I've been wanting to go hiking the peaks of 五指山 (Wu zhi shan, literally translated "Five finger mountain") for a while, especially since I had already been to the road-accessible top several times by bike.

Even though it's not particularly high 五指山 (Wu zhi shan) is one of the most remarkable mountains in the area, partly because of its peculiar shape. Here's a picture of the mountain that I took last year on a trip to 觀霧 (Guan wu):

The hike is neither very long nor very strenuous, but given that you're hiking across five hills and back there is quite a bit of up and down involved as you can easily see from the topographic map and the altitude chart:

The entire hike is less than 6 km long and took only slightly over three hours including a 20 minute lunch break. Of course, without stopping every few minutes to take photos I might have shaved off another few minutes, but then I wouldn't have anything to show to you. :-)

I've been contributing a lot of my biking and hiking routes to OpenStreetMap recently and this one is no exception. I hope this will be useful for fellow hikers. (If you zoom out there are some rendering issues, i.e. you'll see outdated tiles, but with time that problem should disappear.)

(Click here to view a larger map)

So with autumn slowly approaching we decided to take the opportunity of one of the last summery weekends and head south, about a scooter hour away from Hsinchu. It's basically a hill, a few kilometers of coastline and a handful of wind turbines, but despite its simplicity it makes for a beautiful scenery.

We were a bit skeptical at first regarding the weather but we ended up lucky since the sky up in 桃園 (Taoyuan) was less cloudy than back home. The view at the top is great indeed but I'll let you see for yourself:

And, as always, the track log:

The lower arc was the first day, the upper arc the second day. These are the elevation diagrams:

It's difficult in Taiwan to avoid the traffic, especially on popular routes like the cross-island highways. Accidents on those narrow mountain roads are unfortunately quite frequent, caused by aggressively driving motorcyclists, Sunday car drivers who lack mountain road skills, but also by careless cyclists without lights or helmet.

There are a few tunnels on these roads, so any vehicle entering the completely unilluminated tunnel from the bright sunlight is unlikely to see an unlit cyclist. And the number of riders who consider a helmet nothing but an unnecessarily heavy sun shield is alarmingly high. I didn't get to shoot any "Darwin at work" photos but we did cross an ambulance on the way.

We chose - equipped with helmets and lights - to leave on Sunday morning in an attempt to minimize traffic, at least for the second day. Getting up at 0430 in the morning is probably my least favorite part about biking, and the sunrise isn't worth it, but with over 160 km to go on the first day it is a necessity.

Schedule (Day 1)

*Day 1:*

0530: Meeting point, 竹北喜來登大飯店 (Zhubei Sheraton Hotel)
0625: 關西 (Guan xi)
0630: Rest stop, 台3線/羅馬公路入口 (Highway 3 & Luo ma gong lu entrance)
0645: Departure, 羅馬公路入口 (Luo ma gong lu entrance)
0840: 羅馬公路出口 (Luo ma gong lu exit)
0855: 北橫入口 (Northern Cross-island highway entrance)
0915: Rest stop, 北橫之星 (Bei heng zhi xing)
0925: Departure, 北橫之星 (Bei heng zhi xing)
1035: 蘇樂橋 (Su le bridge)
1045: 巴陵大橋 (Big Ba ling bridge)
1125: 巴陵/拉拉山叉路 (Ba ling, La La shan fork)
1255: 四陵 (Si ling)
1315: 桃園縣/宜蘭縣 縣界 (Taoyuan county/Yilan county border)
1335: Lunch break, 明池 (Ming chi)
1455: Departure, 明池 (Ming chi)
1515: Highest point of Highway 7
1525: "777", 台7線77公里 (Highway 7, 77 km sign)
1600: 台7線/台7甲線叉路 (Highway 7 & Highway 7-bis crossroad)
1720: 圓山 (Yuan shan)
1805: 礁溪 (Jiao xi)

Distance: 162.2 km
Ascent: 2580 m
Maximum elevation: 1215 m

The second day was marked mostly by sore legs, joints, butts, and other body parts, on top of which came the heat of a clear summer day. Unlike the previous day where the mountainous climate cooled us down a little bit, wind and clouds were a rarity. After lunch an outside thermometer displayed 42 °C in the sun.

Unfortunately there is no interesting route back from Taipei to Hsinchu, so after the relatively quiet highway 110 we soon ended up on highway 3, one of the two large and long roads that connect Northern Taiwan with Southern Taiwan. The traffic on those is rather annoying and we soon ended up in the middle of rush hour traffic.

Only after 龍潭 (Long tan), where we took a shortcut, did the traffic get better again. Of course the shortcut came with a price: The last ascent of the day. But with over 250 km behind you most of your body is numb anyway, so it doesn't hurt that much.

Schedule (Day 2)

0820: Departure, 礁溪 (Jiao xi)
0935: Rest stop, 1st peak, 宜蘭縣/新北市 縣界 (Yilan county/Taipei City border)
0950: Departure
1040: Rest stop, 坪林 (Ping lin)
1105: Departure
1155: Rest stop, 石碇 (Shi ding)
1225: Departure
1245: Lunch break, 新店 (Xin dian)
1335: Departure, 42 °C outside!
1430: Rest stop, 三峽 大成國小 (San xia, Da cheng elementary school)
1455: Departure
1500: 三峽 台110線/台3線叉路 (San xia, Highway 110/3 crossroads)
1520: Rest stop, 三峽 台3線/台7線叉路 (San xia, Highway 3/7 crossroads)
1530: Departure
1700: 龍潭 (Long tan)
1715: Rest stop
1730: Departure
1800: 新埔 (Xin pu)
1815: 竹北喜來登大飯店 (Zhubei Sheraton Hotel)

Distance: 133.5 km
Ascent: 1681 m
Maximum elevation: 552 m

Photos

The peak itself is quite easily reachable and not that tall, but it gives a beautiful 360° view of valleys, lakes, and mountains. We took a tiny cable car to reach the level of the Stausee Garichti, an old reservoir, and hiked from there.

Despite the initial drizzle we ended up very lucky with the weather and spotting some wildlife, giving me a chance to play with my new 300 mm zoom lens. Bird or no bird, this was my favorite hiking trip of my vacation.

After a huge landslide covered large parts of a valley with rubble 10,000 years ago, the Anterior Rhine started digging the canyon known as the Ruinaulta. It has become a popular destination for hikers, bikers, rafters, and, apparently, Swiss people living abroad. ;-)

The Grüenseeli (probably) doesn't have such an exciting history. It is a tiny lake that lies not too far from Arosa, yet far enough to keep away the tourist masses. Luckily this wasn't a concern for us in the first place since summer vacation season hadn't started yet. More of a concern was the weather which set an abrupt end to my taking pictures when the looming rain clouds finally opened their flood gates and forced my camera to retreat.

Since you rarely get to really see the plane you're taking we figured we'd get a better look from the observation deck. So, after flying it for the third time we were finally able to see the A380 in all its impressiveness from the rooftop of the midfield terminal.

Another trip that, for me at least, was long overdue was to the Uetliberg, Zurich's closest and best-known (I'm tempted to add "only") mountain. In my 13 years of living in Zurich I've only been there once and I merely remember from being told about it.

