ArsTechnica has released their review of Mozilla 1.0. While they gave Gecko a very high score (9 out of 10), they gave the browser itself a much lower score (6 out of 10). The main reason they had for disliking the browser was that it didn't fit in with other Windows applications. There is a nice debate raging over at Slashdot about whether or not XUL is to blame.

I think Mozilla's UI is overly complex and has numerous problems that have nothing to do with XUL. That said, however, of course the XUL solution is not going to compete with the equivalent native solution. Netscape simply didn't have the resources to do mail/news, instant messenger, composer, the browser, and the address book on three different platforms with three front end teams for each application. Rather than narrow the scope to one platform or dump other applications, Netscape opted for the cross-platform approach. The idea was to enable each application to be written by a single smaller front end team. Of course that involved throwing out all the old GUI code and rewriting new front ends from scratch.

Someone on the Slashdot thread mentioned that Mozilla took four years because of XUL. That isn't true. The first year or so was lost because of moving from the old codebase to Gecko. Even at that time Gecko wasn't even remotely ready for prime time. It didn't handle focus or tabbing at all, events were a mess, a staggering percentage of pages rendered incorrectly, and so on. It took a very long time for Gecko to achieve the level of correctness required to be branded 1.0. This work was ongoing all the way up to Mozilla 1.0.

Another cause for delay was the front end, but that consisted not simply of XUL, but of the actual rewrites of all the application GUI code. The widgets themselves did have to be developed, yes, but then apps had to be built from scratch on top of the toolkit... five applications! Add to that rewrites of the networking library, the image library, and so on, and you'll see that Mozilla as a whole succumbed to "rewrite"-itis at all levels, from the GUI down to the core. The finger should be pointed firmly at every level of the infrastructure and not just at the GUI.

In the end, it isn't really Mozilla's fault that it took four years to reach something usable. It has more to do with what Netscape paid people to work on in the Mozilla tree. Had Netscape focused on doing only a browser and had they dumped the other applications, they would have easily had sufficient resources to do native GUIs for the browser, and Gecko could probably have been ready a year or two earlier. However they wanted to do multiple applications on multiple platforms, and XUL was the hammer to fit that nail. The nail is what should be questioned, not the hammer.

Netscape has always had this problem of thinking that it could handle many ongoing efforts simultaneously. The problem, though, is that Netscape only has a finite amount of talent, and they distribute that talent throughout many different projects, from the open source Mozilla projects to AOL confidential projects that are not open source. With all of this precious talent spread so thin, teams end up getting filled out with mediocre engineers and talentless hacks, and every application is doomed before you even write the first line of code. With so many modules and projects, each of which require strong leadership and direction, it's inevitable that many of those modules end up helmed by people who had no business being in charge of that area of code in the first place.

This problem also applies in the open source community, where the level of contributors varies widely. Mozilla has non-Netscape contributors that have been given checkin access to the tree that have no business being let anywhere near a computer. The argument for access was always, "But this idiot from Netscape is allowed to checkin, and I can't?" and so the lowered bar at Netscape resulted in a lowered bar for the rest of the world.

The only way Mozilla is going to become a strong product IMO is if many fewer people are allowed to check in. Mozilla has to stop the bad code from getting into the tree. They tried to do this with the review/super-review process, but it isn't really sufficient. There are simply too many patches being contributed for super-reviewers to catch all of the problems and errors caused by bad coding practices and sloppy programming.

I began working on Chimera largely out of frustration with having to deal with all of the lousy work being done on the Navigator front end (both in UI design, marketing nonsense and lousy implementation). It wasn't so much that I wanted to learn Cocoa or anything; I just wanted to work with a small number of talented people instead of an uncontrollable mob.

I still think the m/b effort to produce only a browser is the best hope for Mozilla's future, a future in which the individual apps
are disentangled from being in the same process, in the same bloated suite. m/b is scaled back with a streamlined UI. I suspect Blake started it after going through some of the same emotions that led me to work on Chimera.

