🗁Added 5 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Driving through the snowy mountains to Mariazelle (Austria).
Posts between 2018/04 and 2018/05 (43 out of 43)
- Spent ten days on a snowy mountain in Austria serving on a Viapssana course. I helped to cook for and clean up after 165 people as part of a team of ~17. I got to stir giant pots with giant spoons and make volumes of apple crumble I've never seen before. Meditated at least 4 hours per day. Made wonderful new friends.
- Got a ride to Vienna, then took a bus to Bratislava.
- Wandered and ate and cafe-worked around Bratislava.
- My sister showed up for a couple of nights. Then we took the bus to Vienna.
- Wandered around Vienna a bit; worked from a few cafes and the library, but it's pretty darn expensive.
- Continued loading and reloading datasets into the new and improved OCCRP Data Portal.
- Messed with Celery Flower for queue monitoring so I can actually see what I'm doing when I'm loading datasets.
- Ran and hiked.
- Took a train from Vienna to Brno, then a bus from Brno to Hustopece, to stay with my Vipassana friend in the countryside.
- Wandered around the area. Did yoga. Resumed meditating.
- Explored the South Moravian countryside.
- Spent one night in Prague, then took a bus to Munich.
- Night bus to Lyon. Cat cafe.
- Attended TheWebConf in Lyon.
- Saw Avengers: Infinity War omg
- Took a night bus to Munich, and spent a day in Munich.
- Took a night bus to Krakow.
🗁Added 37 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Arrival in Bratislava. Evening castle and old town wandering.
Week-and-a-half in review: 22 March - 1 April
I love Bratislava.
🗁Added 37 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Cafe-hopping and wandering around Bratislava.
🗁Added 25 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Walk up to Slavin monument (and more Bratislava old town).
Vegan in Bratislava
Compared to the size of the city, there are a lot of veg*n places to eat. Most regular coffeeshops have plant milks, and a surprising number have raw vegan cakes too. It's overall cheap.
Also quite a few places have vegan ice cream options. I got chestnut from Luculus 5 minutes after hopping off the bus.
Balans Bistro
Busy both times I went, this all vegan place has a pretty extensive menu. I tried the quesadilla which was more beans than cheese, but still good. A plate of some of the best chips I've had outside of the UK (high praise, y'know). Another time I was really not hungry enough for a full meal and I was definitely going to get soup or/and a cake, but the day's special was a pulled jackfruit burger.. It was great. I got fluffy creamy chestnut cake to go. My sister had the soup which was spicy and had avocado floating in it, which worked surprisingly well.
Vegan Kiosk
A foodtruck outside Tesco. Various burgers, drinks, bananabread. Interesting burger buns. Approved.
U Dobrozrutra
All vegan bakery; I wish I had been able to try everything here. They also had a few groceries like nut butters. I ate a poppyseed pastry. No wifi, but a few seats and coffee as well.
Foodstock
All veggie, mostly vegan. One of the only places I could find open on Easter Sunday, they have gyoza, ramen and falafel and hummus. Food quality is good. I ate miso soup and gyoza, which were covered in edamame and mushrooms. A small portion, but very delicious. They also have bottomless green tea.
Pestre
A French crepe place, with coffees and fresh juices. They can make vegan and gluten-free crepes from almond milk and buckwheat flour, and have vegan chocolate options. I tried one with banana and blueberries, and one with 'nougat' chocolate sauce. There's wifi and lots of seating; I worked here for a whole morning. The espresso is good too.
Re:fresh
Need vegan junk food at 2am? No problem. I didn't go at 2am, but it was nice to know it was an option. Mid-afternoon, it wasn't busy and was a fantastic place to work, with wifi and power. I ate an absolutely fantastic quesadilla, which was just packed with not-cheese. They also have some great cakes; on another occasion I had a burger. It's good solid (omnivore) pub food, with extensive vegan options, big portions.
