Living in Germany Helloween never ever was a topic for me. Besides knowing it out of a  few movies occasionally  showing dressed up kids walking around and asking for candy and a few oversea contacts mentioning it, it always remains a funny but strange behavior for me.

Now since a few years the shops here have started to sell Helloween stuff as well  ….

Me always wondering about who really would need that to buy that, last year I was very surprised seeing two little ghosts and a bit of a pumpkin decoration at home.

Also our German kids seems to like it and once again it looks the Americans have archived to export some of their good stuff (like Hamburgers, Windows, root beer, Dr. Pepper Coke and KFC …. ) to us.

Nevertheless receiving some Helloween greetings today was fun indeed. It is still not like I would care about this Helloween. But seeing someone making effort, even sending greetings to people living in oversea is great. And specially in this case when exchange isn’t really that much though it values double!!

Perhaps I should now mark down this Oct, 31 for sending greetings myself next year?!!

Often it does not need much …. and as more unexpected it is, the more fun and joy it will bring.

On Monday an oversea friend of mine had her birthday. Now even living a few thousand kilometer away I think about them as good and close friends. So for sure postal services had to do some work (nothing special, just that bit of attention making the difference) lately.

Nontheless I had the idea to give her a call and so basic math dealing with time delays did start. When can you call someone at earliest on a normal working monday? Will there be a public holiday you could disturb on?

Anyway, in case there is a will some clever mind will make it through all and using a phone really isn’t a challenge at all … at least for most of us.

To dial the number was easy and then the tension reached the maximum …. to eases immediately when the exactly right person did take the call! No need to say we had a quick and nice chat then.

Just a few valuable and rare minutes though. Day had already started there… But ended with the given promise to do soon again…

It is so much of a difference to hear and speak with someone, even when you frequently stay in contact by email or chat.

But thats not the major aspect of all. At same stage it might not even possible to talk for some reason e.q. the missing ability to speak a language for example.

Often just small things make a big difference. This one second expiring the “unexpected” does make the difference. One day I still remember very well, I opened the letters shipped two weeks ago and nearly about 14000Km away. Something small for sure, but intended to honor friendship …. until today I keep it like a treasure. At least for me it is ONE!

Today my day is filled up with lots of interesting and pleasant things so far. An really appreciated change after to a serious of more or less dragging weeks dealing with all kind of trouble recently.

It started already this morning with me getting an interesting request from oversea, continued with the good news that some difficult job I more or less only supervised and monitored (but being responsible for) completed successfully, went on with an urgent incoming problem - later on turned out into basically some actual product changes without really forcing trouble, into so far finally a phone call I got from some Oracle Consultant friendly pointing me to a new Oracle BI Publisher Community Site.

It must now be a little bit about a year when a developer contacted me about this product, which I later on installed for him. Surprisingly this installation turned out into some real success story! Mostly for the reason that my decision about using a Apache Tomcat environment instead of joining into the mainstream of installations using the standard OC4J cartridge turned out as the right one. Today we have nearly two hands full of different and for sure successful, nice and neat separated projects (different project admins with different rights concepts) running on a single box never making any trouble at all.

But back to that community pages …. sure I’m a man, but it would have to be someone different than me, not directly recognizing the BIP girl link on that community pages!

Now I know all the 8 secrets about a 29 years old American Lady living at Albany, NY …. and thanks god I was able to resist directly posting back at her blog!

ps: now feeling curious about how this day will go on ….. more exciting things to come?

Once again I recognised that talking about something and doing it at the end are two different things. Recently I did an international order, ordering something online from a real big company. Until that order, I thought someone should be allowed to hope that such bigger companies would take care about customers living in overseas with a bit different address details than the one locally …. Far away from that!

Even I really tried hard, I wasn’t even nearly able to fill in my address details into their order form correctly. Why for example do they limit the postal code field to 4 digits when we here deal with 5 instead?! Then insisting to get a state info, while we here do not deal with that!!

I hope you can imagine my bad feeling about to finally complete the order form with my half incorrect typed in information and giving them my creditcard details for invoicing me later on …. not knowing this will ever work out

Seems like speaking about global markets and finally dealing with them seems really to be two totally different things.

To ensure everything will work smart for me, I later on emailed them and thanks god they responded in a satisfying way even over the weekend. At the end … Thats Tops!!