I’ll be in Hong Kong for the upcoming OpenStack Summit Nov 5-8. I’d be thrilled to talk database things with others present, especially around Trove DBaaS (DataBase as a Service) and high availability MySQL for OpenStack deployments.

I was last in Hong Kong in 2010 when I worked for Rackspace. The closest office to me was in Hong Kong so that’s where I did my HR onboarding training. I remember telling friends on the Sunday night before leaving for Hong Kong that I may be able to make dinner later in the week purely depending on if somebody got back to me on if I was going to Hong Kong that week. I was, and I went. I took some photos while there.

Walking from the hotel where we were staying to the Rackspace office could be done pretty much entirely through buildings without going outside. There were bits of art around too, which is just kind of awesome – I’m …

Travelling to Hongkong and Taipei has made such an impression on me, that I couldn’t help but add two new blogs to my homepage kaj.arno.fi:

• http://blogs.arno.fi/guanxi/ is (or pretends to be) in Simplified Chinese, written on the Chinese mainland
• http://blogs.arno.fi/yilingyi/ is (or pretends to be) in Traditional Chinese, written here in Taiwan

Guanxi means “relations”, as in “Community Relations”. It’s also a very common word describing how to get things done in China. It even has its own English language Wikipedia entry.

Yi-ling-yi means one-oh-one, as in Taipei 101. …

Hej hej from Stockholm where I arrived about two weeks ago for a fun-filled two four six weeks of meetings and face-to-face contact with the MySQL Cluster developers. And the chance to check things out when it’s not 2°C and raining, all the time, as it was when I was here in November and December of 2005. (This week, it’s 12°C and kind of misty.)

The last five or six weeks have been pretty hectic, and this evening (it’s just after 10 PM local time as I write this) represents the first time in that span that I’ve actually had time that’s not been planned out for me in one way or another. At the end of April, I moved out of my place in Brisbane and stuffed all my gear into storage in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, where I rented a post office box that now constitutes my sole legal address for the duration.

That last sentence is actually …