Lets Strike Because The Economy Stinks

There are mumblings around work about the French transportation strike that starts Wednesday evening and runs until Friday morning (story on cnn).

Such strikes cause havoc to our company because our headquarters are in France and when this happens the entire office seems to shut down, and anybody traveling to or from the central office is paralyzed.

Which leads me to the question, why do the French do this? What aspect of their culture do I not understand? To me it makes no sense to strike because you are afraid of the economy and losing your job. What is that going to achieve other than give everyone on a vacation day?

As an American my values tell me to go to work, work hard, and there is a good chance you'll keep your job. If you aren't working your not helping the company, which means no cashflow, wich means no money to pay salaries. You just gotta be there to keep the company afloalt

Shall I Exercise While Watching German TV?

To stay somewhat in shape I have been riding my road bike on an indoor stationary stand. This little stand makes a standard bike int a sort of exercise bike. At first when I started these work outs I told myself I would watch 45 minutes of German language television while I was on the bike. The problem with that is watching German language television while working out is not really any sort of incentive at all.

While my German is suffering, my new motivation is catching an episode or two of MacGuyver or X-files is keeping me on the rightous path to fit. It is so much more fitting to be watching something I can understand and zone out to rather than struggle to translate episodes of CSI Las Vegas from German on a Monday night.

I managed to ride for 45 minutes tonight staying in my target heart rate zone for about 50% of the time. That is pretty good considering I usually totally zone out and find myself pedaling way to slow during some of the high tension scenes. Hopefully I'll be able to hit 60% or 70% next time.

Building Baden With Google Sketch Up 7

Working Model of Schlossberg Platz

I posted a in mid January about playing with Google's Sketch-Up 7 and Google Earth. After some initial fun with the tool I realized I could combine the modeling tool with my interest in photography.

One of the recommended best practices is to model buildings in simple cubes, adding textures with imagines.

To test this out, I have built a simple model of Baden's Schlossberg Platz. Then last weekend I did a tour of the square taking photos of the all the exteriors of the buildings. In my free time I have been editing and preparing the photos to apply them as textures to my Google Sketch-Up Model. Above is a work in progress picture of the model. The first one I started with was the building in the upper left corner of the picture. It is a nice sqaure building standing by itself. It was easy to photograph so was a perfect place to start.

I can not take credit for the model of the tower. I got that from the google warehouse. Someone else had already spent the the time to build that model, I simply added to mine to add to the effect.

As you can see I've still got a bit of work to do.

Hectic Week

This week was a little hectic. I had a lot going on at work including a short trip to Warsaw for business. Somehow I just got caught up in some many things that I lost track of blogging.

Today I've had some time to get back to normal. It was the first day in a long time that I remember seeing the sun. When we woke up we decided to grab a quick breakfast and then take a nice walk along the Lagern hill just on the other side of the valley. The path is a nice gravel and paved trail through some of the vineyards of Wettingen. It was quite obvious that we were not the only ones with the idea to get out and enjoy the sun.

Along the walk we met a couple that obviously had a new puppy. It was a tiny Dachshund. I made the mistake of saying that the dog was beautiful in German as the couple past. The tiny creature took a liking to my leg and started jumping up on me. Of course all the while the owner was making some small talk but neither I nor my wife could really understand the Swiss German. We just pet the dog a little and said the standard Adeiu while they were leaving.

For the rest of the afternoon we just hung around the appartment enjoying the sun streaming into our living room. It was really a great day to do absolutely nothing.

Hard Boiled Eggs, Straight From The Store

A set of pre-cooked hard boiled eggs (with one uncooked egg to show the difference)

I've been eyeing some very strange looking eggs at the grocery store for about 2 years now. They look just like Easter eggs. Some packages come in all in a single color (red a shown above), others are mutli-colored. What I have found is they all have one thing in common, they are hard boiled.

I don't seem to ever remember seeing such things at an American store. At Easter we always had to cook and color our own eggs. But here, they have simplified the process. Get them pre-cooked and pre-colored, year round.

I really like the name given to these eggs. They are called 'picnic eggs' and sell for roughly the same price as uncooked eggs. I paide 3.70 CHF for 12 ( 3.30 USD)

I got them because I am too lazy to cook my own hard boiled eggs and this seemed like a nice alternative. I really like a hard boiled egg with a little horse radish. It is tradition passed down from my grandfather. Ususally the only time of year I eat the combination is on Easter Sunday, but given the availability of these little red time savers I might bee having my traditional breakfast a little more often.

Time Lapse Photography

One of the new toys I got at Christmas was a canon TC-80N3 Remote and intervalometer. Man that sounds cool and techie. Yes, I am comfortable admitting I am a bit of a gadget geek. This wonderful little contraption allows one to make their own time lapse movies by shooting a long series of photographs over and extended period of time.

I won't go into details today, but I did have a chance to make a pretty cool movie this evening. I trekked up to the castle ruin in Baden this evening where there is a really good vantage point over the train station. I set up my camera and intervalometer and let her go. After 30 minutes and over 600 images I had everything I need to go home and put together the following movie using Apples Quick Time Pro.

YouTube seems to muck up the first 5 seconds of the video for some reason, but after that it is clear sailing.

The Worst Music Ever

So as is usually the case in the mornings I was listening to a podcast from an American radio station to keep up to date on things and I was unknowing introduced to the worlds most unwanted music.

