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I’ve noticed a few things in Switzerland this past week that I wasn’t previously aware of.  First is that the Swiss drink inordinate amounts of Red Bull.  I can’t claim to be a world traveler but at least around the states its seems the preferred non-alcoholic beverage is by and large coke or diet coke.  In Switzerland it’s Red Bull.

This is somewhat ironic given the proliferation of public drinking fountains.  Usually in Europe one might think of fountains as purely ornate or perhaps useful on a hot summer day to wash ones face.  In Switzerland not only are fountains ubiquitous, the free flowing water is meant for drinking. Of course you can bath in them too if they’re big enough.

My third (unrelated) observation is that the Swiss are generally very courteous. They stop for pedestrians in cross walks, share the road with bikers and will help with strollers getting on and off public transportation.  Perhaps this is why it sticks out when someone doesn’t make room for a stroller – especially when we’re trying to fit three at the end of a train car and avoid causing traffic jams for the rest of the passengers.  It’s happened three times so far – almost enough for me to learn the Swiss German phrase for “excuse me, you are sitting in the stroller parking area.”

I haven’t blogged in forever - in part because work has been insanely busy and in part because I can tweet or facebook most things that that are interesting on any given day. Now I’m on vacation and find myself with plenty of time to put pen to paper (or in my case stylus to touch screen). For those who pay close attention this qualifies as a real vacation because I have yet to open my work laptop. Of course I’m not computer-less. I’ve been using my new viliv x70 extensively. After all it takes a good few weeks to really break in a new gadget.

We’re visiting friends in Switzerland and despite the two toddlers whose schedules rarely align and an adorable two month old who is either sleeping or eating it’s been a rather relaxing trip. We’ve been to Winterthur, where our friends live, downtown Zurich to eat some ostrich and today to Konstanz just over the German border. Without exception the weather has been phenomenal and the Swiss are just as I remember them (meticulous, courteous, and efficient). The food is better no doubt in part thanks to our culinarily inclined hosts.

We’ve yet to plan the week ahead. On the agenda is likely a return to Winterthur downtown for some window shopping, a visit with family in Zurich and of course a stop at Migros for some bacon flavored puffed crisps.

With my free time this week I hope to get more blogging in. Stay tuned for tails of beautiful countryside and yodeling galore.

I wonder if Dave and Melba are still together.

I’m a sucker for productivity enhancement tools and nowhere more than on my phone. I’m seduced by the promises of better organized information and faster access to information processing tools. The truth is that, like most people, I spend most of my time working with just three tools - calendar, e-mail and a web browser. Sure I occasionally twitter and I like to keep up with Facebook. I’ve even been known to update my Netflix queue on the go. Yet the triumvirate of productivity remains when, who and what (that’s calendar, e-mail and web for those keeping track). So any real productively enhancement tools - like a better, slicker home screen for my phone - needs to help manage these three as efficiently as possible. While SPB Mobile Shell is pretty and 3.0 is a welcome upgrade, it’s not that great for what I need.
As a reference point I should probably start by explaining my current phone home screen. I do use SPB Weather, which is a very nice tool and it takes up the top line on my home screen along with the clock. The rest of the screen displays my next twelve meetings (usually two days worth) thanks to Pocket Informant (a nice improvement over the built in WinMo calendaring). I have two customizable hard keys - one that displays a touch commander window with a 4×6 set of program icons (including several web browsers) while the other hard key opens my e-mail. The soft keys immediately above the hard keys open calendaring and contacts. I’m considering swapping the contacts for my default browser (Iris Browser from Torch Mobile) since my web to phone ration is probably 10:1. I also have the usual notification icons on the top bar showing me new e-mails or missed calls.
How does SPB Mobile Shell 3.0 stack up against this bar? All the information is displayed and the tools I use are just as accessible. They’re also much prettier (can’t underscore this enough - SPB is very nicely designed). What it lacks though is information density. There’s a very big clock and a today’s weather icon for today’s weather. It would be great to swap these (small clock, more weather). The notification icons, while cool, are not that important that I need them front and center or that large. The calendar shows me the next four appointments but that’s not enough to see my day at a glance (I can click for more…but I need to click). I have also tried customizing the screen to better fit what I would like to see but the calendar becomes even shorter (this might just be a bug) and the other icons are still unnecessarily large.
Would I recommend SPB Mobile Shell? I think it’s definitely worth a trial. If you find it helpful it’s also worth the $30. For me, SPB Mobile Shell is still a few tweaks short of replacing my tried and true WinMo home screen. Denser information and customization so I can see more at a glance.

