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EuroTrip Travel Wisdoms
- Your dollar isn’t worth a nickel in Europe anymore.
- When the rental company offers you a free upgrade to a larger, “better” car – don’t do it. You will spend a fortune on gas.
- Switzerland has different plugs than the surrounding countries; so does Italy, but at least you can fit standard euro plugs into Italian outlets.
- In Europe “double room” room means room for two people, and not room with two beds. If you go by US customs (paying per room and not per person), the hotel will think you are trying to cheat them.
- If you had argued with the hotel owner, and accidently left something in the room, don’t expect to get it back.
- The Swiss have a huge inferiority complex.
- Don’t trust MapPoint directions – they will route you through mountain hiking trails.
- Don’t leave fresh alpine cheese in a plastic bag in a hot hotel room.
- Most European hotels don’t have 24h reception.
- When driving in Rome: there is no concept of lanes. Scooters always think they have the right of way.
- Even though the stamps in Europe are old school, you don’t have to lick. They have sponges for that. Just don’t go overboard.
- When arriving in small village hotel, make sure you are at the right address before you unpack =)
- When going to a small alpine village, don’t trust the GPS – be sure to know the hotel name.
- Not everyone accepts credit cards (especially not B&Bs). Make sure to have cash.
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First Silverlight 3 app
Despite my earlier blog post, I decided to take part in the “sexiest” mortgage calculator contest after all. It seemed like a perfect excuse to give Silverlight 3 a try. The end result may not be the sexiest (I’m a developer, not a designer), but I think it’s fairly functional. Actually, I wish I had a tool like that when I was shopping for mortgages. I had a lot of fun writing this app, and I learned a lot.
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Photos of the day
Some snaps I took today while shopping with my Nokia phone. Not so good quality, but still pretty cool =))
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Mortgage calculators
By the magic of Twitter I learned from sizeof about a contest for the “sexiest mortgage calculator”. While my graphics skills leave much to wish for and I won’t participate, I found some cool links for mortgage calculators out there. I wish I knew about these when I was buying a house.
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New Mower
My old lawn mower has something wrong with the engine – it smokes a lot and comes to a rapid halt once it gets hot. Obviously that’s not very usable. To finally cut my jungle of a yard I decided to get a new one. Rather than shelling out $300 for a brand new mower, I turned to craigslist. As always, it worked. I found one I liked, the price was right, so I got it. I just wish the seller had more faith in people – he actually made me go to an ATM since he would not accept personal check. Old people…
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Pleasant surprise from Microsoft
A while back I listened to Scott Hanselman’s podcast with Noah Richards about the new Visual Studio 2010 editor. It is a from scratch rewrite using WPF technologies. Noah mentioned that Microsoft will provide many hooks to the editor (via MEF), to make extensibility a snap. The overall message was that culture at Microsoft is slowly changing and that Microsoft is becoming more open (Noah’s apparently being called an “open source communist” by some old-timers).
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Diamond – Java 7 new feature
I spotted an article on InfoQ summarizing new futures of the upcoming JDK 7. Coming from a Java background, I was really curious to see what’s in store. The article noted several
small language enhancements, so I binged around (yes, I actually used bing), and found the presentation slides from JavaOne by Joe Darcy.
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College project WTF
My sister is studying Bioengineering at the University of Michigan. She was showing me her group project. As a UM engineering grad I could not believe my eyes. One big WTF. Here’s the whole story:
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Windows Forms on Japanese XP
Today at work we ran into an interesting issue. Our Windows Forms-based application worked perfectly on the English Windows XP, but it looked weired on the Japanese version. It was quite noticable – size of some UI controls differed by about 2 pixels and the entire layout was out of wack (of course we probably should have been using some sort of layout manager, but that’s a different story).
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Run Ricky, Run
This morning Tabatha finally succeeded in filming our hedgehog Ricky running in his wheel. We have seen him running before, but each time we recorded him, the video would be too dark. And each time we turned the light on, Ricky would stop and hide.