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17. ágúst á því herrans ári 2008

Spam

The site has been under spam attack since for the last 2-3 months, so I had to take actions. Some 18,000 span comment entries were removed.

From now on your comment will not appear on the site until it has been reviewed and accepted.

This photo was take in Cuba during my trip there last year. It is the typical for the ornament on some 1950s cars still being used in Cuba.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 13:02 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

14. mars á því herrans ári 2008

Busy schedule

Can't say I have much time for personal life these days. There are some pretty interesting stuff in the pipeline and it seems that when you think you have more than plenty to do, the opportunities are flowing in! So I must juggle my time between paid contractor work and unpaid development, marketing and sales work. On top of all of this I am organizing a conference to be held in the second week of August.

I am looking forward to a semi-relaxed weekend. Tonight I will have a lobster meal with a good glass of wine :-)

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 12:12 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

01. febrúar á því herrans ári 2008

It's been a while

It's been a while since I wrote the last blog entry here. Well, I am still alive, but I must say I have been extremely busy building up my software company. Now that the foundations are there, I will just have to sit back and wait for the money to start flowing in. Cash machine! Seriously, I will have to keep up the hard work to make things happen, but things look quite good and there are tremendous possiblities.

If you are interested in electronic business, please visit the Unimaze Software web site. A bit technical at the moment, but later this year, we will shift our marketing focus to solutions. If you would like me to answer some questions regarding this subject, this blog might be the right place to to so. What is e-business? What is it good for? How will it help me? Why is this better than that? I can try to answer these kind of questions.

If I get some feedback on this blog, I might even continue to write here. Since I will not be talking about travel here I guess I will have to change gears. I would rather not bore people with stuff that is too technical, so hopefully I can come up with interesting subjects.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 17:42 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

22. ágúst á því herrans ári 2006

Þórsmörk


Þórsmörk (c) Markús Pólus
On the way across Fimmvörðuháls you pass 50 striking waterfalls and when you are about to finish you are rewared with the view of Þórsmörk, a haven between glaciers.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 15:15 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

Glacier on Fimmvörðuháls

This photo is taken on Fimmvörðuháls, the popular hiking route in south Iceland. On the pass you will experience some snow, which usually is not too much late summer.

When there is less snow, there is more going up and down and as long as the snow is not to soft walking across it is not too bad, so it is recommended passing early in the mornings.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 15:12 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

18. ágúst á því herrans ári 2006

Lighthouse


Lighthouse (c) Markús Pólus
My enthusiasm for photography has awaken. After Costa Rica at the end of last year I regretted not having good camera equipment to take photos of wildlife. Therefore I replaced my Sony Cybershot with a brand new SLR Digital Canon Rebel XT camera and two splendid zoom lenses. I love everything about picture taking and the new digital technology makes it so much more fun than when I had my old Olympus SLR camera.

I always hope to take nice photos and I like to experiment. I also like to get visitors to Iceland, so I will try to impress my friends with pictures from Iceland. Here is the first one specifically with that in mind, taken at Grótta lighthouse on the outskirts of sleep town Seltjarnarnes, a few minutes drive from downtown Reykjavík.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 11:04 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

Reality bites the engineer


Iceland nature, from top of a lighthouse (c) Markús Pólus
I am a problemsolver by nature and I am very good at it. I guess the engineering program at the University of Iceland has implanted the problemsolver genes. As I grow older, I realize my techniques can be applied to daily life.

This way, life becomes a set of tasks which are never a hazzle.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 10:43 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

31. júlí á því herrans ári 2006

Books, books

I have a faint of heart for books. I must admit it. Every time I enter a bookstore I return with at least one book in my hand. Some of these books are highly useful and important and after staying on my nightstand for two weeks, end up in myn bookcase where they wait for their useful moments, which never come.

Some books are quite funny, like the one I bought in Gibraltar two months ago about 500 things you can do to make the world a better place. I browsed it a few times, read some of the articles, but now I seem to be too busy to open it.

This weekend I bought 3 books; "Cuentos populares de Islandia", folk stories from Iceland in spanish. This is probably the fifth copy I buy of this book. The others serve good purpose educating people of Central America; now I am finally able to read it and enjoy it. At the same time I bought a highly useful book on vitamins and minerals and what they do you good. If someone sees me looking pale and white, please tell me to go home read it.

Yesterday I could not help buy a book from the "Teach yourself" series. I did not know they had anything else but language books, but there was this books on understanding ethics. The cover said; BUY ME; so I had to walk out with it.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 08:18 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

25. júlí á því herrans ári 2006

Iceland is cool


My daughter with kitten (c) Markús Pólus
Well, some things have changed now, since I decided to stay in Iceland at least until the end of this year to work on my projects. My friends offered me to join them and share their office space, so it will be much more fun than working from home or in a faraway place like Spain or Argentina and I will have a chance to discuss my ideas with them. The downside of course, it that I will have to put down the fun-loving thing called travelling for a while and I can not practice my spanish with the locals.