This was music based on science. A survey was done and people voted that they hated bag pipes, harps, accordions, slow tempos, opera singers, brass bands, country music, rap, and childrens choirs.

So what you get is a 21 minute song with an rapping opera singer singing about country music with a childrens choir screaming out the refrains over bag pipes.

My favorite lyric:

"Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur, Yom Kippur, do all your shopping at Wal-mart"

The album also includes the worlds most wanted music, but that is not nearly as good as the worst music.

You can sample the song on wired.com here. At 3.99 USD for the download on iTunes it is almost worth it because it's so bad its almost good.

SketchUp 7 and Google Earth

I used to teach a course in engineering drawing when I was student at the University. I was responsible for running the CAD (Computer Aided Design) lab and would help students with their practical labs. Essentially the lab section of the course was building 3D wireframe models with Autocad.

I haven't used Autocad for a while, but I've always liked to play around with 3D modeling software. One of the problems with such a hobby though is it is tough to get you hands on such software.

I was interested in some 3D modeling I have seen on done in Google Earth. What is neat about the google earth model is that anybody can build a model of a building as an example, and submit it to the global model repository. The building models that are submitted can then be downloaded and viewed by anyone.

As I was reading more and more about it I learned that you could build the models using the free version of googles Sketchup software package.

I downloaded the software and after watching about a hour of various tutorials I was up and building models. For someone with CAD experience it was really a snap to use. I am hoping that I can build a couple of models of the buildings around Baden and submit them to the repository since there are currently no models of the town. Lets see if I actually can commit to doing it.

It seems like a fun and easy way to keep up the skill.

Ehthnic Food: Easy Pho Soup

Our Version of Vietnamese Pho Soup

One thing I do miss when I am in Switzerland is the lack of quality ethnic restaurants. Finding a good meal outside of Italian cuisine is difficult. Asian cuisine including Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and Indian is rare to find, and rarely good.

When we were in the States we gorged on all types of cuisine and snacks that we hadn't had in a long while. One stop was at a Vietnamese Pho soup spot. I love a huge bowl of Pho on a cold night.

When leaving for work I had mentioned that maybe a nice soup for dinner would be nice. Much to my surprise when I got home I recognized that my wife had obviously visited the Asian market near the Smiling Fish restaurant in Baden. The strange collection of vegetables on my counter was a dead giveaway.

My wife and planned to try to make Pho. Thanks to a Cheat n' Eat Vietnamese Chicken Soup receipe she found online, in about 20 minutes we were sitting down to two hot steaming bowls of Pho.

After eating Pho at home I do have a new appreciation for the bowls and utensiles that are used in a Vietnamese resturaunt. Western forks, knives, and shallow bowls make eating Pho a real pain. As the receipe was so good, and we know we'll make it again we vowed to head over to the market and get ourselves a set of proper Pho compatible dinnerware.

Lots O' Heavy Books

My Stack O Books

So one thing we found on the cheap in the States were books. Lots and lots of books. As both my wife and I are avid readers and used to love hanging out in bookstores on a Friday night just wandering the aisles looking for something to read, being back in the States with tons of English books was a little overwhelming.

In particular my Mother introduced us to Half Price Books Records, and Magazines. The concept is similar the record stores or CD stores of old that would buy your old stuff from you and sell it at reasonable prices to the next guy. The nice thing about this chain is that it essentially has all the same sections as a normal bookstore. As the majority of the titles are contributed past reads the shelves are littered with strange anomalies.

My favorite find, Twinkie, Deconstructed, which goes through the entire Twinkie ingredient list and explains where each ingredient comes from, how it is made, and why it is in the Twinkie in the first place. It is a great read too.

The only trouble with going nuts in an American bookstore is that you somehow have to get the books back to Europe with you. We had investigated the M-Bag for sending books oversea's via the U.S. Post Office. That was an attractive option at $3 a pound but after weighing our bags just before our flight we realized we have enough weight allowance left to put our stack of books (40 inches high, 1 meter for the metric folks) in our luggage.

With four large suitcases right at maximum capacity getting to and from airports was a bit difficult but now I have what I need to keep me busy for 2009.

As a side note, I had some fun experimenting in taking the photo for this post. I have included of shot of the pile leaning against a door with different tape measures as I was finding the best angle.

Jet Lag

We arrived back in Switzerland yesterday and with the trip back comes the jet lag again.

Somehow I managed to stay awake yesterday until about 8:30 or 9:00 in the evening. I woke up feeling refreshed and ready to go. I didn't even need my alarm to wake up. But then I looked at the clock and it was only midnight. Darn. Back to sleep.

In all of the fogginess last evening I did manage to set my alarm, but I forgot to turn it on. Since my wife's alarm woke me this morning I was about a half an hour late this morning. I still think that is pretty good time considering I was fighting jet lag.

Oh, the joys of going back to work.

End of 2008: Year in Review

I just received a text message from the future! A co-worker of mine sent me a message from Switzerland wishing me a happy 2009. As I still have a few minutes I thought I would post a few thoughts about the best and worst of 2008



Worst of 2008

1. George Bush
2. Taxes, they start in January and aren't done until November
3. Stress, lots and lots of it
4. My progress with the German language
5. My ability to keep up with my mail at home

Best of 2008

1. Completing a bike race to the top of Dalsniba with a friend.
2. Shoe(s) thrown at George Bush
3. Trip to the Netherlands to see the tulips
4. Skiing in Zermatt
5. 3 weeks of vacation in a row, for the first time ever and enough time to visit friends