Oh, huumm, I forgot to mention… the IoT meetup last week, titled “IoT Entrepreneur Journeys”, turned out to be pretty ![global_63313102[1]](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-Bx1yzogwn98/UUD2QeFnKMI/AAAAAAAAA9w/1JTFH-FAJoA/global_6331310213.jpg?imgmax=800 "global_63313102[1]")
fantastic. I was originally not planning on going, so I have to thank the friend who convinced me to go. =) Great crowd, great discussions… much learned.
Out of the 5 companies who’s founders were present, [Evrythng, DecentLab, EnvEve, Koubachi, Yaler], I had actually never heard of Evrythng before. And I must say I found what they’re trying to do quite exciting. So, check out their website!
About a year after all the buzz, and everyone [and most likely their dogs] having already ![MV5BMTk4ODQzNDY3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODA0NTM4Nw@@._V1_SX214_[1]](http://lh3.ggpht.com/-h-N74JRz9cs/UT4e29x95UI/AAAAAAAAA9g/H7fs0m2FQaA/MV5BMTk4ODQzNDY3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODA0NTM4Nw%252540%252540._V1_SX214_%25255B1%25255D_thumb%25255B2%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800 "MV5BMTk4ODQzNDY3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODA0NTM4Nw@@._V1_SX214_[1]")
watched “The Dark Knight Rises”, Saturday night I finally managed to watch the movie. =D I had simply not found the time before, especially given that I’ve [please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me….] never really been that big of a fan of the Batman movies. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always had fun with the movies and the comics and heck, even the old TV series. =) I’ve just not really been a _fan_. At least, not till now.
The recent Batman movies [Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale] have been quite different from the older versions. There’s now actually a plot, a real story, some fantastic character development. And now, with this latest movie, I’m actually a fan! For the first time in my life I’ve actually watched a Batman movie that I’ve really truly enjoyed enough to even feel like watching more than once. =D
Of course it also appears [at least so far] that this is going to be the last Nolan/Bale Batman movie, which is quite a shame. This has definitely been the best version of Batman so far, and I really would have liked to see more of it….
On Tuesday evening I attended the 2nd OpenStack user group meeting at the Switch building in Zürich. Out of the numerous presentations, the most interesting [well, the most relevant you could perhaps say…] to me were the “Heat” presentation, and the “CloudFoundry on OpenStack” one. If anyone here is interested in the topic[s] you can check out the presentation slides here. You can also view the video recordings of all the talks here.
Oh, yes, and there’s of course pictures. And below there’s a couple of pictures with me in them looking all sorts of dazed.
P.S.: YES, the pizza was great! [Thanks for the reminder! =P]
![8492247209_5cb39891ba_k[1]](http://lh4.ggpht.com/-3na08qUjUsM/USaO9yvGfmI/AAAAAAAAA7o/RRYiVQ8rLLo/8492247209_5cb39891ba_k%25255B1%25255D%25255B5%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800 "8492247209_5cb39891ba_k[1]")
![8493352056_d3d6b35f93_k[1]](http://lh6.ggpht.com/-cm1Iz5qjFs4/USaO-pRl5pI/AAAAAAAAA7w/TMXddF_Oxcw/8493352056_d3d6b35f93_k%25255B1%25255D%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800 "8493352056_d3d6b35f93_k[1]")
This made me laugh, then cry, then laugh, then cry again…. One of “those” movies.
![The-Odd-Life-of-Timothy-Green-poster[1]](http://lh4.ggpht.com/-JTRgh1HAxMA/URl_0_93nkI/AAAAAAAAA6w/qrCOk253U08/The-Odd-Life-of-Timothy-Green-poster%25255B1%25255D%25255B6%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800 "The-Odd-Life-of-Timothy-Green-poster[1]")
The Erlang group meetup on Wednesday evening was pretty cool. I arrived to the
local.ch building a tad too early and caused a bit of a commotion… well… what a surprise… anyway… =P The topics were “Erlang Ports, Parsing and Internal FS”, and the presentation was comprehensive and easy to follow. And of course the discussions afterwards were quite informative. Even though I currently don’t really have a proper use case for Erlang, I get tempted to come up with at least some sort of a hobby project using Erlang, every time I go to one of these events…
Oh, and here’s something nice for anyone trying to learn Erlang. ErlangQuest is a set of challenges, from simple to difficult, the solving of each takes you one step further in understanding Erlang. Check it out!
On Tuesday evening I attended the “Zürich .NET Developers” very first event, with the topic of “Windows 8 development with MVVM Light”, at the Microsoft Zürich building. I had a bit of a misfortune, or perhaps miscalculation getting there, as it started to wet-snow pretty heavily just before I got to the Wallisellen train station, and the 5 minute walk between the station and the MS building was quite sufficient for me to get thoroughly soaked. When I got to the door I was dripping, and the first thing I said to the gentleman who opened the door on me was “is there a bathroom here somewhere?”. =)
But once I managed to get myself dry and comfortable, all was great. Laurent Bugnion gave a rather thorough and pretty interesting presentation about MVVM, as well as a nice demo of some of the cool features available for .NET development, on Windows 8. I might not be a fan of Windows 8 itself… well…. at all, but I’m definitely interested those development goodies.
Oh, and a friend just sent me these…. You can probably spot me in there. =P [Click for high-res.]
Last Tuesday I attended a really cool IoT meetup on the topic of “Internet-connected Art“. The presentations were great, and a number of truly awesome projects were discussed. There’s a list of the projects that were mentioned or talked about in the 2nd part of the evening here in this PDF, for anyone interested in any IoT related topics, I recommend having a look at these projects.
One of the project that somehow [I have no idea how] I had never heard about, and 
really caught my attention, is called “Delivery for Mr. Assange“. It’s an art project by the Swiss group called Bitnik. They sent a parcel to Mr. Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The parcel contained a camera and a whole load of batteries, so the parcel transmitted images of the whole delivery route, as well as the destination and Mr. Assange himself. Pretty brilliant, you can read all about it here.
![global_63313102[1]](http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/3/3/2/e/global_63313102.jpeg "global_63313102[1]")
![MV5BMTk4ODQzNDY3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODA0NTM4Nw@@._V1_SX214_[1]](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-18onf_NxAXU/UT4e2LLmr7I/AAAAAAAAA9Y/TX3iIwWKeQc/s1600-h/MV5BMTk4ODQzNDY3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODA0NTM4Nw%252540%252540._V1_SX214_%25255B1%25255D%25255B4%25255D.jpg "MV5BMTk4ODQzNDY3Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwODA0NTM4Nw@@._V1_SX214_[1]")
![global_176059582[1]](http://lh4.ggpht.com/-vESIhaD6sgk/UToFPZ0AVuI/AAAAAAAAA8w/8ymtAWrzW4I/global_176059582%25255B1%25255D%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800 "global_176059582[1]")
![8492247209_5cb39891ba_k[1]](http://lothlorien.aasemoon.com/first-half-2013/8492247209_5cb39891ba_k.jpg.php "8492247209_5cb39891ba_k[1]")
![8493352056_d3d6b35f93_k[1]](http://lothlorien.aasemoon.com/first-half-2013/8493352056_d3d6b35f93_k.jpg.php "8493352056_d3d6b35f93_k[1]")
![url[1]](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-Q97MLtzNQDE/UR7A1c-t75I/AAAAAAAAA7M/lBSAX06z-us/url%25255B1%25255D%25255B7%25255D.png?imgmax=800 "url[1]")
