When I was 17, I spent six weeks in the summer of 1994 living and studying in Krefeld, Germany as part of the Indiana University Honors Program in Foreign Languages. There were about thirty of us, and we spent most of our time living with host families and going to class in the city. We did make a couple of group trips though, including one to Heidelberg to visit the famous Schloß Heidelberg. I remember vividly that it was my favourite castle in all of Germany. (I even posted some photos on my very first website way back in 1996!)

Fast forward 27 years…

After a Covid “Schnelltest” first thing in the morning, we boarded the train from Munich to Heidelberg. We’d decided to splurge and go for first class (mostly because you can reserve a seat that way), and to our surprise we had an entire compartment to ourselves! The trip was around 4 hours and we got there around lunchtime.

We dropped off our bags at our hotel and headed down into the Altstadt. Heidelberg’s historic main street is quite a bit longer than a lot of other cities, and there were plenty of folks out and about.

Down a side street we caught a glimpse of the Brückentor (bridge gate) at the Alte Brücke (Old Bridge) across the Neckar River. We also stopped to check out the lovely pink stone Jesuitenkirche (Jesuit Church). But our stomachs were growling, and we had a very special destination in mind for lunch…

The Schnookeloch! Somehow when we were planning the trip, the Snook noticed that there was a historic guesthouse with his name (sort of) on it. 😂 As near we can figure out, “Schnooke” in the local dialect refers to jokes or pranks, and “Loch” is German for “hole.” Fitting name for a very old student pub!

The burgers and beers were pretty good! On my way to the bathrooms, I noticed that the tables inside were covered in hundreds of student graffiti carvings. Pretty neat! But it was finally time to head to the castle…

We took the Heidelberger Bergbahn funicular railway up to the castle. Interestingly, I don’t remember taking that back in 1994. I suspect that our tour bus simply drove us up to the castle. (Any other IUHPFL alumni remember?)

The castle is a beautiful ruin. As far back as the 19th century there were debates about whether to fully restore it, but thankfully the decision was made it leave most of it alone. The way it looks now is pretty much the same as when Mark Twain visited and wrote about it in 1880. My memories of it from 27 years ago were mostly about being an overly dramatic teenager and swanning about moodily thinking about Romantic poets. (I still can’t quite believe I’m getting to revisit some of these places again.)

After walking around the castle walls, we headed into the courtyard in search of the Großes Fass (Big Barrel), also known as the Heidelberg Tun…

Rumoured to be the world’s largest wine barrel, I definitely remembered visiting it back in 1994. But… I remembered it being a lot bigger? Confused, we rounded the next corner and—OH. That’s the big barrel. 😂

That’s more like it! We made the circuit up the stairs to the viewing platform on the top, then back down the other side. With a Snookums for scale:

We headed back out to walk around the gardens behind the castle. The views of the city were glorious. The castle isn’t really as high up the hill as I’d remembered. The weather was overcast but hot.

We headed back to the funicular to go even higher. The castle is at 120m above sea level, but you can ride up to Molkenkur at 289m and then switch to the older line to go up to the Königstuhl at 550m. The old line is slower and smaller and doesn’t run as frequently, so we had to wait a while to board. The trip on the upper section takes about 10 minutes and at times you’re climbing a 41% grade! 😳

But it’s all worth it for that view…

There’s a hotel at the top of the mountain, as well as an observatory, a falconry (?!), a kids’ fairytale park, and many walking trails. We decided to follow the family walking trail, marked with these rather creepy signs…

We saw very few other people.

The family trail was a big loop and had some rustic play areas. The Snook found a brilliant orange slug and took a photo of it. There were also several creepy structures built out of old tree branches, which gave off a very witchy fairytale vibe.

We caught the funicular back down the mountain and walked through the Altstadt again. Back down by the Alte Brücke we patiently waited our turn to take a photo with the famous Brückenaffe (Bridge Monkey), who’s meant to bring you luck. 🐵

I should mention that I made heavy use of this blog post for planning our time in Heidelberg. We took the author’s advice and headed to the Vetter’s Alt Heidelberger-Brauhaus for dinner, and everything was delicious!