Here you go, part 1 from our Switzerland vacation 2011:

This time's challenge: Climb Taiwan's highest peak and come back the same day. The trail head starts at an altitude of around 2600 meters and 玉山主峰 (Yu shan or Mt. Jade main peak) stands 3952 meters tall. The distance to the top is about 12 km and the entire trip generally takes around 12 hours.

It's certainly not an easy hike, but very doable, at least if you don't go over the top with packing your backpack like I tend to. We stayed the night in 東埔山莊 (Dong pu mountain lodge), which is conveniently located about 2-3 kilometers from the 塔塔加登山口 (Ta ta jia trail head).

Unfortunately we had rather bad luck with the weather. The first five hours of ascent were largely dry but near the 排雲山莊 (Pai yun mountain lodge) we entered the fog and drizzle set in, which got worse as we hiked up to the peak.

A few hundred meters before the top I decided to leave my backpack at the side of the road and continued with nothing but a bottle of water, a small waterproof camera, and the Swiss and Taiwanese flags that I carry an all these trips. The heavy backpack had really worn me out and with the weight off my shoulders advancing was much easier.

We spent only a few minutes at the top to take the obligatory peak photos. After all, the fog was so thick that there was nothing else to take pictures of unless you're an artist who's heavily into gray shapes on gray background. Besides, it was too cold for eating, so we postponed lunch for a few hours half-way down.

Finally at the bottom, exactly 12 hours after we had started, we sprung for the shuttle back to the parking lot and headed home to recover our sore muscles and aching joints.

On the way home a strange feeling befell me: It just didn't feel like I had just been to the highest mountain in Taiwan. Hiking without a view is just not the same for the brain. Conquering the physical challenge was great but I'll definitely have to go back for the view and the feeling!

GPS track

Hiking log

''(The altitudes may be a little off as I hadn't calibrated my altimeter.)''

0300: Get up, eat breakfast
0330: Set out by car to the parking lot close by
0345: Start hiking from the 新中橫公路北側平面停車場 (New central traversal highway north side parking lot), 2595 m
0427: 塔塔加登山口 (Ta ta jia trail head), 2598 m
0503: 孟祿亭 (Meng lu pavilion), 2783 m
0633: 西峰觀景台 West peak view pavilon, 2988 m
0810: 排雲山莊 (Pai yun mountain lodge), 3406 m
1033: 玉山主峰 (Yu shan main peak), 3952 m
1040: Descent
1156: 排雲山莊 (Pai yun mountain lodge)
1330: 西峰觀景台 West peak view pavilon, lunch
1400: Continue descent
1545: 塔塔加登山口 (Ta ta jia trail head)
1556: Shuttle back to the parking lot

Photos

*Update (2011-05-14): *I've uploaded the GPS track to GPSies: 單攻玉山 (Yu shan one-day trip)

The festival isn't free per se but, given that a light festival probably looks better from a distance than when you're in the middle of it, we enjoyed the view from the Memorial Hall's balcony and were not disappointed. Judge for yourself:

I had a chance to try a borrowed NIKKOR 50mm f/1.2 lens, which allowed me to get some amazing results without the help of a tripod. Very handy if your left hand is holding up an umbrella most of the time. :-)

It took two layers of pants and five layers of shirts, fleece, and jackets in order not to freeze to death on the scooter. Luckily we only had to ride about fifteen minutes to meet Kevin and his heated car.

With several stops on the way we drove along 竹122線 all the way to 觀霧 (Guan wu), which loosely translates into "View of the fog". The place has its name for a good reason as especially in the afternoon it is very common to have fog in the area. But not this time; we didn't see a cloud the whole day. Unfortunately the absence of clouds also ruined our sunrise photo session. Not that I would see many of them but apparently they are quite boring without clouds. :-)

Anyway, I'll take a clear sky over a great sunrise any day and below you'll quickly see why. Of course when you're freezing at 4 am your first thought isn't exactly "pack sunscreen", so I ended up looking like a strawberry, but it was still worth it. All in all one of my favorite mountain trips in Taiwan so far. And the best part is that the scenery makes for a lot of inspiration on where to go next!

A few weeks ago I was trying to find a good spot that had a view of Taipei but was still easily reachable by public transportation. 陽明山國家公園 (Yang Ming Shan National Park) has plenty of nice hills and mountains but most of them are poorly connected to bus or metro.

One of the closer ones immediately stood out: 中正山 (Zhong zheng shan). It promised to have a good view of the whole city, all the way down to Taipei 101:

So, we did a little research, found how to go there and off we went, armed with my trusted GPS logger, the camera, and way too little water.

Just so you get an idea where our hike took us, here's the bird's eye view:

The yellow arrow is 中正山 (Zhong zheng shan), our main destination. The red one is 大屯西峰 (Da tun shan west peak), the place we figured we could go if we had enough energy left (which we did).

The green arrow is hovering over 七星山 (Qi xing shan), the highest mountain in Taipei. And, finally, the blue arrow is pointing at 大屯山 (Da tun shan), which is said to have one of the nicest sunsets in Northern Taiwan, something we had been able to confirm on a previous trip.

There you go, so much for the maps. Lean back and enjoy the photos. (But don't lean back too far, otherwise you won't be able to reach your mouse. ;-)

Last Saturday a friend invited me to join him and his mentor to take photos at a Lotus pond near 北埔 (Bei pu). I learned a thing or two about photography, but what I realized the most was that there are at least two very different types of photographers.

** The first kind likes to get up early, say 4-6 in the morning, occupy a well-chosen spot, and patiently wait for the sun to rise to shoot the perfect photograph - a true work of art.
** The second one doesn't like to change his sleeping habits because of his camera. He likes to drag it along, though, whenever he goes some place nice and then tries to shoot a great photo given the current angle and lighting conditions.

Have you guessed which type I am? Yes, big surprise, I don't like to get up early. :-) Either way, it's very interesting to observe the differences in both behavior and outcome.

My friend is of the first kind. He'll adjust his tripod for minutes, just to get the exact angle he has in mind. I, on the other hand, will rather look for a new subject than fidget with my tripod to make it stand in the muddy slope. Cause, you know, you have to clean it later and get your hands dirty ...

Obviously, the outcome is also very different. His photo collection is full with photos that you could hang on a wall and that will make people go "oooh" and "aaah".

My photos are much simpler. Still nice, I believe, but much simpler. My only real goal when I take photos is to capture the moment and make the photo look as impressive as what I perceive. I want my photos to tell a story and give people an impression of what the place and the atmosphere was like.

Do I wish I could take some more "artistic" photos once in a while? Of course, but I don't think I'm patient enough to focus on that. I'll just be learning it slowly - after all I have plenty of time. If BP keeps their wells shut nature will be around long enough for me to learn how to ban it on (virtual) film.

So, the photos below may not exactly reach my declared goal since it wasn't an actual trip. See it as the result of my exercise for there be more beautiful trip photos in the future! :-)

On our three-day Paris trip last year I got a little bored of stereotype Paris. It's really just like you know it from TV with one big exception; the tourists and their side effects are mostly missing in TV Paris. Real Paris, however, is teeming with tourists, street vendors and other ripper-offers - pretty much everything that takes the fun out of traveling.

Armed with my new toy I started observing the people instead and the little things that no one normally pays attention to. Suddenly the city became much more entertaining!

