I've thought about this for a while and I came to the conclusion that it is time to split my blog in two. Clearly the target audience of this blog are friends and family interested in news about my personal life, which is not surprising given the fact that I don't get to seem them very often due to my constant traveling.

However, I felt that this very fact was stopping me from posting about other stuff that plays a rather big role in my life: technology. There are thousands of blogs with small but interesting tips or reviews that I come across while looking for solutions to weird problems and that I wouldn't want to miss. The target audience for those type of blogs is obviously very different and mixing them just seems like a bad idea. (Can you hear it, too? "What do I care about how to work around that Vista bug? And what's a vista anyway?")

I hereby announce my new technology blog, where I will be posting random stuff I encounter during work or non-work related computer time. There's also a new category in the menu to the left. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, I also suggest you subscribe to my tech blog's RSS feed.

I promise I'll try not to let that new blog get in the way of posting funny and interesting stuff over here. :-)

Almost two weeks; that may have been the longest that I left my blog deserted. The reasons are to be found somewhere between work, Chinese classes, going out, and resting from doing the former three things. However, I did have time to make a list of things I want to write about and I've planned some time next week to do some serious blogging as there's definitely news worth writting about.

This weekend I'll be in 台北 (Taipei) with a friend, so you can expect some new pictures very soon. If the weather is good, we might even "climb" Taipei 101, the tallest building of the world.

Time to get some sleep. Before the little trip starts I'll have another Chinese class Saturday morning--for the third time this week. At this rate, I'll be blogging in Chinese by the end of the year. Or maybe not quite. ;-)

One last thing: the temperatures have reached something like 37 °C this week. It is now so hot that, when I get home by bike, I come into my apartment and think "Hmm, pretty cool in here." Only to discover, a few seconds later, that the room thermometer is also at 30 °C. My shirt consumption has increased a little, and so did the electricity usage thanks to the AC in my place, but it troubles me surprisingly little so far. We'll see where it goes, people tell me we haven't reached the summer peak quite yet ...

My long series of moving in and out of hotels and apartments is richer by another episode. While some things never change (like worrying about the empty fridge ;-), other things do. This time, the greatest change is that I feel like I'm about 10 years old and in constant need of my parents' help. Except that I'm 26, my parents are some 9,500 km away and I'm in need of Chinese and English speaking people's help instead.

Luckily, I'm surrounded by very nice people at Logitech who helped me find an apartment for the next two and a half months, who take me out for dinner and shopping, and who help me translate basic household devices like water cookers.

Even easy tasks like doing laundry suddenly turn into a minor adventure. Here's what the front panel of my washing machine looks like:

It took me nearly two hours of dictionary work to be able to wash my clothes with the necessary confidence level. :-)

Yesterday I met a few people in 竹北 (Zhú Bĕi), a little North of 新竹 (Xīn Zhú), for Thai food. Again, that sounds easy enough. But without scooter or bike it's pretty nothing but a taxi driver who barely speaks English, a helpless Swiss guy whose Mandarin is even worse, and an address like the following:

竹北市光明一路396號

Luckily, for such situations I have my loyal digital camera! So, before I leave home, I just photograph the address off my computer and show the camera to the taxi driver. Works like a charm; the Thai food was delicious!

Later we went shopping to Géant, a "local" hypermarket. (Interestingly enough French supermarkets are popular in Taiwan, Carrefour can also be found here.) As part of my search to adopt local habits I had a crash course in making tea with tea leaves and a tea set. The lady at the store was so nice she even gave me a very cleverly engineered tea cup that supersedes the teaball.

Because the weather is still rather bad (albeit at a pretty high temperature) I spent most of today studying Chinese and fixing some Chinese-related computer issues. As you may have noticed since today my blog posts can contain Chinese characters. Obviously, unless you install support for East Asian languages, you won't see much but a bunch of squares. So, if you saw but squares above I strongly suggest you install East Asian language support because in one of the next posts I will reveal my Chinese name. ;-)

PS: I've added some more pictures to the Taiwan Snapshot album in my gallery.

If you're wondering what I'm up to these days, you'll soon find out. The days of the current layout of my website and blog are sure counted. After about three years (roughly) on the todo list I finally decided to go ahead and do something about the design.

