This is a tipical estonian pine forest. Which is very untipical for me, the pines are very high and completely naked except at the top, and the whole floor is covered by very low bushes... have to get used to it, i guess.

On Thursday, I and all my colleagues did participate (and also survive) the 3. Entreprise Run in Cologne. We even won a cup: 3rd place in the category of less than 50 co-workers.

Look how happy are the children to be with dad on Father's day.

By the way, did you know that Father's day is not standardized as Mother's day is?
So, i am celebrating 3 times per year, first in May as in Germany, then in June as in Chile and finally in November as in Estonia ;)

Playing settlers of catan with Karla & Rodrigo.

Celebrating my 35 years of life shadowed by a pharyngitis :(

Well, next, on saturday the weather was absolutely great, clear sky, sunny and 7^oC.

So i went out to walk to the Parque del Retiro, being really fantastic, comparable New York's Central Park. So i spent there a good part of the day, wearing t-shirt, and enjoying ow people, dressed with coats and scarfs, watching me with incredulity...

I started walking down the Calle de Alcala, passing by the Metropolis building, continuing to old Mail Office, now the new city hall then the Plaza de las Cibeles and the Puerta de Alcala,to finally reach the Parque del Retiro, with his beautiful Estanque Grande (big pond) and it's wide avenues full of life, with plenty of street musicians including some Mariachis and human statues including wizards, toreros and even chewbacca.

On the way back i passed by the Atocha Station, and then i re-did friday's tour to get the pictures... In the afternoon i stayed at the hotel learning a bit GWT.

On sunday, the idea was to borrow a bike from the hotel to bike the new cycling road around Madrid of about 69km in length. But the state of the available bikes was not the best, first only with 20" wheels and not working brakes and loose handle bar.

So i decided to abort the bike trip and went for plan B, to the cinema to watch Avatar. Which was really, really good...

After that a normal 2 days business trip, turned out to became, due to certain political reasons i do not really grasp, a 6 days trip, here i am, landed in Madrid...

The first 2 days went as expected, working with the client, without being able to do actually much, and getting a bit bored, but eating really good :p

I had also to get all supplies for surviving these 6 days, including clothing, shaving stuff, etc. and i was also trying to save as much mobile's battery as possible and regreting not having taking my photo camera with. Later, as you can see, i realised that my mobile could also take pictures, so i did not care any more about my mobile's battery taking all the pictures i could :D, now i just hope to survive without mobile :p

Eventually the weekend arrived and so my first true chance to see something of Madrid, and i was really lucky that FJ offered himself to show me the down-town on friday evening. Thanks to him, i learned in just one evening much more about Madrid than i would have never learned by my own.

We started at the Puerta del Sol (Sun's Gate and not Square), with it statue of extincts bear and tree, the km0 sign, a modern subway entrance and the old neón ad of Tio Pepé, then we passed by the Opera with open-air screencasts, to arrive to the King's Palace with its great and large gardens, and vast the ancient summer cottage area reaching to the horizon, now hosting the Zoo Park and more.

Then we passed by the former town-hall with its prison tower, to finally get to the Mercado de San Miguel to eat the best olives and ham i have never eating before. And on the way back we got to the Plaza Mayor, ancient place for all kind of public acts, and we walked though the streets Cava Baja and Cava Alta, were you can find that kind of restaurants frecuented by the king.

"Ready to go" to the FIFA World Cup 2010. Finally, after some not so good matches in September, Chile won yesterday against Colombia classifying for South Africa 2010. Viva Chile mierda!

Last week we went to the Games Com 2009 here in Cologne, and i was hoping to be able to play for the first time Starcraft 2, but at the end i thought it was not worth to queue more than 4 hours to be able to play for 15 mins, so i will have just to wait until the game is officially released :(

I have not post anything for long time, almost 2 weeks, not only i do not have so much time for writing, but mainly because we are just doing less... but i will try to write at least one post per week.

Politically, I am not very active, but when i see this kind of ads i have to do something.