That was a pretty big day. My smartwatch says we did nearly 19K steps! We headed back to the hotel to crash.

The next morning, we took advantage of the fact that Heidelberg is a university town to have a hipster cafe breakfast at deer. (Honestly, going out for breakfast is the #1 thing I’ve missed in Corona lockdown.) The Snook was very, very happy with his pourover…

After breakfast we headed back to the Altstadt and finally crossed the Alte Brücke.

Our goal was the Philosophenweg (Philosopher’s Way), a walking path high up on the other side of the Neckar. To get to it, we decided to climb the Schlangenweg (Snake’s Way). This is an old narrow vineyard path that climbs nearly 90m as it snakes back and forth up the hillside, with stone walls on either side of you. It was actually pretty gruelling, and thankfully there are a couple spots with benches to stop and take in the view.

We even saw sheep!

We finally reached the Philosophenweg, which was thankfully flat. We meandered past more vineyards and gardens with lovely flowers. At one point, there was an outlook with some seats, and an old man was playing the guitar. It was heavenly.

We slowly made our way back down to city level. At the end of the Philosophenweg is the Philosophengarten, which was a riot of colourful blooms.

I took advantage of the backdrop to take some cute photos of us.

We walked past many university buildings and charming houses. This one was one of my favourites. It has a poem painted on the side:

Behüt dies Haus
von Wetter und Wind
und Menschen die langweilig sind.

“Watch over this house
from weather and wind
and people who are boring.”

We checked out of the hotel and stashed our bags in a locker at the train station. Then we hopped on a bus and headed to the nearby town of Schwetzingen. This hadn’t been part of our original plan, but I realised when looking at my old website that the IUHPFL trip had included a stop at Schloß Schwetzingen and the Snook cleverly figured out how to get there. More nostalgia! When we got to Schwetzingen, we had a quick lunch at a Mexican restaurant near the palace.

Then we headed over to the palace…

I remember that, as a 17-year-old from Indiana, stepping into that formal garden felt like Alice going into Wonderland. I’d never seen anything like it in my entire life.

The garden was established just as the more formal French style was giving way to the English landscape garden, so it’s unique in the way it tries to marry the two.

While the central vista features strict geometrical beds, topiary, and large fountains, the sides and back have more rambly, natural feeling paths with hidden grottoes and follies.

I was most looking forward to The Temple of Apollo. I remember spending a big chunk of my time in the garden back in 1994 having lunch on the lawn in front of the temple, swooning about and pretending to be a pagan. It looked exactly as I’d remembered.

We were delighted to find out you can actually go under/inside the monument and peek out behind the fountain.

We also came across the Vogelbad (bird bath), an over-the-top circular aviary built around a fountain, where dozens of bird sculptures perched around the roof spit water down into the center.

In the alcoves around the sides were many living birds, including quite a few from Australia! Here’s the Snook chatting with the budgerigars.

The far end of the palace gardens have a lake of sorts with little brooks with bridges over them. It’s all very charming.

We noticed that the Snook bore a resemblance to the statue of the Danube river god…

…and happily, we found my doppelgänger in a statue of Athena. She’s clearly taking a selfie! 😂

Rain was threatening, so it was time to leave the palace and catch the bus back to Heidelberg. We collected our suitcases and then hopped on the train back to Munich, getting back late Sunday night. I honestly never expected to get to visit these places again in my life, so it was such a special and unique treat to see these sights again! ❤️

After only glimpsing the Chiemsee from a distance on our trip to Salzburg, we knew we needed to head back on a nice day. It’s a large freshwater lake with several islands you can visit, including one with a palace! So when a suitable weather forecast presented itself a few weeks back, we caught the train southeast from Munich towards Prien am Chiemsee…

But not this train, of course. We took a modern train from Munich. This little green steam train is actually the Chiemsee-Bahn, which runs about a mile from the main station in Prien down to the edge of the lake. You could easily walk that distance, but we couldn’t resist getting to ride on heritage-listed choo-choo!

The train lets you out right at the water and then the engine detaches, spins around on a turntable, and hooks up to head back the other direction.

