Musings

We have safely returned from our holidays in the mountains. Both weather, snow and skiing was terrific, thanks for asking! On the last day, while gliding up towards the ski slopes, I solved a particular puzzling aspect of my life. I don’t really like to travel. I have nothing against sitting in a train (actually I love that), a plane and going some place, but I don’t like to travel through a country without a base where I can stay. ...

Quite a bit quicker to watch than the original epos :-)

The big moment for me - and the reason for going to these conferences - is to get into a state, where I “connect the dots”. Meeting people, listening to talks, sharing ideas, talking, thinking. Mostly about seemingly unrelated topics (“Technology and Society” is a fairly broad description. And then, all going well, something happens. A common theme emerges, and it connects the dots. It has happened to me an around lunch today. ...

One of the decisions we made for a new project, was to use OpenID based authentication, instead of the normal username/password. This has led to interesting discussions - mainly about usability. MostNo people that have tried our new application, had an OpenID identity and so had to log on to one of the OpenID servers, get an Identity, get back to our site and login. Confusing, confusing. And a constant source of comments about getting rid of OpenID. ...

Lift really started today and had a bunch of very different talks that I attended. I’m not even going to try to summarize them - Stephanie and Bruno are doing a wonderful, wonderful job with their notes. (I wonder how Bruno manages to attend (seemingly) every talk and publish a concise recap with pictures and links within hours. Must be that journalist thing :) - or a couple of ghost writers maybe? ) ...

The first day of the Lift conference - the day with the workshops - is over. I was close to not attending, and boy am I glad, that I changed that decision two weeks ago. The day started of with a visit to CERN and their building of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). It started with a superb presentation on why CERN is doing all of this research (“finding out how the universe works” seems like a great reason). The vision, dedication, passion and fire of the researchers, that are looking for the answers to questions about the start of the universe can be felt at all times. Somehow, I’m always close to tears, when I hear about works of that scale, that are truly beneficial to humanity. And the humility, those people have: “Come back in 50 or 100 years and see if anything has been made out of the research we are doing” (meaning - any practical use) ...