We flew out from Heathrow and after the gauntlet of security theater (one for another post methinks), a walk across the tarmac to the plane (totally felt like a Beatle) and a 20 minute delay on the runway we finally got airborne en route to Munich’s Franz Joseph Strauss airport.

Munich is a beautiful city with its mix of gothic revival, über-modern and traditional bavarian architecture. The level of cleanliness was astonishing coming from London, there was hardly any litter or graffitti in the streets. People don’t feel the need to chain up their bicycles (which are everywhere in the city) and there are practically no CCTV cameras to be seen. We only really noticed police officers in the airport (which with their sub-machine guns was quite a shock) and the occassional police car on the streets. There is a sense of civic pride and a feeling of trust all across the city, the U-Bahn (underground) for instance doesn’t employ ticket barriers, you are simply expected to have bought your ticket and to have stamped it.

We stayed at the K+K Hotel am Harras, which is (unsurprisingly) located in the district of Harras – a very quiet suberb of the city within a 15 minute U-Bahn ride of the centre. The room was a reasonable size, the multi-lingual staff were very helpful (which seems to be true of everyone we met, including strangers on the trains) and the free high-speed interwebs was a lifesaver; the only little thing we really missed was not having tea/coffee facilities in the room. A free tea and coffee station was open downstairs, by the lifts until 5pm, but the water wasn’t exactly hot and the mil was necessarily UHT – no good for an english tea-belly like me!

Deutsches Museum

It’s said that if you were to spend a minute at each of the exhibits at the Deutsches Museum von Meisterwerken der Naturwissenschaft und Technik it would take you 36 days to see everything…So we went straight to the computing section.

From the Remington Rand to the Telefunken TR4, from Enigma to the CRAY-1 there were some great pieces of technological history – but all in all we were slightly dissapointed that their collection seemed to stop abruptly just short of the birth of personal computing. Still, if you’re a geek in Munich – you’ve got to go.

Sea Life

I’d never been to a Sea Life Centre before, what with being claustrophobic and all, but we decided that I should be brave and try it out. I’m so glad I did! Whilst some of the tanks did seem to me to be a little too small for the size and type of creatures living in them, I was totally distracted by the ability to be so close to such beautiful creatures. I lost my revulsion for Morae Eels once I saw three of them peeking out a treasure chest, and developed a crush on an Octopus (as you do!).

All in all, given that Sea Life inhabitants are captive bred and the impact that being able to see them has on the visitors in terms of increasing awareness of marine ecology and engendering a desire to protect the increasingly endangered species, I came away thinking that such centres are a darn good idea.

Also I saw sharks. ^_^

BMW Museum

One of the highlights of the trip for me was a visit to the BMW Musuem, set in the Olympic Park (home to the 1972 Summer games and one of the darkest moments in the event’s history).

BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Works) and has it’s headquarters and main manufacturing plant in Munich. The museum stands in a silver-bowl structure and is the finest example of how a museum should be. From a simple guided tour structure, so that you don’t miss anything, to multi-lingual audio benches with fantastic directional speakers and RFID books than enable audio-enhanced reading; it was superb. Each exhibit has plenty of space so you can view from multiple angles and get photographs without having too many other visitors in the frame. The best €12 I’ve ever spent.

Danke schön München!

A third of a decade later Ethernet remains the standard for wired client networks, and doesn’t look to be supplanted anytime soon.

Thanks Bob, and Happy Birthday Ethernet!

Via: Wired (who have a copy of the original memo)

Don’t worry there’ll be no unboxing shots from me, instead here are some from California’s Computer History Museum, as they take delivery of a fully working replica of Babbage’s Difference Engine Number 2.

Via: Wired