Trekking in Hohenkasten (Appenzell)

A set of older pictures, taken before we went in holidays.

On the 30th of June, my sister, the girls and I went for a very nice trek in the small state of Appenzell, not too far from my place. We first drove to a very small village named Bruelisau, and there (after a stop for wild strawberries) we took the cablecar, bringing us to 1789 m AMSL. We strolled a little on top of the mountain Hohenkasten, enjoying the great view of the Rhine valley, some 1000 meters lower.

More

After a while, we started to walk down down down, Laeticia on my back in the "backpack chair" and Alise following with my sister on foot. I am really proud of Alise, as she walked the whole way down, pretty good for a 4.5 years old! The trek took us about 4 hours, including a small stop near a wonderful small alpine lake called the Saemtisersee, where we spontanously enjoyed a swim in the cold water... nothing like it after 2.5 hours of effort... and 1.5 more to come ;-)

More

You can see the trek's map and profile, and also download the trek to a GPS

PhotoAlbum: Cleaning up, posting older pictures

Since we came back from Malaysia, I have been implementing new features and bug corrections in my PhotoAlbum. I already did a lot, and I still have plenty of ideas to make my experience as a developer and your experience as a user better. In the process, I learn a lot of new techniques, which is very exciting for me.

I posted plenty of new pictures today, as well as the new version of the software. I am now working on cleaning up the pictures from Malaysia and from Singapore. The cleaned up files should be published soon. In the meantime, the pictures published during the trip can be seen here

Enjoy ;-)

Alise's first week of school

This week, Alise finally started school (well, Kindergarten) after having spent almost one full year looking forward to the event... Since she goes to the daycare monday to wednesday, she was always seeing other kids being brought to school (that's a service that the local daycare (that I help to manage) offers). So she was always asking when her turn would come. Additionally, we made the mistake of telling her that she would go when she would be 4, so on her very birthday (October 18), she told us that now she could go to school...

Anyway, the wait is finally over, and I brought her to school last monday afternoon. The first contact with the teacher and the other kids was very good (actually it was really the second contact, because we had been to an 'open door' afternoon a few weeks ago). It was a bit funny, because the teacher was taking a whole lot of care making sure that the 'separation' from the parents would go smooth. Actually, you could really tell which children were used to daycare, and which were separating from their mom for the very first time... Anyway, there was no drama (in fact, Alise was rather happy to see my heels, because she wanted to 'go all alone to school').

One hour later it was over already, and I fetched her and brought her back to the daycare. All in all, it went great. Since then she went again on tuesday and wednesday (this time she was brought by the daycare's educators), and had a lot of fun things to tell us at night.

Mom's birthday

My mom was celebrating her birthday on saturday, so we took Chi Meei's new car and drove to Lausanne to meet my parents, my sister and her boyfriend, and my granmother. From Lausanne, we drove to the Jura, not far from Vallorbe, where we spent part of the afternoon in a place called Jurapark, which features bears, wolves and american buffaloes. Both kids were very interested in watching the animals. It was a nice, relaxed afternoon, though a bit cold (August this year is terrible here, cold and rainy after a very, very hot July).

In the evening, we had dinner there too, and most of us decided to try the buffalo meat, which was really great and tender.

Here under a picture of my dad with Laeticia, which I find just great. I want to try to print it and to frame it as a present to him. I really love the way they both look.

Maria Himmelfahrt

Today is Maria Himmelfahrt, which can be translated by the day where Mary went to heaven. This is a catholic public holiday, and since the state I work in (Zug) is catholic, I had a free day today. However, since Zurich is reformed, it didn't celebrate and Chi Meei had to work. So I decided to just have a day on my own, which I like to do from time to time.

Actually, this happens from time to time, because of the nature of my job (software engineering), which allows me to have very liberal working hours, When busy developing code, it's sometimes difficult to put the computer down, so I often work evenings too, when the kids are in bed, and this overtime can be converted later in free time. Because I don't deal with customers (my customers are internal marketing guys), I don't have to ensure office presence, which also allows me to work from home quite often. Well, it's not all that easy, since our IT department is very eager to cut some of our privileges, for example logging in the VPN with our private PCs, so we do have to fight for these rights, but so far it has worked out rather well for me.

All this to say that I took a slow day today, and even more because we finally had sun again, after many days of bad and cold weather. So I woke up one hour later than usual, and brought the girls to daycare. After that I went back home for tea, and then left with the train to Zurich where I did some shopping. Actually, I bought a very small wireless router, which should allow me to connect from hotel rooms when they only offer wired connection (which is the case in most of the hotels I went to lately). That should make it easier to connect using my PDA, which only has WiFi and bluetooth to connect.

Since the weather is so nice, I decided to go back home by ship, on the lake of Zurich. It takes quite a longer time than the train, but when the weather is that nice, it's really worth every minute. The landscape is beautiful (actually, we're still at the dock now, but we're leaving soon). The good thing with public transportation here is that you can get a general abonment valid for almost all public transportation systems in Switzerland, including boats. Since I have one of these cards, I can travel as I wish, which is just great.