Schoendorf Bio Cafe
An omni place off the main street. I just stopped in for a coffee but ended up staying for a hot chocolate and waffles as well. Small portions, on the pricey side, but the hot chocolate was really fantastic. Good for vegan breakfast or snack, not so much for lunch.
There were a bunch of places I tried to go to but didn't because they were closed when I was in the area, or were way too busy. Next time. Things I did in Bratislava that weren't eating.
🗁Added 50 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
The arrival of the sister. Hike to Kamzik, wandering around old town, up the UFO Bridge, and a bus to Vienna.
A week in Bratislava
I fell in love with Bratislava immediately. I arrived on a pleasant afternoon, checked into my AirBnb (a comically small apartment) and then went wandering, ending up exploring the castle at dusk. The city reminded me in ways of Edinburgh and in ways of Sarajevo, both places I felt like I could call home.
Close to where I was staying was the presidential palace, and a big inverted pyramid building. I went to see them, but like, don't go out of your way.
Walks along the river on both sides are pleasant. There are footpaths and parkland, not too much street hassle.
I climbed to the Slavin monument. It wasn't so far.
I took one afternoon to hike to Devin Castle, about 12km from the city. I mostly followed the river, having to detour on a couple of occassions. There was plenty of greenery, some parks that seemed to be crafted for nearby apartment blocks to enjoy, as well as wilder looking riverside beaches. THe walk took me along the top of an old quarry, through some vinyards, and eventually to the town of Devin. The castle itself is situated on the far side of town from where I emerged from the hills, and I was running out of steam and ready for lunch by the time I got there.
I bought a ticket just in time to have lunch in the grounds, as they close for a break for half an hour at 1300. Part of the castle (perhaps the interesting part) was closed for repairs. The rest was fairly pleasant, but pretty full of tourists. There's an exhibition about the history of Slovakia in one room.
The next part of the trek was to Dubravka, over the hills, about another two hours. From here, I caught a bus back into town.
When H arrived we embarked on another hike, this time to the distant Kamzik TV tower. You know I can never resist a tower on a hill. We took the elevator to the top, and stayed for a drink in the restaurant. It was pretty cloudy.
The whole area is a 'forest park' and it's huge. There are places set out for campsites, kids playgrounds, and exercise. There are a couple of bus routes running through as well. On the map and a couple of blog posts I saw 'cable cars' so we set out to find them. Turned out to be nothing more than ski lift, which I've never been on before, but I was swept off my feet before I could think too hard about it. It went pretty high, and pretty far.. probably ten minutes in total but it felt like eternity. H passed the time by telling me ski lift horror stories. When it finally ended, we walked around some lakes and tried to track down a bus back into town. We did not find the one I was expecting, but made it back eventually.
On the last day we took our luggage to the bus station, and were greatly interrupted by a marathon taking place. A long line of runners got between us and the road to the bus station for what felt like an eternity. When we made it though, we were delighted to find the storage lockers are free! Unheard of. You just push some buttons, set a secret code, and lock your stuff inside.
A trip to Bratislava is probably not complete without going up the UFO bridge. Well, maybe you can skip it. It was pretty expensive (7.40eur) for the observation deck; you can go to the restaurant for free but that's a 30eur/dish kind of deal. The views are good, and adorably it's the smallest tower to belong to the World Federation of Great Towers.
Early afternoon we took the bus to Vienna. Regiojet sometimes has the route for 1eur, but more commonly (and what we paid, buying the ticket 20 minutes before departure) is 5eur. Beats FlixBus's 7.50!
I feel an absolute certainty in my heart that I'll be back to Bratislava, some day, for longer.
The rest of the photos from Bratislava and the official food summary.
Week in review: 2 - 8 April
I've finally got pretty good at cooking for one recently. Which is a problem as this week I'm feeding my sister, who eats for twenty.
The phrase "passionate about delivering innovative solutions" just overwhelms me with dead-weight exhaustion.
