Tuesday October 23, 2001
A couple of former dotcom'ers who got dotbombed and decided to travel the world instead of sit at home and mope (or get another job) are documenting their world travels at www.emergencyexit.net. You not only find out about the two of them but, just as importantly, find out about the gear that they are using. The best idea is that they have a CD burner in the laptop. This way they can pop the CD into the drive at an internet cafe and blast their photos over the web using a high speed connection. During our recent trip to Europe I was trying to figure out how to do regular updates to my blog, including pictures, but couldn't come up with an answer that didn't involve tons of gear and long distance phone charges.

Quite a few of the towns in France feature a carousel in one of their central plazas. Strasbourg has at least two of them: a more traditional version and the other a creative and slightly deranged departure from the norm which I caught in a 15 second movie. It's a bit of a pain to view the movie, but worth it. Click the image below which leads to a Yahoo briefcase. You'll see all kinds of garbage and in the center is a "file" called merrygo. Click merrygo and it should start downloading the quicktime movie into your browser. Warning, the movie is about 5 meg.


It's almost as much fun to watch the lady's jacket, which is striped and becomes an animated moire pattern as the camera's internal compression algorithms tried to compress the image.




It dropped below 30°f again this morning. A sweater hung out to dry yesterday is but frozen wool cardboard this morning. Another month or so and we'll look just like this photo. Well...without the glacier, mountain peak, and probably only a sciff of snow. This is a pic I took from the top of JungFrauJoch in Switzerland.


Over the border and up a little bit we snapped many shots of the northern Alsace village of Birlenbach. As I noted last week, some of our great relatives left this area (for Russia at the time) during the French revolution. It's a beautiful and snug little town, surrounded by fields of corn and, of course, row upon row of grapes. Not finding any stores or shops in Birlenbach we stopped at Wissembourg and bought some eclairs, goat cheese, and fresh Muscat grapes to nibble on. Even though Muscat is a white wine the grapes are red skinned. They have the same unmistakable, almost perfumey flavor of the wine.


We spent three days in Strasbourgh, France which is where we rented the car to drive up to Birlenbach and through the Alsace wine region. I've been to Strasbourg twice now and really enjoy the city. A map of the town shows the Petite France area outlined by the waterways. This is where you find the Cathedral (with the fascinating mechanical Astronomical clock inside) and many of the old buildings and shops. The waterway is worth a leisurely walk as illustrated in this picture of my Mom.