You’ve heard of cable cars and cable bridges and cable TV – but have you heard of a cable ferry?
This is something I have not encountered very often: a car-carrying ferry across a river, which itself is pulled by a cable that runs high above the river, rather than pushed by a motor. What you see here is located on the Rhein river, between Germany and France, in the small town of Plittersdorf. I discovered this quite by accident during my first year in Germany, by taking the Rastatt exit off the autobahn then driving towards the river. (Very embarrassing admission: I exited the Autobahn here in need of gasoline, and it seems I confused the village name with the German word for the Autobahn rest area, or Raststätte! I wonder if anyone else makes this mistake?)
It is amazing just how little known this is – but during the summer, and especially on bicycle, it is a wonderful old-time way to cross the river.
Another one of my all-time-favorite photographs. The skyline is punctuated with both very old and very new spires. And the purpose of the spires, both old and new, simultaneously was and is both spiritual and acoustical communication.
I suppose it’s nothing special, but still it’s one of my all-time favorite photographs that I’ve taken. I love fishing, I never associated fishing or seafood with Istanbul – and I was thrilled and impressed to see so many passionate fisherman on the bridge.
I’ve always been fascinated by termite mounds as an example of emergent behavior – but as far as I can tell (mainly by the millions of little black ants swarming all over it), this is a true ant mound, not a termite mound. I took this picture in Tamil Nadu, not too far outside of Tiruchirappali, in the far south of India.
An unresolved mystery I want to clear up one of these days: when I talk to the village locals, they invariably refer to these structures as “snake houses” and not “termite houses.” I think we both agree snakes live here – but I’ve never really understood if the villagers know these structures are created by insects, not reptiles.
If anyone has any links to the termites and ants of southern India, please do share them with me! I’ve seen some very exotic architectures, and I’ll post more pictures as time permits.
The search for an upgrade for the Eiger Chopper continues. I spent about 500 km on a Honda CTX1300A this weekend – here it is shown parked on the south shore of the Bodensee, also known as Lake Constance, between Germany and Switzerland.
Very nice bike. Very comfortable upright touring position. Center of mass very low to the ground. Terrific power. Windscreen very effective. Saddlebags and top case made of cheap plastic, could scratch easily. Handgrip heating system very nice.
I couldn’t go wrong with this one, but I’m still looking.
This is the so-called “Western Wall” in the old city of Jerusalem. It was amazing, both because it was smaller than I expected, and because essentially no one was visiting on this day.
I just returned from my first trip to Israel, where I had a fabulous time. What is happening in Gaza is of course a tragedy, but away from Gaza in Israel – as elsewhere – life goes on. I wanted to share a few pictures and observations and thoughts after my first visit to this country.
Motivation
The Gaza conflict has devastated the travel industry. Airline tickets and hotel prices are ridiculously low, sites visited by thousands of tourists are empty, and as as long as you are not in Gaza Israel is statistically safer than your own country, no matter what your country may be. But also, this is a region it seems, unfortunately, of perpetual conflict – and I wanted to see and feel for myself a bit of what life is like in Israel.
Getting there
A few things disappointed me. I had read that the security is so high, even at the airport you’ll be “approached” by other passengers who are really secret Mossad operatives trying to size you up as a terrorist threat. Or that the security in Ben Gurion airport is so high, they will open your luggage and inspect each item. I was really looking forward to this! Sadly, none of this was true in my case. Our jumbo jet was filled with 30 passengers at most, so we could sit where we wanted. And at the Ben Gurien airport I never saw a guard or a gun. The only difficulty was getting through customs: the customs officer spoke with me (and I am not making this up!) about 10 minutes before he finally let me through. “Sir, you do understand that we are in the middle of a war?” Me: yes. “And let me understand correctly, you are here on holiday?” Me: yes. Well, you can imagine what he was probably thinking.
Finally, I was looking forward to having my passport stamped with “a visa stamp so damaging, other Arab countries may put you in jail.” Sadly, this never happened either. My passport was not stamped; instead I got a little printed paper with a barcode and was told to keep it in my passport. So after returning home, I taped the printout to my passport instead of throwing it away – just to give me that diabolical feeling!
Impressions
5 days is not nearly enough to take in this fabulous country. Europe is “brand spanking new” in comparison to the history you’ll find here. Fabulous food. Very friendly people in all Quarters of Jerusalem. Fabulous weather. Economically, lots of shopkeepers seem very worried about their immediate future – since the city is of devoid of tourists, but at this time there should be thousands.
As time permits I’ll share a few other pictures I took.
I was recently asked: how do I keep current on the latest trends and developments in IT? The short answer: ACM.