I give you Paris through Martin's eyes ...

We quickly found something on what by now is one of our favorite hiking blogs. The family who writes it has been to so many places in Hsinchu County that you can always find a good suggestion or directions to a hard-to-find trail.

So, we settled for a rather short but nice little hiking trail near 新豐 (Xin feng), just north of 竹北 (Zhu bei), called 鳳崎落日登山步道 (Feng qi luo ri hiking trail). It's only about 3.3 kilometers one way but that coincided well with our habit of getting up (too) late.

The GPSies map ...

... and our photos. Have fun!

Dragon boat festival also marks the end of the rainy season. This year the sky was right on time and after a few days of relatively heavy rain we had a (mostly) dry day to enjoy our hike.

After seeing a few blog articles and Panoramio photos I had got the impression that it must be a fairly easy hike with maybe one or two short segments that involve pulling yourself up on a rope. Far from it! On the last quarter of the trail your hands are just as busy as your legs.

An elevation of 800 meters on about 4 km length makes it an interesting day hike. Below are the trail record on GPSies and the photos from my gallery. Enjoy!

Since many mountains don't have official hiking trails it can be a little tricky to find the trail entrance and you never know how many different trails there are. We had found a blog post that described a hike to said mountain and decided to try and approach it from the other side - unfortunately with little luck because our road of choice turned out to be a dead end.

Either way, the view was good and the hike was just right to take advantage of another rare sunny Saturday in the middle of the rain season.

Sunday first took us to 合歡山東峰 (He huan shan east peak). And the two of us who still had enough energy bagged the - admittedly easy - trophies of 石門山 (Shi men shan) and 合歡尖山 (He huan jian shan) as well. The latter two are really just better hills but the wind sure made it fun. It brought back memories of our typhoon weekend in 墾丁 (Kenting) over two years ago. It was hard to stand at times.

Unfortunately the wind also brought a lot of fog with it, so if you're looking for more great views you'll have to come back in a few weeks or so. :-)

The list of Taiwan's 100 highest mountains is pretty famous here but only few people are adventurous enough to complete it. Some mountains are only accessible after days of difficult hiking and the weather is a factor not to be underestimated.

Luckily some of these 100 mountains are quite easy to conquer. The easiest ones are all part of 合歡山 (He huan shan), so that it's perfectly possible to climb five of them in a good weekend of relaxed hiking. We managed to do four of them - two per day. On Saturday we hiked 北峰 (north peak) and walked up (it can't be called hiking ...) 主峰 (main peak).

So, what's with the frog you ask? Well, you'll see it in the photos below. Let's just say that green wasn't the color of my choice but now that I look like a frog I figured I might as well make this the motto of my Top-100 attack! :-)

Enjoy the photos! (If you liked them, there's a link to more at the bottom.)

There are more photos in my gallery, so be sure to check it out as well.

Part two will be coming up soon ...

Luckily there's an exception to every rule, so we came up with something we like to call "emergency hikes". An emergency hike consists of a) a hiking route that needs virtually no preparation and b) no expectations. Basically, they're perfect when the clouds suddenly lift and you can no longer stand to be trapped inside.

One such emergency hike was 騎龍古道 (Qi long ancient trail), not too far from here. The trail itself is very short and more of a walk than a hike, but the area is nice and very quiet:

Link to the full album

Of course the little cold and rain wouldn't stop us from hiking, so here are a few photos from our umbrella hike. One day we're going back there and we'll return with a myriad of beautiful photos of mountain and ocean views, sunrises, sunsets, and seas of clouds!

Link to the full album

You can find the GPS track over at GPSies and there's a link to more photos from that trip at the bottom.

Link to the full album

Be sure to check out the full album if you like these.

Link to the full album

Later that day Ivy and I rode our scooter to the 天恩彌勒佛院 (Voice of Maitreya area), which features the biggest 彌勒佛 (Maitreya) statue in Asia. While still under construction it is already an impressive piece of work, in particular the majestic statue that rises above the nearby lake.

Enjoy the photos!

So far, so good; there's nothing wrong with kids getting used to today's media early on. But let's have a closer look what he was playing:

I apologize for the photo quality, but you can recognize that it's a pretty violent and bloody game that involves running around simple 2D levels shooting with machine guns at others until the blood splashes and having the same done to yourself. Quite amazingly when the father noticed what his kid was doing he wasn't the least bit shocked or even surprised and seemed to smile approvingly of his son's pastime.

The next two photos speak for themselves:

In case you're wondering: Yes, "idiot" in French means the same thing as in English ...

I assume that the person who gave the idiot-ic name to the restaurant would respond to the tea shop's question with a resounding "yes!".

The area around the world's tallest skyscraper (looks like the financial crisis is buying us another few years in this regard) was more crowded than last year, but I still managed to find a little spot to put up my camera and shoot some firework pictures for the first time with my D-SLR. Given that I had no idea what I was doing and only had about two minutes to experiment I'm quite happy with the outcome.

I'll upload more photos to my gallery as soon as I get to process them (maybe together with the Switzerland photos that have been in the queue for the last four months :-). Until then here are three of my favorite pictures I took last night, directly from the camera.

Happy New Year to everybody!

In case you're wondering what the "Taiwan UP" stands for, we've had the same discussion last night. Ideas went from "Up into the sky is where the money gets shot during the fireworks" to simply "up yours", but it seems the correct interpretation is that 2010 is the year where the economy recovers and life goes up again. I like this idea. Let's drink to that!

As always the track log is on GPSies but you can also check out the map here:

Photo-wise, for now I only have a bunch of rather boring Panoramio photos but more will follow soon.

*Update (2009-11-09):* Thanks to everybody's picture sharing efforts I was able to put together a few nice group photos. Enjoy!

If you liked these pictures there are a few more in my Bike trip to 宇老 album.

This little collection is still from my shameful "DSLR in auto mode" days, but then again travel preparations are hard enough without learning to use your new toys. Anyway, as part of my experiments I was chasing helpless butterflies and even more helpless flowers around the house and pushing the macro end of my kit lens. While some of the photos got surprisingly good let me apologize in advance for any oversaturation caused by auto mode. :-)

It also gives me a chance to try the latest feature of my blog software: inserting the content of an entire gallery album with a simple line of markup text. I'm still working on the layout part, but while I'm doing that you can enjoy these little photos.

With only marginal help from the clouds and a pair of sunglasses my trusted Casio Exilim EX-750 didn't let me down. I was able to take a few decent pictures as you can see:

Some full-sized pictures can be found in my Snapshot album.

I think this is a good occasion to dedicate a few words to my camera. In the last four years it has taken more than 10,000 photos or about 20 GB of image data. It survived the occasional drop and even came back from a salt water induced coma last year. Hats off to this amazing little piece of technology! :-)

With only eight seconds left to cross the road, shouldn't the man be walking instead of what he seems to be doing?

The saying that there is no accounting for taste is probably as old as the first cave paintings. As for me you'll much rather see me carefully remove a 30,000 year-old painting from a cave wall than spend a single dollar on one of the exhibits at these events.

I have picked two examples to class up my blog. The first one is a traditional Taiwanese set of living room furniture:

The second one (and this is the part that really worries me - after all you can't argue with tradition), is fashioned after ancient European cultural periods (possibly Baroque?). It is considered European luxury style luxury.

