News

2006 News

03/05/2006

I thought once again it's about time to put up some more new after another long delay. The big news from here is that my girlfriend, Gitte, is now 25 weeks pregnant and is due to give birth on August the 11th. It was a planned event and even though the time draws nearer and nearer it still seems a bit unreal, as though it's happening to someone else. We went to look for prams last week and I'm still shocked at the price, about 6000 DKK and up depending on how 'sporty' it should be. That's about £550 in UK money! Fortunately Gittes mum and brothers have agreed to split the cost so that's a relief.

If you want to see some scans of the baby you can see two here:

My parents are also coming to visit for the first time from the 24th of May for 7 days, hopefully the weather is good but it will be nice to show them around anyway. I also hope the work on our hallway is finished by then, we had a builder come today to fill in some of the larger holes but then we need a painter, electrician and floorman to finally make the hall look decent. It's not had any work done to it since we knocked the wall down between the 2 flats so still looks pretty ugly.

2005 News

04/12/2005

Christmas is almost here again so I thought it was time for an update. I'm still working for IC Companys in the warehouse, it's been pretty quiet at work for a while but now things are picking up gain so it's a bit more interesting now that there are more people at work. In Denmark if Christmas falls on a weekend then the normal holiday is just lost, so this year since the 25th is a Sunday I only get Monday the 26th off work, not great. For this reason we'll not be going to the west coast to spend Christmas with Gitte's mum. Her mum and her brothers who live in århus will be coming here on the 24th and staying to the 26th.

It will be a change for me to spend Christmas in Copenhagen ,in fact it will be my first one spent entirely here. We haven't been to the Christmas market in Tivoli yet but will probably go there the week after next, I've seen the lights from outside and it does look very nice. We've also done some of our Christmas shopping but still have more to do, we are going into town this Tuesday to hopefully get the rest.

We are also still working on the flat next door, but at least the end is in sight. We will be having an office/guest room in the front room and moving our bedroom into the back room. All that's left to do is some painting of the woodwork before we can finally move in. It has to be ready before Christmas so Gitte's mum can stay in the room. We went to IKEA last week and bought a desk for the office so it will be nice when we can move the computers out of the bedroom and have a proper desk to sit at.

I've also moved the website from a Windows 2003 server to Linux but still hosted by Vonetwork. Apart from uploading the files to the new server all I needed to do was to change the DNS settings to point to the new site. I also started to use Zoneedit nameservers for my site, I used to use my webhosts nameservers but that meant using their interface to change my DNS settings which I found a bit limiting. By using Zoneedits nameservers I use their web interface which seems much more powerful, it's also free for the first 5 domains added.

I'm still adding to the website, mainly in the technical section. Most recently I've made my laptop into a dual boot Windows XP/ Fedora Core 5 setup but to be honest I spend all my time using Linux. I've set up the Apache webserver and MySQL so I can have a local web server to develop my site before uploading to my host. The learning curve for Linux is maybe a bit steep to begin with but there's a wealth of information on the internet and most of my problems were fixed after a bit of goolgling for the answer. More surprisingly, after the initial unfamiliarity of the Gnome desktop and the whole Linux system it only took a short while to become accustomed to it and now I never miss using Windows at all.

16/06/2005

Well after fighting against it for a while I finally accepted a permanent contract at the warehouse where I work. It became very quiet at the end of April so it was either take a contract or be out of work for a few months. Since the latter option didn't sound too promising I took the contract and started permanent from the end of April. Things are stating to get busy again now at work, but it's been dead for almost 3 months now so it was the right thing to do. For anyone interested, the company I work for is called IC Companys and is one of the largest clothing companies in Scandinavia.

I also stopped going to the Danish course at the end of March. I felt that things were going a bit too fast for me and after attending for a year solidly I needed some time off for things to sink in a little bit. It's easy enough to rejoin the school and start again where you left off so maybe later this year I'll go back. It's also nice to have 2 more evenings free now that the summer is here with warm, light evenings. On that note I tend to forget how light it is here these days, the sun rises at 4.27am today and sets at 9.53pm so it's not fully dark until after 11pm. Last weekend we went out for dinner and then round a few bars in town afterwards, we rode our bikes home at about 4.45am and of course it was completely daylight outside. I should have expected it, but after sitting in a dark bar ( we were in a cellar bar ) most of the night it was a bit of a shock to walk out into the daylight.

