Remix07 in Zurich – Day 2

 The next morning the keynote speech WPF and Silverlight: Creating designs that will Captivate not Intimidate users from Paul Dawson was really impressive. Paul talked about the new thinking of web content. People want to cut out the rubbish content during their web surfing which means that browsing via RSS feeds is getting more and more popular. Using RSS feeds for getting and overview is much more effective and has less “noise” of unwanted content. A nice way to look at this trend I think.

Also thinking about the following questions when starting a project may help to make the right decisions:

- What will people use ?
- What can we build ?
- What can the business support ?

Some interesting links from his talk:

Conchango.com 
kayak.com (great search engine for flights) 
systemone.at (great search engine: make a sketch to find similar pictures)

The next presentation Killer Digital Reading Experiences was also from Paul Dawson. He showed us new intelligent ways to read information on screens. Text flow and layout is dynamically adapting to the screen size. The New York Times uses this modern form of reading experience already.

The last talk and the second part of yesterdays “Thinking in CSS” was Web Standards and IE7 by Molly Holzschlag.

All in all these two days were very informative and well organized. I am looking forward to the Remix08 …

Read Part 1

Some useful links:

positioniseverything.net

quirksmode.org

gtalbot.com

designdetector.com

Remix07 in Zurich

We are looking back on two days of exciting talks about design and development issues in Zurich. The event was hosted by Microsoft but there were lot of presentations from other companies. The main topic was the new Silverlight technology and Visual Studio 2008, Codename “Orcas”.

Bear Grylls – Rocky Mountains

This time he parachuted near the Canadian border into a remote area of the Rocky Mountains. He had a timeframe of 5 days to find civilization. These days he was on his own with no spare clothes, map or even a knife.

This was the second time where he had problems with the landing. He got stuck in a tree top, about 60 feet above the ground. His only chance was to use his emergency parachute which brought him closer to the ground. After he took some of the parachute lines for later use he jumped…

The plan was – as most of the time – to look for a river, than a track and than a road. The weather in the Rockies can be very demanding. During the day the temperature is at about 18 degree Celsius and at night it can be below zero. At about 5 pm it is getting almost dark. For the first night he built a simple shelter with the help of a fallen tree. Keeping the shelter and his body warm was a key thing during the cold nights. He used pine needles and moss on the ground and roof for isolation and wind protection.

Food was the second important thing he had to worry about. Luckily he found a rattle snake while collecting firewood. He killed it and had a tasty diner

Tip from Bear : Always burn the rest of your meal and all of your leftovers in the fire so that no animals will be attracted at night.

But still there was “something” out there in the night. It was around his shelter and fireplace, but he couldn’t find out what it was. Bear decided to move although it was in the middle of the night. The northstar gave him enough information about where to go next…

The next day (day 2) he was very tired and he used a lot of energy. He only found some disgusting worms which he had to eat to get at least some of the proteins back.

After several hours of walking he reached a cliff. 70 feet below was a river and he decided to jump to follow the stream. The riverbank had also some garbage like plastic bags or cans (but for Bear great tools).

Cattails (a plant) can be also very useful. For example can the top be used as a nice tender for fire. The shaft is great for arrows and they say the roots are very tasty.

Still hungry he follow some streams to smaller ponds, where sometimes fish get lost. It was hard but he managed to catch a few by hand. And again he did it – like in the Alaska episode. He bite right into the living raw fish ! Best sushi he ever had was his comment

On day 3 he cleaned his teeth with a horsetail plant which is optimal for this task (now we know how useful cattail and horsetail plants are).

The next 12 miles he used the river for traveling. It took him much faster where he wanted to go, the downside was that the water was really cold and after this 12 miles he couldn’t bear it any more. To get his body heat back he made a fire are heated some stones. Then he covered the fire and the hot stones with sand and used this warm ground to sleep and get a rest.

On day 4 he followed the river again for several hours until he reached a cliff. From there he could see a road at the horizon and therefor civilization. With the parachute lines the abseiling was no problem for him and he met the road at the end of day 4.

This was the last episode I saw from Bear Grylls but I just found out that season 2 is already on air. So there will be some more survival tips from him.