Solipsism Gradient

Life’s full of surprises. Yesterday I was surfing the net in preparation for my upcoming trip to Paris for the Apple Expo. Booking the extra legs to and from São Paulo was no problem. I’ll leave next Thursday (Sept. 11), stay in Amsterdam for two days, then on Sunday (Sept. 14) it’s off to Paris. Steve Job’s keynote is on Sept. 16, then we’ll have time to see the first two days of the exhibition and conferences, and we fly back on Sept. 18.

It took some searching but I even found a relatively inexpensive hotel not terribly far away from the Expo. At first I had no such luck for Amsterdam, though… everything was either full or demanded a minimum stay of 3, 4 or even 5 days! Site after site reported back that there were practically no rooms available in Amsterdam from Sept. 12 to 14. And there were some obscure references to “during IBC”.

Hm. Sounded familiar, somehow…

Of course, IBC is the International Broadcasting Convention, and it turns out that Apple is an exhibitor there too. So I immediately took steps to register for that, too. And again I lucked into one of the last available hotels; somewhat out in the suburbs but next to a train station, and a little more expensive than planned but still bearable. So we’ll get two conferences for the price of one…

I can’t understand how one could travel in the dark ages before the Internet…

Looks like I’ll be attending the Apple Expo in Paris in two weeks, much to my surprise. The nice folks at Macmania magazine are sponsoring part of the trip. I’m going with my “Press” hat, so expect to see some updates from the press room during the expo.

Time to brush up on my French… I had 3 years of French in school and actually did quite well, but then English moved in and occupied (it seems) more or less the same neurons. I still can read and pronounce it, and understand about 50% of French movies .

It’s been at least 5 or 6 years since my last non-developer Mac-related conference/expo. I must admit I grew disillusioned with the marketeering aspects of the old MacWorld expos. Let’s see if the French do it any better. The published list of exhibitors isn’t all that inspiring, but hopefully Steve Jobs will announce something interesting at the keynote.

Regarding the keynote, informed guessers say we’ll see a new 15″ PowerBook (aluminum), a speed boost for the 12″ and 17″ models, and some music-related stuff: music store for Europe and/or Windows, and possibly some iPod news.

More later…

We’re back from our trip to Buenos Aires, having arrived shortly before 1 AM. Everything went well; I’m downloading several hundred e-mails and checking out what (if anything) happened while we were away. Hopefully some of the 200+ photos I took will be fit for publication…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I´m writing this in a very small Internet Café in Buenos Aires (three PCs and five phone booths). Amazingly, there´s a lot of those here in the city center, the average seems to be about one or two per block. And it costs between 1 and 1.50 pesos per hour (30 to 50 US cents).

This post will have to be very short as we´re due to leave for yet another tour in half an hour. Buenos Aires is a very interesting city – wide avenues, many old buildings, great restaurants, sophisticated shopping. However, the streets are dirty and many historical buildings are either abandoned or in terrible disrepair. I´ve taken lots of pictures and will post them as soon as we get back, in a couple of days.

We’re packing for another trip… this time a short one, to Buenos Aires (Argentina). We’re leaving tomorrow (Friday, Aug.15th) very early in the morning and return next Tuesday (Aug.19th) around midnight.

Chances to get to an Internet Café are low, as Monday is a national holiday. But expect some nice photos to be posted later next week.

Vienna again…

this was a bakery just around the corner from our hotel. The name is probably Czech, and so would be pronounced “TJRESH-nyeff-skee” (try to pronounce the J and R in the first syllable together ).

The small poster says “My bread is 100 years old!” – no idea why there’s a sitting horse on it, though. They also had an ad on a nearby bus stop, saying “We make unpronounceably good bread!”

Also in Vienna we found this intriguing poster outside a theater:

this is written in Austrian dialect; a loose translation would be:

To all who can come

DIRTY TRICK

First you can’t get tickets/then you do/

then you arrive late/then a giant sits in front of you/

then you can’t hear anything/then you get angry/

then he gets angry/then the piece is over/then you clap

…sounds oddly familiar

On our trips, we often visit old cemeteries. There’s a wealth of information and curious facts to be found in cemeteries. For instance, did you know that in Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax, on the Canadian east coast, 121 victims of the Titanic disaster were buried – and that one of those gravestones is of one “J.Dawson”? And that only this one gets fresh flowers and movie memorabilia laid on it every day? We visited that one in 2001… alas, I didn’t have a camera at the time.

Here’s a (slightly obfuscated) photo of a gravestone found in Vienna:

It’s very common in Austria (and to a lesser extent in other European countries) to engrave all of a deceased’s titles, condecorations and employments on the gravestone; this is by no means the longest we found. Even humble tradesmen were proud to put, for instance, “Master Plumber” on their gravestones – and in such cases, often the wife’s name also said “Master Plumber’s Widow”.