Archive for 'General'
My very short ski experience with Britt and Michael Janyk
February 17th, 2010. Published under General, Life, Sports. No Comments.
Sometime around 1995 or ’96 I spent a winter in Whistler teaching skiing. I was teaching in Whistlers Ski Scamps, the kids ski school, and having a great time. I was teaching school groups during most of the week, but on the weekends I had the chance to teach the same group of kids every weekend. That was the most fun because the kids were pretty good skiers and I got to see them learn lot over the course of the season. That weekend program was run by Andree Janyk, Britt and Michaels mom. She was a tough person to work for; she expected a lot out of everyone who taught in that program, but she was quick to praise you when you were doing a good job.
Close to the end of the season we had some big event where all of the groups got together, all the weekend groups and all of the racing groups. Andrees son Michael there with some group of racing kids, most of whom were a bit older than the group I was teaching. Britt was hanging around there somewhere too, but I think she was already on a development team by that point so she was really just helping her mom out. For one reason or another all of my kids left early that day (it was a beautiful March day) and one of the coaches with the racing groups had to leave. That coach asked me if I’d ski down to the village with his group then let them go off on their own. I was about to head down for the day so that was fine with me. Michael happened to be in that group of kids.
Once we got started going down the hill I was flying down the hill, enjoying being able to ski fast and not worry about whether the kids I was leading could keep up or not. I thought I was keeping ahead of them no problem until I looked back over my shoulder to make sure they were all still there only to see Michael right on my heels and a look on his face of “Why the hell did we get stuck with the slow guy?”. I did everything I could to ski the fastest I possibly could, but I definitely couldn’t outrun any of those barely-teenage-kids. I like to think I did pretty good, but when I was skiing flat out I was barely keeping up with them! I won’t even get into how tough it was to keep up to Britt and her mom skiing out one day.
Now that both of them have been on the national team for years and Britt just came 6th in the 2010 Olympic downhill race I think my ego can bounce back from barely being able to keep up with them ;)
Going to Geneva for the LIFT Conference?
January 29th, 2007. Published under General. 3 Comments.
Scoble has mentioned a couple of times that he is going to Geneva for the LIFT conference; if you are heading there as well then while you are in Geneva you should take some time to do a couple of things:
- Take the 40 minute drive to Chamonix and take the cable car to the top of the Aiguille du Midi, the view is absolutely incredible. If you’re a skier take some extra time and go skiing there
- Check out the many Swiss watch makers, most of them are based in Geneva and their watches truely are like works of art
- Patek Philippe (My favourite watch maker, they also invented the wrist watch): www.patek.com/
- Piaget (lots of flash and jewels): http://www.piaget.com/
- Bucherer (they are not a watchmaker really, they sell many different brands/models and if you would like to compare different companies side by side this is a great place to do it: www.bucherer.com/
- There are others (Audemars Piguet, Chopard, Girard-Perregaux, Breitling, Rolex), but Patek and Piaget are a good example of the pinnacle of watch making (although for very different reasons; Patek is the best in the business when it comes to the movement and it’s complexity while Piaget is all about the bling).
- If you are into watches, or you get into watches after looking at some of the crazily expensive ones available from the Swiss watchmakers then check out the Patek Philippe Museum: http://www.patekmuseum.com/
- The European headquarters of the UN
- The WTO is also in Geneva, not sure if you can get in to check it out or not
- If you like chocolate as much as I do (and that is a lot!) then definitely check out this chocolate shop: www.chocolat-auer.ch/en/chocolate_factory.html
- Geneva is the home of Davidoff Cigars, anyone who likes cigars even a little bit should drop by their Geneva store. It’s not a big store, but it’s where Zino’s first shop was (and his father before him, but Zino is the one who really got them into cigars): www.davidoff.com/davidoff/
While you are there take taxi’s to get around, don’t bother renting a car. Parking in Geneva is totally brutal, especially during the workday. If you do rent a car, don’t take the car out for lunch or you might find yourself sitting in a long line waiting to get a parking spot again after lunch.
The old part of Geneva is a beautiful thing to see and shouldnt be missed. There is a train-like tour through the city that starts downtown near the main shopping area and takes you through the old part of town and past an incredibly beautiful church. If you’re like me and you love to see the old architecture of European buildings then take the tour, it doesnt take too long and is well worth it just for some of the views. Don’t forget to check out the Jet D’Eau, although that only takes a minute and you can do it from anywhere in downtown Geneva. Not the most exciting thing, but it’s cool to see (giant jet of water shooting out of the lake). Also there is a great little coffee shop type thing in a park right in the middle of the river just a little west of downtown. I have no idea what it’s called and can’t give you any directions so if that makes any sense to you or someone you’re with can decipher that then go check it out, it is a very quiet and relaxing spot in Geneva, although it might be a little too cool there now to sit out and enjoy. I believe that it’s just west of the Place D I’Ile in this map.
That is what I can think of quickly off the top of my head (with some quick searches for the links), anyone else have things they love to see/do in Geneva?
In Switzerland; an odd technical tidbit
August 27th, 2006. Published under General. No Comments.
So I am in Geneva visiting my Brother-in-law and his family and I just noticed something. Google has been guessing my location based on my IP address for quite a while, pretty much everytime I use Google it defaults to Google Canada (when I am at home in Toronto), which is normally no big deal. This week though I am here in Geneva and when I go to Google it tries to guess where I am and correctly judges that I am in Switzerland and defaults to www.google.ch … and displays everything in German.
This caught be a bit by surprise and when I went looking for a button to change the language to English I couldn’t find one. I was using Firefox at the time and was getting the Google Firefox page, when bringing Google up in IE7 it does give a link to change the language which is good.
So this isnt really that important, but it was a minor little annoyance when I first saw it. If I lived here in Geneva (mostly French) and got the German page by default I might even be a bit put off, even though most of Switzerland speaks German primarily.
Phil
Exchange support on a Virtual environment
October 27th, 2005. Published under General. No Comments.
Now that Windows Server 2003 R2 has been released, Exchange 2003 SP2 is now supported in a Virtual environment.
http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?id=320220
That KB article contains the specifics on support for Exchange as there are a few pre-requisites that need to be met.
Exchange 12 to ship on DVD
September 6th, 2005. Published under General. No Comments.
The Exchange team just blogged that Exchange 12 is going to ship on DVD. This is a pretty big announcement that is going to get a very mixed reaction. As mentioned on their blog this move is inevitable, in a few years much more enterprise software will be coming on DVDs. In fact a lot of client software/games are starting to come on DVD already.
Personally I understand their need to move to DVD (for the additional space), but there are a very large number of servers around that do not have DVD drives and still have CDROM’s. Kudo’s to the Exchange team for bringing this out in the open very early (a year in advance) to give people some time to handle this and to also keep this in mind if they are purchasing Exchange hardware in the next year.
Good stuff; great use of the blog.
Phil