All of the Chiemsee ferries and cruises depart from this landing, and there are restaurants, a Ferris wheel, boat rental, a promenade, a swimming center, and lots of folks just hanging out, enjoying the weather. The view of the lake was really spectacular.

We hopped on a ferry and headed to the Herreninsel (“Men’s island”), the largest one and the one with the palace.

When you get to the island, you end up at a visitor center next to an old Augustinian Monastery. There’s about a 20 minute walk to the Herrenchiemsee Palace, or you can take a horse carriage ride. We went for the walk, strolling through a beautiful shady wood…

We eventually reached a break in the woods and stepped out into a formal garden, straight out of Versailles! 😳

It’s not accidental. It was built by King Ludwig II as the third and last of his famous castles (after Neuschwanstein and Linderhof), and he deliberately modelled it after Versailles. Dude had a fixation with Louis XIV! Several of the fountains are copies of ones at the French palace. (They weren’t running constantly; it seems like they were going every half an hour on the day we were there.)

The only way to see inside the palace is to book a tour, and I was lucky enough to get us on one of the few English versions. It was us and two other couples, and the tour guide took us inside and through all of the completed rooms. Unfortunately photography wasn’t allowed, but you can see some pictures on the Wikipedia page. One thing I found fascinating was that Ludwig had his architects copy Versailles pretty closely, but he also built in secret “modern” technology, like central heating from furnaces under the palace. He also had a trap door under his dining table, which cranked up and down like an elevator so it could magically appear with food on it! The Hall of Mirrors was spectacular, as was the world’s largest Meissen porcelain chandelier. Sadly, Ludwig ran out of money before the palace was finished, and he only spent like ten days there before he mysteriously died at 40. (Nowadays they use the unfinished part to host art exhibitions.)

Leaving the palace, you look across the sunken formal garden all the way to the Chiemsee in the distance!

After a wander back to ferry landing, we caught another boat over to the Fraueninsel (“ladies’ island”).

While the Herreninsel is mainly a tourist destination, the Fraueninsel has a Benedictine convent and a little village of about 300. It’s car-free, so we had a lovely time walking around and checking out all the little houses and shops. I noticed that several of the places had rental details on them, and I can’t imagine a more beautiful place to spend a week just chilling out. We were also delighted to spot some familiar flags. There are Antipodeans living on Fraueninsel! 🇦🇺🇳🇿

We took another small cruise to end the day, but we were getting a bit sunburnt and tired at this point!

To get home, we disembarked at Prien Stock and took the Chiemsee-Bahn back to Prien train station, before catching the regional train back to Munich. Lovely day out on the water!

It’s summer in Deutschland, and now that we’ve had our first vaccine shot, we feel a bit more comfortable travelling again. Two weeks ago we headed out of Munich for the first time since the Zugspitze last year. And where did we go? Salzburg, Austria.

We actually started the day with a Covid Schnelltest at our local shopping center. Austria has lifted a lot of its restrictions, but we knew that it was important to have a negative test result. By the time we got to the Hauptbahnhof (central train station) 20min later, the results were in our email inboxes. Protip: Bavaria offers a special discount ticket called the Bayern Ticket, which lets you ride regional trains and most public transport through Bavaria. It also gets you to Salzburg, which is about two hours from Munich. The weather forecast was for clouds, but it was a beautiful sunny day as we headed southeast towards the mountains, whizzing through idyllic German villages and rolling green fields…

We crossed the Salzach River and got our first glimpse of the Festung Hohensalzburg (“High Salzburg Fortress”) atop the Festungsberg as we pulled into our destination. I had planned some activities based on this blog post, including booking tickets up to the castle. We had a few hours to kill though, so we started by walking to the Altstadt along the river. We crossed over at the Marko-Feingold-Steg, a pedestrian bridge decorated by visitors with thousands of padlocks.