(place names have been changed for an American audience)
There seems to be some confusion about the honeymoon. They were supposed to go to Cancun but apparently the groom thinks they’re going to Maine. At least that’s what I think he meant when he said he was going to Bangore for three weeks.

Devices that work on Windows 7: Logitech QuickCam Pro Visioneer 4400 Flatbed Scanner Griffin PowerMate Fingerworks TouchStream Keyboard USB External Drive USB 2.0 Hub USB 2.0 PCI Card
Devices that do not work on Windows 7: SnapScan 300 Sheet Fed Scanner Authentec Fingerprint Reader Old Teac USB Floppy

BadFilterError: invalid filter: Only one property per query may have inequality filters (=, )…sigh…

The new Palm Pre looks like a fantastic device. There’s plenty of video on the usual gadget blogs. What has me scratching my head is…is there anyone left who would buy such a phone that hasn’t recently gotten an iPhone, Android, or something HTC WinMo? Also the screen resolution is decided last gen for smart phones which is a bit disappointing.

Evernote.enex

Update - forgot that e-mail from outlook (Evernote uses the default e-mail client) posts lots of html garbage and there are some bugs in the postie plugin for this version of wordpress.

If you ride the T you are familiar with the mysterious disabled train that haunts the punctual among us. I have never been lucky enough to happen on one. Tonight’s experience suggests that more often than the MBTA would like to admint, a poorly trained operator barrels into the station a bit too fast, is slow on the breaks and overshoots the exit.
If you ever find yourself in a position where someone asks if the subway car you are building needs to be able to reverse, please say “yes.” Consider the occasion that some operator misses the exit and needs to back up a few feet. Suggesting that such incidents are so rare that one could easily deploy a reverse pushing vehicle to facilitate is a poor choice.

I’ve seen Back to the Future III at least a half dozen times and it just dawned on me that there’s a major (potential) plot hole. The move takes place in 1885, 100 years before the original. Marty and Doc are trapped because the time machine that Marty took back ripped a fuel line and ran out of gas. Putting aside the whole why not just change the speed at which the time circuits activate, they still have the time machine that Doc got sent back in. The can’t use it as is to get back (because the time circuits fried and in any case it would create a temporal paradox and disrupt the time space continuum). But there’s no reason they couldn’t siphon the gas from the first machine to get back in the second. The first would stay put for 70 years until 1995 when they refuel it to send Marty back. I guess if it’s taken me this long to figure that out maybe it’s reasonable that Marty and Doc didn’t think of it.

For my birthday this year my wife and I went out for a very special dinner to Blue Hill at Stone Barn. The restaurant is co-located on a working farm and agricultural center. The food is prepared with ingredients from the surrounding lands and the menu is seasonal. To say that the meal was fantastic would not do it justice. We had an eight course farmers feast with paired wines.

Each dish was distinct and delicious. For a teaser they served shots of mushroom soup with fresh carrot and well seasoned cauliflower. Following this was an eggplant satay with miniature beet burgers - a bite sized perfection. A pairing of soy beans, prosciutto and homemade bologna accompanied a sparkling wine. This was the first course.

Our second course was a green tomato puree with crab meat, served cold with a chardonnay. The wine was not oak aged, not a flavor we’re fond of but it went well with the crab. The next dish my wife described as heaven. A poached egg in mushroom broth with collard greens, bacon and a divine Riesling. Fourth was butternut squash with speck and we changed over to red wines with a glass of Pinot.

Following the spec was one of my favorite dishes, a poached salmon with a medley of chickpeas and vegetables (the details of which escape me). I can’t remember which wine it was, though my best guess would be a Syrah. The sixth dish was ricotta filled gnocchi with hen of the wood mushroom. The wine pairing was a Cab/Merlot blend. They brought out a fresh mushroom to show us - it was the size of a beach ball.

The final savory dish, which we were both too full to finish, was pork loin, with sausage and basil. I can’t remember the wine for this course either. Since we sat for dinner at 9, it was now approaching midnight and we were both tired, full and a bit tipsy.