"Cologne is a feeling. In several dark corners a feeling of fear!"

Are they crazy? I agree that Cologne is not as safe as the traditional 2000 inhabitants german town, but i am really far from having felt fear here, never ever! And this is one of the reasons that keeps me here. Really terrible.

On the other side, they seem to be totally out of creativity, cloning Obamas slogan:

• FPD: "Cologne can more"
• CDU: "Cologne can better"

After Pille's comment i just had to check the rodizio restaurant in Tallinn.

First, i have to say that it works a little bit different than normal rodizio, specially if you go for early dinner and you are alone in the place. Because of the small electric grill they do single portions on the spade.

The rodizio includes salad buffet, one drink and one dessert. We got fried bananas as starter and grilled ananas were missing. The salad bar was not the richest i have seen, but it was ok, and the desert we had was really good: some mandarins on cream, hardly brazilian but good.

And the meat? i have to say that the meat despite not being anything special, compared to the rest of the beef you can get in Estonia, was really outstanding!

And the waiter, a south brazilian, who spoke good english and spanish (no estonian) was kind but a little bit shy and dressed like an argentinian gaucho. My conclusion: quite ok, but a little bit expensive, specially the drinks. But since i have the choice i will continue to eat meet at Pantanal.

What are my personal impressions you might ask...

Well, first i have to say that after hearing the european choir of estonians in Bonn, i had really high expectation for this song festival, imagine those feelings and power multiplied by 1000!! On the other side, i saw the dance celebration as just a side event to just use the popularity of the song celebration.

And it turns out that i was completely wrong: first, the dance celebration was really impressive with 7500 dancers where everybody was important and had his place in an excellent choreography at the level, or even above, of an olympic games opening, but 2 hours long. Really amazing.

But then, the first day of song celebration, everything was perfect during the march, but then the big disappointment:

First, almost 2 hours delay, which for an event focused on the family, where thousand of children were present, it is not really acceptable. Then once started, the applauses were spare and everybody seemed to be more interested in grabbing some trash-food than to 'breathe as one'.

Also, the loudspeakers were completely destroying the feeling of the event, at the end you could not tell the difference between a 10 head choir and this 25000 head choir, not at all, very disappointing!

Then having already the 25000 singers gathered, they only sang 2 or 3 songs together and then they were splitted, that was taking lot of time generating several breaks of up to 30 mins just moving singers around, which i can not really understand: if you have already the 25000 singers together, use them!! and organize another concert with 1000 singers later which is much easier to manage, and from the 5 hours programme at the end the singers were singing maximum only 3 hours! What a waste of resources!

And the cherry on the cake: despite estonians love their country and their traditions, and they should also know their weather, but after some rain everybody was leaving!! yes, leaving their 25000 singers singing in the rain for no audience, this is really disrespectful and a shame!

Thanks god there was a second day of song celebration which gave me hope. There was more audience and more interest in the show, even somehow you could really hear the singers not only through the loudspeakers, and despite that at the beginning the concert was being the same than the day before, the last 1 hour was it all worth: all singers on stage, singing popular songs that the audience was singing with, even repeating songs and improvising, really great performance and i can now really tell that Estonia was at the end breathing as one!

We left Tallinn as soon as possible to visit grand father in Saaremaa, and i spend some time helping him to paint it. The reward: a couples of hours riding his bike ;)

This weekend we got the quick visit of Cecilia, my classmate in Highschool, who made a very extensive tour in east europe.

I came across this truck advertising a gardening service called 'pico bello'.

Would you really contract the services of a company called in chilean "beautiful dick" ??? :s

Today i saw Google's Camera Car in Cologne!!!!

That means that most likely cologne will be soon available in Google Maps' Street View :D

Yesterday we got our new Internet Connection, and despite all my efforts this webpage was after 213 days for the first time (more than 1 minute) and for almost a whole day down :(

But we got a 100mbps/10mbps line, which is currently 'just' working at 19.84mbps/9.23mbps. enjoy ;)

I turned 34 last Thursday, and we celebrated yesterday with a big BBQ. It was really sunny but still a little cold, just perfect to inaugurate this years grill season ;)

Finally the timetable is here!