Maybe it's time to send a few of these designers on a business trip across European living rooms.

What's funny is that, when you take pictures at these exhibitions, it usually doesn't take long until some worried sales person comes jumping across the hall telling you not to take pictures.

At first I didn't quite understand why. After all they are trying to make a sale. And nowadays people often shop with cameras. You take pictures, go home, take your time comparing, matching styles and colors. And at the end of the day you decide. So why stop people from taking pictures? Are they too embarrassed about their design? Do they fear to be ridiculed by the blogging community?

Not at all! The opposite is the case: They are proud of their design. So proud, in fact, that they fear that people take pictures at an exhibition, then bring these pictures to the next best furniture factory to have an exact replica built at a fraction of the price. It is sad but true that this is common practice among a large part of Taiwanese.

Be that is it may. My motto is that you can take pictures of anything as long as you're fast enough. And in that spirit you can find the rest of the pictures in my gallery. But I'm warning you: They are not for the faint of stomach!

Our means of transportation was a scooter, without a doubt the most convenient way of getting around. We even brought our own helmets cause riding at 50 km/h with a 100 TWD helmet (about the price of two bowls of noodles), the kind that scooter rental places offer, is just half the fun.

The thing that personally impressed me the most was a Buddhist ceremony we saw at the beach. (It goes by the name of 海之祭 or, in full, 安平海祭淨安祈福消災冥陽法會. The translation is left to the reader - and the writer - as an exercise.) The preparations were huge since the whole beach was decorated not only with traditional items such as paper ships, statues, flags, swags, and fruit, but also with modern elements like fireworks, a laser show, and an ear-shattering loudspeaker system. The ceremony itself consisted of dance, praying, music, and an abundance of fire. All of this was to honor the gods, pray for luck, and hope the people who died in the ocean can find the way to heaven. Truly an impressive spectacle.

Apart from that there were different parks, temples, flowers, and nature. (I just noticed I forgot to take pictures of food again. Maybe I'll remember next time ...)

Check out my Tainan album for all the pictures!

This and some other interesting night shots were taken during one of our walks to 象山 (Xiang shan; Elephant mountain). Check out the Xiang shan by night album for some nice photos of Taipei and 101.

Okinawa is a relatively small island in the south of Japan and inhabited by a little more than 1.3 million people. Actually, the whole prefecture includes hundreds of little islands, the Ryukyu Islands, but we only visited the main one. We spent two days in Naha, the prefecture's capital, and southern area before heading up to the center and eastern part.

Some of the views are breathtaking and so is driving on the left side for the first time in your life. Apart from the occasional struggle with the GPS (strictly Japanese and only workable with the handbrake pulled - learn the hard way!) it went fine, though, and we enjoyed five relaxing days in the sun.

The pictures, complete with GPS coordinates, thanks to my trusted and always present "Easy Showily" GPS logger:

Okinawa (Days 1 and 2)
Okinawa (Days 3 to 5)

If you think that vacations are relaxing then you should try coming back from one of my vacations. Hundreds of photos and dozens of GPS traces are waiting to be combined and put online.

Luckily, I finally found a working program that does this job quite well: Geotag. It loads pictures from different directories and multiple GPS tracks and with a little bit of magic you'll have coordinates in your pictures in no time. The result of this can be seen here:

Turtle Island album

Turtle Island (龜山島, Gui shan dao) is a small, uninhabited island on the west coast of Taiwan. Unfortunately it's still under military control and visiting involves going with a rather large tour group or a lot of paperwork (If you have the choice, go with the paperwork! :-), but it's worthwile in spite of that. See for yourself.

Oh, and pictures from Okinawa are coming up soon. At least some of them; turns out my camera is allergic to water. ;-)

And then there's the National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu where a walk around the lake is more like an obstacle course around dead animals:

Theories as to the reason of this animal battle ground include "bored to death by professors" and "university graduate designed aeration system". ;-)

All jokes aside, apart from the lake the university is quite nice. Take a look by visiting my Taiwanese Universities album.

* Mother's cooking is still the best
* Shops close over lunch time
* The amount of snow
* The challenge of getting food after 22h!

And some things are not quite what they used to be:

* I can walk through my parents' home town largely incognito
* I feel weird going to a Chinese restaurant (especially accompanied by a Taiwanese)
* My ability to speak my mother tongue (it's embarrassing trying to order something in a bakery and not remembering its name ;-)

Together with Ivy I traveled through Switzerland in what can be described as a mixture between Swiss retiree style (i.e. sitting in the train a lo-o-ot) and Japanese city hopping. In three days we went from Chur to Lausanne in the Glacier Express, from there to Basel and Bern, and via Zürich back to Chur. Our vacation also included a Snow Show in Arosa and a one-day trip to St. Moritz, one of the most expensive (and, if it wasn't for the scenery, most boring) towns in Switzerland.

But Chinese food (not my idea, I swear) was not the only thing that reminded us of Taiwan. See for yourself:

Apparently, the Love sculpture in front of Taipei's 101 is not the only one of its kind. Turns out that there are more instances of Robert Indiana's art piece than you'd think as a quick Internet search reveals. :-)

My gallery has more pictures from our trip. Enjoy!

If you're wondering what I'm up to these days: shopping, cleaning, and working. The former two are mostly related to my new apartment. I have the essentials to live, i.e. a desk, a couch, a decent washing machine, and a heater, but many things are still outstanding. There's carpets, curtains, a TV, a Wii, a decent computer (to replace the horrible horrible Lenovo laptop I'm forced to use), and lots of little household things.

Then there's work which is keeping me quite busy, especially shortly before the Chinese New Year's vacation where as many things as possible need to be wrapped up. Who wants to work in their vacation, after all? Well, I'll be working at least for a few hours. During my trip through Swizerland I will quickly stop by my old university with which Logitech works together. No nostalgic feelings, though.

When I'm not working or shopping, I'm trying to bike a little more often, at least when the weather allows. One such weekend was about three weeks back and there are even a few pictures in my gallery.

I finally have my GPS logger, a Wintec WPL-1000, so keeping track of my bike trips has gotten a lot easier. Check out the route of my last trip.

I'll try to post some snow pictures from Switzerland. ;-)

The activities were not too exciting (especially the paint ball for which some people had signed up and then got to play for around 10 minutes), but I got to make one of my favorite Taiwanese desserts, 愛玉. Here are two pictures of me and another one where they were making mochi (麻糬):

By the way, Loïc was a little faster than I was, he's mentioning the event in his blog as well, including some funny pictures.

As part of the event we even got a gift voucher and today was the day where we could pick it up at the warehouse (that already made me suspicious). It turned out we had the choice between a really old webcam, a really old wired mouse, and a really old wired PS/2 keyboard. It wasn't so much a gift as a "please help us empty our warehouse, it's cheaper than ordering the trash company" object.

Anyway, free stuff is free stuff (haha, I'm cheap ;-), so I went for the keyboard. If nothing else I can use it to practice Bopomofo (the Taiwanese alphabet).

For the time being, though, I put it up in my office:

(I hate to explain jokes, but in case you can't read the Chinese, it says: "Antique keyboard exhibition. Please don't touch.")

