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!!!

In 2000, the Swiss ‘price supervisor’ Werner Marti criticised Microsoft for unfair license prices. No wonder, this role in Swiss administration has to take care that market prices are reasonable and that monopolies are not missused by greedy companies. While so far, the position of the Preisüberwacher was executed with great tenacity, the new person - Stefan Meierhans - who is honoured with this duty runs into the danger of weakening anti-trust in Switzerland. We, /ch/open, and several other organizations (Free Software Foundation Europe, Digitale Allmend, Wilhelm Tux, The Alternative, and Linux User Group Oberwallis) doubt the independence of Meierhans, top manager within Microsoft Switzerland. Therefore we sent out a press release (PDF, ODT) stating our concerns, demanding explanation of the Bundesrat for this decision and transparency by Meierhans how he will distance himself from his current employer.

Update 2008-06-19: It seems like the press release had hit the mark - basically every Swiss IT online news channel and even heise Germany did take up our message: Heise, Netzwoche, Computerworld, PCtipp, iTReseller, InfoWeek, and inside-it.ch.

The dutch fans are fun and have a lot of fun during their stay in Bern at the European championship 2008. No wonder, winning 3 of 3 games! Some impressions of todays siteseeing tour downtown. (some Romanians were discovered as well)

Click-through gallery

The Flash slideshow was made with NetGEN Gallery and JW Image Rotator - everything open source of course, Serge!

Let’s hope the sun is indeed shining at the Golfo del Sole so my first offline-week since years will not be that painful ;)
(will be back online on June 15th - just in case the world stops spinning till then)

Update 2008-06-15: Back from great family vacation I selected 177 of the over 1000 photos we took with our new Canon EOS 450D.

Normal things become very abnormal when filmed very slowly or very quickly. My favorite ones:

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup?id=5542783

http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup?id=5593958

This morning we welcomed Kai Timon Stürmer, 3400g and 47cm, at 8.02h in Bern. What a joy to say hi to Kai!

Update 2008-03-22: Many photos of Kai and his friends online now.