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.

A late Swiss-National-Day post

We spent Swiss National Day this year by first climbing the local church's tower. The tower is only open to visitors a few times each year. Swiss National Day is one of those days. I figured it would be a good chance to get a good view of our new town. And I figured it'd be cool to look back to our balcony and see what our place looks like from the tower.

I took this picture from just in front of the church. The tower looks much smaller than it actually is at this angle. But, you can see the person in the corner of the railing hanging out. It was over 200 steps to where the railing is.

From Cinque Terre/...

The view to the south was very nice, with Lake Zurich in the forground and the Alps in the background.

From Cinque Terre/...

To the North is Thalwil in the foreground. The Uetliberg is in the center rear, and Zurich is in the right background.



We live somewhere to the West.

From Cinque Terre/...

Speaking of the West.... After going up the church tower, we then headed to Felsenegg for a short hike up to the top, followed by a aerial tramway trip back down. There's a restaurant on top of the Felsenegg, and it was getting ready to celebrate in the evening.

From Cinque Terre/...

We finished the day with a dinner of barbecued bratwurst and then watched a few of the evening's firework shows.

There is a website with the information on when the church tower is next open. Which is September 21st from 7-9 in the evening, and on Sunday September 23rd from 11am to 12 noon. It's only open when the weather is good. There's also a better picture of the tower on their website.

SihlCity

So today I decided to go check out SihlCity, the big shopping center just on the south side of downtown Zurich. It's not too bad. It's not really all that big though compared to the malls I've been to in America.

Parking is a big problem. Yeah, I know, this is Europe, but 4 franks for the first hour and then an additional frank each for the next hours is just a little bit expensive. I did manage to park for exactly 59 minutes and only paid the four franks. On the other side, it's pretty easy to get to. Well, it is once I figured out the way to the parking lot. The big downside transportation-wise is that public transportation isn't too convienient, and that it's actually easier for us to take the train downtown and go shopping, or even go to the Airport.

There are a bunch of clothing shops. There's a huge MediaMarkt (the European equivalent to Best Buy) and a large COOP supermarket. Sadly though, the COOP supermarket doesn't have much more in the way of variety than our local shop, and the parking is much cheaper there, or it's about a 15 minute walk. There was also a big bookshop, but I'll bet that there is a better English book selection at the Orell Fuesseli shop downtown.

Movin' Day!

Tomorrow is Movin' Day, or rather the past few days have been moving days. So, we're busy with all of that and Alice still has a long commute to Zurich for another day. We're leaving Muttenz and the Basel area for Thalwil. We'll miss many things about living near Basel, especially grocery shopping in France, and all our friends in the area.

I need to finish up writing about the trip to Paris, and in the meantime, I've also taken a trip to the Cinque Terre in Italy.