Arguably, AI is moving at breakneck speed and as a techie I needed a way to learn at pace. All that in parallel to a rather demanding (and not really 9-5) job, I had to find a way to build a lab where I could experiment on everything AI while also improving my overall tech setup and a way to access it remotely from my Macbook while travelling somewhere around the world. But in order.
Yours truly has been interviewed by the Swiss AI podcast. The podcast is in German, but for my German friends - at least not in Wallisertitsch. Should be easy to understand. Here is the spotify link:
Ah, coffee. As a Melbournian by choice, conviction, and happenstance, coffee is a special topic that leads to strong opinions. And rightly so. Like wine, coffee can be anywhere on the range from divine to atrocious. And that is only the coffee. How you accessorize your coffee then becomes an almost religious debate, especially amongst Melbournians.
Black coffee… early memories tell horrendous stories of something called Jakob’s Krönung - Jacob’s crowning. Filter coffee, highly acidic and burned, completely unbalanced, and usually - by people from a certain generation - enjoyed in a weak form that Brazilians would call cha-fé (how ever you write this). Cha is tea of course, and I’ll leave the rest up to your imagination.
So here are my best of lists from my cycling adventure.
The canal was just outright spectacular. Its unerring straightness was maybe a bit “boring” for lack of a better word, but this was peaceful, cute cafes in the lock houses, no traffic. Outstanding.
The Rhine Valley is just beautiful. You feel castled out after a while (at least I do) but you cannot deny the beauty.
Today is the last long cycling day, following the usual pattern. Tomorrow I’m just going to cycle to Mannheim train station and from there take the train to Basel. So now it is again quarter past six seems to be my preferred waking up time, and I am catching up on blog writing - and waiting for breakfast.
Right now I am looking out on blue skies, and the weather forecast tells me that it’s going to stay that way for a couple of hours and then become cloudy. But at least there’s not going to be any rain or thunderstorms today. So with all that, I will try to get out of here by 8ish and make my way down south. It’s about 103 kilometres today and that will take me a while, especially since there are over 300m elevation gain on the plan. So - leaving at 8am will get me there in about 6-7h I guess.
The weather gods were not clement today - we had lots and lots of torrential rain. Instead of getting up really early in the morning and riding all the way by bike, I spent some more time with family and then took a train down to Neuwied. OV to Koblenz is really quite short. It’s about 25 kilometres, which took me a bit over an hour. I was quite lucky as in that hour there was basically no rain, but some quite strong winds. So overall not nearly as long as some of the other days, but quite exhausing.
Only a short note today about a random encounter over breakfast. I came down to the restaurant at 8am and there was - again - one other person having breakfast (there were more coming later though…). We greeted each other and then randomly decided instead of sitting at different tables, to have breakfast together. A financial analyst from San Francisco, en route to visiting family in the Netherlands - and we had a super interesting, wide-ranging conversation about a wide variety of topics.
Quarter past 6, sunlight in my eyes from the sunrise. And it looks like a pretty good morning for cycling. So waiting for breakfast and will then leave the hotel relatively quickly and get onto my 86km ride down the Rhine through the Gorge all the way to Andernach.
This really is where the EuroVelo 15 route is coming to its full glory. The Rhine Valley is magnificent. Of course, I have been here many times, but going through it at a very leisurely cycling pace is so different than driving through. In the beginning, there was a lot of sunshine, seeing the vineyards, the castles, and the little towns dotting the Rhine is absolutely a sight worth seeing and an effort worth making. Here are a few of them as illustrations.
It seems like after missing the major weather events last week, I am now collecting them. But at least it also looks like it is only rain today and no thunderstorms. I guess I will skip the ferry and rather take the bridge.
I am still lazing in bed. 34km to go today, no rush really and the weather is nothing that fills you with energy. And it looks like the weather might be nicer in the afternoon, although the clouds will not break before 4pm and by that time I want to be in Bingen.
I am intrigued by a technique I read about in Peter Steinberger’s blog. One of the challenges I had in the last couple of days is that the image size for my github - cloudflare setup for my blog is limited to 25 MB. Granted, this is not a particularly difficult problem, but I wanted to see if I can use genAI and build a Python tool that would solve this for me.