We headed to Getreidegasse (“Grain Lane”), a busy shopping street in the heart of the old town. It’s narrow and historic and super charming, even despite the fact that many of the shops were the same as you’d see in any major city. It was also surprisingly busy, and I found myself feeling a little wary of all the unmasked folks! (It’s been a long lockdown. 🙁)

It was lunchtime and we were hungry, so we headed to the Zipfer Bierhaus. We got a table out the back in University Square and enjoyed a couple plates of sausages along with some local Austrian brew…

Our next stop was back on Getreidegasse – Mozarts Geburtshaus (Mozart’s birthplace). It was fairly empty at the time, and we enjoyed wandering the rooms and  learning a bit more about his life and his family. Did you know that Mozart’s sister Maria Anna (nicknamed “Nannerl” by the family) was also a musical child prodigy, but because she was a girl, she eventually had to stop touring and performing? (I found myself feeling so angry on her behalf.) I was also surprised to see that pianos in Mozart’s day had the black and white keys reversed!

We ended the tour in the gift shop, of course, where I bought a cool lenticular magnet to add to our collection. They had a TV set up showing scenes from Amadeus, and I confessed to the Snook that I’d never seen it. That was going to have to be rectified, I decided…

And then it was time to head up to the fortress! We caught the Festungsbahn (funicular) up to the top and were greeted with stunning views across the city to the mountains beyond.

The day was turning out pretty hot, so we headed into the Zeughaus (Armory) Museum to cool off and learn about medieval weaponry. They had a lot of interactive exhibits, including a kiosk where you could picture yourself as a knight. The Snook also enjoyed creating virtual gunpowder and seeing how far he could fire a cannon.

The real highlight of the Festung is the view over the city. How stunning is this? This is why we came to Europe. ❤️

It really was quite hot though. 😅 We were also getting tired from all the walking so we caught a quick rest in the shade.

Our tickets also included access to the Prince’s Chambers, the richly appointed staterooms installed by Prince-Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach. My favourite part was the Golden Hall, with its 17m-long beam, carved columns, and decorated ceiling.

And from every window, an amazing view…

We were really flagging by this point, so we caught the funicular back down to the Altstadt. In need of refreshment, we headed to the nearby Stiegl-Keller where I was delighted to sample their Grapefruit Radler in the rooftop biergarten. What a way to end the day!

We walked back to the Hauptbahnhof and caught the return train to Munich, exhausted and happy. What a perfect day! Can’t wait to do more exploring over the next few months…

OH! And the first thing we did back in Munich? Watch Amadeus, of course. I loved it. ❤️

I’ve been a Twitch streamer for six months now. Isn’t that weird? I’ve noticed that a lot of the really fancy streamers use an elgato Stream Deck as part of their setup. This is essentially a “macropad” – a little programmable keyboard that you can set up so that clicking a button kicks off a series of actions. People use them for adding sounds and graphics to their streams, replying to comments, even controlling lighting and cameras. They’re not cheap though, and as much as I coveted one, I didn’t think I’d use it enough to justify the expense.

Then somehow I found out about the duckyPad. This is an Open Source “do-it-yourself” mechanical macropad, and all up the components come to about half the cost of the Stream Deck. It has a very simple little scripting language you use to program each key, and it has a little screen that shows what each one does. You can have 32 different “profiles” (set of 15 keys), which means up to 480 different key actions. And it also lights up! I decided to order one and explore what I could do with it.

Here’s what it looks like straight from the box if you order the standard components:

Putting it together was actually very simple following the instructions in the Assembly Guide. Man, those tiny 2mm standoffs are awfully small though, even for my hands! The only difficulty I had was getting the keyboard switches inserted. They required a little more pressure than I expected, and I was really paranoid that I’d break one or bend one of the pins. As it turns out, when I had the thing together and turned it on, one of the keys was indeed dead. I pulled it off and saw that, yep, I’d bent one of the pins flat. Luckily the Snook whipped out a pair of pliers and managed to straighten it out, and once reinserted it worked fine. So yeah, the instructions say over and over to be careful for bent pins, and now I understand why!

The duckyPad comes pre-programmed with a couple different profiles, but most of them were Windows-specific. I installed the Configurator app and used the provided USB card reader to plug in the SD card. Then I was able to start creating new profiles and scripts.

The duckyPad is literally just sending off key presses, just like you’re typing on your normal keyboard. So anything you can do via keyboard shortcut, you can trigger with the duckyPad. The critical thing for Mac users is invoking Spotlight with “COMMAND SPACE”. That’s what you use to open apps and change focus. I also found that often the duckyPad is too fast and I needed to insert a DELAY before subsequent key presses (like between opening the browser and typing in a URL).

