InVisible

Via Ned Batchelder comes this wonderful Regular Expression Puzzle (Click for PDF version) Each cell is constrained by three regular expressions, and according to the author of the puzzle, there is one unique solution to it. We spent around an hour at the office trying to solve it, but only managed around 20 or so cells. That is until JF, our CEO, came in. While he didn’t live up to his claim that he’d be able to solve it with his eyes closed, he managed to solve the puzzle at breakneck speed, finishing it at the dinner table. Highly impressive - and good fun! ...

Kickstarter is a huge time and money sink - all those nifty projects, great ideas, great artists… Last year I spent way too much money on nice projects, some of them turned out to be not so hot as thought (CordCruncher, I’m looking at you) But today, coming back from holidays, saw the letter with the Nifty minidrive, and earlier today I got the email with the link to download the beta version of Drifter. Last year I received the gorgeous album by Amanda Palmer (and got to see her live later) ...

I have a long fascination with augmentation through the use of computers. I fondly remember the evening at reboot 7 where we first watched the mother of all demos and then had a live video conference with Doug Engelbart, where he talked about his work on augmenting humans through computers (and his slight frustration that so few of his ideas had been implemented…) But my fascination goes back even further. I remember installing the remembrance agent in Emacs, playing with the Autonomy agent software that watched what you wrote and suggested texts and articles that were related to what you were writing. Later, Zementa analyzed what you wrote in Wordpress and suggested similar articles, images etc. ...

Today we did the tour from Weisshorn to Molinis, that Adi hinted at earlier this week. We started around 13:00 and skied almost 9km with around 1700 height meters. The first part was wonderful deep powder, the second part down through the forest (steep and very steep). Zoë had no problems at all, Tobias on the Snowboard managed well but was beaten and tired, Doris skied technically perfect but got tired in the middle and fell a couple of times. Me? I was way over my limit (especially in the steep parts) and had more ground contact with the snow than in the last 10 years combined. But down we came, unhurt and proud. ...

0 phone calls (but one intended one that didn’t connect) 1 DM on Twitter 1 message on Viber 2 messages on Whatsapp 3 mentions on Twitter 3 4 5 messages on Skype 3 private messages on Facebook 3 messages on LinkedIn 4 5 emails 4 hugs 5 hand shakes 4 SMS 8 messages on Xing 17 posts on the facebook wall Thank you all (And I guess Facebook wins…)

10 years ago (actually 10 years and 2 days ago - but Wordpress missed the scheduled release date of this post, so here it is - manually published) And I had a blog before that (Moveable Type based) and still another one (written in Python). Sadly, they no longer exist… That makes me one of the older bloggers in Switzerland, even though I haven’t been as active as others (like Steph with her Climb to the Stars blog) ...