And I'm suspicious of anyone who says it about themselves.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2018/04/passionate
"Moderately interested in not entirely fucking things up, some of the time, when I'm awake" is more my vibe
Web searches for stuff about Celery, Flower, brokers, queue management, yields a really weird combination of results.
Vegan in Vienna
There are quite a lot of options in Vienna, but everything is expensive, so I mostly bought groceries and cooked. But not always..
Vegan Anker
Anker is a bakery chain that's everywhere in the city. Regular branches have a few vegan things, but there's an entirely vegan Anker right in Stefansplatz Metro station. There are a couple of tables, and it's around a corner away from the bustle of the main station, so a nice place to hide away and pass the time. It's also really cheap by Vienna standards. They have a huge array of cakes and pastries of course, as well as sandwiches and other savouries. My sister (who's not vegan) got a sandwich from there for her conference lunch one day and raved about it for the whole evening afterwards. I only tried a great sticky pastry, plus an espresso, and read my kindle for a couple of hours.
Elmira
I went to this place cos it was relatively close to where I was staying. It's a small biomarket with a vegan cafe added on, only a couple of tables. The food is super fresh and homemade; they have a couple of salad options and a hot main dish each day, on a changing menu. I tried goulash, and a big fluffy latte. It was all good. She tried to upsell me a salad, but I wasn't hungry enough.
It was hard to find somehow.. but I can't recall exactly why now. The street of the address is not actually where the entrance is, or something.
Veganista
An ice cream chain, these are everywhere. Great flavours, generous scoops, good prices. I tried black forest and poppyseed.
Pita Box
They have a big kebab-shaped lump of seitan rotating in the same way normal kebab places have meat! Wild. An extensive mostly-vegan menu, including different kebab combos and falafel. I had seitan in a pita and was able to load it with toppings from the counter myself. They have a bunch of interesting hummus flavours, including peanut (which obviously is what I had). The guy told me which things in the counter weren't vegan, which I think was just the tzatziki.
HappyCow lists this as non-veg, but I'm 99% sure everything was vegetarian.
Voodies
A junkfood stop near Karlsplatz with a wide range of burgers and toppings. I had a Mexican hotdog, fries and homemade lemonade. Cheap and tasty.
Veggiezz
A wide and varied menu, mostly consisting of meat-substitute oriented dishes, the form of bowls, plates and burgers. I went with a couple of omnivores and they were both happy. It was super busy and there seemed to be only two staff, so it was a while before we got served. There are seats downstairs, too. I ate pepper steak. Most dishes are very customisable in terms of sides, sauces and add-ons. Pricey, and not huge portions, but average by Vienna standards I think. There are a few branches around the city.
Harvest Cafe
A super nice cosy place, my sister and I collapsed here after a long day of walking to recouperate so we wouldn't start fighting as soon as we got home. She had a hot chocolate and I had a veganised Viennese coffee, and we shared apple strudel. We were spoilt for choice on the cake front, they all looked great, but we weren't hungry enough for two.
It's all vegetarian, and vegan stuff is labelled.
Denn's Biomart
If all else fails, there are Denn's everywhere. They usually have a cafe counter with sandwiches, pastries and cakes, as well as good coffee and smoothie options.
Things I did in Vienna that weren't eating.
Update: Return in June.
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🗁Added 71 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Walking and eating in Vienna.
Some stuff I did in Vienna
I didn't do a lot of touristy stuff in Vienna (I did eat of course), but here's a few things...
I went to the Central Library. It's pretty awesome, straddling a highway and a metro station, with lots of floors, a good view, and a restaurant at the very top.
The main library, in the museum quarter, is an architectural marvel in itself and costs 3eur to enter for a day. Since I was passing by late afternoon, I figured I'd come back when I had a full day to spend, but I never did.