One annoyance is that some apps’ keyboard shortcuts only work while the app is in focus. If you’re using Windows, there’s an “Auto-switcher app” that will automatically switch profiles based on which app is foregrounded. There’s currently no Mac version (someone is working on it), so I’ve found it helpful to have a dedicated key that switches focus back to the desired app (especially when presenting or streaming).

I’ve spent a few weeks now tweaking and refining my setup, and I keep finding new things to automate. With some of these, I just cannot remember the keyboard shortcut so having a button helps. With others, I’m finding that I already have the muscle memory for the keyboard shortcut so I may not need the macro. The ones that get the most use by far are volume control (much better than the stupid Touchbar on my Mac) and the “mute” shortcut (used to invoke Mutify and turn on/off my microphone), so I’ve reproduced those as the bottom row of keys across multiple profiles.  But read on to see what I’ve got so far…

And if you have any suggestions for things to add, please let me know!

Read more →

The AWS Summit EMEA is coming up next week, and a few of my colleagues created funny videos to drum up excitement. Seb documented his preparations…

Je suis prêt pour le AWS Online Summit le 9 juin prochain. Et vous ?

150+ sessions techniques dans 7 langues, (18 en français)

Quelque soit votre niveau, vous apprendrez quelque chose.

Inscrivez-vous aujourd'hui https://t.co/2DDNBvunk8 pic.twitter.com/VTLEvU0OVh

— Sébastien ☁ Stormacq (@sebsto) May 27, 2021

As did Darko, but a bit more retro. 🙂

📅 9th and 10th of June 2021
🌍 Online

(check out this video)

Join in for the AWS Virtual Summit coming this June!
Register today for 150+ sessions, 8 tracks and 7 languages! 🚀

Time to get ready for the #AWS Online Summit 2021

👇👇👇👇👇https://t.co/hue5gWyw52#aws #summit pic.twitter.com/lO8CpcnL7Z

— Darko Mesaroš @ localhost (@darkosubotica) May 11, 2021

Isa did a super cute one with her pupper Jago, a “Solutions Barkitecht”. 😂

Me and Jago, my Solutions Barkitect, are getting ready for the #AWSSummit, are you? Registrations are open at https://t.co/x5XWNvXAnc 👩🏻‍💻🐶 pic.twitter.com/5h3Qu3Vfbi

— Isa Huerga (@isahuerga) May 20, 2021

My first impulse was to do something similar for mine, but of course include myself surrounded by knitting projects. But the more I thought about it, the more boring that felt. I knew I really needed to raise the level of creativity.

And then I had a flash of inspiration – GPS art! This is where you run/walk/cycle a particular path and the GPS path in your tracking app draws a picture. What if I could cycle my way across the AWS logo?? I immediately started searching for an app, hoping there was a way to automatically plan out a route. But guess what? Tech has not cracked this particular problem yet. My only option was to do it the hard way.

I opened up Google Maps and realised immediately I was going to have a problem. Munich is an old city, and it doesn’t have a nice rectangular grid for its streets. It’s also got the Altstadt (the medieval city center) and a river running right through it, all of which really limited my options. I decided to focus on looking for something suitable for the smile part. It probably took me half an hour to find a nice big curving bit to the south-east. I used the drawing tools in Google’s “My Maps” to draw on the map and plot out the rest of the logo. Not too bad! All I needed then was to join it up into an actual cycling map that I could follow.

For that I used Strava, which I’ve been using to track my cycling for a few years. It has a feature where you can create your own Routes and it will help plot out the path. I ended up creating it as a “walking” route because that gave me finer-grained control over which streets I could take. (When you select “cycling,” it will push you towards cycleways – which is normally great, but for this I was willing to forego that.) It turns out this caused me one slight issue, which I’ll get to shortly. But pretty quickly I had my route, as well as an estimated distance – 21.8km. Yikes! And that didn’t even include getting from the start/finish to my house. I knew this was going to take me a couple hours to complete.

