Weekend in Locarno

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March 21st, 2011

Emily and I just spent an amazing and very relaxing weekend in Locarno.  Even though we knew we were leaving for Cabo soon, we needed to get away for a couple days.  We found a last-minute deal online and stayed at the Esplanade Hotel, a nice wellness hotel and spa in Minusio (walking distance to Lake Maggiore and Locarno).

It was our first time visiting Ticino, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, and we loved it.  We had heard rumors about this little, hidden piece of paradise where it is always warm and sunny, even when it is cold and rainy in Zurich. We got a bit worried when our train went through a heavy snowstorm at the top of the Alps, but on the other side of the mountains, the sun came out and Ticino lived up to its reputation.  They even have palm trees!  Ticino is a bit of a cross between Italy and Switzerland – authentic Italian food (including risotto and gelato) plus Swiss punctuality!  What’s not to love?

Photos:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_church/sets/72157626996123798/

Creating a Custom Personal Profile Website (in the about.me style)

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March 6th, 2011

When I discovered that my grad school, ETH, offered a free website to all students, I immediately had to design a quick personal profile to put up. I recently came across a site called about.me that makes it easy to create a nice-looking personal profile website. I like the concept and design of this site, and I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to implement it myself. The site is basically one large background image with a semi-transparent text area overlay. I utilized some of the new CSS3 features to deal with the gradients and opacity. After less than a day, the site was ready to go and seemed to be rendering correctly in all the modern browsers.

See the final result: http://n.ethz.ch/student/tchurch/