Jilles’ weblog

For the past 6 or 7 years I have gone to Westendorf, Austria with friends and family for a week long wintersports holiday. Westendorf not being the biggest city ever we quite know the place and always book well in advance. This year however we couldn’t book the 9 rooms we needed in one of our usual places. Which brought up the question of “which other appartments are there for rent and how close are they to the slopes?”.

I remembered finding a map/photograph of Westendorf with all the appartments, hotels, apres-ski bars painted on it. I tried to find it again, but couldn’t. Booted up my really old laptop and found it there. So, in order to make sure both I and you will be able to find it again in the future, I’m hosting a copy here on the site. Go check out the map of Westendorf.

Update: Seems that this year we will be staying a week at Mesnerwirt, Westendorf. (Impression video’s: outside, room, wellness, restaurant - we have aten here a lot over the last couple of years, great atmosphere!, and the (in-)famous Kellerbar!)

Update 2: Found some footage on YouTube of places where I have been. See:

• A little piece of the boarders playground at Westendorf
• The 111th track, which is a long (7km?) ski way that it fairly flat but where you can reach great speeds (unlike the guy filming the movie).
• The new Ki-West track
• Tirolian folk dance. This was recorded by someone I don’t know but last year I have been there myself as well. Highly recommended!

Ofcourse, people have been publishing video’s on the net for a long time. The interesting effect of this - to me - it that this turns the net into a “Funniest Home Video’s” for everyone. For years now people have been buying camcorders, but the reaching an audience with that was still pretty hard (e.g. you needed to get your video’s aired on television. Not so anymore — as already happened to writing (anyone can start a blog and gather a crowd).

Just to show the big diversity out there, here are three video’s I just found on the net:

• On guy performing the first level of Mario Bro’s.
• Snakes on a plane, rap home edition
• Brianiacs ripoff, but professionally done!
• 20 something second Rubrik Cube’s solve with only the left hand. (But really, Rubrik Cubes are for children.)
• Mentos and Diet Coke. And more, and more…(Interesting enough, same search on Google Video’s doesn’t turn up any results)

That last one gets me a bit scared, wondering how big an incentive the net wil provide for those that don’t think about the stunts they perform to get some traffic for their video’s.

Oh, and remember comments on weblogs? People are doing the same on YouTube. Take this lady for example (commenting on a comment, on a comment…) with a rap. Hey, if you are there, you are only so far away of couples ‘fighting it out’ on YouTube ofcourse.

Just ran across the site off Basil Vandegriend, who wrote an article back in May about project management for software development projects. In that article he shows an application that shows the relation between the four factors that play a role in project management: time, resources, scope and quality with which you can visually show their relation.