I went for a run with H along the river. There are tons of good places to run. We also hiked through some vinyards, to the Alps. We found a lookout tower, but it was closed until May. There were some great views of the city on the way down.
🗁Added 28 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
An evening in Brno, Czech Republic.
🗁Added 20 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Walks around Hustopece, South Moravia.
Week in review: 9 - 15 April
🗁Added 144 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Day trip to Mikulov
🗁Added 105 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
Walk through Palava Hills.
This week I did yoga for the first time since I cut my hair and oh my god the floor is just so... there.
Maybe one day I will have a day where I don't spent several hours staring at bus timetables and calendars.
A week in South Moravia
Some chill time in the Czech countryside, with my new Vipassana friend P. Photosets linked throughout.
P met me in Brno, and we spent the evening wandering around in the sun. And whiled the evening away in an amazing tea shop, with different culturally themed rooms (Japanese, Chinese, Indian) and a super chill atmosphere.
We walked around the local countryside, around P's town Hustopece. It's largely flat, with gentle rolling hills and lots of vinyards. Spring was here and the flowers were blooming.
We took the bus to Mikulov, and explored this beautiful town. There's a castle with stunning grounds and gardens, and view over the town from above. We went into the crypt and learnt about the history of the building which had once been a church.
We had a great lunch with some amazing DIY hot chocolates, before wandering up nearby hills.
We hiked up Palava Hill, with stops along the way to look out over the lake, and see various ruins. The lake used to be a valley with villages; you can still see some trees standing tall out of the water, and a small island with the remains of a church. We ended in a town where we visited a chaotic art studio, and had drinks in a nationally famous coffee place, with a beautiful terrace and view from the hillside.
At the end of the week we took the bus to Prague. In the evening we took a boat ride on the river, and ate at Loving Hut. The next morning we walked into the city from the suburbs, and at at Moment, before parting ways.
🗁Added 44 photos to album Slovakia, Austria & Czech Republic, Apr 2018.
An afternoon and a morning in Prague.
I'm in Lyon for TheWebConf.
It's a beautiful day and I'm starting out by getting everything I own thoroughly covered in hair at a cat cafe. I think it's gonna be a good week.
I'll be at Researcher Centric Scholarly Communication on Tuesday, the journalism and misinformation track on Wednesday, and the Developer track on Thursday. See you around!
Week in review: 16 - 22 April
In reply to: https://twitter.com/maulikkamdar/status/989416285275598848
Kira Radinsky: Data is going to be the new currency. Not sharing health data is inadvertently causing someone else to die. Same with terrorism-related data.
And the way she said it... is a terrifying lay justification of surveillance and authoritarianism. This is how you convince the population to give up their privacy.. through fear.. I'm not buying what she's selling.
Fortunately one of the subsequent questions from the floor pointed out that privacy has been distinctly lacking from this panel discussion so far.
Great quality live demos on a variety of topics at the Dev Track, has been really nice to see :D
Wendy Hall talks about the importance of recording Web history... pix or it didn't happen:
"People didn't realise they were witnessing history, then."
And the trouble with memories.. Wendy, Tim and others are reminiscing with the room and remembering things differently.
I wrote everything Timbl said in the Web history session, but it needs some serious clean up before I post it xD Stand by.
Sandro Hawke at the W3C track presents the work done by the W3C Social Web WG and ongoing work by the CG, and importantly.. what comes next?
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2018/04/thewebconf-timbl
My transcription of TimBL's talk in the Web History track at TheWebConf 2018.
So much stuff I could bore you with.
I'll tell you about some random bits, some of the other systems.
I start with the tip of the hat to Mum and Dad for brining me up as two programmers, some of the earlier programmers. Mum and Dad met designing and working on the team that put together the Ferranti Mark I computer, the commercialization of the Ferranti Mark I. The spirit then was very much that all computers were the same and whatever you can do with one computer you can do with all and it's really up to your imagination. They imagined they'd have early computers translating to Russian and back by the end of the week. Figuring out that some things were easy and some things were more difficult.