Technical folks can be the worst marketers, and that’s probably why the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is not as well known in the general IT community as it should be. This is the best professional society to support IT that I know of, and membership brings you lots of benefits:
Great magazine
iPad application to access an extensive library of books and literature
To be fair, I think the organization struggles with one challenge: it tries to reach the complete IT audience, from the academic scholars that research if P=NP, to the compiler designers, to everyday IT guys like me. This shows in their monthly magazine, which might have little to appeal to your tastes. But this is more than compensated for, by the library and specific topical newsletters.
Summary: If you want to stay current in IT topics, I highly recommend you consider membership in the ACM.
You can find out more about the ACM at their webpage.
This photo of the Saint-Étienne de Metz cathedral in Metz isn’t too bad – but it’s not great either. It’s just darned hard to take good photos of big buildings using mobile phones. I wonder if this is something modern architects are aware of and try to account for in their designs?
Of all the cathedrals in Europe, I think this is one of the most impressive I’ve seen. They all have flying buttresses and ornate features, but this one – and others like it in the region – are all made of a very light-colored stone that comes from this part of France. Apparently, the yellow color is due to a high iron content in the stone.
When it’s summer and the sun is shining, it is hard to find prettier villages than those in Europe. But as you’ll probably see in a few months, when it’s cold and rainy, those same views become quite dreary and depressing.
Thionville (pronounced “tee-own-vee”) is a French village along the Moselle river and just on the border with Belgium. It’s a small village, and because there are no tourist attractions, you’re not likely to find any tourists here. There was some heavy fighting and a lot of casualties during WWII, so there are a lot of historical markers everywhere – but that’s it.
Is it just me, or do other people also enjoy spending time in normal places, without any tourist attractions, where everyday people grow up and spend their lives?
You can find more information about Thionville in Wikipedia – but it’s so boring, even Google won’t return this link on the first page when you search for it!
Metz (pronounced “mess”) is a wonderful old city in the northeast corner of France, in the part of France known as Lorraine. It was here that, in the 8th century, the famous religious chanting of the monks – known as Gregorian Chant – was developed.
One thing I find so wonderful about this magnificent city is that the only tourists you will find here are French tourists. It’s generally off-the-beaten-path for world travelers, so the only people you’ll see enjoying the sights are likely to be other people from France.
Another thing I find so wonderful are the buses, which I think are among the most unusual buses in the world. They are very long and composed of many cars and they look just like trains, but they move on rubber wheels.
You can find more information about Metz in Wikipedia.
I call her the Eiger Chopper, for obvious reasons (that’s the Swiss Berner Oberland in the background). She’s 5 years old, and she has 27,000 km. She’s been a trusty commuter workhorse for me – as well as a wonderful way to explore the Swiss countryside. But I am starting to itch for something a little bigger.
Scientists will tell you there is nothing special about coincidences. As we live our lives we experience a continuous stream of sensory inputs – so it’s only natural and expected that from time to time that our internal pattern recognition systems will alert us that some random event triggers a meaningful response.
But still and all . . . I find the following story almost too incredible to be true.
Just a few weeks ago I was was in Mumbai. With well over 15 million inhabitants it’s slated to become the world’s largest mega-city by the year 2020. And on one evening I was enjoying the warm weather, walking down a street in the posh district of Hiranandani, when I accidentally ran into a friend and previous colleague of mine, Sandhya! The last time we had seen each other was in 2007 – when she and I were both in Bangalore, a city some 500 km to the south of Mumbai. I had no idea she moved to Mumbai, and she had no idea I was there on business.
Is this an amazing coincidence?!
We agreed to meet a few days later for coffee. At the time, back in the day, she was the best software engineer I knew. (At a very young age she absolutely mastered a very complex document management system, Documentum.) And I was both impressed and thrilled that she continued in her career, now a senior project manager leading huge international projects with dozens of people for the Indian company Cognizant! Way to go, Sandhya!
A few days ago I installed WordPress, because I wanted to create a new personal homepage and start blogging. And to showcase some of my writing and my music.
WordPress is fairly self-explanatory so I didn’t need a manual. And after finding the Radiate theme I quickly got the “parallax” effect I always wanted to have – not the best parallax I’ve seen (no pun), but better than the old static web-pages. But I quickly hit a limit: I could find no easy and straightforward way to create a photo album I was happy with. The only solution seemed to be to download and use various freeware plug-ins, most of which overloaded my system with spam messages inviting me to upgrade to their “pro” version.
So I took a timeout, investigated a few other CMS systems, even installed Drupal – and after another hour gave up in frustration and returned to WordPress.
So far, WordPress seems to be a fine product. But it also seems to be a home for “bait-and-switch” theme and plug-in developers, promising you much but delivering next-to-nothing in their freeware version. And so far, I am seeing a few signs that my web-hoster might also be playing bait-and-switch, trying to get me to upgrade to the “high performance” version.
