Hot Horse, Trubarjeva, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Hot Horse is a very popular fast food chain of restaurants in Ljubljana. Synonym for after-party-early-morning burgers.


Serving also students that can pay with subsidized meal vouchers - študentski boni.


Pavle Rebic (Rebič) - an expert for providing IT solutions to Telecom sector. He worked for Iskratel and now his Telco customers are benefiting from IBM end-to-end solutions, due to his drive and ambition. He's a native Ljubljana citizen and decided not to pursue post graduate study in Slovenian Faculty of Economics. I must agree with his decision - too little valued add. If he would not have to work for living, he would build not-for-profit holiday resorts and activities centers for older people. Better society, better world.


The most popular Horseburger has - you guessed right - horse meat in it.


On the way to Trubarjeva street, passing Preserenn Square ...


Horseburger is being assembled ...

Enchantment, Phoenix Isle, Second Life

This is my very first Blog post from Virtual world. Vastly popular virtual world is called SecondLife (SL) (http://secondlife.com) It has population of over 800.000 and rising. Being consistent to my Blog's mission, I had a Blog Dinner in SL with my friend from RL (Real Life). The place was nicely decorated with groovy music. It was a solely audio-video experience with no taste and other feelings. Yet.


I believe we were having Prime Rib dinner. Medium done. As if one could tell :)


If you will ever come to SecondLife, my name is Matej Xi.

AteljeCaffe, Ljubljana, Slovenia

AteljeCaffe is a pretty new chic place in Ljubljana. Somewhat weird, but cool enough website. It's good that the serving ad eating itself is made in real brick-and-mortar life. Recommendation.


Chinese salad. At least that's the name under which they served us this dish.


Niko Slavnic (Slavnič) - a very interesting person with wide range of activities going on in his life. He was one of the few people that I need not explain the whole idea of my Blog Lunches. He knows marketing and networking very well. More about him and his skills you can see at his company's website: http://www.iqbator.si/


We tried this strawberry flavored wine for the first time. Interesting. Niche. You can buy it from these guys here: http://www.mengo-trade.si/

Cevabdzinica Didov, BTC City, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Domen Rojnik - Business Developer at MA&L. Among other things MA&L has Matrix brand name in Slovenia. If you are an OEM producer anywhere in the world and want to penetrate Slovenia and Balkan region thru Matrix brand name, he's the person you want to know and talk to. If you are a retailer in Slovenia and Balkan region and want to increase your sales with adding Matrix to your portfolio, again, Domen is the guy you want to know. Matrix is a brand which rising fast in Slovenia.
With Domen we used to work for Allied Domecq, promoting brands like Canadian Club, Ballantines and Sauza ... and having loads of fun while doing it. Good times.


BTC City is the biggest and fastest growing shopping center in Slovenia. http://www.btc.si/eng/index.php


Jota is Slovenian bean and sauerkraut soup. Here is the recipe: http://www.soupsong.com/rslovjot.html


Bottles with Slovenian spirit in the open market.

Osmica, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Roman Bale - taking care of IBM Slovenia internal logistics and saving our asses when things need to be arranged. He grew up in Sentjanz in Dolenjska part of Slovenia. He likes to eat alone and read :) One could never guess that he is so much into Zoology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoology Actually he's just about to finish Zootechnics at Biotechnical Faculty http://www.bf.uni-lj.si/deansoffice.htm He would have finished it by now and not even come to work at IBM if it wasn't for an accident of his mentor, dr.Janez Poklukar. Bees were a very important part of his life. Roman is riding Suzuki Bandit 1200 and he is about to post some Bandir Roadshow videos on YouTube. When he will have enough money, he will make and sell custom bikes. Like the ones they do here: http://www.carefreecustomcycles.com

Emonska klet, Ljubljana, Slovenia

A special pizza with live alien worms a.k.a. chilli peppers :)


Tomaz (Tomaž) Pelko - IBM Global Financing and Quality Management guy. If you want to improve your IT infrastructure, but you don't want to ar can't pay up front, he can arrange you a good leasing offer. There were several branches out of our discussion. We touched on the difficult situation of translation of high-tech terms. One one side legislation and respect to local language makes high-tech vendors translate the terms and texts, but on the other hand users don't understand the translated terms. One of the more capable companies for translating IT texts (and also IBM specific) to Slovenian language is ZOP http://www.zop-cr.com/Prevod/index.html If you didn't know, besides being the biggest IT company, IBM is also the biggest leasing company for computer equipment. The financing arm is called IBM Global Financing (IGF) And IBM doesn't lease only IBM equipment ... http://ibm.com/financing As we were talking, a cat caught a live pigeon just next to the tables. We were experiencing National Geographic type of action in the very center of Ljubljana. A lesson from table manners (bonton): Toothpicks are not supposed to be on the table and they should be used away from the table - outside or at the rest rooms. That's how it is supposed to be at least. http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=408653&agid=2

