Status-Q

I was in Toronto at the weekend, meeting up with the good folks from DirectLeap. It was exceedingly cold on Sat night when I arrived, as I had expected at this time of the year, but on Sunday the sun shone, and all was bright and clear, and we sat outside enjoying the weather.

There are some people, perhaps even amongst my readership, for whom milk is only milk if it comes straight from the cow. For some of you, the very thought of pasteurisation is an abhorrence. That, at least, was my assumption when I saw that my local supermarket had created an aisle which wholeheartedly rejected the UHT concept:

On closer inspection, I discovered that this aisle not only contained long-life milk, but that it was right next door to the 'Free from' section: "Free from gluten", "Free from sugar", "Free from artificial preservatives"...

Once again, a certain platform was noticeably more popular than any other at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony conference.

Christine Herron, pictured here in the glow of her screen, has been blogging the conference pretty thoroughly.

Thanks to my jetlag, I was up and about earlier than usual yesterday morning, as evidenced by the shadows on this section of a BART platform.

I was in San Francisco for a meeting and did some clothes shopping at the same time. I'll be sure to wear some flowers in my hair, I thought, but it would be nice to wear something else as well.

I walked out of the store clutching my bag, crossed Market St in glorious sunshine, and my mobile rang. It was BA telling me they'd found my suitcase...

I've landed at San Francisco, but my suitcase hasn't. I am both combatting my jetlag, and postponing the laundry I'm going to have to do in the bathroom of my hotel room, by playing with the Ixus 750 that I bought in Duty Free on the way out. Lovely.

If you have a Mac and you don't need to get any work done for a bit... Tickr for Flickr is remarkably addictive. You type a word into its search box and it displays, along one side of your screen, a scrolling band of photos which have that tag on Flickr. It's very nicely done. If you want some good words to get started, try 'coniston', 'scuba' or 'night'...

A couple of days ago.

Yesterday evening.

Swiss trains not only run on time, they also have clean enough windows that you can take photos through them!

I was visiting my old friends Pierre & Linda, who live in a little village high up in the hills. Here's a view from Pierre's commute in to work:

Pierre works in Martigny at IDIAP which doesn't look quite like your typical research lab:

More photos of the area here.

Chris DiBona uploaded this rather nice picture of Ward Cunningham (creator of the original Wiki) holding a half-exploded balloon.

The high-speed photography session was a fun one at Foo Camp, but I got there at the end and didn't get anything as good as those in Chris's collection.