* Chiayi and Ali shan
* Yílán and Taipei
* Kenting

Some others are still on my todo list. Unfortunately, the location data for these albums is a little sparse. For one thing, I don't always remember where the places were and for another, the satellite imagery of Taiwan is sometimes of such low resolution that it's hard to locate places without GPS.

As a first step to solving this problem I recently bought a new cell phone. But it's not just a cell phone, it's a ASUS P535, which combines cell phone, digital camera, PDA, and GPS in one slick device. In case you were wondering: Yes, it's yet another reason why my blogging frequency is fairly low.

But obviously a PDA with GPS is not the most elegant way to keep track of your location when you're doing a trip. Much better is a GPS track logger like the Wintec WPL-1000. Unfortunately it's not yet for sale but it should be in the next few weeks. So, prepare for some nice location and tracking information in the near future, here on this channel. :-)

Instead of boring you with a description of the entire weekend (I'll leave that job to the photos) I want to share two little episodes that are characteristic for what I like so much about Taiwan.

Winds were rather strong on Saturday, so not many people dared (or bothered) to go outside. Given our short stay we didn't want to stay inside and live off of instant noodles, so we decided to drive around the area and enjoy the beautiful scenery. One of our destinations was the Erluanbi Lighthouse National Park (鵝鑾鼻國家公園, Éluánbí guójiā gōngyuán) at the southernmost point of Taiwan. Unfortunately the park was closed during the typhoon and we were already heading back to our car when the staff told us that we could visit anyway, just at our own risk. No need to tell us twice! We ran in and fought our way against the wind to the top of the hill on which the lighthouse is standing. We had a blast (literally and metaphorically speaking)! It's great when rules can be bent once in a while and the fear of a legal suit doesn't stifle every hint of flexibility and common sense.

Later the same day we had lunch in 恆春 (Héngchūn), a town in Southern Taiwan. With eight people it tends to become a little difficult to choose a restaurant, so our group ended up split into four people preferring rice from one store and four people preferring food from the noodle store next door. Not a problem in Taiwan. The noodle store owner saw that we were one big group and told us to go sit together, she would bring us our food over. If that's not great service, then what is? Try the same thing in Switzerland and you'll find yourself kicked out before you realize what's going on.

I'm still sorting through everybody's pictures and making a selection. Today was National Day and I was busy trying to ride a scooter. Anyway, Candy was a lot faster, so until I'm done, go ahead and check out her gallery.

*Update:* (date censored) My album is online at last. Check it out!

Grimselpass and Rhonegletscher
Flight Zürich - Taipei

If the latter name sounds familar, you may have been reading Sherlock Holmes books. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was so impressed with these falls that he let his hero fall down and "die" at that location, struggling with his archenemy. There's still a large number of fans who pilgrimage to this place. You can check out the official website if you're interested.

For the tech-savvy and the always busy out there, let me point out that you can see most of my photo albums in different versions, including Google Map, Google Earth variants, and a Quick tour by going to the gallery page and choosing the corresponding link.

More pictures to come soon ...

Our test hike today led us to the top of 七星山 (Qīxīng mountain) in the 陽明山國家公園 (Yángmángshān National Park). It seems the three of us who will be there in August (Joe, Sunny, and I) should be fit enough, so all we need is some better equipment (quick-drying clothes, backpacks, etc.).

Anyway, as always I took a few pictures and I've just uploaded them into my gallery. Enjoy the pictures of Taipei county's highest mountain.

I have barely unpacked and already I'm packing again, although only for one day. I'm going to the north of Taiwan to the beach. Yes, that's pretty much the extent of what I know so far, I guess I'll find out more on the way. I'm still struggling with spontaneity but I think I might get there eventually. :-)

So, while I get suntanned at the beach (or maybe not, cause suntans are not very popular in Taiwan, at least among women; have to find out if the same holds true for men) I invite you to go outside and enjoy the sun with me or, if it rains like it currently does in Switzerland, you can just look at my Hong Kong pictures.

I went to Běipǔ (北埔) in the hills south east of Hsinchu and came back via Zhúdōng (竹東). When you only bike in Hsinchu, it's hard to believe that there are real hills and mountains. But it only takes about an hour to go to Běipǔ, which should be a good starting point for future, more serious biking trips into the mountains. The highest I got today was only about 200 meters above sea level, but they have mountains that reach almost 4,000 in central Taiwan. I feel an urge to hit some of the higher ones. It's probably my Swiss genes showing through ...

I took a few pictures of the landscape. It's mostly (sub?)tropical forest, but once you get off the busy roads, far away from scooters and cars, it's really nice and quiet.

About two weeks ago, I found two very good sets of maps. The first one is the "Formosa Complete Road Atlas". You can see what it looks like here. (But don't buy it there. In Taiwan one volume only costs around 1,600 TWD, which is roughly half of the 90 USD listed on that website.) It's an excellent collection of Taiwanese maps. All Chinese, but every tiny road is visible and there's lots of extra information. So, it's very useful for planning bike trips. (I take pictures with my camera or make copies for underway cause it's quite big and heavy.)

Then, there's the cheaper alternative, the Hsinchu City Atlas:

Unfortunately, it doesn't cover the entire Hsinchu county, but it has excellent and detailed map material of the greater Hsinchu city area. Běipǔ is just about where it stops in the south. But hey, it's free! In Switzerland, the same thing would cost at least 20 CHF. According to this announcement article you can get it at the City Hall Service Center and the Bureau of Tourism.

I got mine at the Sun and Tree Outfitters (鄉野情) store in Hsinchu, where I also bought a bunch of other things. They have a nice (albeit not cheap) selection of everything you need for outdoor sports and competent staff. (Yes, some of them even speak English!) It's a dangerous place, though. Every time I leave the store, my wallet feels like it just got off an instant-diet. :-)

*PS:* On one of the photos I posted, you can see 五指山 (Five Finger Mountain). Here are two Google Earth views of it (click to enlarge). The green pin in the second picture is Běipǔ. Looks like there should be a nice view from up there--that is if the air is clean and the weather is nice.

* This week I went for a walk around Qīngcǎo Lake (青草湖), which is only five minutes away from where I live. It's a quite peaceful place, except for A K-TV (Karaoke) place that you (un?)fortunately can't hear on the pictures. There are also a few pictures from the rooftop of the building I live in.
* Last Saturday I was invited to a wedding of one my work colleagues. A picture of the lovely couple, my new "roommate", and a few other things in the Snapshot album.
* If you're wondering why I'm not buying an X-Box, here is why. Funny, this didn't happen during the demos at WinHEC.
* And this week in the series of weird things that I ate in Taiwan: Chicken feet. They're not really my favorite food, cause they're difficult to eat (you have to gnaw off the skin) and there's not much taste to them besides the sauce. But at least I've tried. :-)

If everything (i.e. the weather) goes well, I'll go biking tomorrow. I have a bunch of new maps that open up entirely new ways to see beautiful things and get lost. If I make it back, there will be more pictures soon!

As I already mentioned, I went on a short bike tour on Labor day along the 頭前溪 (Tóuqián river) in 竹東 (Zhúdōng/Jhudong). The captions are still not complete but I decided to make the album available anyway.

Yesterday I decided to go to the beach. The seems to make me one of the few people who live in Hsinchu and have actually been to that beach! Whoever I ask, they tell me they have never been to the beach. That made me curious and after a lovely day of biking and beach walking I must say I don't know why more people don't go there. See for yourself!