Other than that I managed to hurt my thigh by playing "chase", something an old guy like me should not do. The doctor gave me Ibufen so the pain is gone and hopefully the swollen muscle will be gone in a few days too.

Luckily I had the chance to do some hiking before hurting myself, so I will have some picture of beautiful Iceland coming up soon.

Ciao.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 12:35 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

14. maí á því herrans ári 2006

Trip report from El Mirador

My fellow traveller has composed a report from our El Mirador trip in Guatemala, almost two months ago. There are numerous interesting photos and his writing style gives a good insight into the kind of experiences we had.


I have been here in Mexico City for a few weeks now. The only thing I can really complain about is that the city is biiiiiig and I am not exactly in the best part of it to wander around, although I have seen several museums and am being treated well by the locals.

The Spanish language here is spoken way faster than I have experienced in Guatemala and Costa Rica but speaking is getting more natural every day. The Mexicans use a lot of expressions that I had not heard before such as "que padre" and "padrisimo" = cool, and other short stubs such as "orale", "sale", "mande", "andale".

I will meet my family and go on vacation with them in June, so far I have not made any firm plans on what to do after June.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 22:32 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

12. apríl á því herrans ári 2006

In Mexico

Well, I left Quetzaltengango in Guatemala about one and a half week ago and headed for Mexico City with stopovers in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas and Oaxaca (both really nice places).

One of my last thing was going to Petén in Guatemala and see the touristy Maya ruins in Tikal and then a jungle trip to see the El Mirador ruins. During this trip and on the way from San Cristobal to Oaxaca I took three overnight bus rides in about one week and since I was not able to sleep much on these rides I think I prefer to fly when I need to stop by in Quetzaltengango to pick up part of my stuff on my way to Iceland.

I don't want to put down any rigid plans, but as a guideline I have put down this plan: Fly to Iceland at the end of May, go right away to Spain for two weeks with my family, spend 2-3 weeks in Iceland (all of which is pretty sure), go to Spain again in July, meet my cousin and his friends on the pilagrim's way to Santiago de Compostella, study some Spanish in Spain for some undetermined number of weeks and head down to Buenas Aires when the summer is about to start in the southern hemisphere (all of which is not so sure, except for the summer of course :-).

I have found a family to stay with here in Mexico City (or rather in the outskirts) and so far I have gone on one trip to Chiuhuahua and with the train from there to Los Mochis and Topolobampo on the Pacific with a stopover in Creel. Quite an amazing terrain the train traverses: Me and my friend had a lot of fun and some adventures thrills as well; missing the train in Creel and racing after it in an irritatibly slow taxi.

I am planning to stay here more or less until I head back to Iceland and further advance my Spanish knowledge.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 04:14 | | Ummæli (1) | TrackBacks (0) | English

07. febrúar á því herrans ári 2006

Xela, Guatemala

I am back in Central America now, in Quetzaltenango (Xela) in Guatemala. This is my second week of studying Spanish. After my first week I changed schools and the homestay so both my social life (more students and activites) and the food has improved.

I have no idea for how long I am going to here in Xela, but it is a small and nice town with lots of volcanoes to hike and other interesting places so I might just hang around here while I improve my spanish. I will go visit Iceland in the summer and until then I would like to visit Mexico, keep on studying spanish somewhere there and visit a friend in Mexico.

Here in Guatemala there will be plenty to see and experience, I have already done a class in Salsa showing off surprisingly good tactics although more practice is needed. There are plenty of volcanoes nearby to improve my heart and lungs after three months without excercising, as well as to see how I cope with the high altitutes (to see if I will be fit for Aconcagua). Of course one must not miss visiting Tikal here in Guatemala and one of my friends here at school has already shown interest in going with me to El Mirador, which is an ancient Mayan site, dated back to about 10.000 BC, which is deep inside the jungle and requires a 5 day hike.

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 20:33 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

18. janúar á því herrans ári 2006

Going back to Central America

I am flying through Boston and New York next week and will hopefully be in Xela in Guatemala some time next week, where I will continue my Spanish studies.

I have managed to have a conversation in spanish about the Da Vinci Code, religion, so my spanish is getting better (OK I admit, with two glasses of wine and a beer). But my aim is to speak spanish as well as english, so I have still a long way to go.

Being here in Iceland is terribly expensive and besides I think I have been managed to catch all currently active flus here in Iceland so it is perhaps best to get my ass of this island ...

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 22:52 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English

22. október á því herrans ári 2005

English blog

For my English speaking friends I will once in a while add entries here in English under a seperate category.

As for now, I am packing my stuff and preparing my trip to Costa Rica, where I will brush up my 10 year old knowledge in Spanish, Salsa and Merengue. After that I will hopefully have the confidence to travel around South America to see and experience new things, culture and people.

I encourage you to write comments (sorry, but the instructions are in Icelandic, I hope you can figure out what is what), so that I can see people are reading my blog (codenames are fine as long as the comments are positive).

Markús Pólus ritaði kl. 13:22 | | Ummæli (0) | TrackBacks (0) | English