One of the early themes was my Dad talking to people about computers, explaining things to people, using intersecting water jets to explain how binary worked for people.
One of the things he tried to explain was the difference between what people can do and what computers can do. People can do that random association, they can think about something technical they learned and every time they smell the cheese they were eating when they learned it (at the WebConf in Lyon) then they can make that connection, random connection, between cheese and the idea. Computers couldn't do that.
One of the early fascinations was with things that could do that. The first time I went to CERN in 1980 was write a program called ENQUIRE. Two versions, one for PC, COMPAQ portable luggable PC. This was a notepad thing, basically ran on a terminal so you could look at a notepad, create a note and at the bottom of the note would be links, you could add extra links, browse through the thing, only go through it by following links, start with the homepage and organise your stuff with an hierarchy, remember the place, mark this point, go to another place and say you want to link to this place, mark and link, a link would store to the place I'd previously marked and when you link between the two it would give you a sentence you had to fill in from a popup menu with the relationship between the two things. This thing in this note is described by this or had things like 'created by', and so on. Pretty semantic webby in a sense, in that you had a choice of different predicates. Useful for describing particular projects, the sort of thing a British programmer would end up going to Switzerland to work to help program.
I came in as a contract programmer for 6 months, during that 6 months we had to get up to speed. So the idea that any organisation ought to have some sort of system for allowing people to write down what they've done, explain why they did it and then go away, at the end of the student's summer or whatever. One of the critical things was you could make arbitrary links, when you realised there was a connection between two things you couldcapt ure it.
Spreadsheets were ridiculously popular, a huge amount of human knowledge is.. there's a great TED talk, someone who looked at how much knowledge is locked up in spreadsheets, and nobody who wrote the spreadsheet has the faintest idea of what it means, and people use the spreadsheet as a critical part of the business end up abandoning parts of it because they don't understand it. The spreadsheet can't make arbitrary connections between different things.
When you say, when we tell it that I want this thing, I put the same formula in all these rows it doesn't even realise you've got an array, you just made a lot of things that are the same, but it doesn't realise that you're talking about an array of objects let alone what the array of objects actually represents or the semantic relationship between the columns.
A lot of fascination with trying to capture the semantics of things and of arbitrary links.
I won't talk about the history of the Web itself because it's already been talked about, so I'll just pick some things.
One thing about the architecture of the Web. The crucial thing about the Web you realise you've been told is taking the Internet stuff, the idea of getting things over the Internet world of documents which existed before wikipedia, and the world of hypertext. The world of hypertext, at the time, you could make links on my little hypertext note thing between different files, you could typically make links within a CD-ROM but you couldn't make links between different CD-ROMs, they were used for manuals and things, there was a whole thing there.
I hadn't come across Ted Nelson at all, not until afterwards.
The idea of Web architecture, if you think about URLs, http://yadayad/yada - which is the most important symbol in the URL? The key one is the #. Everything hangs around the hash. The thing that connects one world to the other world and makes them work together.
On the left hand side of the URL that's all the name of a document. And then there's a hash and after that means: okay when you've got that document, within that document - whatever that document is, whatever system whatever language - then that thing. So it's global identifier for a document, followed by # local identifier within the document.
I didn't expect the whole Web to be a Web of HTML, I imagined lots of PDFs and SVGs and things, and that HTML would be mainly used for finding those things so you could follow the links and eventually you'd end up with the jewel of information you were after. Like gopher had menus and menus and then the text file. HTML would be used for the menus. Wasn't like that at all, HTML became powerful enough to use for all the documents. It became an HTML Web.
Relatively soon afterwards at the first conference I remember having a slide about Web semantics and saying that we have links between different documents but actually... when you have my birth certificate and the title deeds for my house and the title deeds for the house are saying this house and this person, and that this person owns this house. With hypertext links you clicked on one thing but yeah, it's more interesting to work on semantics, certainly from a computer science point of view, to build systems which process the actual knowledge underneath.
