Blog

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) ...

When we are here in Arosa, we take ski lessons with Adi - a known teacher here. He’s fun, talkative but most of all, he is an amazing teacher. Not so much in what he shows you - I guess many other teachers can do that too. But Adi has a gift of making his pupils believe in themselves. He spent two hours with Daniela who is on skis for the first time again after 25 years. After those she had a big smile on her face, and skied faster and more secure than before. Today he spent two hours with Zoë and me - and we raced the mountains like I never would have believed possible. He just smiles at you, says “let’s do this” and you are totally confident that it’s a good idea to go straight down the steepest slope (and of course I forgot to track this and see how fast we really went, I enjoyed it way too much). Zoë now skis faster and technically better than me - and she enjoys every second of it. ...