Shopping, Meetings and farewells

Last night I stayed out late, walking to St. Stephen's and getting back after 4:00. It didn't seem like jet lag, exactly, but Mr. Ocam would say it probably was.

So a fairly late sleep, but not embarrasingly late!

Kyle Machulis came by and there was fun conversation. Really great conversation.

In case there is confusion, I would like folks to know that I really like this whole 'be in Europe with cool people doing cool things and take GigaPans of them' gig.

Rose and I finally got ourselves out, we had dinner plans but we had to eat something. Caught in that awkward space of being too hungry to wait, but worried that any little nibble will turn into a massive chow-fest leaving you incapable of enjoying the planned dinner.

We walked up Burggasse and across the Christmas market on Spittelberggasse. We had punsch from a stall with 12 different varieties, and a sort of egg salad on bread.

I wasn't sure if we had been told that the mugs were included, or what. But we watched other people and it turned out that there was a 2 euro deposit. Later I saw another market where the deposit was 1 Euro, and I thought of the arbitrage opportunities. But ultimately decided that this was a bad bad idea :-)

I then acquired roasted chestnuts and we went to the camera store and bought a new charger and a new SD card reader. Funny the things we forget. And I looked at a massive tall carbon fibre tripod...it was 1,500 euros without a head.

And onward more errands and then I discovered The Cool Tool . For 349 Euro one can have a kit which makes into a number of tools...it needed its' own blog post :-)

My first fascination was with the XYZ table one can assemble out of the case...

We got a chance for a brief break and then joined all sorts of people at the Monochrom office for a walk through district one, past St. Stephans, for dinner at Figlmuller and pastries from Zanoni & Zanoni.

And farewells to various people. Sad face :-(

More things happened, but I can't really keep track of them all.

Getting Ready for Vienna

My wonderful girlfriend Rose White is the artist/sociologist in residence for December at the nifty Vienna based group Monochrom.

This is fabulously cool because I am going with her. We fly Nov 30th, a week from Monday. And it looks like my spit spot awesome kids will be joining us Dec 21st.

This is all a bit stressful - lots of details and bits to organize - but it is starting to move from 'eeeeek' mode to 'wow, how cool' mode.

Any advice is welcome.

This year we spent 11 days on the playa for Burning Man and I took something like 170+ GigaPans.

We will have almost twice that amount of time in Vienna _before_ the chaos of my children descend, plus Vienna is filled with things which are worth capturing. It seems like I might take a gigapan or two while I am there.

Then we go to Berlin for the Chaos Communications Congress, plus we get a bonus day in Amsterdam. Officially I think it is a 23 hour layover, but how fun...enough time to dive bomb another city locked in the cold of winter :-)

I should probably bring warm clothes.