It's still my hope that someone talented enough will demonstrate that with good front end code, you can produce a decent XUL browser for Win32 and Linux, so that XUL alone doesn't have to take the brunt of the blame for Mozilla's user interface problems. While I won't argue that a native GUI for a given platform is the best approach (I think that's pretty obvious), there's no reason why the current XUL-based UI has to be as lousy as it is.

John Gaunt went and moved his blog, but did he tell anyone? Noooo. Was this some sort of web I.Q. test, John? If so, did I pass?

The new URL: http://www.redfive.ws/

Don't tell anyone, but I just took the Dawson's Creek trivia challenge at tvguide.com, and, well... umm... I got a perfect score on it. Yes, it's a guilty little pleasure, now move along. *cough*. Nothing to see here.

I saw a fantastic Indian film recently called Lagaan. It's a throwback to great epics like Ben Hur, but it's also a classic sports movie (with the big showdown at the end), as well as a musical! 225 minutes (that's 3 hours and 45 minutes folks, so be prepared to watch it in installments) of pure fun. If you get the DVD, you can even catch a whole deleted subplot that adds another 30 minutes to the film (bringing it over the 4 hour mark!). Don't worry about the length though. You'll love every minute of it.

Asa quotes Timothy Dyck from EWeek who wrote a glowing review of tabbed browsing. Timothy Dyck had the following to say about tabs:

Again, I repeat, this was not an Opera invention, and Timothy himself hits on the key distinction that separates tabs from the MDI interface that Opera was known for. In an MDI interface, all you've done is shift the problem of window management into the application itself. This is also the primary objection mpt has to tabbed browsing, but again, I believe that's because he mistakenly associates it with MDI.

Tabs are not a replacement for window management. They are an enhancement that can be used in conjunction with the window manager of your operating system to group thematically related content in separate windows. Different topics can be kept in different windows, and then within a window you can have any number of pages open that are all topically linked. This is much more powerful than MDI, as it isn't about replacing your window manager or keeping you inside a single browser window.

Tabbed browsing is about improving the ability to organize your browsing as you drill into single topics. With straight window management and no tabs, all your browser windows become mixed together, and you have no means of controlling the organization of those windows that isn't cumbersome. With straight MDI, as Opera had, you have the same problem, since you end up trapped in one Opera uber-window with all of your pages mixed together again. This problem also exists with NetCaptor, the pioneer of tabbed browsing. Their approach is no better than MDI as well, because they also constrain you to an uber-window that contains only tabs.

Mozilla is the pioneer of the mixed window/tab system in browsers (unless someone can point me to a counter-example).and that is why it's the first browser to get so much attention for this feature. People are complimenting it in a way they never did with Opera's old MDI, even if they don't fundamentally understand why it's better.

Opera added the mixed window/tab feature in Opera 6 only after it had already been implemented in Mozilla and made it a new mode of browsing that can replace their MDI model. Remember, tabbed browsing is not MDI.

mpt writes that because I am working for the secretive fruit company, that I now have "practically nothing to write about any more." I don't really think that's true at all. Although I can't blog about what I'm doing at Apple, I can state that I'm blissfully happy working there... that I've been surrounded by more undiluted excitement and enthusiasm in my first two weeks there than I ever felt during my last few years at AOL.

My blog initially started as a vehicle for me to express my opinions about the state of the Mozilla project, both regarding the external structure set up by Mozilla, and the internal politics and power structure of AOL/Netscape. Even were I able to talk about what I do at Apple, I don't really have any criticism to express. So far it's been smooth sailing over calm waters.

[Long-winded AOL rant deleted.]

Since all the cool kids were doing it, I decided to eliminate the tables from my layout and just use pure CSS. Hopefully this looks ok in your browser of choice. I tested it with Mozilla and Internet Explorer.

I see that Blake is realizing just how tantalizing a taste of forbidden fruit can be... come on, Blake, you know you want to... all the cool kids are doing it. Just imagine the kind of "Switch" ad that could be done with you as the star!