On the day of the ride, I had the Snook film me getting ready. I filled up my hydration backpack and wore my new padded cycling pants. Then I was off! I have a mount for my iPhone on the handlebars, which allows me to easily see the map as well as film footage of both the road and my face as I’m riding. Everything went pretty well, until…

Yeah. My route had me turning left… onto that bridge way above my head. There were stairs, but at that point I was in no state to drag my bike up there. This is the downside to using a walking route! So I had to improvise a bit, going down a side-street and walking my bike along a path to get back onto the route.

The only other mishap was a wrong turn at the base of the second point on the “w”, which I thankfully caught quickly. Unfortunately Strava doesn’t allow you to remove points afterwards, but it was small enough that it doesn’t really detract. On the upside, I also discovered that when you “pause” tracking on Strava and then “un-pause,” it will draw a straight line between those points. I realised I could use this strategically to create diagonals and smooth out some of the rougher bits along the “s”.

As I got back to the house, I messaged the Snook to come out and meet me so he could film one final bit of me arriving and saying “I’m getting ready for the AWS Summit. Are you?” I was pretty puffed at that point, and the hydration pack was completely empty. 😅

So here’s the final cycling workout!

Then I used iMovie to cut together all the footage I’d created, along with a final screenshot of the map. I was really pleased with it and sent it to a few folks. One of them loved it and was really enthusiastic, but the other reactions were muted. It was only when I probed them further that I realised they didn’t get it! They weren’t seeing the logo at all. Once I pointed it out they could see it, but without that context it just looked like I was riding around Munich aimlessly for no reason. 😂 So I had to do a lot of explaining, including for the lovely marketing folks who cut together the final version with music and graphics.

Anyway, here it is! My first ever attempt at GPS art. And if you’d like to attend the AWS Summit next week (it’s free!), you can register here: https://amzn.to/3fbS1wA.

The Corona situation has been improving in Germany, mainly because the vaccination rate has been steadily increasing. Supply seems to have increased and we even hit 1M vaccinations in a single day! Here in Bavaria the situation is even better. While the big Immunisation Centers are still adhering to strict prioritisation, the local government recently announced that GPs could administer the vaccine regardless of priority groups. We’re at about 40% of the population with one shot, and 13% fully immunised. And thankfully, the Snook and I can now count ourselves among that 40%!

We were able to get appointments at MVZ Laim through the Doctolib app. The Snook had seen on Reddit that some folks were managing to get appointments there, and he started checking the app periodically. When appointments appeared for Saturday, he jumped on it. Then we debated whether to go through with it or cancel. MVZ were only offering AstraZeneca with a 12-week wait for the second shot (putting us into August for full immunisation). If we cancelled and got an mRNA vaccine, we’d be able to get the second shot sooner. Ultimately we decided it was better to have some protection now rather than risk waiting any longer.

At MVZ there was a steady stream of people in for their vaccinations. We checked in and were happy to find that the staff swiftly switched to English once they heard our accents. We were asked if we’d brought our safety waivers (acknowledging the risk of the AZ shot), which we had. Then we were directed into a waiting room. After a few minutes, the doctor called Rodd but realised we were together and brought me in as well. We had forgotten to bring our “Impfung Ausweis” (vaccination card), which is a little yellow book where your doctor records all your vaccinations. He instead gave us a form that recorded our first shots and made us promise to bring the Ausweis next time. Then he swiftly gave us the shots in our left arms and directed us to another waiting room for 15 minutes in case we had any adverse reactions. Then we were allowed to head home.

I honestly teared up a bit when he gave me the shot. I haven’t been particularly worried about myself through the pandemic; it was more the thought of how much human ingenuity and hard work and sacrifice had gone into this massive effort around the world. SCIENCE, YEAH! Humanity is amazing. ❤️

For that first day, I didn’t really have any side effects other than perhaps a mild headache. By the evening though, the Snook was responding as he does to any viral infection: fever and chills to the point of teeth chattering. During the night my usual response kicked in, with a fever, muscle aches, and my arm getting very sore. We both spent the next day resting and hydrating. Now on Day 2 we’re feeling better, but both of us still have slightly elevated temperatures. Our arms are still sore.

Still worth it.