Sestica, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Salah Al-Halawani is working in Dubai, but his heart is in Jordan. I wonder if has seen Petra. In Jordan. Petra is nice. We talked a lot about Middle East, Arab world, Pakistan and also a lot about SecondLife (http://secondlife.com) or SL. SL seems to be part of every discussionm in these days.


Miha Music (Mušič) is the guy you wanna talk to when you are thinking of, sizing, setting up, managing and repairing your newest and coolest IBM System p machine. These babies rock. http://ibm.com/systems/p/ And when he is done tweaking your Unix beast, he loves to read Frederik Pohl and his Gateway (Heechee Saga)


Elena Pentcheva is very nice lady from Bulgaria, working for a succesful IT company Acsior (http://www.acsior.com/). They have very healthy climate in the company and presumably nobody smokes. For some reason she didn't talk much. I guess it was Salas and myself not letting anybody else have their say.


Dinner of contrasts: grilled all-vegie meal on one side and big fat sausage on the other side.

Emonska klet, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Peter Gersak (Geršak) - when you are defining, planning and/or implementing complex solution that runs mainly on IBM middleware (http://ibm.com/middleware), Peter will help you get the right technical team to advise and make proof-of-concept. He finished Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (http://www.fs.uni-lj.si/eng) and topped it with M.Sc. degree from Faculty of Economics (http://www.ef.uni-lj.si/en/) his major being Business Process Management. He worked for a while for Trata (http://www.trata.danfoss.com/) puting pictures in digital via AutoCad. At Oracle he was doing several things before joining IBM as Technical Presales person in WebSphere Business Integration area. He tasted how life&work at 3GEN (http://www.3gen.si/eng) feels like, before he rejoined IBM. He has 2 kid girls (1 year and 3 years old) and is building his own house in Ljubljana now. When he will have more free time, he will devote it to mountain climbing, mountain tour guiding, trekking and backpack style traveling.


Klemen Dragar - if you want to implement secure and reliable SOA (Services Oriented Architecture) http://ibm.com/soa/ in your company or beef up your Business Integration and Business Process Management infrastructure, Klemen can help you get the software and get in touch with competent resources that will make your wishes come true. Klemen finished FOV http://www.fov.uni-mb.si/, worked for third mobile operator Vega run by WesternWireless - now Alltel (http://www.alltel.com/) Besides "enjoying life every minute" as he puts it, he would love to spend more time meeting and getting to know new people, cultures and also organizing events. Organizing weding being one of them ... something in this sense:http://www.ezweddingplanner.com/

Romansa, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Romansa is a restaurant, owned by Maxi department store, owned by Mercator, Slovenian retail giant.


Andreja Jernejcic (Jernejčič) - IBM Slovenia PR lady. The debate spanned networking, communication, travel, tribes, corporate image and more. Andreja is an interesting person with a very rich other, non-IBM side. You can get a good feel about it on her website: http://www.andreja-jernejcic.com/


Veggie soup. Spaghetti bolognese. Green salad. Lunch not really worth mentioning.

Cow Parade, Budapest, Hungary

Cow Parade is not a place. Nor was there any eating done. It's an art exchibition. Cows usually get eaten as beef steaks and one cow was transformed into an ice cream. That gave them the ticket to this blog.

Net cafe Pollus City Center, Bratislava, Slovakia

Tariq Zamrawi from Tempest. Beer. Pistachio. Situation review. Business Development ideas. Tempest is a very capable IT solutions company. www.tempest.sk One of the best for IBM Tivoli software solutions. www.ibm.com/tivoli

Maschu Maschu, Vienna, Austria

Falafel place. Nice. Treating Mike Weinnig from IBM Tivoli Channel Enablement to "orientalisches" meal in Vienna.

Cote Soleil, Aix-en-Provence, France

Moule à la Provençale. Vinegar and olive oil in spray. Not seen so far. Amazing.

China Park, Nice, France

Hot and sour soup in Zurich. Hot and sour soup in Ljubljana. Hot and sour soup in Nice. Nice is nice. Nice is expensive.