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Hardronic... it's not the competitor to Softronic.
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15 August 2005 (one of several catch-ups posted on the same day)
The same evening was the CERN Hardronic festival, which (in my little world) is famous for being the gig where the Cernettes made their debut all those years ago. No Cernettes this time, but it turns out that one of the people I see in meetings every week is a member of the band Der Schöne Bahnhof. Is that a great name for a band, or what?
Caravane du monde
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15 August 2005 (one of several catch-ups posted on the same day)
After that was more fireworks for the Swiss National Day without an interesting name, which I have photos of that I haven't uploaded yet. A few days later the Geneva Festival started -- another ten days of parties etc. It started off with the Caravane du monde, almost like another Lake Parade really.
And another watermelon (okay, so this isn't really tourism)
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15 August 2005 (one of several catch-ups posted on the same day)
The week after the Spanish barbecue, another person from the long-finished French class brought back a watermelon from her home country. This was a 17.5kg one from Italy. The Spanish might be better at soccer (or so they tell me) but the Italians produce the best watermelons.
We went to Versoix intending to massacre the watermelon and have a bit of a barbecue, but the frequent lightning was not very encouraging. Just as the barbecue was lit the rain started coming down, so we sheltered under the roof which connected the toilets with the changing rooms. Soon there was water a few cm deep where we were standing and it blew right into the passage we were in, so we took shelter in the mens' restroom. That's the first time I've had a party in the mens' loos. When the rain stopped we went to someone's apartment and slaughtered the monster. (I can't decide whether to mention names or not. They'd be pretty meaningless to you anyway since I'm only mentioning each person once, and I'm not sure if scary-looking-guy-at-the-end-of-the-film wants tout le monde to know who he is.)
At last, some pictures
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15 August 2005 (one of several catch-ups posted on the same day)
I've been doing some touristic things lately, and got the PHP installation working on my Mac working properly thanks to a weird Swiss guy from Zurich (his words), so I finally got around to uploading some pictures. There's a lot more still to upload from the Europe tour, Regensburg, and Geneva last year, but I have at least uploaded pictures of my trip to Sydney last year. When I get time I'm going to completely reorganise my whole photo gallerificationalator system to make it more like the Apronyms site, so I'm actually deliberately not uploading too many photos until I get that done.
Around here it seems like there's some kind of party every week, so even though I have three new 'rolls' for you there's still a lot I haven't got around to uploading yet. After Bastille day the crazy Spaniards I sometimes have lunch with had a barbecue, so I'm calling that the 'Spanish barbecue' because, unlike the 'French barbecue' with the people from the French class, it was actually held in France. There were 22 people, 18 of which were Spanish. And, like there is in almost any group of people, there was exactly one German. There was also an incredibly big watermelon recently imported from... um... Spain, I think. It was about 11kg or so.
The Ultimate Question
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16 July 2005
I went to that lecture on inflation, and also one of the summer student lectures... it's great to be there rather than just watching the videos. But this weekend I've been watching a lot of the videos to catch up, so that I have more choice of lectures to go to next week -- I wouldn't want to go to lecture 3 in a series when I hadn't watched the first two, for instance. Anyway, in the discussion session at the end of the lecture I just watched, Dr. Philippe Chomaz said something which I think shows CERN's purpose of finding the question to the ultimate answer of life, the universe, and everything. As a hitchhiker's
 fan, I was amused enough to put an audio file of what he said online... you can get it from here.
In a different lecture, Mr. Olav Ullaland showed indeed that they do know the answer.
In other news, just when I thought I'd be in the same country for a whole week, I went to France with some of the people from the French class for Bastille day. We saw a band, and the best fireworks display I've seen in ages -- much better than the one I didn't see on July 4 in San Francisco last year.
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