Author: kenritley

Old Timer Tram – is that really what it’s called?

kenritley

The big cities in Switzerland like Zürich and Bern keep a small number of their old, antiquated street cars in good functioning order, then from time to time put them into limited use.

This is a snap of the “Old Timer” tram in Basel – and it raises a very good question:

Is there no phrase in German – or in the more advanced, evolved language of Basel (know as Alemannic) – besides “Old Timer?”

Stork poop

kenritley

OK, sounds gross, but it’s one of those questions you gotta ask!

Alsace and Southern Germany are filled with storks, as this snap of a village in Alsace shows:

But it makes you wonder: do storks poop into and onto their nests (as do many birds, such as pigeons), or do they keep their nests clean and make sure their body waste goes over the side, as this snap would seem to suggest:

The amazing SUPER MOON – one month later

kenritley

Continuing the series, I was lucky enough to accidentally capture not only the first full moon of 2019 over Saigon (called the Wolf Moon) – but in fact, it was a super moon.

Well, one month later there was another super moon, as you’ll see in the snap below. But . . . let me put this into perspective for you. I took this snap in the early afternoon, and in normal circumstances it would be so faint as to be invisible in the sky.  Being a super moon, this was was nearly blinding!

How does anything start?

kenritley

A guest blog, by Paul Cottingham

“Write me a guest blog,” Ken said. “Me?” I said. “Yes,” Ken said. “OK,” I said. What a fool, I think to myself, not Ken, ME! I agree to something I have not done in years – WRITE! Well, strictly not true, I write most weekends just not in this fashion but I will explain this one day. I am 51-year-old father of two, married to Carole for 25 years, I work in IT and I live in a small city in Yorkshire, England called York and from the age of 14 I wanted to be a rock star, well, sort of. I suppose what I want in life is the same as most others: I want to be happy in what I do and hopefully make other people happy also and if I can use a modicum of my talents to make people happy then it’s job done.

Let me explain. Back in 1979 I was friendly with two local kids and we discovered we liked the same music. We had moved into post-punk era of Joy Division, Durutti Column, Marine Girls and – some may disagree as they were in the punk era but for me as they extended life beyond punk – The Clash. Kicking around the neighbourhood one long summer day in the school holidays, Iain the elder of the trio suggested we should form a band. No hesitation from Pete and myself – we both spluttered out, brilliant! We had no clue how to play, no clue what instruments we would play, no clue how we would perform this task of forming a band. We just knew this was what we should do. Iain had a Clash poster above his bed and they were photographed for their first album with the three of them stood in an alley looking cool into the camera. Sold! That’s us, we are cool, we can be in a band, we can do it! Now all we had to do was go figure out how we could rule the world with our smouldering coolness and amazing music.

Hold on though, we looked at each other and paused. It was a little bit like that moment in The Graduate and a part of a scene that folks often do not notice right at the end of the movie, when Benjamin, played by Dustin Hoffman and Elaine, played by Katharine Ross, leap on to the bus and all the passengers look back at the couple whom have just run from the wedding in an act of spontaneous euphoric love. They too stop and look at each other, pretty much like we were right now, and realise the gravity of their actions, what have we done? Well, maybe not quite as dramatic and romantic as that but nonetheless to a 14-year-old kid whose only goal in life was to look cool and play a little football or soccer as our brothers from across the pond would say and have Sandra Pearson as my girlfriend this was a big deal and we are not backing down now.

It is 1979, Summer, three bored kids with 5 weeks of school holidays ahead of them, on the cusp of being the best band in the world, with no instruments, no talent (that we know of), no record deal but heaps of enthusiasm and smouldering coolness. What could possibly go wrong?

. . . to be continued.

Paul Cottingham is one of those amazing senior IT leaders you run into all too infrequently: he has an innate sense for true leadership, and out of an interest in the well-being of his team he won’t stop until he has everyone fully motivated and pulling together. Paul is an accomplished musician who’s original compositions and multi-instrument production work is regularly aired on international radio programs such as the BBC. You can find links to his music here: (add link).

 

Not top secret – but very few people have seen this or ever will

kenritley

This is the highly restricted “operations” building at Zürich airport (ZRH), where pilots brief their crews and certain nameless government protection organizations carry out certain unmentionable tasks

As part of my job at Swissport I was involved in a complicated IT transformation project that impacted the IT infrastructure at the airport – so I would come here regularly for meetings.

The amazing automatic popcorn machines of Switzerland and Germany

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We’re under attack!  It seems these machines are now literally all over Southern Germany and Northern Switzerland!  By which I mean, to date, I’ve seen two of them: one in Friedrichshafen (Germany) and one in Winterthur (Switzerland) – the latter at my local grocery store, no less.

They work like this. You deposit either a 2 EUR coin (if you are in Germany) or a two 2 CHF coins (if you are in Switzerland),

and in just 2 minutes you’ll have a little paper container of freshly popped popcorn (sweet or salty, your choice).

How does it taste?  I found the kernels to be better that what you’d get at home with microwave popcorn, but not quite as good as the popcorn they serve at movies. And there was a faint taste of oil – but a type of oil I’m not used to tasting. It wasn’t bad, just different.

Einstein Museum in Bern

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For a brief while I lived just a few hundred meters from here,

Nobody really knows how Switzerland’s capital city Bern got its name, but the favorite story that the locals tell goes like this: a long time ago the King was looking for a good name for the city, so he sent a team of hunters into the surrounding woods, promising to name the city after the first animal that a hunter could kill and bring back. That animal happened to be a bear, so ever since then the city has been named Bern – or, as it is known in the local Alemannic language (a more evolved form of German), Bäärn.