You've heard about the Web consortium.
The browser wars... we only just had the consortium running in time, Microsoft and Netscape were furiously battling each other for the domination of the net.
I'll sumamarise Web history from then on.. a lot of people were terrified that Netscape dominated the Web, then that Microsoft dominated the Web and all computing. Then the Web realising they're not worried about Microsoft dominating because there are lots of browsers, but then the world worrying that the browser is irrelevant and the dominant search engine has lots more power, and then Facebook login and so on..
The eras of the Web you can characterise by what the dominant commercial, by what the threat was. Always when you have a monopoly it threatens the duration.. the person who is running the monopoly can decide arbitrary standards themselves, they can just write specs and if you're lucky they can let you know in due course how they work.
There are mainly 4 dominant companies, not so many code bases... this has always been an issue. When there are times when you wake up and you're not worried about the AT&T any more, the Netscape monopoly, the AOL monopoly any more.. things can change very quickly, maybe there will be one day you don't worry about the Facebook monopoly. Maybe things will use Solid (solid.mit.edu) where we're using the Web to build systems that don't have the problem that everyone is in one silo.
The hash was a key part of the web architecture generally. And it took off with largely with HTTP and HTML. The idea of the http-colon-yada.. the idea was that you should be able to change out the protocols every now and again. When you found that you wanted a new space of documents then you could change that out. Initially it could be gopher:, ftp:. By allowing it to be ftp: - you were told the ftp address, you probably were given the ftp instructions before the Web. Go to this site and log in as anonymous, give your email address, cd to here, get the thing. Wrap those instructions up into a URL and wow! All of the legacy ftp system became part of the Web.
The colon was the second most important part of Web architecture, that says even though it's HTTP at the moment we can change that.
One of the things we messed up quite early on when people said this is not secure enough, and there was competition between two designs: shttp and https... wrooongg.. we should.. what we ended up doing is saying we should have https everywhere. This means that every Web page, wherever you have an HTTP URL, you should be changing it to an https URL. I bet when you do that you don't even keep it all the same, you change one thing you change some other things too.
The push for https everywhere basically breaks the entire Web. This is the only technical change that breaks the entire Web. The links to W3C TRs, the link to semantic technologies, we had to put in a lot more things to allow computers to understand that http and https are interchangeable.
Like HSTS.. upgrade secure requests.. should have used that way back at the beginning, instead of adding an s to the URL. People felt they wanted to be able to give the guarantee of security to link follower.
The colon is an interesting thing, fun now to see that.
We have this project called Solid which allows you to store your data on datastores that you control and uses https, and somebody just wrote all the code for safe:. SAFE is a decentralised network where your data is stored by lots of people and is encrypted and out of the eyes of governments and companies, they just added safe: handling to the Solid stack. You can now run your Solid apps over a SAFE infrastructure.
The hash is something that is important for moving on bit by bit, decade after decade, about every ten years we can afford to change those protocols. Most of the people in the W3C TAG, Henry [Thompson], had been involved in this and is just getting around.. finding people who introduce new namespaces, want them to go to their system, their protocol, pay them for a name.. The TAG goes around saying no just put it in http space. It works. We all want to take over the world, but...
How many minutes have I got? Who's in charge?
I'll tell you the history of the Semantic Web.
> Wendy: Can we still get lunch?
I had no idea.
Okay I won't tell you the history.
In one sentence... the Semantic Web which was introduced, we started talking about back in the days of this conference, which later became the crazy focus of a whole bunch of dedicated logicians. And it was a lot.. much pride was lost and face was lost and which was much poo-poo-ed by the incumbents, shot down by Google and Microsoft, by people whose careers had been built on existing systems like XML. And poo-poo-ed by people like the CTO, the chief researcher of Google, Peter Norvig, as severely.. that Semantic Web was attacked by all these people, it battled on. It is now huge. I was just in the Linked Open Data track, there is a ridiculous amount of Linked Open Data in the world. A serious proportion of webpages have embedded microdata and Google will honour that data if you have it. A product, a band, if you put
RDFa in that webpage Google will understand what it's about.
