This weekend I wanted to try out my new camera again and I have to say that I am really happy with it so far. I was especially surprised by it’s low light performance. All the pictures are taken without using a tripod which I still have in Austria but will bring with me on my next trip. These are some of Times Square, The Empire State Building, the ING NYC Marathon and Brooklyn Bridge at night.
This weekend in pictures
November 1st, 2009
Sunny Autumn Sunday in Central Park
October 25th, 2009Ater a rainy Saturday, NYC enjoyed a very sunny Sunday which I used for a walk through Central Park (joined by my little shadow) to try out my new camera. Here is the outcome.
Protected: From Presales to QA Engineer
October 25th, 2009Twitter Updates for 2009-10-16
October 16th, 2009- Surprising how much better AT&T works outside of manhattan #
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Shadows, Work and other stuff
October 15th, 2009Sorry for being absent on this blog for a while. Life has been busy but I didn’t really feel like writing about it. Last week another colleague from our Austrian office moved over to join the NY team for at least a while. It feels a little bit like a shadow is following me. When he started his first job he joined a company I worked for and I taught him some development and database stuff. Years later he filled in my position at my current company in the Austrian office when I moved to NY. And now he followed me to NY and funny enough he is gonna live in the same area at least for a while I used to live in when I first came to NY. I think so far he learned a couple of things: Life in NY is faster, choices of decent food are endless, London can not be compared to NYC and communication between different departments that are spread across different continents always appears to be different once you join the other side. But I’m sure he will be able to continue that list. Anyways, welcome to NY, my little shadow!
Although I still officially work for the sales department, I sometimes get pulled into services work again to support those poor guys that are trying to implement our software at the client’s site. Currently I got asked to help at a client in Stamford to support performance tuning which should rather be called on-site QA. Performance-wise today has been quite successful but the sad part is that most of the performance improvements were due to bug fixes on our out-of-the-box packages which made us all wonder how this could pass our internal QA and even more how we should explain that to the client. I guess we will focus on the positive part which is that we are in a good shape from a performance perspective right now although we still have some days of more performance tests ahead of us.
That’s pretty much it for now. Only thing left to mention might be that I have booked my XMas-trip to Austria and really look forward to it. So everyone in the country of the farmers and cows beware: pumsti’s on his way again, haha 
Twitter Updates for 2009-10-14
October 14th, 2009- I was sorry to hear that Hermann Maier resigned. The skiing world is not going to be same without him. #
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Twitter Updates for 2009-10-10
October 10th, 2009- 4 out of 4 calls dropped this morning….but I'm glad I got more bars in more places #
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Twitter Updates for 2009-10-09
October 9th, 2009- over 90 percent of my calls today dropped. Is it just me or is ATT having real issues? #
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Schnitzel&Things update
October 1st, 2009
As already posted last week, there is a new street vendor in town that sells Schnitzel as sandwich or platter. They also won a Vendy award for the best rookie of the year and that seemed to give their business even more boost. I went there again today and the line was huuuuuuge (see picture). I had to wait at least 30 min in line to get my pork schnitzel platter but it really was worth every single minute. The food is awesome although I’m still missing the Lingonberries 
Check out this video on CNBC. Oleg Voss, the owner of Schnitzel&Things, apparently used to work for Raiffeisen in Vienna as financial analyst before he lost his job there and moved back to Brooklyn. I can only say: Thank you Luigi for kicking that guy out. Because of you I now get great Schnitzel here in the city.
What’s wrong with AT&T?
September 30th, 2009I bought my iPhone over a year ago and I was never really happy about the fact that Apple made a exclusive deal with ATT in the US to be their only service provide for the iPhone. To be quite honest: If I would have had an option to go with someone else I would not be an ATT customer anymore. Until now the quality service was never great but it was at least working most of the time. But the issues I’m experiencing right now are close to unacceptable. In downtown Manhattan the data service is not working at all. ATT claims that they are experiencing an outage from 3 different towers there which they also said already last week when I complained. How long does it take to fix that? Almost every single call I make drops after a while. According to iLounge and Appleinsider, a Genius bar employee at the Soho Apple store claimed that it’s around 30 percent dropped calls in average which I doubt. But I seriously hope they are not proud of that percentage. Problems really started when they release the 3.1 firmware when I was forced to upgrade by ATT because I wasn’t able to receive any calls anymore using 3.0. Currently my iPhone seems to be more an expensive iPod instead of a phone and if the quality continues like that I will consider to cancel my contract. Fair enough, Manhattan has the highest density of iPhones of all the metropolitan areas and it might not be that bad outside of Manhattan but why are they not willing to spend more on increasing their quality of service?