How great are these cupcakes I stumpled upon while surfing the otherday? Go here for more fantastic baking.

A couple of months ago I bought a new bike, a mountain bike, specifically a Scott Scale 40, 2006 model (link to 2007 model). It’s fantastic, absolutely fantastic. It has a very nice frame, excellent suspended Fox 32 F100RL fork and great gears from Shimano. All in all a fantastic new toy.

Throughout the years I have tried lots of different sports, I play or have played football, badminton and tennis; I have swum, kayaked, gone to the gym and I still regularly run. To me the key thing across all of these is that I have to have fun doing them. If not I just can’t get myself out the door. And riding my new bike is so much fun! Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard (we are talking “having to stop and catch your breath and fight the urge to through up” kind of hard) but fun – that’s the beauty of it.

Just to underline, I had a trip a few weeks back where I spent a couple of hours beating myself up on the bike in the forest and had my first crash, rode through my first pool of mud and almost ran in to a deer! How great is that!

And all the time I had fun and although I was in the middle of a lot of work and had my head full of too many things I totally ‘forgot’ it all for a couple of hours. The trip actually took place the day before I went to a potential client to present an important proposal. And finally we are closing in on the point of this post – yes there was one, right from the start – the clearing of heads.

I believe that clearing your head is one of the most important things you can do. I believe that letting everything go for a while is one of the healthiest things there is. To walk away from an obstacle when having stared at it long enough. If you have been digging in to a problem and simply can’t seem to find a solution; let it go; think about something else and come back later – more times than not this will help. I now it does for me.

Now for this to work your head needs to be cleared as much as possible and right now my bike does that for me. How you do it is up to you – go clear your head!

My name is Troels Riisbrich Underlien. I am an IT Consultant / Developer / Trainer / Microsoft BizTalk 2006 Technology Specialist (if you look at my Microsoft certifications) / Solution Architect – call me what you like – I work in IT.

At the end of the day I am a geek, I drink Coca Cola, the reel kind, not the diet stuff, I get lost in technicalities and like to. Obviously it is important to add that a geek is a positive thing in my world (as it would have to be). A geek to me is someone who knows his trade and is good at it – someone who is passionate about what he does; passionate in general.

One of the most important things in life is passion – together with excitement; the ability to get excited about everything in life, even the small things. Appreciate both wherever you come across them. Behind these two is the craving for knowledge and expanding your horizon.
Oh, and the existence of geeks is in no way limited to my line of work – we are everywhere.

I work at Vertica which I founded with a couple of friends in 2001 right when the .com rollercoaster ride was coming to an end, the IT World and entire trade was under pressure and companies were closing around us at a dizzying speed.

Coming from one of these companies we started Vertica with a simple – fell free to add naive – mindset; to actually deliver what the customers needed; deliver true value; solve real problems – and have fun doing it.

Vertica is a solution provider within the Microsoft world. We focus primarily on Commerce, Application / Business Integration and Process Management Solutions. Personally I am involved in the integration and process management parts as the leader of the team handling those solutions.

I want to work with exiting and passionate people – the two abilities again. I want to know my colleagues beyond “hello” in the morning. I want to be challenged by them and by the tasks given to me. I want to learn and expand my horizon – also outside the technical world. And I want to feel as if I am making a difference to the customers. We do our best to make Vertica a place where these statements can be met and I try to do it every day myself.

This is not an easy task – at any level. For the company it basically requires the right people to start with; secondly to work towards a matching united mindset. Personally it requires a certain attitude from me; an approach to everything I do and towards my colleagues and customers. It’s a tough one – but I believe we are getting there.

Enough about me and my world for now – I hope that you have gotten some impression of both and I hope you will be coming back. I will be writing about technicalities, yes; BizTalk, yes; but also about all sorts of other things – I really can’t say what will excite me enough tomorrow or next week that I will post it here.

So you really have to come back to find out – ‘till then, go get exited!