Unfortunate language problem

Although combining the month "May" the prefix for "Medical" may be perfectly ok for German speakers, I was a bit nervous to see this brand of product in our local hospital.

 

Geneva

OK, I was in Geneva quite a few weeks ago now, but I thought I would just throw out this picture of the waterfront that I took. I really have not done too much that is interesting in the past day or two and I have not taken any new pictures of anything worth sharing...

Now it is a long weekend here (labour day) and I look forward to the grey coldness that I have ahead of me. Our nice weather has vanished in a typical German fashion.

Week after next I am off to Barcelona for a "Large Format Printing Supplies Summit" where I will have amazing things to discuss like forecast of 84 inch paper and backlit translucent film. Who said my job is not glamarous? Hopefully the sun will shine and I can get a look at something slightly more interesting than I have in Germany at the moment.

 

My wonderful home

this is the view out of my bedroom window.

I love where I live, it is quiet and small and isolated despite being in the super crowded country of Germany. Granted not everyone would like to live in the middle of nowhere, but there is a bakery and a butchers 50 metres from my front door, so at least I can have fresh sandwiches whenever I want.

The trees on the hill in are a national park. Hundreds of km of bike trails start at the end of my street. It is superb. If you go 2 villages over, there is a wildlife area with wild pigs, deer and mountain sheep to look at. Can't really beat that can you? Piiiiiiiiiggggs.

Basket baby

Am I a bad parent? My child is essentially just another toy for me to play with. I like putting him places to see how long he takes to escape. Another great bit of fun is putting various things on his head, toys, hats, cushions.... anything I can balance there.

The way I see it, there is no point in having kids if you can't treat them like toys. This is how he will get used to doing my evil bidding.

 

A ride in the car

So, we were out for a drive on the weekend and the car continued to work is sleeping magic on the boy. It is almost hard to believe that about 2 minutes before this, he was an energy machine. I like when he zonks right out, funny dude.

 

Sock Monkeys

OK, Dave asked me to put up some pictures of sock monkeys.

Back many years ago, I saw a commercial for Eggo Waffles where a guy was having breakfast with a sock monkey and a stuffed squirrel. I thought the monkey was so great, I had to make one myself. It was reasonably successful, and I have since made several more. Here is a collection of the sock monkeys I have made over the years.

Here is the most recent one, Fritz. Claudia knit the sweater. Fritz was a gift to Mike and Kiyomi in Japan when they graciously let us visit them:

Here is Chad and Bear. Chad is my "house monkey" and constant companion in Germany. This was the first monkey for whom Claudia knit a sweater:

This is Ignatz, and he was a gift for my mother in law. He lives in Augsburg:

And the monkey that started it all... Mungo. He is in Canada at Mum's place. Sadly I could only find this one, not very good photo of him:

Doctor Who Season Two

OK,

So I just watched the first episode of the new season of the new Doctor Who... Why do I keep watching? This is a train wreck of a show, the dialogue is horrible, the level of camp is way over the top and I think the story/logic is just bad.

Yet, I have seen every episode. Is this a case of so bad it's good? No, that was the Tom Baker years of Doctor Who from my childhood. Why am I compelled to watch this terrible show? The only reason I can come up with is that Anything on normal German TV is even worse.

I long for the next season of Battlestar Galactica already.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/

Easter break

Over easter, I saw a bear. This is that bear.

It was at the Augsburg zoo, but this bear was the absolute highlight of the visit.

 

Geek Holiday

Ok, so I recently was in Geneva visiting my brother and sister in-law. While there, I took the opportunity to go and visit CERN. This is the European Particle Physics research lab and home to the largest machine inthe world. The Large Hadron Collider is 27KM long!

CERN is also the place where the WWW was invented by Tim Berners Lee, I got to see the box that was used to invent HTML and was the first web server. It was a NeXT box just like I used in university and had a big yellow post it attached that said "do not turn off this computer."

Geek heaven.

This is the "dome of Science" recently built to host exhibitions and presentations. It is made of wood and it actually looks sort of cheap when you get up close to it...

Greatest Hat Ever

OK, So I was at the Geneva Auto show recently and here are some of the really interesting cars that I saw. Mostly I decided to only look at cars that cost over 100K, then I would not feel bad about not being able to buy them.

New Ferrari. The only italian thing I could imagine to own.

A fully customized VW Beetle. It had denim seats and leather bumpers. Very Fancy

The new BMW z4. I would certainly accept one of these as a gift if anyone is offering. 

Attack of the Giant Baby 

Lets get started

OK, this is now replacing the living hell that is mass emailing.

I thought rather than send out annoying updates to people en masse, I will giving this blogging thing a try. So if you are interested to pop in from time to time and see what is going on with me over here, then that would be great.

I will throw on pictures, news and things that people I know will hopefully be interested to have a look at.

So here we go:

There is my house.... look at it, love it.