June 2009
Intermediate to advanced
208 pages
4h 47m
English
Content preview from And Then the Roof Caved In
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 8
Narvik and Me
Somehow I imagined Narvik, Norway, would all be a lot more pleasant—Sound-of-Music pretty with lots of verdant vistas and beautiful people. It just wasn’t. In fact, Narvik, a town of 18,000 people 150 miles inside the Arctic Circle, was downright depressing. And not just because the town was battling to stay solvent after gorging itself on CDOs made from what it thought were American mortgages.
Drab architecture and dull concrete give Narvik a “Soviet” feel. That will happen when a place is bombed into the Stone Age. I’m told it was quite a wondrous little port town before the Germans and British laid waste to it in the spring of 1940.
Gray, endless days. A constant chill in the air. It took me four airplane rides and a full 36 hours to get there. This, in the middle of a beautiful summer with my family in Montauk, New York. Not that I’m complaining. I always wanted to see the Arctic. I actually saw a few moose. And it is kind of cool to witness the sun never going down.
I slept surprisingly well in Narvik. My hotel room put me in mind of what it must be like to bunk on a submarine. Very cozy. I watched a lot of the summer Olympics on a tiny TV in the corner of my submarine bunk. The Norwegians have an impressive number of Olympic athletes for a country with only five million people.
Narvik, Norway
Photo courtesy of CNBC.
My documentary crew and I did ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.