While I was away, surpisingly few things happened at home, no major breakdown at the office, no hate mail because of stuff I left undocumented or broken.
What did happen:

-Mediagonal hired another developer, Brian King from the US of A, formerly employed at AMD, enhancing our capacities with his database and programming skills.

-My little blog became the most visited Kaywa blog, which is quite a surprise and I guess not an actually good sign for those folks blogging professionally like those newspaper guys. But thanks a lot for visiting, everybody!

-There will be a monthly meet-up for bloggers in the French-speaking part of Switzerland in Lausanne. My French ain't perfect, but Fribourg is right on the edge between the francophone and the germanophone parts, so I guess I might qualify for stopping by.

-My friend and former fellow student Muriel Bowie started blogging: you can follow her great asian adventures, which will certainly not end after she finished her M.Sc thesis at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok.

You might be interested in the preliminary conference programme of OSCOM4, the conference of the international association for Open Source Content Management to take place nearby in Zürich in September.
There are several great attractions in the programme consisting of the three sections "Dev/Community", "Business/Legal" and this year's special Apache track, which includes several PHP presentations.
I'm specially looking forward to hearing David speaking about "his" JSR-170.
See you there.

Addendum: ... if I can afford it.

# Edit: I know this blog currently serves corrupt RDF.. apart from pestering the Kaywa folks there's nothing I can do about it.

I'm back from Barranconi/Sardegna.
Travelling by train,ferry and bus was surprisingly smooth, no
'sciopero', not one 'ritardo'.

Sardegna in the summer is rather dry and, as you might have guessed,
quite hot, mediterranean 'macchia' and the typical rounded rocks of the
Gallura region define the landscape's character. Barranconi itself is
and old farm (with goats, donkeys, etc., wonderful for children), the very kind Swiss family running it rents four small holiday flats mostly to people sharing their vision of ecological and socially responsible tourism.
The picture above with "Empire and the Sun" in the foreground was
actually taken right out of the door of our kitchen. Barranconi is on the first line of hills about 6 km from the coast and the beach of Vignola Mare, and can be reached on a small old dust track.
As I don't have (want to have) a driver's license, we did all our
excursions on the bikes we rented (pictured above, mine was an rusty, antique "Specialized Stumpjumper", pretty comfortable in fact), which for us meant regular exercise, but also a rather reduced cruising radius.
So the only larger trip we made was to the city of Sassari, which is a nice but not actually spectacular italian province town. We had the luck to be among the very first guests of the new beautifully renovated B+B "Casachiara" which is run by Luigi (a passionate rock drummer) and Chiara, whose cordiality and hospitality was touching indeed.
I might have to add that I completely avoided to use any kind of
telecommunication device during those two weeks, I guess you can imagine the deeply relaxing effects of such a time without computers, cellphones or even television.
In case you're interested and need a time off: Autumn might well be the
best time to go there.. :)

More news follow.