Switzerland in Snow

So I'm here in Switzerland since last week Tuesday. I've had some great business meetings and events (yay! new customer!), I've seen some really good friends, but above all I've had a huge share of freezing cold and snow, -18c in the mornings, -8c during the daytime.

The first few days it was mostly cold with only a small dusting of snow. The snow in the air was thin seemed mostly to be snow brushed up by the wind. Yesterday it really started to snow though, and this morning thick snow fell, turning the air and everyting on the ground to white. Tourist weather.

In practical terms, what's annoying me is my ever-running nose and all the time spent to get dressed for going outside and get rid of gloves, caps, shawls, coats when coming back in. It could be worse, I'm prepared with good, warm clothes.

Here in Switzerland they have good heating too. Back home in Greece, temperatures have been much more mild, but heating and isolation of houses are not in such a good shape. Not to speak of the many people who do not have the money for heating this winter. This here is an island of the lucky and right now I'm one of them.

Back in Greece

So I arrived back in Athens yesterday. Travelling was unexciting and a bit tiresome, but overall OK. I still have to put order to everything that was in my luggage. Today I started working on the new client's code, so excitement all over!

I had been for almost a week to Paris again after Switzerland. Ate a lot of good food there, had much, much fun with friends.

Got a new ebook reader: Cybook Odyssey

My old ebook reader (Bookeen Cybook Opus) fell down some time ago, the screen cracked. It wasn't really an excellent product, but it did the job, so I don't think I would have replaced it anytime soon if I had had a choice. But with this turn of events, I had to look around. The "big" offerings from Amazon and the like were out of the question for "political" reasons, no way am I going to tie myself into those corporate orwellian worlds. Besides, I'm mostly reading the classics, which I get from Project Gutenberg.

In the end I decided to look for Bookeen's latest product, the "Odyssey". (Someone should examine my psychology for buying again from a company that I bought a rather shaky product from before.) To my defense, I must say that this time I checked some reviews through the mobileread forum, and those reviews looked satisfactory. So, how have I been faring?

Scanning Cross Processed Slide Film

Yesterday I've been scanning some film for the first time in a while. The films from my recent trip aren't developed yet, but I still have some older (and lots of really old) stuff to scan. So I scanned some cross processed slide film, which always gets funny results...

Caecilia Font for ebook readers

Somewhere on the MobileRead forum (where I'm only lurking), I found a recommendation for the Caecilia font for use on ebook readers. The poster said that the font has thicker serifs, which would work better on e-ink displays. You can download the font on the FontYükle site. I got the "Roman" version, tried it out on my Bookeen Cybook Odyssey, and I think it's working fine - I still use it since I loaded it.

I don't think that it's a matter of "thicker serifs" though - I think the font just draws a bit "fatter" and wider, which works better on the display if there is lower ambient light. It's not as fat as the "Emboldened Text" setting of the reader, just slightly fatter. On the downside, the text looks less like in a book now to me. So from an aesthetic point of view, I don't like the font so much - while from an utilistic point of view it works well for reading.