Looking back at my blog about my first day at Apple, I don't understand what I was so upset about. Why, just last Wednesday I got to spend the entire morning under my manager's desk, serving as his personal footstool. I still can't really stand up straight, but that's just the hunch of a job well done. That afternoon I got to fetch coffee for everyone on my team, and boy was that some good exercise. I was kind of bummed about not being put on urinal duty again, as I really liked admiring the urinal cakes in Building 2. They looked just like those hockey puck iMac mice, although they didn't smell as nice.

For some reason, my teammates at Apple keep referring to me as their "bitch." It's nice to have already earned an affectionate nickname from my co-workers. Every time one of them says, "Hey, bitch, get over here and empty my trash can," it just sends a warm tingle up and down my spine. Just knowing that I matter, that I'm useful to Apple's great endeavor... well, I could just burst into song right now.

On Thursday my co-workers told me that I had to stand on the fourth floor balcony all night. "Bitch," they said, "go outside and stay there until we say you can come inside." This seemed like very important work, since the balcony was usually unguarded, and someone might have scaled the campus wall in an attempt to steal important company secrets. I didn't fall asleep. Not once. Thirty-eight hours later, I did really have to pee, and I was pretty hungry. I would have stayed out there longer, but my co-workers brought me inside and threw darts at me for the rest of the day. Sure, it kind of hurt being tagged by my teammates, but then they'd say, "Yeah! I just nailed bitch in the belly button! Bullseye!" and it would all be ok.

Helping other people, that's what I do. I don't get all these rumors, all this crazy speculation that I was hired by Apple to write code. Programming is a thing of the past. Basking in the love of my fellow man, now I am truly fulfilled.

I thought this article was extremely funny, mainly because I found myself really thinking this at times during the keynote. Of course Apple is frequently doing a better job at the same features than Microsoft did. :)

I received a number of nasty emails from people who were insulted by my MacRumors comment below, as well as my "First Day At Apple" blog. You do know I was joking, right? Joking? J-O-K-I-N-G. As in:

Main Entry: ¹joke
Pronunciation: 'jOk
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin jocus; perhaps akin to Old High German gehan to say, Sanskrit yAcati he asks
Date: 1670
1 a : something said or done to provoke laughter; especially : a brief oral narrative with a climactic humorous twist b (1) : the humorous or ridiculous element in something (2) : an instance of jesting : KIDDING <can't take a joke> c : PRACTICAL JOKE d : LAUGHINGSTOCK
2 : something not to be taken seriously : a trifling matter <consider his skiing a joke -- Harold Callender> -- often used in negative construction <it is no joke to be lost in the desert>

If you don't enjoy this blog, I suggest that you stop reading it. Alternatively you can try returning to this site when your humor filter is properly functioning. :)

Stuart got me a ticket to see They Might Be Giants in concert in San Francisco (thanks Stuart!). I just got back from the concert, and although most of my internal organs have liquefied and blood is oozing from my ears, I had an awesome time. They finally played my favorite song from Flood near the very end of the concert, and at that point I was finally coaxed into bouncing up and down along with everyone else.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback on how to approach getting a dog. Most of you advised that I go to either a breed-specific rescue organization, or to just go to shelters and rescue organizations that aren't breed specific. One person called purebred dogs from pet stores "genetic freaks" and said that purebred dogs from breeders were just "genetic freaks with papers." I thought that was pretty hilarious.

By the way, if you came here from MacRumors, you have too much time on your hands. Read a book, see a movie, go outside and play. Surely you have better things to do with your time.

What a wonderful second day of work at Apple. When I arrived at work this morning, I was given my very own iToothbrush and ordered to clean all of the urinals on the Apple campus with it. I was both honored and humbled to receive such important work from my superiors. I didn't actually eat any lunch, because I was so busy working at my very important task. In fact it took me the whole day to finish, and boy am I tuckered out now.

I wonder what great things they'll have in store for me tomorrow?

Rebecca and I have decided it's time to get a dog. The problem now is, if you're interested in a particular breed, how do you proceed? It appears that I would be committing some sort of horrible crime against puppy-kind by purchasing a dog from a pet store, since these locations acquire their pets from puppy mills, places that breed indiscriminately without regard for genetic defects and specific breed issues.