Google created schema.org in the way that a large company with a couple of friends can do... gobbled some standards up gave them a different name and a different URL, and because of that the Semantic Web is a thing, there's a ridiculous amount of it.
The people who had been plugging along at it for a long time, it was great to see them celebrating in the session today.
If you were talking about graphs people would look at you weirdly, 'excuse me, we use trees'. But now if you're not using a graph database you're just missing out. It's the year of the graph, the year of the Semantic Web stuff. A story with a happy ending.
Sometimes I like to walk through malls, just to feel invisible.
Vegan in Lyon
Mostly I cooked for myself or ate (terrible) conference food, but on a couple of occasions I ate out in Lyon...
Aux Bonheurs des Chats
Arriving by nightbus first thing on a Sunday morning didn't yield a lot of breakfast options. Aux Bonheurs des Chats, a vegan cat cafe, opened at 11 though, so I waited.
A wonderful decision! I sat down at a window table, already occupied by a moggie who declined to move, and inched closer and closer to my laptop over the course of the morning. Everything was covered in hair. They offered brunch for 16eur which seemed a bit much, and I wasn't that hungry. I had a hazelnut chocolate brownie (big!) and a super creamy matcha latte.
Hank Vegan Burger
Good burgers, lots of different toppings, and coleslaw or potato wedges as a side, and some vegan cakes. Small meal deal (drink and side) or large (plus dessert) at 13 and 15eur respectively. I just ate a burger and potato wedges.
Like An Elephant
A trek across town and up a hill was absolutely worth it. The menu wasn't huge, which means I wasn't paralysed by choice. Between two of us, we shared two starters, two mains, and two desserts, which came to 49eur. Delicious gazpacho soup, and an avocado mush thing were the starters. The avocado mush was seated upon a cheesecake-like grount nut crust, and topped with dark chocolate flakes. It was as close to dessert as you can get without actually being sweet. The mains were seitan with bok choi and mango noodles, and a burger with baby potatoes. And the desserts were two tiny cakes; one with chocolate and one with pear. I loved all of it. It was also a nice cosy place, with friendly staff and witty signage.
YAAFA
Recommended for the 'potato things', and it was open late, and there is a branch not too far from the bus station, I went to YAAFA on my last afternoon. There are many falafel pita options, half of which are vegan (all vegetarian), plus homemade bottomless lemonade and iced tea, and indeed good potato things - something between wedges and US style homefries. I had a falafel pitta with orange carrot salad, and stayed there for several hours. Seating upstairs was nice. No wifi.
Modjo
Not far from the Part-Dieu train station and the central library is a big glass fronted cafe on a corner. Stopped in for coffee, and to enjoy sitting in the sun whilst still being inside, and spotted a chia bowl with coconut milk on the menu. It was pricey, but a nice breakfast.
Un Monde Vegan
I stopped by this all vegan supermarket just to see. Picked up some Vego of course, and some chocolate almond milk and tofu sausage to snack on for lunch. They have a whole arrary of fancy looking vegan cheese wheels, in good French style. Had I come here at the beginning of the week, I might have invested.
I didn't do any touristing in Lyon, I was just at TheWebConf.
TheWebConf 2018 in Lyon
Despite the fact I am no longer officially an academic, I hauled myself off-route from my EU wanderings to France to attend my fifth World Wide Web Conference. This conference series holds a little nostalgia for me, because it's the very first place I published a paper (in Seoul in 2014) and somewhere I met for the first time many academic idols and people who have gone on to become great friends, collaborators, and shape my future in ways that are even now still unfolding.
