW Eng), twice each with Larry Stefonic (SVP APAC) and Clint Smith (Legal Counsel), and once each with Kristofer Pettersson (SW Eng), Saskia Schweitzer (Training coordinator), Mikael Ronstr?m (Principal Engineer/Senior MySQL Architect), and Nicolas Pujol (Sr Director, Alliances & Channels). Running can even be social time spent with non-runners (not just on the phone), as three of my runs were with MySQLers on …