So I got a new job.
The interesting thing is that it is a startup and the company’s site just went live this week!!!! You can come visit it at http://weplaytv.com. It is a interactive, fun website based around TV shows. It allows you to interact with other viewers of the same show. Currently we offer Fantastic Baseball.
My task that I am currently on is to create a widget that other users can put on there blogs, wink wink.
Here is mine:
So you can view all 2 million of my photos at My Gallery or view the abridged versions here:
(More coming soon!)
Trains in the CH are pretty cool and i finally got to see the illustrious Schloss Toffen. It is an old house with portraits that follow you across the room. It was built in the 1200s with a good view over its peons in the town of Toffen.
Chocolate, cheese, wine, and bread, the four food groups, were pretty great. We took a boat across Lake Lucerne and then took the steepest cograil in the world (48% which is apparently 22 degrees) up to the top of Mt Pilatus, then took a gondola down to do some toboganning. Luckily this time there weren’t slow people ahead of me like in Austria, and i flew down the mountain in my sled. Like Maria.
Thennn on Jeanne-Marie’s birthday we went to Gruyère (CHEESE) and had lunch in the restaurant at the cheese factory. The highlight of the factory tour was Cherry the Cow, who narrated the audio tour. Very cheesy indeed.
After a birthday party for JM’s grandpa and aunt that looked like some gathering out of the Godfather, we took off for Grenoble.
PS: CH = Confederation Helvetica
PPS: Swiss trains are cool, and the best way to get to the train station is definitely on a train, not a car!!!
Italian toilets are weird, especially when you have to stand over them. Blech.
Venice was pretty cool, except for when i was hot and wanted to sit down in Piazza San Marco, which is apparently illegal…
Luckily the Italians did a good job with their PIZZA, which i had more than a few times.
Theennnn, we went to see THE ME in florence (il davide). We didn’t see the real one, not wanting to wait in a 2 hour line, but we saw two replicas, so that has to count for at least one real one. Florence had the nerve to rain on us though, but luckily we emerged after a torrential downpour at the Piazzala Michaelangelo up on a hill above the city for a perfect Fuji FinePix moment with me and my statue.
Also, we climbed 414 steps to the top of the Campanile (bell tower) next to the Duomo, which had a pretty sweet view. The pizza in florence wasn’t so bad either.
I suck at Italian. I tried to mix Spanish and German and that didn’t go so well. Alas..
Sooo, in Salzburg we took the… Sound of Music tour!!!
We went to the gazebo where they sang 16 going on 17, the path where Maria sang I have confidence, the lake where the kids fell out of the boat, the back of the house, the lake and mountain district from the first scene, and it was all guided by an old Austrian lady in traditional garb pretending to be Maria von Trapp.
We also took a REALLY COOL SALT MINE tour… which included two long slides to get down into the mines, and a Disneyland-esq boat trip across the salt lake , 180 meters under ground. OOOooooOOOO. Other than the bus leaving us in the middle of nowhere and coming back an hour and 15 minutes to get us, it was pretty sweet. Jaaaayyyy.
So I like biergardens… and so does Jeanne-Marie. They are like everywhere. The biggest uban park in Germany has it’s own biergarden!
Also in addtion to bier, we are going to Neuschwanstein, one of the biggest ’schloßes’ in Bravaria. It is also the schloß that Disneyland is based off of.
-Dave
So we have been Czeching out Prague for the last day.
Apparently Prague never sleeps, because when we arrived at our hostel around 10:30 or 11 last night, the streets were flooded with people going out. We had no trouble getting a sit down dinner at 11:30 pm… :-/
Prague is a “quaint” eastern european city with castles, red roof tops, and bridges galore. There are 20 czech crowns to the dollar, but the prices are pretty comparable to the norwegian prices in kroners, which are 5 to the dollar… IE, it is pretty cheap.
One of the cheap things is… BEER! We have had Ute Pils several times today, in the beautiful warm weather with nice views in the background.
Also, my brilliant girlfriend reserved a hostel right in the middle of the old town, and right above a PIZZARIA! Yummm.
So we went to Leipzig for my big important software engineering conference. Ooo, i’m a pro now!!
The train from Berlin was an ICE…=really fast and smooth. Why don’t we have those across the US??
So it turns out my “colleague” and i are geniuses, and booked a hotel in the boonies outside of leipzig, a 20 minute cab drive away from everything else. Nonetheless, an adventure.
The conference, with free lunch, free dinner out, old guys with jeans and flannel shirts and young undergrads in shirts and ties, was a real hootenany. The only weird thing about our free dinner out, in some famous restaurant underground called Auerbachs Keller, was that there was a “special guest” by some gothic dressed devil impersonator, blabbing around in german, with a translator as his echo, about some serum he was injecting into a test tube of beer, and then making an innocent bystander drink it.
Anywho… all the nerds at the Nerdix convention loved my speech. Im David Pattison and I’m number ONE!
Soo, we took a night train from Bergen to Oslo. I didn’t get a great night’s sleep between the drunk guy walking up and down the aisle and the sunrise at 3 am, but we got to Oslo bright and early and had a great day walking around.
One of the highlights was a trip out to Holmenkollen, where there is a massive ski jump that they used in the 1994 Lillehammer olympics, and a sweet ski museum under the jump. We climbed about 8 million steps to the top of the jump, and it looked like it would take some balls to go off it on a pair of skis, a pair of balls i do not possess. Norway seems to have invented skiing, and has it as its national sport, which was pretty cool. Too bad our sport is football. blech.
We also took a ferry to see the Fram, a MASSIVE boat out on this peninsula that they took on 3 exbiditions to the North and south poles in 1910 or sometime. Once it got icelocked and floated in the Arctic ocean for 3 years. Talk about “cabin fever.” Luckily they were equipped with enough crap for 12 people to stay on it for 5 years. Sheesh!!
Berlin is cool, there are a lot of museums and huge buildings, lots of beer which is cheaper than soda in some cases, and the weather, thanks to us, was beautiful. Tomorrow its a bike tour of the city. Woohoo!
Nexte halt, Leipzig!