We also had a long weekend away in Stockholm, you can see the photographs here, a few weeks ago now. It's a beautiful city and a great place to go for a weekend or longer, I would quite like to go back sometime as there's lots that we didn't get to see in only 4 days. We have also booked flights for our summer holiday, we're off to Greece again for 2 1/2 weeks at the end of August and start of September. It's very cheap to fly there with Snowflake, they are the budget part of SAS, our tickets cost about 1000 DKK which is about £90 return to Athens. We will travel round a few islands again, just like in 2003, but maybe this time we will fly to Samos from Athens when we arrive to save a 14 hour ferry trip!

Work is still progressing on the new flat, the extra front door has been removed and boarded up and we have started to strip the wallpaper from 2 of the rooms that will become our bedroom and office/guest room. Hopefully we will have most of the work done in the next few weeks.

Finally the weather has improved here, after a very wet and pretty cold first 2 weeks of June the last 2 days have been around 22º C with a forecast for 28º C on Sunday this week. Tomorrow it's my summer party at work so the good weather is just in time, especially since we're having a barbecue.

12/03/2005

I'm still working for the job agency I was working for at the end of last year, it's in a clothing warehouse and the work is OK. Fortunately it only takes me about 10 minutes by bike to get there which is a bonus especially with the weather we've had recently. I was actually offered a permanent contract there a few weeks back but I turned it down. The job security would have been nice but it would be even less incentive to start looking for a better job. Of course dues to laziness on my part I have made no effort to find a better job yet but I need to start applying again soon.

In the flat the wall between the old flat and the new flat we bought has finally been knocked down. It's still a bit weird being able to walk between the two flats without having to go out into the hallway, but it's nice to go from living in 62m2 to 124m2 overnight. So far the wall is gone and the two fuseboxes that were in the hall have been put together into one but we still need to block off the extra front and back doors to the flat and of course do some decorating so the flats match a bit better than they do now.

Flat construction Flat construction

These pictures show the hallway where the wall between the two flats used to be. Both the front doors are next to each other on the left side of the photos and the new electricity meter and fuse box are on the division between the flats. As you can see we still need to do some work to fix up the holes.

I'm still plugging away at the Danish course even though it's sometimes hard to motivate myself to go there twice a week every week and do homework for it as well. I have to read three books at the moment so I can be tested on one of them for my next module test in 8 weeks or so. Reading them is not the hard part, it's retelling the story afterwards in my own words which is a lot more difficult.

We got through most of the winter without really bad weather, then March started and we had a blizzard. It's also been very cold recently, down to -13º C in Copenhagen and even colder further inland, not so much fun when I'm riding my bike to work at 7.30am. We had a few days recently when it got up to 4º C and it really felt like spring was just round the corner, but as I write this it's snowing again.

I also made a few changes to the design of the website. The main picture at the top is of a church not far from where I live called Vor Frelsers Kirke, it has an amazing spire decorated with gold, and spiral stairs running around the outside right to the top. I took the photo sometime last year and thought it looked really good against the blue sky.

On a more technical note I also bought the domain bobpeers.dk ( dk is the Danish TLD ) which points to the same site, so you can access these pages through bobpeers.com or bobpeers.dk.

Right now I'm looking forward to the Easter weekend since in Denmark we have the Thursday and Friday off as well as the Monday, a nice 5 day weekend. Gitte is going to her mums next weekend for 5 days but I'll be staying here. Not much else to report here, life goes on and I'm looking forward to the Spring and Summer.

2004 News

05/11/2004

Well after far too many months not working I have finally been doing some work. The interviews with Mærsk went well, or so I thought, but after 3 interviews they rejected me. So it was back to the drawing board, I finally had an interview with an agency dealing with warehouse work and got a job in a clothing warehouse near where I live. That job lasted for about 1 week but then they had a quiet patch so I was looking for more work again. Then just today I had another days work in a book warehouse about 1 hour from here, I'm working there again on Monday but after that I'm not so sure. I'm fairly sure the old job will pick up again in a week or two and then I should have steady work through till March or April 2005.

I'm still looking for a permanent job but as I learn more Danish that should become easier. The warehouse work here is OK though, I had forgotten the joys of forgetting everything about work the minute you step out of the door, and with the wages in Denmark being very high the pay is not bad at all, I get about £9 per hour (it's also tax free for me until the end of the year due to the Danish tax system). As well as that, the 'social equality' system here means that you share the canteen and all the other facilities with all the other staff from the managing director down so to say the facilities are good does them an injustice.

