Brian Trammell

I’m packing for a trip to Memphis, for what will probably be the last time in the foreseeable future.

Got yet another SVP (Swiss People’s Party) flyer stuffed in the mailbox yesterday, outlining what passes for their platform for the April cantonal elections, which is a straight cognitively-dissonant mix between xenophobic nationalism and classical libera…

It is not yet completely clear the extent to which the Revolutions of 2011 were run on Facebook and Twitter, but to say they have not been instrumental would, I think, be disingenuous.

Stuck at home this weekend: doctor said stay off a rather badly twisted ankle, not from snowboarding in Arosa, but from falling down the damn stairs in Bahnhof Chur after snowboarding.

This is Ivan S.

When the Glattalbahn Line 12 opened in December, it turned the VBZ/VBG tram network into a big circle with a few branches, which made this (admittedly somewhat abstract) representation possible.

I started this blog, ostensibly, to write more, especially fiction.

ICANN will hold a press conference in Miami on Thursday, presumably announcing the exhaustion of the IANA IPv4 address pool.

Nope, this isn’t about web privacy.

Welcome to trammell.ch, yet another in a long line of periodically updated versions of my web presence.

The tenor of the health-care slapfight (I’ll not dignify it with the word debate) in the United States of late is… well, frankly, embarrassing.

U+1DE7 COMBINING STACK OF DIAERESIS FALLING RIGHT, used primarily for native English speakers trying to pronounce Swiss German.

Happy New Year, all!

So, I apparently now how to speak German now, at least a bit.

One advantage of the fact the sun doesn’t rise ’til eight in the morning here these days is you can drag out of bed at the usual time and see something like this without any effort.

It’s two on a Sunday morning, and I’m coming up on the last twenty-four hours of my first six months in Switzerland.

The last month or so has been a bit of a whirlwind.

The east-southeast view from the balcony, 10 August 2008, showing (bottom to top) the Hardturmbrücke railway bridge over the Limmat, most of Züri-West, the old city (clustered mainly behind the big smokestack), the Zürichberg (green hill on the left), the…

I had about half an hour to kill this afternoon in the neighborhood of the university, so I decided to take this week’s Economist out to the Polyterrasse, a giant balcony behind the main building of ETH with a great, close-up view of the center of the cit…

The apartment is coming together, slowly.

I was sitting on the balcony last night, my ears recovering from the quite loud, somewhat interesting, yet ultimately disappointingly clubby beats of my brief Bellerive-to-Mythenquai flirtation with Streetparade, registering to vote in the November U.S. p…

From the twenty-third of March, two thousand five to the fifth of August, two thousand eight: my one thousand, two hundred thirty-one day tenure as a homeowner ended yesterday with a wire transfer, a HUD-1 form via fax, and a closing in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Have just returned from Ireland.

I moved into the flat yesterday.

I went by my new flat Monday morning to pick up the keys and do the walkthrough.

Every reasonably-sized city in the Western world is basically similar.

I have now joined the ranks of adoptive Zürchers who can (and seemingly invariably do) say, in the language of their choosing, “with luck, and patience, you will find a flat.”

On the door of my office, there are two of those little car-window flags hanging off the nameplate.

In software development, we have a saying: “Good, fast, cheap: pick any two.”

Too much going on here to write about any of it.

Found in Blick am Abend, on the seat next to me on the tram ride home yesterday: As for Game Six, Let's Go Pens!!

I arrived in Zürich at ten on Sunday morning, having spent eight hours on a plane from Newark, two hours on the runway at Newark waiting for the storm to clear out of the way of the transatlantic routes from New York, four hours in the Continental first c…

Eight years, nineteen days ago, I arrived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a convoy from Atlanta consisting of a ten-foot cargo truck and a slightly battered green ‘95 Honda Civic with about ninety thousand miles on it, and moved into a seven hundred square

I think it’s safe to say it’s crunch time now.

Every so often, I run a 5k.

Another day, another set of tourists through the house.

Time, it feels, is running out.

At the corner of Murray and Bartlett in Squirrel Hill lies the 61C Cafe, named after the bus route that stops at its front door; it has come to be my standard weekend morning hangout these last days in Pittsburgh.

On my return from Tucson tonight, I walked, as usual, straight from the gate to the taxi stand, because while the 28X (see all previous grumbling about the Port Authority) is perfectly serviceable for a ride from my office (which it stops right in front o…

It’s a good thing that Pittsburgh’s hockey team is better than its public transit system, because otherwise I’d be in a mood.

All right.