alex chiang: web 6.0

Jenny, Christophe, and Martin, sitting down to a meal of raclette, in Martin’s Geneva flat.

Raclette is delicious — think of delicious cheese, melted and poured over various processed meats, such as salami, prosciutto, etc., and potatoes. Doesn’t really get much more basic, comforting, and delicious than that.

Other traditional Swiss meals are fondue (melted cheese and bread), rösti (melted cheese and hashbrowns), and alpenmacaroni (Swiss mac n’ cheese). We sampled them all, and found them all to be quite tasty. Even though I’m lactose intolerant, somehow my body figured out that all it was getting was cheese, and managed to adapt quite nicely.

A note on fondue — there’s the traditional cheese fondue, oil fondue, and much to my surprise, “chinoise fondue” aka hot pot, the dish that I grew up somewhat hating as a kid. Turns out that chinoise fondue is the upscale, expensive fondue, which confounds me, since it’s basically just boiling water that you dip thinly sliced meat and veggies into. Weird.

I don’t think I’d be out of line to claim that the Swiss are a stout and hearty people, exhibit A, any restaurant menu, and exhibit B, their waistlines (at least as compared to the French).

We went on a tour of the wine catacombs in Beaune, France, and visited only a single cellar: Patriarche et fils (Patriarche and sons). They are the largest cellar in the city, with over 5 kilometers of hallways upon hallways, with millions of wine bottles silently aging to perfection.

For our 20€, we got to wander around the spooky catacombs and sample 13 wines.

We’re here in the Jungfrau valley in Interlaken, Switzerland, and it’s beautiful.

From Nice, we drove through Italy, spent a night in Torino, then crossed the border into Switzerland, with the goal of making it all the way to Interlaken. We had a brief detour in Gstaad and Saanen, two tiny ski hamlets that fit perfectly into this American’s sterotype of what Switzerland looks like, complete with cows and giant bells around their necks. What you don’t get from pictures, though, is the constant smell of manure in the valley. Oh well.

Now we’re in Interlaken, in the tiny town of Lautenbrunnen, where we’ll spend a day or two before heading to Zurich. Hopefully, the rain will let up soon. Perhaps being a rainmaker can be a lucrative side business for me — farmers ask me to come camp on their fields, and I’ll guarantee that it’ll rain on our tent.

That’s all for now.

‘Allo from the French Riviera!

In a previous episode, our heroes were headed south, to the Cote d’Azur region of France, in an attempt to find some beaches (preferably topless (although I shan’t mention exactly whose preference it was)) for some quality relaxation time.

The accommodations story has been interesting. We went from the world’s worst hostel in Aix-en-Provence (stay away from Hostel International hostels unless you thought the place they stayed during the first half of Full Metal Jacket looked pretty nice) to a great room with a view at the world’s best hostel in Nice (named Villa Saint Exupery, with lots of cute Little Prince motifs all around) and finally relegated to the worst room (the “emergency room” storage closet underneath the 24/7 bar/hangout for multitudes of fresh faced young Anglophones looking for their magical European hookup) in aforementioned world’s best hostel, due to a distinct lack of planning and booking ahead from yours truly (much to the frustration of Jenny).

But that’s neither here nor there. And in any case, Alex’s handy hostel survival tip #349834 is specifically designed for just this scenario, and the solution is to drink at least two bottles of 2003 Bordeaux (price: 5 euros) and then top off with as many of the el cheapo 1 euro beers as you can stomach, and I guarantee that you won’t even need ear plugs.

Continuing on with the story, we’ve spent the past few days getting intimately familiar with public transport in Nice, with the reward of lazing about on a few sun soaked beaches, one in Cap d’Ail (pronounced “cap die”), which is just west of Monaco, and the others in Cannes and Antibes.

Speaking of Cannes, the 60th anniversary film festival is occurring as we speak, and we wandered around for a bit today. The only celeb we saw was Ivana Trump, but there was tons of paparazzi who were suitably blase about it all (”oh yeah man, we were just shooting Quentin and Rose McGowan and now we’re just waiting for the next one, man…”), and much to my amusement, quite a few touts zipping around on Segways, hawking newspapers and oddly enough, HP kit.

The Grand Prix is this weekend in Monaco, but thankfully, we’re escaping the heat and crowds and headed towards my native environment, namely the mountains of Switzerland, near Interlaken.

That’s it for now.

ciao,

Bonjour, Alex’s friendly BCC list o’ travelogue-spam-victims!

It hasn’t been that long since the last time we talked, I know, but after 2006, the year of austerity, 2007 seems to be the year of fun.

This mail is being sent with Swiss precision; I can actually see little electron brigades standing at attention and at the ready to shoot off into the aether as soon as the REMF (moi) says “go”.

Um, right — in other words, hello from Geneva!

Jenny and I are here, after a few soggy, whirlwind days. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

A ton has happened in the space of about a week, and to avoid the eye-glazing over syndrome that happens with novella-length emails, I’ll just try to summarize.

• We’re here in Europe, originally for a friend’s wedding in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France (the city of Strasbourg) and decided to make a vacation out of it. So the next three weeks are turning out to be a nice break inbetween jobs for me. (don’t be alarmed, I’m still with HP, just changing from one nerdy role to another nerdy role)
• We have the pleasure of driving the Fiat Panda, a ridiculous looking mini-econo-box on wheels, that’s actually more spacious than it looks, and gets 100 km / 5.5 liters of petrol (try wrapping your head around that one).

  bevy of pandas

  Ours is silver, and sadly, there is no place to insert bamboo for a turboboost. It costs about 38 euros or 46 Swiss Francs to fill up the tank, which only holds 6 gallons(!), but we have about a 500 km range per tank.