Apart from that we still haven't joined the 2 flats into 1 but we now have permission so it should happen before Christmas. The Christmas beer comes out in Denmark tonight at 8.59pm, it an annual tradition here where all the bars here start selling the Christmas beer made by Tuborg this evening and you can buy it in the supermarkets from tomorrow. I'm a bit too tired tonight but may partake in a bottle or two tomorrow.

Finally, the Danish is still going OK, I had another test this week and passed. It's just that using the language outside school requires a big effort when I know everyone here speaks near perfect English. I'll have to force myself to try more in the future.

26/07/2004

It's been a while since the last update so here goes. Well I got my bike stolen from outside the language school 3 weeks ago, fortunately it was insured and I got a replacement last Saturday so good news there.
I'm still going to Danish lessons and next week I have a test that I must pass to be able to move on to the next level. If I fail then I have to repeat the last 6 weeks and re-take the test. It might be a bit hard as it's an oral test, never my strongest area. After the test I take a break from Danish for 6 weeks before rejoining the class again.

On the job front I had an interview at Mærsk today for a financial job, they're the biggest company in Denmark and the head office is in Copenhagen. The interview went well I think but we'll see.

We've also bought the flat next door to us, we own it from the 1st of August. The plan is to knock some walls down and join the 2 flats into one larger one, it will be nice the have the extra space. We have also finished decorating the kitchen at last, it took too long but it looks really good and we no longer have to live in the constant mess.

Hopefully summer will start sometime soon but I'm not holding my breath, I've had 1 barbecue so far this year, not good.

07/05/2004

The first part of my language course finishes next week but the next level continues straight on from then. I'm doing OK but it's certainly not the easiest language to pick up. The weather here has been great recently, plenty of sun with temperatures over 20 on quite a few days. I've applied for a few jobs but still waiting to hear back from them, a guy from the language class works for Microsoft and is sending me their vacancies on Monday so I'll see what's there. I was never a great supporter but it's still a bit of a shock that Leeds Utd are relagated, bummer for Leeds.

Here's one of the first things I learned in Danish: Jeg hedder Bob og jeg bor i København - My name is Bob and I live in Copenhagen....pretty impressive I think.

10/04/2004

I've had the first 2 classes in Danish language school and it's going OK, I think. It was a bit in at the deep end with speaking Danish right from the start but I'm picking it up bit by bit. Of course it helps that I've already been here for 9 months so it's not completely new to me. There's 15 in the class from all over the world. This week there's been no classes due to the Easter holiday so I'll need to practice at home as it's easy to forget as it's all so new. We're also going to Århus next weekend to visit Gitte's brothers, it's a city on the East coast of Jutland. Still no job but need to get my act together. Feels like spring is here right now, sunny days and feeling warm, can't wait for my first barbeque.

Well the language course starts for me on the 30th of March. It's twice a week for 3 1/2 hours each time,so my head should be pretty tired after that. The course and books are paid for by the City of Copenhagen (very nice of them) but is at a private language school in the centre of Copenhagen. It lasts for 6 weeks then I can continue to go onto higher levels if I want. We'll see how it goes. Also added some winter photos to make you glad you don't live here.

As you may be aware the site has moved again to a new location. The main reasons for the move was so I could add some dynamic content to the site. Previously the site was hosted for free on a server in the building where I live but I was only able to post static pages there.

I bought my own domain bobpeers.com for the princely sum of $8.88 US for a year. This was bought through a company called namecheap who can be found at namecheap.com. It's easy enough to do this and from now on if I move the site again then if you always go to www.bobpeers.com you'll still find the site.

Now the site is hosted by a company called Vonetwork ( you can see them at Vonetwork ) for the modest sum of about $13 US a year.

Apart from that there have been some small changes to the site, you can e-mail me directly through the website by clicking on the "Info & contact" menu and filling out the form, it gets sent straight to me. I've also added a counter to the front page but don't expect it to get much use for a while as not that many people know of the site.

I might be adding a guestbook sometime, the code is written but not sure if it's worth the effort to put up. For anyone interested all the dynamic content is written in PHP which is a free ,opensource,OS independent language you can get at PHP.net