However, in order to acquire a dog from a breeder, it appears you have to become the breeder's best friend, sit on a waiting list for months, attend dog shows and doggie social functions, and pass all sorts of tests to prove your worthiness to adopt a dog from the breeder.

One way is easier, but I suppose morally questionable? The other seems to be a complete pain (and could take a long time), but is the right thing to do. Got any advice? Send it to me at hyatt@apple.com.

7:00 am
As they say in the musical Oklahoma, "Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day! I've got this wonderful feeling, everything's goin' my way!" Today will be my first day at my new job, and I'm as excited as Blake at his first R rated movie. I hope the limo that they send to pick me up has a well-stocked mini-bar. I haven't had my morning mimosa yet.

7:45 am
Puzzlement. The limousine is nowhere to be seen. Maybe the driver is lost. This is not an auspicious start. Surely they don't expect me to drive myself to Cupertino. No, this just won't do. I'm going to be late for my morning pedicure.

8:00 am
Still no transportation. Well, fortunately I can still make it there in time for the last course of breakfast. I will of course have to ensure that the driver is fired for this lapse of judgment. Such behavior is intolerable, especially on my first day.

8:25 am
Something is horribly wrong. I've arrived at the campus only to discover that I am expected to attend something called orientation. The breakfast is not multiple courses, and they don't have my usual champagne, so I can't even make myself a proper mimosa. Furthermore, they have me grouped with other new employees, and after the breakfast, we must all attend a multi-hour educational session. Together! To add insult to injury, none of these people seem to know who I am. Do they not recognize my genius? I created Chimera! I invented XUL and XBL! I even implemented them a little! These creations surpass some of the greatest inventions of the previous century! The pay toilet? Bah. The Black and Decker snake light? So it bends. Who cares? And don't even get me started on that stupid little self-balancing scooter. My brilliance is readily apparent.

There has been a serious lapse of communication. Heads will roll for this. Mark my words.

10:30 am
It looks like no pedicure will be forthcoming. Perhaps once this torture session has ended, I will be able to contact my superiors and get things back on the right track in the afternoon. I assume they have made allowances for my 1 pm racquetball session, as well as my 2 pm rubdown with Inga.

12:45 pm
Lunch was unacceptable. It took place in the company's cafeteria, and not at a trendy Palo Alto cafe. How did they expect me to eat when surrounded by a teeming herd of my fellow employees? Moreover, I was told that I must go to my office and work during the afternoon. Just what kind of job is this? It sounds like they expect me to stay on their campus during the day! What's next? Are they going to make me write code? Don't they know that I am an architect? I am the power behind the throne, the rock star, the master puppeteer! The rock star doesn't code! This situation must be rectified as quickly as possible, or else my Tuesday roller blading session will be placed in jeopardy.

1:30 pm
I was shown to my office after lunch. Horror of horrors, this pillbox that they have given me is only one room! It was supposed to be a suite, and I was supposed to have my own personal manservant to rub my feet and fluff my chair pillows.

Feeling horribly misled, I calmly explained that I created Chimera, XUL and XBL, and as such, should be worshipped as a god. Slighted by this feeble offering, I ordered them to erect a great golden pyramid on campus to house my glorious presence. I would then be draped in Sun God robes and would venture forth periodically to utter cryptic pronouncements that would be interpreted by a team of expert scholars and implemented by the remaining underlings at the company.

For some inexplicable reason, they did not appear to be amused by my demands. I must investigate this further.

3:30 pm
I remain imprisoned in this frightfully small office. I can feel claustrophobia setting in. I am thirsty, but the Cokes here are 90 cents! I have no change, and I have no manservant to fetch the soda for me. So here I sit, languishing, expected to actually program. To make matters worse, I have been ordered to report to Building 1 for "neo-cortical implantation." If they want to put chips in my head, I suppose that's all right, as long as they do not compromise my titanic intellect in any way. At least the procedure doesn't cost 90 cents.

