This is yesterday’s “Business as Usual” picture:

And here for comparison is a similar group photo of today, where people are a bit more “normal” than yesterday’s picture:

(Note that the dog who was wearing a tie yesterday is also in a far more relaxed state in her T-shirt)

We’d already been advised to make sure to dress appropriately (in a suit), and been constantly reminded to bring our wallets. Here’s a picture documentary of what awaited us. In short, there was no more free food or drink, the pinball machines require you to put coins in (*gasp!*), and the Wii and XBox have disappeared. I think my favourite prank was the message on the printers:

The money collected today is being donated to charity.

Here’s a group shot of all those who participated:

The Google public April Fools jokes so far include Google Australia introduucing Google gDay, Gmail adding Custom Time, and Virgin and Google cooperating for Virgle. In other news, Google China’s Search is now powered by real humans and the YouTube homepage has been rickrolled (click on any featured video)! Google Book search introduces - scratch and sniff, and Google Calendar has the Wake Up Kit!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is CERN’s flagship as it’s the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. They’re having an open day next Sunday. One guess as to what I’ll be doing on Sunday. Read more about it at the Slashdot post (Imagine a Beowulf cluster of ….., uuh, never mind), the XKCD comic, or more likely the corresponding Wikipedia entry. Should one even be surprised that a botanist is claiming that powering on the LHC will hurl the earth into a parallel universe! Well, I say “go for it”, I’ve always wanted to see what a parallel universe would be like! I can’t wait for the TED talk about the LHC to become available.

I’ve recently started exploring more and more of the TED talks, finding the range of topics discussed to be both unique and eye-opening. Some of my favourite talks include Hans Rosling’s talk on debunking third world myths, James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA and Ben Dunlap on the life of Sandor Teszler. I was never a big fan of podcasts until I found the TED talks available as podcasts via iTunes. For those of you interested, here’s a direct link to the iTunes TED Talks podcast.

After installing Nokia’s Multimedia Transfer application, I’ve created an iTunes smart playlist which contains the last 3 TED talks. Ensure that this smart playlist is within the N95 sync folder, and I always have the last 3 TED talks available on my phone for when I’m in a tram or bus. The screen on the N95 is not that large, but for watching most talks this is more than enough. Mmmm…. both the N95 8GB and N96 have larger screens…

A London-based HR consulting firm has for five consecutive years ranked Zürich as the city with the highest quality of life. Two other Swiss cities were in the top-ten list, with Geneva and Bern coming in at 2^nd and 9^th place respectively. The analysis is based on 39 criteria including political, social, economic and environmental factors, personal safety and health, education, transport and other public services.

Since over a year, we've been doing a continual move from the old building to the new.  Following completion of the redecoration and fitting of the first half of the building, I've also been at the new building.  At the end of January, work on the rest of the building was completed and we're now reunited with rest of the people who have now joined us in the new building.  We're all amazed at how well the new building has turned out.  Highlights include the water lounge, game room, egg meeting pods, cable car meeting rooms, and fire poles and slides to take you from one floor to another! My favourite part is definitely the very cosy library, complete with its own (fake) fireplace. There are lots of micro-kitchens scattered throughout the building, and an amazing restaurant where one can have breakfast, lunch or dinner. We had a media-day a few days back, with the beeb doing a nice video on it. Check out the rest of my gallery, or the Zürich office's official Picasa gallery.