The area is called Hsinchu Coastline Scenic Area. The government is going to great lengths to build a very nice recreational area including a 17km bike path. It's not quite complete yet (I'd say half of it is there), but it's still very much worth going.

PS: Now that Google Maps finally has half-way decent coverage of Taiwan (it still doesn't find any addresses but at least they have maps in addition to the satellite imagery), I was even able to add location information to the photos. If you want to know where the pictures were taken, just scroll down and click the 'Show map' link below the photo.

Beitou is a city a little North of Taipei, about 1.5h from Hsinchu, that is famous for its natural hot springs and many outdoor baths. There seems to be a constant layer of mist hanging over the city, which looks great in combination with the city lights. We went there with Joe, a Taiwanese guy who just started at Logitech this week. He's a great guide and--unlike Loïc and myself--not afraid of driving.

Completely relaxed we visited the Shilin Night Market, the largest of its kind in Taipei. There's almost nothing you can't buy there. It consists of a combination of small businesses and stands, so you can walk through the market and just grab a bite here and there. The food is very inexpensive but delicious and diverse.

Apart from that I went apartment hunting last week! To be honest, it wasn't so much comparable to exciting hunting than to sitting still until the prey happens to cross the barrel's direction. The great people from the Logitech's Taiwanese video group are helping us out with everything that we can't do for lack of the language.

We looked at two places, the first one was downtown and looked okay, albeit a little old and cool. Carpets don't seem to be very popular from what I've seen so far. I could live with that, but what bugged me more was that there was no place to cook.

Luckily, someone at Logitech happens to be renting out an apartment in a fairly new building complex, so just a few hours later we got to look at a second place. It's not quite as well situated (i.e. not downtown, but in a very green area, and closer to Logitech) but it looks _really_ nice. (I was warned it would look a little girly but for the short time I can very easily make my peace with that. ;-)

On the culinary side the week had a few highlights like the dinner with the video driver team, from which I now finally have some photos (awaiting more), and a great hot pot dinner that we had with Rebecca the other night. Hot pot (huoguo) is something slightly similar to what we know in Europe except that you just throw everything into the (very spicy) pot and let it simmer. Kind of like Fondue Bourguignonne but chop stick compatible. :-) (Sidenote: cow stomach doesn't taste better in a hot pot than it does in tomato sauce ...)

Today, I realized that the language is not the only communication barrier for a Western person in Taiwan. Even the hand gestures for indicating numbers are different, which explains why I didn't get _two_ skewers for lunch today. To make things worse, when I got home I started learning the mainland Chinese gestures until I noticed that Taiwan uses a different set. Just one of the reasons why I don't see boredom coming up in the next couple of weeks.

I guess that covers the week. I put a number of assorted pictures together, enjoy!

The food was very good so far despite a number of weird things that crossed my plate (metaphorically speaking--none of them were alive and moving):

* Marinated jellyfish (for breakfast)
* Chicken hearts skewer
* Squid
* Blue potatoes (I had my doubt if they are really considered potatoes but I was told so)

Talking about weird things, who would have thought that I would have my first chocolate fondue in Taiwan! The video system software team took us out for dinner to a French restaurant in Hsinchu. (Pictures coming soon.) I had "Zürichgeschnetzeltes" (it wasn't quite called that but the name had "Zurich" in it), which is not exactly French but close enough. Apart from this special event I try to steer clear of Western cuisine (breakfast excluded so far) and McDonalds, there's just too many good things to try out. I'm a big fan of fried chicken, the spices they use here are awesome.

Enough about food, though, let's talk for a minute about another all-time classic topic, the weather. After the lovely weekend things took a turn for the worse and it has been raining a lot since Monday. Also, the temperatures have dropped to around 15C, time to add another layer of clothes.

The great Sunday gave us a chance, however, to walk around the city for a bit. I took some pictures that you can find in my my gallery. We visited the Eighteen Peaks Mountain Park, which is located on a hilltop not far from downtown.

Finally, I also shot two short videos. The first one is to prove that Hsinchu got its nickname "The Windy City" for a good reason. The second one shows one of the rather musical stones that can be found along the park roads.

The view along the route wasn't exactly magnificient because it was mostly in the woods and even the scenic sounding Skeggs Point Scenic View vista point let me down. But the exercise was good nevertheless; about 40 km of cycling were a good change after yet another week of way too much work.

Since I didn't want to bring down the scenic level of my gallery :-), I decided to upload the few pictures I took to Panoramio. Also, there is a Google Earth route available, so you can follow the tour the way most people do sports: from your couch. ;-)

Some of the pictures available in Panoramio also show up in Google Earth, which looks something like this:

(Note the enabled 'Panoramio' feature in the 'Geographic Web' section to the left.)

Since I already have coordinates for most of my gallery content, I thought I'd give it a try and start uploading a few pictures from my Coast Line to Santa Cruz album.

You can either see all my Panoramio pictures or, and this is much more interesting, go explore an area like this one. This is a great way to find nice places to visit if you're ever looking for a trip!

As always, it comes in a Google Earth version and a map version; or you can choose how many pictures you want to see--from "I have one minute while my code compiles" (Quick tour) to "It's 4pm and I don't want to start something new" (Full tour).

Also, I've added a few snapshots and screenshots, both of which can be found in my gallery.

So instead of going to the Asian Art museum in San Francisco, which was the original bad weather plan, we spontaneously decided to drive along the coast to Santa Cruz. There were a couple of amazing views, and Pescadero Beach is so beautiful that you just want to stay there for the rest of the day.

If these pictures don't make you want to visit me in California, then I can't help you. ;-)

To see the pictures you have the choice:

* Boring old album with plain photos
* Exciting 3D view with route and photos! (requires Google Earth)
* A few other fancy options ;-)

The result of it all is the album of my trip to the Half Moon Bay and the coast line. This is the first album that not only has geolocated photos but also the routes I took. Just click the View in Google Earth link in the album to enjoy the bird's-eye version of my trip and a lot of scenic pictures.

I had already hinted something in my last blog post, so here it finally is; the first version of what happens when the Quip Gallery meets Google Earth. All of my albums now have a "Google Earth" link next to them, which allows you to directly look at the gallery in said program. Once Google Earth is open, click on one of the yellow buttons in the map to view the picture taken at the marked location.

If you happen to be the last person on earth that doesn't have Google Earth installed on their computer, you can either download it or use Google Maps to sneak a peek. (It's not quite the same, though: no 3D!) Just copy the link location of the "Google Earth" link to your clipboard and type it into Google Maps. Click the following link to see what one of the latest albums looks like:

The "Stanford Dish and Ladera" album on Google Maps.

The simple secret behind this little trick? Google Maps understands KML.

I'll add a few more cool things when time permits. Right now I'm thinking about automatically built paths between the photographed locations and resizable pictures. Any cool ideas, please drop me a message!

*PS:* A short warning to Opera users out there: Opera has an unfortunate "feature" that overrides the MIME type in certain cases. What this means is that if you try to save the file, it will end up as a .xml file in your hard drive and you have to rename it manually. There are two workarounds that I know of:

1. Choose *.* in the "Save as" dialog under "Save as type" when you store the .kml file and make sure the name ends in .kml.
2. Add a MIME type mapping in the preferences (press Alt+P and go to 'Advanced|Downloads') for the type application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml and the extension kml. Then, go to the opera:config page and tick the _Trust Server Types_ checkbox.

