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Beta testing (The Wrong State of Mind)
I attended my first GOTO Scrum night, organised by Trifork Switzerland, on how to become a good Product Owner in Scrum, with John Styffe and Jeff Sutherland (a co-creator of the Scrum Model). I am not...
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Speaking the right language (Accent vs vocabulary, language vs communication)
In my experience, if you have a good accent when you speak a foreign language, you can make people believe that you speak the language very well, even if you can actually say one word. It doesn’t...
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Travel peeves (And the perfect hotel room)
I’m currently living out of a suitcase, which is mostly fun and interesting, but there are a few things that I try very hard not to get annoyed about being constantly on the road… Hairdryers in hotel...
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Bloody politics (Do I have BSE?)
It seems that it’s pretty hard to donate blood if you’re British and wanting to donate your blood outside the UK. I’ve tried in France and in Switzerland (where, somewhat ironically the blood donation...
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Speaking proper (or trying not to apply English rules to Swiss German)
Speaking Swiss German earns quite some respect from the Swiss. I think in general in Europe, if you’re English and you can speak one or more languages other than your own, you are a rarity and you’ll...
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WiFi Wishes (Get me connected!)
Going back to what I have previously written here about hotel rooms, and tiny things making a massive difference when travelling, I’d like to talk about WiFi. Firstly I never know whether to pronounce...
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Doing it with the lights on (A disappointing Earth Hour)
For Earth Hour 2013 (March 23rd 8:30 – 9:30pm for those who missed it), I was on a hotel terrace restaurant overlooking the sparkly Dubai Marina. The waitresses kindly gave us one of those plastic...
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Google says play don’t translate (YouTube vs Dictionaries)
Having grown up in a country where monolingualism is the norm, and now living in a country where most under the age of 40 can easily communicate in more than one language (I wouldn’t go as far to call...
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On poppycock (Or the value of communication)
My Twitter feed right now includes someone who has retweeted about going shopping for bread in Paris, a tweet consisting of a url, a hashtag and a twitter username, and someone who has retweeted “‘Fuck...
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Nomadic Woman (Lone lady travels)
As a woman, in many parts of the world, it’s downright daft to walk around unaccompanied by friends or even a man. As a blonde, perhaps even more so in many places… But the reality is, there aren’t...
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City loving (What makes a city liveable and loveable?)
I am a city person. Or at least, I am a person who loves cities. But I think I tend to fall for cities that have an element of the countryside in them. Or a closeness to nature of some kind. Zurich is...
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Are you being served Ma’am? (The politeness protocol)
Part of learning a culture, integrating, learning a language, whatever you want to call it (and however you want to do it), involves learning how to address people correctly in different situations....
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Guerilla Lobbying on your lunchbreak (Or profitability of water)
Switzerland. The land of clear blue lakes, white water rivers and trickling streams. The water is so pure and heavenly that you could probably feed it directly to your newborn child to no ill effect....
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In at the deep end (Open Water Swimming)
What is open water swimming? Australians treat it as an essential survival skill, learning to swim is as important as learning to walk. In Switzerland it’s a pastime, best enjoyed on a sunny day in a...
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Linguistic Beauty Pageants (What makes a language beautiful?)
Could it be that there is a mathematical formula that calculates the beauty of a language (in the same way there exist theories of ratios for facial beauty related to the roundness, distance of the...
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The Web goes offline (Paperwork and the Internet)
In the fast paced technologically progressive and relatively innovative developed world, it would be easy to expect paper and pen to be heading down the road to yesteryear. However, as much as wifi is...
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Tourist vista (Seeing home through foreign eyes)
Signs. There are so many unnecessary signs. And announcements. Do we really need to be told to mind the gap? Do people read the colourful stickers plastered over every train door warning against...
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Tourist vista (Seeing home through foreign eyes)
Signs. There are so many unnecessary signs. And announcements. Do we really need to be told to mind the gap? Do people read the colourful stickers plastered over every train door warning against...
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