Yesterday around 40 people joined a little expedition on the Faulhorn to ride the longest sledging trail of Europe - a great way of starting the age above 30! And fortunately this time it was much better weather than five years ago ;)
As Google knows everything anyway today we decided from now on we manage our family finances with Google Docs. After long negotiations we agreed on a common categorization of our spendings. My highlite of the day was that I could play around with Google Spreadsheets and program a little ‘lightweight’ budgeting table including a convenient entry form. Here is the demo - unfortunately with fictive numbers as my salary isn’t in that league yet ;)
One needs just to load the form, and fill in the values. Then the spending (or earning) data gets sent to the table, updates the current summary of the actual figures, and compares it with the planned numbers. If an error occurs the entered data may be easily corrected in the list of payments. And the best thing: The form also works on a smartphone, e.g. my new Android HTC Hero, thus I don’t need to keep all the receipts but enter the beers and cinema visits while running.
This weekend Emanuel and I did our annual outdoor adventure, this time hiking in the Bernese Alps. We walked from Oeschinensee up to the Blüemlisalphütte and down the Kiental valley. Here you can see the first part of our trip on Google Maps while Mänus Android phone was recording the GPS signals (later its batteries were empty). Best viewed is this trail of course on Google Earth:
I didn’t just got to know the nice view from Blüemlisalphütte, but also got introduced to the great open source CMS Drupal ;)
Tomorrow we’ll start another short vacation. This time with the bike around Bodensee. Or to be precise: Anita takes the bike with luggage in the Bob Yak, I push the kids in the Chariot while jogging in order to prepare for the 35km-Brienzerseelauf in October, uff…
This is our planned route:
17.7.2009: Bern 11:04h -> Ludwigshafen 14:28h -> Überlingen 12km
Pension Klosterhof, Christophstrasse 17, 88662 Überlingen18.7.2009: Überlingen -> Meersburg 16km (Peter is visiting us, yea!)
Haus Boppenmaier, Hechtweg 2, 88709 Meersburg20.7.2009: Meersburg -> Friedrichshafen 21km
Hotel Hacienda, Am Seewald 36, 88046 Friedrichshafen21.7.2009: Friedrichshafen -> Kressbronn 12km
Hotel Dorfkrug, Tunau 4, 88079 Kressbronn22.7.2009: Kressbronn -> Lindau 10km
Jugendherberge Lindau, Herbergsweg 11, 88131 Lindau24.7.2009: Lindau -> Rorschach 32km
Jugendherberge Rorschach, Churerstrasse 4, 9400 Rorschach28.7.2009: Rorschach -> Romanshorn 15km -> Zug nach Bern
Now let’s hope weather is not like they predict to be…
Update 2009-07-28: The weather men was completely wrong, we had fantastic sunshine (most of the time)! One of the biggest highlights were Lionel’s two jumps into Bodensee from the 3m diving board!!! (frankly, I’ve never been as proud on my 3 year old son)
We don’t have an open source car but a convenient VW from my grandfather. Now let’s go to Follonica, Italy until July 4th, bye!
Update 2009-07-01: Some pictures from Golfo del Sole:
The airboarding expedition to Tschentenalp last Saturday was really fun ;)
At the moment I’m visiting Göttingen on a short two-day trip. Tobias Lechtenfeld, a longtime colleague whom I got to know during my US high school year in 1997, invited me to University of Göttingen to present at the cege Research Seminar. The presentation of our Nokia paper with a focus on the Private-Collective model of innovation went well, the participants asked a lot of interesting questions such as “Doesn’t the community feel betrayed if Nokia earns a lot of money once they found the killer application through the Maemo community?”
At tonight’s dinner of the starting PhD seminar on development research I got the chance to talk to Clive Bell, one of the most renowned economists in the field of HIV research. Getting to know his biography I’m very impressed how he successfully managed the move from credit market to HIV research! And interestingly, his newest publications are mostly in collaboration with Hans Gersbach of ETH Zürich.
Tobi, Prof. Clive Bell, Jan and myself
Nice students city Göttingen
Tobi writing his PhD papers on Vulnerability in Southeast Asia in collaboration with Felix Povel
Ten years after being an high school exchange student in Belleville, Michigan, I finally get now the opportunity to see also the ‘bright side’ of the US, the West Coast. Here’s a little write down of the planned travel schedule so nowbody can complain if I don’t answer mails immediately during the next four weeks ;)
My trip starts today flying with Zeynep to Los Angeles (if United Airlines doesn’t get on strike as Lufthansa did forcing us to a bad flight schedule) to meet up with Stefan, Martin and Peter for the Academy of Management. We then do some pre-conference workshops, enhanced with a little bit of Disney Land, and start with the official conference program presenting an awful lot of papers.
Then on August 13th we’ll start the Highway 1 trip with our probably not really CO2-efficient SUV (…) from L.A. to San Francisco. After some siteseeing we’ll visit Leslie and Chris at the Googleplex on Monday. Then Stefan, Martin and Peter will leave me alone with this horribly large car which I’ve to drive down to Los Angeles again, hopefully meeting up briefly with my high school friend Andreas who’s doing his post doc in phyics in San Diego.
On Wednesday, August 20th I’ll then fly to Seattle to visit Sonali Shah at the University of Washington. As an expert in community research she gratefully accepted my request to continue my studies on open source communities at her university. Next to writing up my dissertation I hope to be able to see a little bit of the beautiful country side as well.
Already on September 3rd we’ll then fly back to San Francisco for the West Coast Research Symposium where I hope to be able to participate in the Doctoral Student Workshop and attend the conference itself.
Then, finally on September 8th I’ll fly back to Switzerland and arrive at 17.10h the day after in Zurich - happy to see Anita and my boys again!
In her 60th year of life, grandma Ursula Stürmer (my mom) reached Top of Europe Mont Blanc (4810m) yesterday morning at 7 am! CONGRATULATIONS!!!