For the time being, i just put everything as it is on it. In the future i will filter more irrelevant things out.

Additionally there is another new link in the footer for the measures graph.

Just a very cool picture ;)

Here are two videos featuring me snowboarding after 5 days training. In the second video, at the beginning i am just the small dot in the middle of the screen, later i fall a couple of times just to show you what you do not have to do :p

Me enjoying the live ;)

Hitting Mait's head against the ceiling :( ... but do not worry, i am pretty sure he will survive ;)

Yesterday Alkacon had its xmas dinner. This time we were invited to the Fantissima Gala and i would say it was the best xmas dinner ever... Until they throw us out at around 4am :D

Check out this new feature: Mait's travel log and wonder how much this small guy has already travelled!

With interactive maps à la Google.

Just to give you to know about the latest new features added to this webpage, just in case you have not discovered them yet ;)

• Mait's measures summary
• Nice cool footer
• Improved RSS feeds, you can choose if you want blog and/or picture gallery updates (with and without comments), old subscribers receive only blog updates.
• Family tree
• Chat, on the right side bar

And even more to come...

Last Sunday, the 9th November, i could celebrate my first father's day, in Estonia.

Since the father's day is not as standardized as the mother's day i will have 3 father's days per year (in Chile, Germany and Estonia) :)

Since i am the one with lower dirt tolerance limit, i am mostly cleaning at home and i am very happy with our last acquisitions: a battery driven vacuum cleaner and a steam floor cleaner.

So i do almost not need anymore any of my old cleaning tools :)

Here is Mait after exercising and me after having watched the soccer match between Chile(1!) and Argentina(0) for the FIFA World Cup 2010 at 3'o clock in the morning... :p

After a couple of days of hard work, the picture galleries are working ;)

The link is for now only in the footer of this page, soon i will put it more visible.

So, from time to time i will move some picasa pictures over here, or publish new ones. enjoy!

Today we went to show Mait to my colleages, but i forgot to take pictures :(

Anyhow, everything seems continue as always there, they even found the perfect replacement for me: a small palm :s

It is just a pity that we could not met Susanne...

I am by nature a very curious person, this is why i am using Google Analytics to track the usage of this webpage, so click on the image to see the current report after only for two weeks online.

The highlights: the best reader price goes to Radu in Switzerland and chlieans are far behind estonians...

In the same spirit, to know more about our audience, we will constantly have interesting questions, so hurry up to give your opinion ;)

Despite i have already several short questions i would like to ask you, i am also always open to suggestion, so if you have one, just leave a comment.

After roughly one month of work, often interrupted by winding or a walk with the pushchair, i was able to put this website online.

The reasons for giving up the previous blog at http://mait-moossen.blogspot.com are many:

• First it was clear for me from the beginning that it would be only temporal
  Blogspot might be good if you blog in only one language, but it was really pain in the ass to do it in 4 languages
• I also wanted to use some state-of-the-art JQuery gadgets and so to also improve my javascript skills
• Having the blog running in your own server has also some other advantages, like knowing the data format and the ability to backup your data

Nevertheless, the state of this website is still beta, there are many pages that are not fully translated in all languages, and some content and features are still missing.

But i hope everybody enjoys our new webpage.

father and son bounded by the great nap time...

After six hours walking Mait still does not want to come out, but we, we got really tired...

Despite it should have better been called rainfall highway, this is for sure the most i will miss staying at home, my almost daily 25km biking along the Rhine river.

Despite i wasn't able to join the Blizzard's WWI08 in Paris to try the last Starcraft2 build, i am playing again the original Starcraft single player campaigns and i have only the last 4 BroodWar missions left. Will i finish before the birth?

Last working days before one year parental leave. I do not believe that it will be more relaxed than in the office, but definitively it will be 'different'.

To take advantage of the only 3 consecutive dry days of this shitty summer and the last days before the birth, we are oiling our terrace...