So, after about a day of work I have a prototype that I'm pretty happy with. It's nothing revolutionary or technically sophisticated but it's simple and neat. The only problem: Usually it takes only a few weeks until my taste outpaces it and I decide to change it again. I'm wondering how long this one survives. Two reasons why the new one might last a little longer:

1. It scales nicely in both directions. (Lack of scaling is the main reason I'm unhappy with the layout of my blog.)
2. It (sort of) works in Internet Explorer. (I don't care much, the days of IE 6 are counted but it's an ego thing. ;-)

I'm going to sleep over it a few times before I upload it and perhaps pester a few friends for opinions. Once I update the layout I can also integrate the blog and gallery (that run on Quip) with the rest of my website (which is purely static), something that has been long overdue. We'll see how it goes. :-)

Apart from that I was/am cleaning up my room, fixing computers, cleaning up my hard drive, and doing little things here and there. Yesterday I went biking for a few hours. The weather here is still pretty summery, so there was relatively little snow (but a lot of mud). Also, my bike here is a lot more fun than the one in Fremont. It did cost a little more but I don't have to worry so much about the frame disintegrating when I push it going downhill.

I made a few pictures that I'll post as soon as I'm up to speed with my USA albums, so that non-Swiss people can finally imagine what it looks like where I live. ;-)

Ever been to San Francisco downtown on a Saturday night? Sure. By car? Once.

Saturday afternoon we went to a "1st of August BBQ" that was organized by the Swiss-List. The weather was beautiful, so was the park, and I got to meet some interesting people.

Later a few of us decided to go to San Francisco, in particular because some people had never been on top of the Twin Peaks before! We also wanted to have dinner in Little Italy but had a little bit of a hard time finding a parking spot in a one mile perimeter from Washington Square.

When I say "a little bit of a hard time" I mean we circled around the steep and narrow streets for about an hour without even seeing anything that resembled a parking spot or a car about to leave one. We eventually gave up and decided to have dinner at home but not before stopping at Krispy Kreme Doughnuts to buy dessert. A dozen donuts should have been about enough to cover for the frustration. :-)

So what are the alternatives for next time?

• Park somewhere else and walk. Cost: $0.
• Park somewhere else and take public transport. Cost: $1.50/person.
• Buy a hummer and park on top of another car. Cost: $30,000 + damages.

I'll keep you posted which alternative turns out to be the most popular one.

PS: This blog post has been written using the latest version of the Quip blog module. Not that (m)any of you out there would care about that but if you have a blog and were scared of your browser crashing in the middle of a blog post, maybe you should. Quip has automatic background saving every few seconds so that it's impossible to lose more than a sentence of text. Nifty, isn't it?

The echo on the first part of my Memorial weekend report was enormeous. Quip broke down at the peak of the rush to write comments following the publication and I had to get more powerful hardware to host my blog. Or so.

In reality, you guys (except one) are the single most lazy bunch of blog commenters I've ever written for. I get live comments about my blog (mostly from people I talk to during the whole day anyway and not from people back home who are the primary target audience of the California section), even in form of letters (thanks, Ma!), but blog comments? Roughly a dozen for more than sixty posts I've written in the last two and a half months. Grade F and off to summer school!

Okay, after insulting my audience and making sure that nobody actually reads up to this point, let's start with the remaining two days of my Memorial day weekend. :-)

Sunday

After the busy Saturday nobody really felt like getting up despite the beautiful weather. Long weekends are for sleeping in, after all, aren't they? Somehow we made it and by noon we were heading to the city once again, this time with slightly less touristic destinations in mind.

First on the list were Twin Peaks (which has nothing to do with the TV series of the same name, by the way). San Francisco's Twin Peaks are two majestic hills that can be seen from large parts of the city and, in return, offer a gorgeous view over San Francisco and the Bay.

The way up isn't exactly easy, especially when you have no wheels. It's not so much the steepness--we Swiss are used to that,--but the difficulty of walking towards a given point in a more or less straight line. In no other place are there so many fences, gates, restricted areas, and "no trespassing" signs as in the country that considers freedom the highest of virtues.

As a result, if you approach Twin Peaks from the wrong direction (South), you literally have to walk around the hill to finally find a trail that leads you to the top. The view, however is stunning and even Adrian seemed to forget that just a half hour ago he was huffing and puffing next to me and searching the streets for signs of a bus line. (He had a bad cold to be fair ;-). All the pictures will follow, but here's one just for Vero:

(Photo courtesy of a nice Australian couple we met on the hilltop. :-)

We took a different way back down and ended up in one of the nicer areas of San Francisco. The houses look very different from the rest of the city; nice and a little on the luxurious side but without crossing the border to pompous and bad taste. (When I get the time to blog about American taste one of these days, I'll include a few pictures.)

Our way back to the BART station took us through a number of neighborhoods, each very different from the others. One of the more interesting ones is the The Castro. I'll let you guess what it is famous for, here's a few hints:

• There's a pub called Moby Dick.
• Another bar nearby is the Men's room.
• The newsstands sell lube (no, not the car kind).
• And, if you really need a fourth one, this is the book that I saw when I glanced at the window of a book store. :-)

Another famous district is The Mission, the center of the Spanish speaking community. We had dinner at a taqueria whose name I don't remember, but if you're in the neighborhood, just follow the loud Mexican music. :-) Luckily, the food was much better than the live band they had playing.

