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.

There's nothing like Californian weather. A beautiful, sunny weekend, ideal to take plenty of photos, followed by a not so beautiful, rainy weekend, ideal to sift through the photos you took the weekend before. And to top it all off, the week that lied in between was great to get my gallery software to do what I want.

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.

As a friend of mine once put it: Who doesn't like to waste time with Google Earth? I know, I do. Along with my gallery it's one of my favorite ways of wasting time, so I asked myself: Why not bring the two together?

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.

Now that the Australian Open 2007 has come to a (happy) end and my (TV-)life is once again hollow and empty it is time to take up the active side of sports again.

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.

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. ;-)

Today we finally did it! We rode our bikes across the most famous bridge in the world.

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 ...

At last! Uploading pictures is really more work than you'd think, especially if your gallery can do more than just displaying pictures ... Yes, your intuition is right, another plug for the Quip gallery is coming up. ;-)

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!

The photo fairy was in a good mood today; the first batch of pictures is online. It covers the first day of our trip to Northern California, namely the ride from San Francisco to Chico and the excursion to the Lake Oroville State Recreation Area.

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.)

Finally! With a delay of only about six weeks I've finally managed to "finish" (that's a very relative expression anyway ...) the first version of Quip's Gallery module.

The layout is a little rough around the edges (anybody volunteering for a nice webdesign?), but it gets the job done; it lets you watch the pictures that I make. (Even more importantly, it lets me upload pictures in the simplest possible way and have the gallery module take care of almost the entire rest, but that's really just important to me. :-)

Anyway, the pictures from our Lake Tahoe trip are already there in the Lake Tahoe picture gallery. Check them out!

Let me draw your attention to one interesting feature: When I upload the pictures and add comments, I also classify them according to their level of interest. So when you get to the gallery page, you only get to see a selection. If you weren't there when I took the pictures, that's probably all you want to see. However, if you want to see all the pictures because you might be on them (or because you hope to see my butt like some people who secretly take pictures of it while I'm playing pool and then show them around the office :-), hit the More items link at the top. You'll see that the number of items displayed varies depending on what level you're currently looking at.

I will add more features gradually, like the ability to comment (because I know that you guys just love to leave comments). If something interesting happens, I will announce it here, ditto if I upload more photos. Have fun!

We (that is Aurélie, David, Joachim, Josna, Thomas, and myself) are going to Lake Tahoe for the weekend. A travel report and, perhaps, a picture or two will appear here as soon as we're back.

There are rumors that one of us geeks is taking his laptop and UMTS card with him. I'm not going to tell any names but here's a hint: he is tall, blond, and has the lung capacity of a three year old. ;-)

Anyway, have a fun weekend, everybody! Oh, and when I return, with a little luck, I may finally be able to upload all the pictures some of you have been waiting for. The Quip gallery module has reached beta and right now I'm just waiting for a bug in an underlying library to be fixed. (We're using Rose::DB::Object, an otherwise great database abstraction library written in Perl.) Take care!