Not being institutionally supported though, there was no way I could justify the registration fees out of my own pocket. Fortunately I got two free days for chairing the Developer's track, and one free day courtesy of csarven for helping out with his workshop.
On the Monday I stayed home and worked until it was time to join the LDOW dinner. On Tuesday I sat in on the Researcher Centric Scholarly Communication workshop, and by 'sat in' I mean took detailed transcription of everything everyone said. It went well. In the evening I somehow managed to convene a dinner attended by (hashtag namedropping) TimBL, Henry Thompson, Jeni Tennison, Sarven, Sandro, Jenny and An from CredCo. Wendy Hall and Ruben Verborgh had planned to attend too but missed out due to VIP activities and going to the wrong restaurant respectively.
On Wednesday I tried to pay attention to the Journalism and Misinformation track. I also joined the Minute Madness to present a one minute plug for data.occrp.org.
Thursday was the Developer's track, the official reason I was there. I took turns chairing with Thomas Steiner, and all of the presentations went really well - including all live demos and a remote speaker!
Thursday evening's alternative to the Gala dinner was fancy delicious vegan food at Like An Elephant. I got lost, fell off my bike, and had to climb a hill to get there, but it was totally worth it.
I spent Friday morning in the Web History track and the afternoon in W3C. Web History was fascinating of course, with Tim, Wendy and others reminiscing (and disagreeing) about early events that shaped the Web. In the W3C track, Sandro presented on the Social Web WG (that old thing) and how that leads into the next big thing - Credibility on the Web.
🗁Added 55 photos to album Lyon & Munich, Apr 2018.
A week in Lyon, eating and attending TheWebConf. Writeup.
Night buses + bus station storage lockers + a different city every day > paying rent.
just kidding jfc I'm exhausted.
🗁Added 22 photos to album Lyon & Munich, Apr 2018.
A day between two night buses, wandering around Munich. Writeup.
Week in review: 23 - 29 April
Some nightbuses
Prague to Lyon, via Munich with Flixbus. About 50eur, 18 hours, a couple of hours to wait in Munich (time for a pretzel and a coffee). Munich ZOB has a Lidl, and a dm, some restaurants, luggage lockers and isn't far from town. Downside: the toilets are 50c, and grim.
There's a much cheaper direct bus from Prague to Lyon with Regiojet, which I originally thought I'd be taking when I decided to go from Prague. But it has limited departures, and I would have arrived a day earlier than I wanted, so I went with Flix.
The journey itself (the night part, Munich to Lyon) was pretty awful. Constant interruptions by the police, mostly in Switzerland. They came to passport check at every stop and sometimes in between. The two black guys on the bus always seemed to be singled out for a bag search when nobody else was. The bus driver had yelling fights with two different sets of passengers, both a couple with a small child. The first, brought too much luggage and he wouldn't let them on the bus. They were yelling a lot outside the bus, which was audible inside, making lots of phonecalls, and eventually the Swiss police turned up anyway. The bus was delayed about 45 minutes, and the family did not board. The second time a family hadn't been woken up at Zurich and were upset to find themselves in Lausanne. Dad was yelling in French, Mum was begging the driver to speak English, and driver only wanted to make demands in German. Some passengers tried to help, but of course the Swiss police were already here. The driver wanted to charge them for their 'illegal' ride from Zurich to Lausanne. Srsly.
The return Lyon to Munich with Flixbus was 30eur, 12 hours; same driver, but no yelling this time. I had two seats to myself, and mostly slept. Still interrupted by Swiss police a lot, one time with a cute dog who sniffed everything.
After a day in Munich, I took Munich to Krakow; 13 hours, 40eur, Flixbus again. After Regensburg I again had two seats to myself, and slept pretty well. We were entirely uninterrupted by police or passport checks; we went through Austria and Czech Republic, and all borders passed unnoticed.