For the first time this year I took my bike for a quick spin around the area. I didn't have my bike repair kit with me, so I didn't want to risk too much. God (and Thomas) knows I've had my experiences with flat tires here in California. I therefore decided to go search for the Stanford Dish, a fairly large parabolic antenna right next to the campus.

I did go just a little further than that, though. If you want to see the route together with a couple of photos I took along the way, you can do this in a new exciting way that looks something like this:

If you have Google Earth installed, you can download a file that contains the route complete with links to the pictures in my gallery. Just click on the little camera icons.

Of course, for all those who are not yet addicted to Google Earth, you can see the same pictures as an "old-style" album. Alternatively, this would be the right time to download Google Earth and join the club. ;-) In the future, there will be more of those as I integrate this feature into Quip, the software the site runs on.

There's one more thing I wanted to share. It turns out you're not actually supposed to ride your bike in the Dish area. As I was told by one of the "park rangers" it's dangerous with all the elderly people and kids that use the area for walking. That got me thinking. The roads are about twelve feet wide and paved. In Switzerland this qualifies as a highway. We are used to sharing mountain trails that are barely wide enough for two people to cross. Everybody pays attention and the descending person steps aside. Nobody would even think about outlawing bikes on a recreational road.

Could it be that the people who make these decisions never learned to bike? Could it be that, as a result, they think of biking as something difficult and highly dangerous? After all it's a sport, and we all know that sports cause accidents. Reason enough to be afraid. Or maybe it's just the American legal system that (I'm guessing here) allows me to sue the University, the city, and the state when I have a bike accident on their land--through my own fault or not.

I really appreciate that California is bike friendly in many ways. The landscape is beautiful and has all you can ask for, and there's a bike lane on virtually every major street. If these attributes were combined with a little more common sense and a little less unfounded fear, it could be bike heaven on earth.

Compared with EPFL, Stanford makes up in old buildings and a cultural background for what it lacks in modern and stylish glass buildings.

There's also a seasonal lake called Lake Lagunita. I'm wondering though what the right season is to see the lake. This is the wet season and there was not a drop of water to be seen. :-)

Pictures of all this in my gallery.

Pictures, as always, in my gallery.

Wondering what the rent is on this 26 m² studio? A stunning 1,550 bucks. (The website says CHF 1,800, so probably they're increasing the rent starting January.) Ok, it's furnished, but it feels like living at an Ikea store and it lacks such fundamental things as an oven, a baking bowl, or a whisk. The very poorly set up wireless Internet access costs about CHF 40 per month, roughly the same as a laundry card.

Last week the landlord must have had a guilt attack. On one evening I came home to find a chair (it looks almost exactly like Ikea's Poäng, only slightly cheaper) and when I got back on Thursday they had replaced the antique TV/VCR with a 19" TFT TV (Haier L1910A-A, about 350 Euro) and a DVD player (Proline DVD1255X, about 40 Euro). The quality of the TV is terrible--the audio can hardly fill the studio and the video is flickering,--but at least the DVD player seems to be region-free. That oughta be reason enough to justify the next rent increase ...

By the way, there are also some pictures of Lausanne that I took recently, when I finally managed to climb a little hill called Montriond after I had wanted to do so for almost five years. ;-)

Pictures, as always, in my gallery.

I've just uploaded a first batch of photos, although these are still from last week's trip to San Francisco. It was Fleet Week, which is a huge promotional event for the U.S. armed forces under the cover of an airshow. The jets on the pictures are the Blue Angels, the flight demonstration squadron of the Navy:

San Francisco Fleet Week 2006

More photos of Yosemite and New York coming shortly. Tomorrow night we'll stay in Morro Bay and our hotel will have Internet. Welcome to travelling in the 21st century!

The occasion was our good-bye dinner at one of California's centers of dead cows, Cattlemens in Newark, right next to Logitech. There's a few pictures of the rather impressive plates that were served in my gallery.

At the moment, there's the San Francisco Fleet Week going on, so we're probably going to get a glimpse of that spectacle. Nothing like a little patriotic support event for the troops when the president's approval ratings are low. But hey, there will be ships and planes. Engineers don't judge.

*PS:* The dish described in the title is more commonly known as "Fondue Bourguignonne". :-)

*PPS:* Okay, you just have to read the security instructions for the ship tours. Thank God the Navy only needs to defend itself against such benign threats as missiles, torpedoes, and heavy fire and not against the disastrous effects of non-IDd people, medium-sized purses, or gestures about terrorism (what do those even look like?!).

That's not what happened, though. According to Wikipedia, the history involves a stock trader and a writer who came up with a game where people could hunt other people.

So today a bunch of Logitech people and their friends came together to hunt each other down, inflicting a little pain but mostly just stains. We had reserved the field for ourselves so that we wouldn't have to share it with any pros. Definitely a wise decision at the sight of 5-year-experience die-hard paintball players in camouflage colors and equipment that would make a Navy SEAL look like a toy soldier next to them.

"Wait a minute", you must be going now, "wasn't he in the army?" Yes, I was. In the Swiss army. The army whose last actual enemy contact was in, ummmh ... very, very long ago (if there ever was one but I lost my interest there to do more research). Tactics? Nice try. Leadership? You gotta be kidding me. Stamina? Yeah, but from biking.

I still did quite okay but I could have lived without the knowledge of what the paint tastes like. :-) Nevertheless, paintball is a lot of fun!

For obvious reasons (I don't want to buy a new camera quite yet) there are no pictures of us in action, but you can still see our costumes in the gallery:

Sunol Paintball

For one thing we wanted to see some really big trees (which we almost did) and for another we wanted to do a little biking (which we definitely did). We loaded our two bikes into the car and headed up North across the Golden Gate, but not before taking a little detour over the coast line of the Halfmoon Bay where we spotted feathers, starfish, and a beautiful beach.

We drove up one of the hills of Mount Tamalpais State Park and went for a quick walk on one of the lookouts. Afterwards, we drove back down to the ranger station where we unloaded our bikes and went for a fun downhill ride, once again putting our bikes to a hard test. We survived although Thomas probably would have bought bike gloves on the spot at the end of the trail if there had been a bike shop. But there was none.

Uphill was just as much fun. The trail (they call it a fire road but I'd like to see the fire truck that goes up there--it's really just a narrow trail) was rather easy and the fog had also cleared up by that time.

Back at the car we loaded up and drove to the Muir Woods National Monument whose parking lot was once again free after being completely overcrowded in the early afternoon. We got into the park for free because it was shortly after 6pm but we nevertheless paid the price of visiting a forest late in the afternoon: bad photos. There were hardly any good ones and Thomas and I look kinda weird on some of them which is why we censored them and you will only find the good ones in the gallery. I hope Thomas applies the same criteria when posting his.

Enough with the text, get to the pictures! Here you go, the Muir Woods album. Have fun!

PS: I wrote _almost_ when talking about the big trees above. Well, you may want to judge with your own eyes but they didn't strike us as _that_ tall. The tallest one is reported to stand 258 feet (79 m) tall and I'm not sure that one's right next to the paved tourist trail.