As palate cleanser they served a sweet celery and apple consomme with yogurt sorbet. We each were served a different desert, the components of which I cannot recall. The desert wine was sweet Chardonnay from Macari vineyards in long island.

If you have the opportunity and can plan at least a month in advance, I would strongly recommend the experience at Blue Hill at Stone Barn.

Wife: how…it’s like you’re twelve Me: did you not read my blog post?

We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.
- Maurice Maeterlinck

If the stereotype is that at 40 men buy a fast car to console the passing dreams of a once adventurous life, then at 30 (or as we approach 30 in my case) we cling to our fanciful childhood (especially those of us with children) by delighting in new gadgets and toys that transport us back to the games of our youth. It was for this purpose that I have this past year been eye-ing a most excellent riding toy called the Whiptide. For those of your familiar with Snakeboards (now called Streetboards) the device is of similar design. Imagine a skateboard with two inline wheels on each of two paddles (for total of four) connected by an axis that has three degrees of freedom (or click the Whiptide link and watch the video - that’s me doing the Ollie).

As with the Streetboard (and unlike a skateboard), the rider must self-propel by wiggling back and forth (see the Streetboard link for a beginners demo video). Unlike the Streetboard, a Whiptide (or Waveboard or RipStick) rider cannot stand still (because the wheels are inline). The advantage is that as with inline skates the rider can carve as one does a snowboard or surfboard (again because the wheels are inline). The combination of wiggling and wobbling when properly executed by a skilled teenager produces a graceful choreography that creates a sense of majestic motion.

Following months of negotiations my loving wife (after renewing the life insurance policy) conceded to purchasing a Whiptide on the condition that we also present my 2 year old son with a Strider Bike. The goal we agreed was to promote father-son bonding as we both might stumble our way down Memorial Drive on Sunday mornings.

With the board delivered this past Thursday night I spent the following evenings practicing my balance in our dining room hall, knocking all of the books, pictures and other assorted items off the shelves. With ten feet of practice under my belt, I was ready to take it up a notch. Thus this morning, brimming with confidence, we set out to the park down the street so I could acquire my bruises and scrapes in the confines of a fenced in street hockey court.

To my surprise the Whiptide was incredibly easy to learn. After a few false starts, my snakeboarding skills (which I earned sophomore year of college and refined in the wide open spaces of the dorm basement…and a certificate to prove it) aligned with my snowboarding skills and I found myself whipping across the court at a blistering 1 mph. A half our of practice later and I was carving like a 10 year old…ok, maybe 8. Tomorrow we adventure out to Memorial Drive to either impress or bemuse the runners, bikers and rollerbladers - Gideon just discovering the delights and freedom of his childhood and me reliving mine.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

We were plagued by incredibly slow and unreliable internet all weekend. Since we were only only sporadically it wasn’t until this morning that I called our provider to see what was going on. They took me through the usual drill which did not help.
This evening I started poking around my router settings, upgrading the firmware, etc. I discovered that QoS engine was enabled and promptly disabled it, rebooted the router and discovered that our problems went away.
I’m still baffled why this all of a sudden started to cause problems - perhaps it was tagging our packets and our provider recently started to pay attention (in a bad way)?

I stumbled upon some fantastic pictures of Boston on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/122285998/in/set-72057594082411405/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/166154363/in/set-72057594082411405/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/151628006/in/set-72057594082411405/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/141931319/in/set-72057594082411405/

I stumbled across the RNC on TV tonight - mid Giuliani followed by Palin. While I’m not a Republican, watching the rhetoric and support exhibited tonight by otherwise respectable adults was disheartening. I felt insulted and berated for having differing opinions. I’m not troubled when people disagree my beliefs. It’s disconcerting and disappointing when people don’t respect my beliefs.

Ruby is truly infuriating. Not only are there six dozen different ways to instantiate a string but they vary in subtle ways. Single quotes interpret escaped characters and double quotes don’t and anything followed by percent becomes a quote terminator and even though double less than appends to strings, when followed by any non-space they also become a quote terminator and you call it a here document. And you can quote the terminators. So while a << "b" will add "b" to a, a <<"b" will expect a bunch of text followed by a freestanding "b" that terminates the here document. I can only imagine the BNF.

Why does anyone willingly write in this language?