4:45 pm
The light! The pain! It hurts! It hurts! It...!

5:30 pm
I love my new job. My office is beautiful. I will make it my new home, since working 60 hours a week is not enough. They must allow me to live here, so that I do not ever have to leave this holiest of sites. The Macintosh is a divine construct, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I am awash in the sea of perfection that is Apple. I worship at the fruity altar of righteousness. I bask in the purple translucent glow of all that is right and good.

Is that a snicker I hear? Noble reader, do you question my convictions? You have the audacity to mock me? If you do not follow the One True Path, if you do not use this Most Perfect of Operating Systems, this Most Magnificent of Machines, then you are quite clearly a heretic and must be put to death. Dissenters will be crushed. I have spoken.

6:00 pm
One of us... one of us... one of us...

Rebecca seems to have totally fallen under the spell of Neverwinter Nights. She's been playing it virtually nonstop all weekend. :) This presents me with a dilemma, since it means that (a) I can't play it, and (b) the only free computer I have is my Mac, so I have to play Warcraft III on it, and of course it's all sluggish and slow because Macs are just that way. Whew, that was a long sentence, wasn't it?

I've decided to adopt a new policy. Anyone in my blogroll who goes for a month without blogging gets removed from my link list. They get reinstated if they blog again. This way only active blogs will show up on the list, and you don't have to waste time clicking your way to dead blogs.

Chris Waterson blogged about his burgeoning love affair with sprinkler systems. It's in the July 14th entry. Waterson doesn't appear to have per-post links going yet. I'll just quote the relevant bit.

But now the rub: the little cheap sprinkler timer seems to conk out after two or three days. This makes it less than useful if you're away from the house for weeks on end, like we were this month. (All the things we planted in April are now scorched, sadly.) So, I went to investigate "real" automatic sprinkler systems, and was enchanted by the fact that the valves are run by 24V AC solenoids.

We have a nice "real" sprinkler system, but all our stuff is now equally scorched. The reason? We forgot to reprogram it to account for summer, and then went off to Europe for five weeks. We returned to find a substantial portion of our grass dead or dying. Maybe you should be in charge of programming my sprinklers from now on, Chris, since you find them so enthralling. :)

I seem to have been "outed" by Hixie. I'll just ignore that "step down" comment. And that "half-implemented" comment (as if any markup language is *ever* fully implemented by anyone). I will take the moral high road and simply congratulate you on your recent graduation. :)

Someone said something interesting to me at AOL yesterday. I don't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of, "Wow. Reading your blog, I had no idea you hated the product that much." The product referred to was Netscape 7. While my blog has been critical at times, by no means do I hate Netscape 7.

Let me sum up my position succinctly. I like Mozilla. Mozilla is 95% of Netscape 7. I happen to hate the 5% delta that is added in to Netscape 7, but come on, most of it is still Mozilla. Overall that means I also like Netscape 7. I don't happen to use Netscape 7, simply because Mozilla 1.0 is available. Because the 5% delta gives me nothing I need (and adds desktop shortcut irritation while taking away features like popup blocking), I choose to use Mozilla. If there weren't two trees, and the only choice I had was Netscape 7, I'd be using that (except on Mac, where I use Chimera).

Today was my last day of employment at AOL Time Warner. It was a fun five years. Those of you wishing to reach me can contact me at mozdave@hotmail.com. The hyatt@netscape.com address is no longer valid. I will remain involved with Mozilla, although I won't be coding as much on it from day to day.

Well, the long vacation has come to an end. I'm back in Mountain View. I'd blog more, but I've been up for 24 hours, and I can't really think straight. I will say this though. Even though I'm tired, cranky, and not thinking clearly at all, I still know that tabbed browsing is useful and that mpt is wrong wrong wrong. Nyah nyah nyah. I am rubber, you are glue, what bounces off me sticks to you.

Oh, and my book's cover is cooler than your book's cover, so there. Pfffft. See, I don't have to make any rational arguments to prove my point. I can just be silly. Did I mention that I've been up for 24 hours?