• Strasbourg was beautiful, and the food was great. I’m of ambivalent feelings to report that foie gras is quite delicious. The beer of choice there is called Picon Biere, which is made by mixing a bit of an orange-flavored liqueur with a light beer (such as Kronenburg 1664). Sounds disgusting, but trust me — I’m as snobby as most people from Ft. Collins are when it comes to beer — and I found it to be quite tasty.
• We camped a few nights in Beaune, France, which is in the heart of the Burgundy region. The original idea was to take a bicycle tour of the vinyards, but after getting rained on continuously for 48 hours, we had to content ourselves with a tour of the catacombs where they age millions of bottles of wine (seriously, millions), and then decided to flee to Geneva…
• …where we got rained on some more. By now, it was our third night in the tent, and things were starting to get alarmingly damp.
• Luckily — and this will sound strange to the majority of you, but maybe not so strange to computer climbing nerds who know what a “usenet” is, and know how odd quasi-friendships develop over this thing called rec.climbing — my internet friend Martin, whom I’ve never met in person before, took pity on us, and last night, fed us a delicious meal and let us crash in his flat.

  With a little foresight in Beaune, I’d picked up a few nice bottles of wine for the express purpose of bribing our way across Europe and tricking people into letting us stay with them. I’m pleased to announce the first experiment was a resounding success — thanks Martin!

• Martin informed us that we ought to have paid a 40 Swiss Franc tax when we entered the country. Oops. Well, they can get their 40 Francs after I get my numbered, anonymous Swiss bank account. Take that, Switzerland!

  Whoops, this has gone on much longer than I’d anticipated. Sorry about the length.

  As always, if you’re sick of my spam, let me know, and I’ll take you off my list.

  Also, I’m going to try something new this time around. Just like before, I’ll be simul-casting my mails on my blog as well, but this time, I’ll attempt to limit the emails to broad brushstrokes, and add extra color exclusively on the blog (so as to not clutter your inboxes and make a better attempt at brevity).

  And now, we point the nose of our little panda southwards, towards the Mediterranean, the French Riviera, Monaco, Cannes
  film festival, Nice, etc. etc.

  au revoir,

  /ac

Short post just to let people know we’re alive. We arrived in Strasbourg a few days ago, after having flown to Frankfurt and hired a rental car. We didn’t get the VW Lupo we were hoping for, but the Fiat Panda instead. Cute name, but it’s rather underpowered for autobahn driving.

Strasbourg is great, and the wedding was big fun. Favorite new drink is Picon, an orange liqueur mixed with beer. Sounds disgusting, but trust me, it’s delicious.

The plan for the next few days is to leave Strasbourg and head for Beaune, in the heart of the Cote d’Or, aka wine country, and see if we can’t take a biking wine tour.

That’s it for now, au revoir.

ps, use google’s German translator to figure out this post’s title

Quick, what’s the worst merger idea ever? No, not HPW + CPQ — that merger is successful by most metrics, so shut yer piehole.

The correct answer would be Microsoft proposing to buy Yahoo for $50 BILLION.

Yahoo is a 2nd place company. Whatever cool stuff they might have done in the past all went out the window when Google IPO’d, and they’ve been trying to play catch-up ever since. They’re second place in search, in advertising, in web properties, and in mindshare. The only area where they are beating Google is with Flickr; everything else they own is lackluster and worn out, like the ‘85 Dodge Colt with pleather seats and no power anything that I inherited sometime during college.

Don’t get me wrong — 2nd place can still make a lot of money. The problem with Yahoo is that their 2nd place has the stink of quiet (or maybe noisy) desperation. They’re foundering and everyone knows it, sorta like when your drunk Uncle Verne and frigid Auntie Clara are having another domestic dispute — in the middle of your family reunion.

For Yahoo, getting bought by Microsoft is the best thing that can happen to them, since the only other way to beat Google is by being smarter than them, and that just ain’t gonna happen.

Now Microsoft, on the other hand, love them or hate them, they must be acknowledged as a top dog. They have a huge moat around their business (in the parlance of Buffet) in the form of Windows, Office, and developer tools like Visual Studio, and generate free cash flow like crazy. That’s the good.

The bad is that a high percentage of their other projects aren’t doing so hot. XBox is pretty cool, but Zune, Windows Live, WinCE, etc. are pretty dismal. They’re like a two-hit wonder, living off royalties from their successes during the big hair days in the ’80s, except that it’s now 2007 and they still have mullets and are wondering why Timbaland isn’t returning their phone calls.

Still, they’ve got a huge warchest, and there are still some pretty smart people working there, so they have a fighting chance — but not if they buy Yahoo. That would be the technological equivalent of making a sex tape with Paris Hilton. Sure, you’ll get a little publicity boost in the short term, but unfortunately for you, herpes is forever.

In case you’re too awestruck by my awesome metaphors and similes to understand my point, let me spell it out for you. Merging with a 2nd place company is the same thing as hooking up with someone who’s jumped the shark. This proposed merger would be horrible for Microsoft and their shareholders (and a nice act of charity for Yahoo).