Monday

For the third day of our California-in-a-nutshell trip Adrian and I decided to go to one of the numerous national parks. Thomas, Michael, and Alex went south for the second day in a row heading for a different national park a little north of Santa Cruz.

Trying to avoid the worst of traffic, we carefully scheduled our trip to Muir Woods with a stopover in Sausalito, a small city just across the Golden Gate that is rather famous for ... hmm, good question, I think it's just famous. (Maybe for the house boats.) Adrian described it as a small Italian town without the charm. That pretty much says all there is to say about Sausalito. It's nice but nothing special.

But before we actually made it there, Thomas called us on the phone saying that had got into an accident which made the BMW about a foot easier to park. The car was totaled in the pile-up but luckily nobody got hurt. California's roads aren't exactly famous for being very safe to drive and I was later told by someone else that the same weekend a much worse accident had happened not far away from that spot.

Anyway, the phone call obviously cut our trip a little short because the three were stranded in nowhere (well, not exactly nowhere but nowhere when you don't have a ride). We still made it to Sausalito until we received the directions where we were supposed to pick them up and then got on our way to San Jose.

After picking up the three guys we decided to make the best of the day (especially because of Adrian who we felt a little sorry for) and visit San Jose which is actually bigger than San Francisco. For people like me who are into modern buildings, San Jose has a few interesting sights, above all the City Hall:

As we were making our way back to Fremont I decided to stop this post right here and go check where, along the way, I lost my sarcasm over all the boring sightseeing reports.

Haha, blogs can be hilarious! I was looking for a little more information about the Vienna Bakery in Fremont, a bakery that was recommended to me on my eternal quest for good bread in the US, when I came across this review. See if you can spot where the author was misled. ;-)

I'm being chased out of the house by my roommate and Michael. We decided to go to the Golden Gate Park despite my resolution of getting some work done today.

At least we were able to sort out some of the stuff that we got yesterday from Mike. Mike is a coworker of mine who happens--like most Americans--to have an entire garage full of stuff they don't need anymore. So he's letting us borrow some houshold stuff like cups and glasses (of which we're still short), a blender, and--best of all--a rocking chair! That's right, my future blog posts will be much more relaxed due to the fact that I will be sitting in a rocking chair while writing. :-)

I'll post some pictures when we get back. San Francisco is amazing right now because the summer fog that usually blurs the view isn't there yet.

Update: Wow, the weather was as good as predicted. Not a single cloud in the sky and no trace of fog. We headed to Golden Gate Park (which--ironically--is nowhere near the Golden Gate Bridge) and walked to the bridge from there. I've made a ton of pictures, so here is a selection of the best ones.

Update: Loic was nice enough to point out an error that I (and many other non-native speakers) keep making. Correct is: borrow = receive, lend = give. Thanks!

These are just two of the reasons why Logitech is a fun place to work:

I guess that Carl is one of the bigger people working at Logitech:

(In case you can't decipher the bottom line of the second picture, it reads: "PS: will be eaten by Carl in facilities dpt!")

The fact that I'm still just embedding simple pictures in my blog probably gives you a hint on how far I'm along with my gallery module ... Well, I'm making progress, the integral parts of the engine are alive and I see a few hours clearing up in the next days.

In the meantime, you can still enjoy my temporary gallery, which I hope to enrich with some more pictures of San Francisco this weekend. I'm planning on meeting an old friend from EPFL, David Hürlimann, who's doing an internship at the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory over in Palo Alto. He moved to France a while back to do his Master at the Eurecom. I must remember to ask him about the student demonstrations and whether anything's left of the institute. :-)

My computer has house arrest. More like office arrest. After it screwed me over last night and lost me two of the most useless hours of my life, I decided it was time to take drastic measures. So for the upcoming weeks my computer will sleep in my office on Tuesday and Thursday nights. That will teach it--or maybe not.

Either way, it gives me a couple of extra hours to read. I'm still about six days behind reading the Times, I haven't read more than two pages in a great book a friend of mine gave me before my departure (One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez), the stack of magazines I took with me is still as high as it was five weeks ago, and I haven't read a single word of Swedish. Pathetic.

Apart from leaving me more time to read, it will also reduce my risk of heart attacks and nervous breakdowns by roughly 29%. Together with the sports I'm doing and the fact that I try to eat as healthy as possible in this sugarcoated, deep-fried country, this should bring me pretty close to the average non-computer user.

Finally, I hope to be more motivated and productive on the days that I have my computer with me, so there's a (slight) chance my gallery will actually make it to a first beta until the end of the month. We'll see.

PS: "It's Tuesday, your laptop's in your office, so what the hell are you blogging with?" you're asking? Well, Thomas was kind enough to borrow me his for a couple of minutes. Thanks!