Chindogu is a Japanese art form of creating inventions that seem to help solve a problem, but when analyzed they bring about just as many problems with them, albeit different ones.

For some nice examples of chindogu, you could take a look at the nonist blog’s 12 examples of chindogu.

Notice the similarity between this photo and the photo of the man with the inverse umbrella.

Technorati Tags: vienna, wien, chindogu, japan, culture, sociology, inventions

Oh, hell… if you value your life, you won’t stay at the hotel Am Brillantengrund on Bandgasse in 7th district.

First, their rooms have glass doors. So when somebody is walking along, they can actually see your naked ass in the shower.

Then, we have the showers. It only offers two temperatures of water: 10 or 60 degrees Celsius. That’s 50 or 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Nothing in between can be achieved by any fooling arond with settings. That’s bad I guess, but the good thing is that I’ll never have to shave my back again.

And the last problem is a combination of old, forgetfull hotel staff and the fact that they’ve had several people there killed. If you happen to go away from the hotel for a weekend, do leave a written note. Otherwise the staff is apt to forget the fact that you left and they’ll contact the police to announce that you have disapeared and/or potentially killed.

On the other hand, I heartily recommend the InterCity chain of hotels. They are great!

Technorati Tags: vienna, travel, hotel, problem, mistake

I’ve been trying to learn more about Vienna and bloggers that live and work from here. I found the Metroblogging Viena, and their interesting posts about life here. Anyway, here’s a link to an article I found particularly interesting. It talks about automatic monitoring in the U-Bahn trains.

Metroblogging Vienna: Transportation Notes

Personally, I don’t think that automated monitoring of public spaces should be allowed. Read on »

As you might already know, I’m currently living and working in Vienna.

I’m employed at Siemens, working mostly as an enterprise application integration consultant. It’s interesting work that requires knowledge not only about integration platforms, but about the communication protocols and end-systems as well. The work we are doing for our current client here in Austria is related to the TIBCO integration platform. Specifically, we are porting some old TIBCO integration packages into the newest versions, doing small updates and feature additions as we go along.

What does this mean for me? Not only that I got to learn more about TIBCO than I currently knew, but I also get to work on quaint end-systems. From various CRM systems, over systems for billing users all the way to obscure CORBA enabled hardware systems which are controlled through TIBCO.

Almost two weeks ago when I arrived, it was still winter here. And I mean it in the full sense of the word winter. When I arrived, as you can see in one of the previous posts, it was snowing. It was damn cold.

In the last couple of days, the weather has taken a complete turn. It’s spring. The people are walking around with unbuttoned coats, no more shawls or hats or gloves. And as the ultimate sign of the coming weather, the hotel where I’m staying at has put it’s large veranda off the restaurant into use. Here’s a photo of it from my room!

Jolly!