PPS: In the meantime I've also uploaded two panorama shots that I took from the lookout.
Panorama 1
Panorama 2 (360 °)

Check out the pictures on the map or in the conventional icon view. (Yes, I'm sorry, there are more pictures of the Golden Gate. ;-)

Have you ever wondered what Morgan Spurlock in _Super Size Me_ must have felt like? I have and today I got a tiny glimpse of it. I don't think I could have gone through with it.

So what did I eat? Oh, nothing big, just two hamburgers. And it's not only the last two minutes when you're holding the last quarter of your second hamburger in your hand imagining yourself as a vegetarian (or perhaps a Pizzatarian cause Pizza would still be damn hard to let go of). No, it's the whole cooking experience.

It starts out pretty harmless. The hamburgers are huge and look kinda nice, although they do shrink together quite a bit in the process:

But once they're in the frying pan, as if tortured, they give up their messy secret: vast amounts of water and grease that, despite the splatter screen, turn your kitchen into a smelly, slippery reincarnation of hell that you spend the rest of the night cleaning, still kicking yourself for not being a vegetarian:

Click here for the close-up

That may have been my last hamburger for a little while. Come to think of it, it is amazing how many bad hamburgers (most of them _not_ self-made) I've had in the country where hamburgers are part of the culture like nowhere else. (Surprisingly enough, hot dogs are a much safer bet.)

This Friday is our next Logitech video group barbecue, where our managers cook for us, a fun thing we have once per month. I might just bring a carrot, though.

Apart from that not much exciting happened today. Okay, Thomas finally got a haircut but that's about it. Tomorrow is reserved for work on my thesis and maybe we'll go see the movie An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary by Al Gore. I hear it gives more insight into how propaganda works in the US than actual facts about climate change but I want to build my own opinion (and post it here ;-).

BTW: If anyone's wondering why I'm posting so much weird stuff lately, so am I. My best shot is a weird interaction of sleep deprivation and guilt for not e-mailing and phoning with people back home as much as I should. :-)

The first one was luckily not for breakfast but for lunch. As part of Logitech's 25 year anniversary a barbecue was organized for all employees. In a park right next to our HQ we were handed out picnic blankets, frisbees, and inflatable beach balls. There were sports and entertainment activities, among them a stand where a victim (among them several of our board of directors including our CEO) would sit on a chair with a menacing water balloon over their head. People could then try and hit a target in order to burst the balloon. Nobody got fired or their budget cut back as far as I know. :-) Try to find that in a European company where the board consists mostly of tie-wearing tight-ass managers ...

Just a few weeks ago after the quarterly employee meeting we were presented with a fancy glass cube.

Pretty shiny, huh? ;-) Okay, the cubes are a little on the tacky side but we appreciate the gesture. A couple of things went wrong though: For starters, some of the people didn't get one while the computers in our lab room did receive one. (I heard they were thrilled.) Moreover, some (according to a non-representative survey among a handful of my co-workers 'many' would be more appropriate a word) of the cubes had broken corners or lacked the stand. Let me assure you that this was in no way meant to represent the quality of our retail products and that they were neither designed nor manifactured by our engineers!

The next barbecue was organized by Michael who invited us for his last night in the Bay Area. (Okay, not technically his last night but it was his last day at work and he and his girlfriend are going away traveling for a few weeks.) Foodwise I went a little easy on the meat and language-wise I finally got to practice my German, which I don't get to do a lot. (Caroline, if you're reading this--which is very unlikely--this is your fault!)

This night I finally got my well-deserved sleep back. At least some of it. Because after about 8h of sleep I just couldn't stay in bed anymore and had to get up.

Oh yeah, as of today I have a guitar! ;-)

270° view on the Marin Headlands and San Francisco
Close-up of the San Francisco skyline

There will be more of those as soon as I find a sponsor for more RAM and/or a bigger hard drive. ;-)

In a nutshell: We took the BART to the city, rode along the pier, went across the bridge, rode up the hills, took a few pictures here and there, and rode back.

You want the longer version? Most of the story is contained in the "Golden Gate by Bike" album that I've just uploaded.

On the way back, we did another very touristy thing: We drove down Lombard street, a very artificial windy road in the middle of San Francisco. But, unlike all the other people who had to queue for 30+ minutes we just jumped the queue and did it at the exact right moment: after the cable car had blocked the entrance for a while. This was a free ticket to exceeding the speed limit of 5 mph and passing the remaining slow cars in the serpentines. It only gets that good on a bike! :-)

By the way:

If you have a half-way decent browser (e.g. Opera 9 or Firefox 1.5), you can also enjoy an interactive map version of the same album! Just go to the "Golden Gate by Bike" album map and click on the little pins you see. A small bubble will pop up and show you what pictures I took at that particular location.

The album map still needs a little work, in particular you can't jump to the larger version of the picture directly from the map yet. But stay tuned, I will add something rather fancy very soon. I'll also test it with a few more browsers and try to make sure that it works with most of them.

For those of you who don't have a supported browser yet, you can either download one or look at a screenshot of this cool feature and then download one. :-)

Let me know if you like the feature! I find it's a pretty interesting way to look at photo albums because it's always interesting to see where they were taken. At least that's what I usually think when I browse through other galleries ...

Crossing the Golden Gate is still on my list of things to do and the day I post pictures of _that_ trip, I will appropriately spell "bridge" uppercase. :-)

To the pictures ...

By the way, we went to Andronico's market. They have a pretty good selection of what seems to be mostly high quality food. If you like cheese, this is definitely one of the best places to go in the area.

And talking about cheese, there's another cheese place, even closer to here: The Cheese Taster Delicatessen in Fremont. They have a nice selection of European cheese and meat and you can get amazing sandwiches there. (Oh, a small tip on the side: If you want to buy Raclette but can't make yourself understood, just ask for the "stinky one". Apparently Raclette really is a matter of taste unless your Swiss ... :-)

During the last few days I have not only uploaded the rest of our Independence Day weekend pictures, I've added a pretty cool feature to my gallery, namely the ability to locate where a picture was taken!

How does it work? It's all very simple: For some of the pictures you will see a small section called 'Location' below the image with a 'Show map' link. If you click on that link, a map and/or satellite image will pop up centered at the place where the photo was taken. All you need for this to work is a browser that supports Google Maps. (I've tested Opera and Firefox, if it doesn't work in your browser but ordinary Google Maps does, please drop me a note.)

Okay, enough with the words, let's see it all in action:

http://blog.rubli.info/gallery/

As always, feedback is welcome. Stay tuned for more cool features!

Sidenote: As you can see, there are not many photos visible by default. There are too many photo albums out there that bore their visitors to death with the 28th shot of Mount So-and-so. If you need to kill some time or are truly interested in an album, just click the "More items" link on the album page or enter the album using the "Full tour" link on the main gallery page.

Sidenote II: I'm still working on the gallery software. So far I'm quite happy with "my half" of it, i.e. the part that allows me to reorder and annotate the pictures. I'm constantly trying to improve my audience's half, too, so please feel free to leave me feedback if you have any ideas of what could be changed or added!

*Update:* The gallery was slightly (euphemism) broken, but it's fixed for the time being ... (Thanks to Bea for reporting the bug.)