On the technical side, I have been working on my PhotoAlbum lately, adding enhancements and functionalities. It's going slower than before the holidays, partly because of my good resolutions (read more, work less), but also because I want to improve the design. Before the holidays, the goal was clearly to add functionality and be ready for the malaysian trip, but now I am refining all this and should be able to release a much better version soon.

I have been thinking about releasing the software for public download too, but I think it still lacks too many functionalities. I will add these before I provide the controls as open source.

Seems that the boat is leaving Zurich, so let's enjoy the landscape now :)

PS: I really have to take my camera in Zurich one of these days. The place is beautiful, and I should really make more pictures of it.

Book: Pai Naa, the story of Nona Baker

I just finished a great book this morning: Pai Naa, the story of Nona Baker, M.B.E., by Dorothy Thatcher & Robert Cross (Constable, London). I couldn't find a ISBN number for that book.

The book retraces the story of this woman, Nona Baker and her brother Vin in Malaya, before and during world war II. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Cross rewrote her words in a very touching, almost naive way. These two characters as well as the people of Malaya around them had to flee to the jungle to be safe from the Japanese who invaded Singapore first, then whole Malaya. These were terrible times, but the way Mrs Baker tells the story makes it sometimes sound like a tale. Only some parts of the book are really sad (Vin's death, for example) or terrible (the execution of 4 old men in the communists' camp), but even then it lasts only a few lines and then her good mood is back. I cannot start to picture how I would have felt like if I had had to go through all that, including suffering malaria in a rain-washed hut in the middle of the jungle, and yet nothing seems to have really hurt her. Of course the story has been written years after it all happened, so probably the memories were softened by the distance in time.

How I got this book is a nice story: A few years ago we spent some time in Kuantan, on the east coast of the Malaysian peninsula. During this stay, I went one day to visit a small village named Sungei Lembing, which was hosting the remanins of what had been the biggest underground tin mine in Malaysia, and one of the biggest in the world. It was a nice visit, and whie I was walking through the small museum, I noticed extracts of a book hanging on the walls. The book was the story of Nona Baker. It really sounded like a nice read, so I wrote down the book's reference.

When we came back to Switzerland, however, I was utterly unable to find the book in any bookshop. The editing house had apparently gone bankrupt or disappeared. Finally, however, I was able to find one in a second hand bookshop on Internet, located in New Zealand! The price was very reasonable, so I ordered it straight away, and I got it a few days later. It was actually a previous exemplary of Auckland's public library, as it seems, because it still has stamps and other markings in it.

It was really a nice read, especially because it was not dry like sometimes history books can be. It was a first hand account of the difficulties encountered during the war in the jungle. Though it is very hard to find, I really recommend it to anyone interested in Malaysia or in history generally.

Books...

I decided I would read more that these last few months. I usually read a lot. I have many paper books, and I also buy e-books that I read on my PDA. The advantage of e-books is that you always have them with you, so it's really easy to find a few minutes here or there to read a bit. However, lately I was not that much in a reading mood, probably because I was preoccupied with my job. But now I want to read more, even if I have to work a little less for that :)

During the holidays, I read a nice historical book about WWII: Band of brothers. This is the book which inspired the TV serie (which I haven't seen BTW). The book is nice, but it's not a novel, it's really a serie of facts about the Easy company. Nice reading if you like history, maybe just a bit long in the end, and a tad too laudative.

I also finished a great fantasy book named A game of thrones. I had to force myself to wait before I buy the second one in the series. It took me some time to get hooked, probably because I was too preoccupied by my job, but during the holidays I really got hooked and I loved it.

Now I am in a book that I had a lot of difficulties finding: Pai Naa, the story of Nona Baker MBE. I'll tell more about that book later, now it's time to go back to read ;-)

The beginning

So that's the new blog I'll use to talk about my non-technical interests... For those interested in technology, software engineering, etc... you all can connect to my website GalaSoft. From there you can easily connect to my technical blog too.

However, many things I do, think about, would like to comment about... don't fit in this technical blog, so I decided I would write about that in here. Well, sometimes some things will mix, I guess, because technology is part of my life as well as all the rest...

This last week has been a bit strange for me because I was supposed to start work again after holidays (in Malaysia, more about this later), but instead I got sick, caught a fever and had to stay home. Add to that the fact that our two daughters were at my parents for one week (in the mountains), and that my wife started her new job, and it fet rather lonely at home... Well I did a lot of things, but still. Tomorrow I'll go back to work, it'll feel strange ;-)

In my next posts, I plan to publish what I wrote when I was in Malaysia. The whole thing can be found in my PhotoAlbum. The pictures and entries have been published when we were there, it was a new experience for me to post while travelling. The whole thing was made possible by a web application I wrote and I am quite proud of it. Of course, I am working on improvements already :-)

OK, that's all for tonight... I hope that readers here will find things interesting and if you wish, don't hesitate to get in touch.