August 05, 2006
Bill Gates has held the top spot forever, but for a while it looked like Warren Buffett might catch him. That threat has now been neutralized in an unexpected way: Buffett gave away most of his fortune — 37 billion dollars — to Bill. Well, not Bill the person, exactly. And if you had to dispose of 37 billion yourself, there is really only one man with experience.
July 03, 2006
Every self-respecting blogger has a Google Alert on his own name. Mostly it surfaces sites scraping the RSS feed for AdSense pennies, but occasionally it delivers a small thrill. Today it delivered the best one yet: someone has gone and written a Wikipedia article about me. Fame, fortune and groupies must surely follow. There is now no way around it.
June 29, 2006
Missing the last train from Milan to Zurich is the kind of problem most travellers solve with a hotel. Not the kind of travellers who notice a Dortmund-bound train sitting on the next platform and decide the route planner must be wrong. What followed involved a flat refusal from the ticket lady, a passport check in Basel, an hour-long walk, and a missed connection at dawn.
June 27, 2006
A fancy wedding at a country house in the Netherlands, reached by the wrong bus. At the front, the kind of passenger every bus has — the one chatting too eagerly with the driver. This one had a beer belly, a scar on his brow, and a sudden urge to play tour guide for the man in the fancy suit. After 32 beers, he had things to confess.
May 28, 2006
My brother — yes, an actual writer — has cooked up an unusual way to promote his new novel Wembley. Instead of the usual press tour, he is serving the book in fragments online and inviting readers to come along for the ride. Here is fragment number 5: a grey Parisian morning, a borrowed bed, and no secrets allowed.
May 11, 2006
The Economist used to publish charts showing how often newspapers said 'recession' versus the actual economy. I always wondered what you could do with the counts of every word in all the news. Then I joined Google. Yesterday a thing I once threw together on a whim quietly went live on Labs.
May 04, 2006
I first heard the word 'foosball' on Friends and assumed it was a gag. Turns out it is real, it is what Google geeks play, and I am terrible at it. Pair anyone with Stefan and they win the tournament — so we needed a ranking system. Cue fifty lines of Python and some machine learning.
April 24, 2006
Godwin says the longer a thread runs, the closer the odds of someone invoking the Nazis approach one — and they automatically lose. This post hopes to be the exception. Zurich burns a giant snowman every spring; this year Left Wing Radicals stole him. Turns out the charming ritual is a culture war with roots going back to Lenin.
April 20, 2006
On a ski trip last weekend I picked up a bottle of Heinz ketchup with a curious label. Does Heinz print these for every country, quietly cheering on each home team — or has the condiment giant secretly thrown its lot in with Switzerland? Send me a photo if you spot one backing a different side.
April 06, 2006
GMail on the tram, Google Talk in my pocket, a tunnel back into work — mobile data has finally arrived. At home in Switzerland, 2GB costs 50 francs. Cross the border into the Netherlands and the same megabyte costs forty francs. A 1500x markup. There has to be a way around this, and I think it involves your neighbor's phone.
March 22, 2006
Booked Swiss, flew American. The trays had old coffee stains and the beer cost five dollars, but the real moment came during the safety video — no life jackets, just instructions to clutch your seat cushion in case of a water landing. I could have sworn I had seen that exact scene before. In a Dilbert strip.
February 27, 2006
I am at the Googleplex this week, after a few days at the New York office. Mountain View is small. Manhattan is enormous. And yet, walking around both, I keep noticing that the small town feels far bigger than the big city. There is something about how Silicon Valley was built that turns 31 square kilometers into a machine.
February 25, 2006
Everyone is learning Chinese in case China takes over the world. I am too — but with a twist. I do not want to speak it, write it, or understand it spoken. I just want to read it. The trick: Chinese is already thirteen languages sharing one set of characters. I want to add a fourteenth.
February 11, 2006
All I want is the same music playing in every room of the house. In Amsterdam I solved it with wires through holes in the walls. In Switzerland I went wireless: two pairs of speakers later, I am still complaining. There is a much simpler solution hiding in plain sight, running through every wall already.
February 06, 2006
A South Park episode about Jesus organizing a Rod Stewart comeback concert somehow leads to a more uncomfortable thought: whether the protesters torching Danish embassies aren't secretly doing Bush a favor. Some sympathy for the Arabs is in order — the last thousand years haven't been kind — but burning down Scandinavian buildings over cartoons makes the case oddly hard to argue.
January 13, 2006
Google Zurich had no executives to host TGIF, so I took it upon myself. Getting Googlers to stop emailing and start drinking turned out to be impossible — until I found the right weapon. A Japanese cartoon theme song about a Swiss girl in the Alps, played at maximum volume, somehow solved everything. The strangest part is what the neighbours now tolerate.
January 10, 2006
Moving to Switzerland meant abandoning my self-built furniture and surrendering to Ikea like every other Googler in Zurich. But when the local wood shop closed at 4pm and ruined my weekend plans, I stared at the old kitchen table long enough to realize I didn't need new wood at all. Which got me thinking about a book O'Reilly really ought to publish.
January 08, 2006
After a server move and a bout of blog spam, I went to see March of the Penguins. Turns out penguins have it rough — the males stand around in the Antarctic winter for three months balancing an egg on their feet while the females are off in the warm water eating fish. Which raises an awkward question for the intelligent design crowd.
December 14, 2005
Back from two weeks in Thailand and Laos, where every guesthouse in Vien Vang has the same cushioned platforms, the same banana pancakes, and three different places playing Friends on continuous loop. Is this hyper-efficient innovation diffusion or just relentless copying? And then there's the menu item that looked like an exotic jungle-era whiskey, until you sound it out properly.
December 03, 2005
Conservatives love the line that low taxes make people work harder — keep more of what you earn, work more for it, everybody wins. Sounds plausible. But once you think about how people actually respond to having less money, the logic flips inside out. The conclusion is the kind of thing that gets you angry comments fifteen years later.
You will have a long and unpleasant discussion with your supervisor.