Flashback: Cinque Terre

From Cinque Terre/...

While discussing travelling around Europe with friends at lunch today, someone mentioned the Cinque Terre, and what a wonderful place it is. I mentioned, yeah, I've got links to some pictures of it on my blog. Well I thought I'd written something...

Back in early July I went and met up with some friends of mine from Seattle in the Cinque Terre. It's a wonderful place, with great food. We were staying in a small town just north of the Cinque Terre proper. It's a bit cheaper that way, and a lot less touristy. That said, the proper Cinque Terre is one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited. There are many hiking trails in the area, and train service between the small villages on the Cinque Terre is quite good, even if the trains don't quite come up to the standards of those here in Switzerland.

Levanto, a town just north of the Cinque Terre is also an interesting place to visit. There is a small but wonderful public market to be found here.

I spent a couple of hours in Sestri Levante on my way back whilst waiting for the Cisalpino train. I found Sestri quite tourisity, and not quite as nice as the other places I was at.

If you do go to the Cinque Terre, be sure to try restaurant Ciak
in Monterosso. Their seafood ravioli (pictured below, and looked even better when it was brought out.) is wonderful.

From Cinque Terre/...

Three years..

I've been an official resident of Switzerland for three years so far, well as of yesterday.

BlogcampSwitzerland_2.0 Dannie Jost Video "The Swiss Myth"

I'm finally getting around to posting the videos from the Blogcamp. It's been a bit of a long time, but there have been a few roadblocks in the way, such as Google Video's upload client not working quite right. I'd embed this video in the page, but I've got it hosted elsewhere. So, you'll just have to view the video via traditional methods.

Dannie Jost gave the Blogcamp presentation that I saw in English. There might have been one other (not counting the Swiss Startup stuff) presentations in english, but I think they might have been at the same time as Dannie's. Dannie lead a group discussion on the topic of "The Swiss Myth", and what it meant to us. After a bit of a political discussion, the talk moved off into other, more interesting topics. It also wandered off into being discussed in German (so be aware, if you don't understand German).

Enjoy the large quicktime video(300MB), or download with a right click the smaller (100MB) mpeg4 version.

Thoughts on Google Video

Last year I used Google Video to host the video I shot of the sessions I attended at BlogcampSwitzerland. It's mostly worked pretty well. However, I did have a bit of trouble uploading one of the videos.

This year's Blogcamp videos aren't getting along so well with Google Video. Google Video requires that you use this uploading client. The support for this client seems pretty low. At first I couldn't seem to get any of the video uploaded at all, then I noticed that the program had been updated. So, I downloaded the update, and then tried uploading the video. One of the presentations has uploaded okay, but the other I tried uploading hasn't been as lucky. As such, I'm now looking at alternatives to Google Video. YouTube isn't an option, as they limit you to videos of 10 minutes or less.

I'll probably end up hosting the video on another server someplace.

Noisy neighbor and I don't mind...

Our little apartment building isn't always the quietest place. Especially as I type this. But I really can't complain. You see, the guy who's causing the "racket" is a really amazing pianist. He just started up with one of the "Well-tempered Clavier" Bach pieces and is now playing all sorts of other stuff. It's all quite pleasant.

When we moved in, and I met him, I commented on the piano and asked if he could play it a bit louder as we really enjoyed listening to the music.

Quick Thoughts on Blogcampswitzerland 2.0

Back on October 20th, I attended Blogcampswitzerland 2.0 held here in Zurich at ETH. I had attended the conference last year and found it quite interesting.

This year was a bit different. To start out with, nearly all of the presentations, with the exception of the start-up segments, were in German. Dannie Jost's presentation on "The Swiss Myth", a nice play on "Swiss Miss" - the chocolate drink, was probably the only exception and was in English. Well, most of Dannie's presentation was in English. As you will see when I finally post the videos, the discussion did branch out into a bit of German. I suppose this isn't surprising given that this is in a German speaking part of the country. Fortunately, my German has progressed to the point that I could understand most of what was going on. Dannie's presentation was quite interesting and I'll comment more on it when I post the video.

The other really good talk was Michael Gisinger's talk on copyright and it's history. Michael did me the great service and presented in that mythical language 'High German', as so I could understand it better. And, users that speak a non-Swiss German will also be able to understand the presentation when I post the video. As for you anglophones, well, perhaps someone will add appropriate subtitles. You can't really run audio through babelfish at this point...

It was mostly a good conference, but not as good as last year. I wonder if a conference on blogging is a bit limited at this point. Perhaps a more general technical (while still having a track on blogging) Barcamp is in order for Zurich?

Many thanks to the BlogcampSwitzerland 2.0 Organizing Committee for all the hard work putting everything together!

Rockin' in the House

I went to go see Neil Finn and Crowded House Friday night for the second time in just over a month. It's certainly good to see that they're mixing the shows up quite a bit, and I got a bit different of a concert than I experienced back in Seattle on the first of September. It was a great concert, and a great crowd.

It was interesting that they handed out earplugs before the concert. These were handy for the opening band, which did indeed play a bit loud. Crowded House wasn't overamped, but there were a few fans that screamed loud enough to almost entirely drown out the band. Ouch! It was my first experience with a show in the Volkshaus, which wasn't a bad venue. Though Neil did mention that the place had some interesting harmonics, that I also noticed.

I was scanning a few photos in, two of which are very appropriate to this post, but it looks like I'll have to put them up a bit later. I don't even have a photo of the Domain scanned...so, here's a picture of Mitre Peak.