Edinburgh rocks. Nuff said.

My brother has stopped blogging! Let's see an update! Surely you have something to say about Wimbledon at least!

Well, it's July 4. Happy birthday America! We are now back in Munich, and tomorrow we begin the arduous trek to Chirk. That's in Wales. Don't worry about it. I didn't know where it was either until Rebecca decided we should go there. Because I'm feeling patriotic today, I thought I'd use this blog to rant about all of the things that have irritated me about Europe so far (instead of all the ooohing and aaahing that I've been doing in previous blogs).

First irritation: smoking. People here smoke like chimneys. I can't believe there's even anyone left alive over here to breed more aspiring little smokers. This was especially bad in Italy, where people were just lighting up left and right. Whenever I got subjected to someone's noxious cigarettes, I would instinctively long for California, a state enlightened enough to ban smoking in restaurants.

Second irritation: cell phone jingles. People in Europe actually use the annoying alternative jingles on their cell phones. In Italy especially you'd have people fielding calls every 5 minutes, and for some reason they'd always take a long time to answer the phone, even when it was right in their fricking hands! Were they stopping to enjoy the crappy single-tone music? Argh!

Third irritation: bathrooms. Europe must be a land of midgets. I could apply for a position as circus contortionist after what I've subjected myself to just to get under shower heads here. Hotel bathrooms have odd steps, odd tubs, odd sinks, odd showers, all designed so badly that the mind boggles. And what is it with the toilets here? Flushing a toilet is like watching Niagara Falls in miniature. It doesn't take that much water to flush a toilet. Sigh.

Fourth irritation: restaurants. From an engineering perspective, the inefficiency of restaurants drives me crazy. Waiters just tag team tables with no organization. The worst problem though is that they don't just bring you your damn bill. Assuming that you even manage to flag your waiter down (frequently you just have to go up to the front and find him, since he doesn't bother to come close to your table after you've had dessert), you then get to wait to see if you actually even get a bill, which will often just be a hand-scrawled number with no explanation of the total. The time from dessert to bill is frequently as long as the time to eat the entire meal. Ridiculous and inefficient. If they just brought the bill, then the patrons could decide when to leave, rather than having to burden the waiter with an entire additional step. Lame lame lame lame lame.

I miss the states. New movies have come out that I want to see. New video games that I want to play. Popular culture to re-immerse myself in. It's about time for this vacation to be over. :)

Finally, Tony was right. The salt mines were awesome, but I suspect they rebuilt the slides since he was last there, because we had no issues with them.

mpt writes about how tabbed browsing sucks because it is further infecting Mozilla's UI. Matthew, I think it is unfair to condemn the feature because Netscape is now doing stupid things with tabbed browsing UI. Any feature can be designed badly. This is just an example of a feature that could stay simple and well-designed, but that is made to suck because of people at Netscape. We've seen this before with many other UI features in Mozilla. This is why Mozilla should fork the UI and let Netscape screw the feature up in its own tree.

I swear, looking at the dumb things being done to tabbed browsing, I realize why working on Mozilla is so painful. You end up feeling like the Little Dutch Boy in the parable. The dyke is all built, and you like the way it looks, but then someone comes along and does something stupid that causes it to spring a leak. You plug it with your thumb and hope everything is ok, but then something else stupid goes into the tree and you have to plug a leak with your other thumb. Pretty soon you and the dyke are getting intimate as you bring the rest of your extremities into play. And it's all for nothing! It doesn't matter how good your Twister game is. Eventually the town is going to be as underwater as my AOL stock options. Only through constant vigilance and oversight can you keep a feature from degenerating.

Too many idiots spoil the broth, and Mozilla has no shortage of broth or idiots. :)

"Last chance for a gondolier ride." - Dan Matejka during our last night in Venice.
"Wow, what a great place to build a city." - Me, admiring the spectacular view of Vesuvius from Pompeii, without really thinking things through.

Ok, I am now in Salzburg. We arrived in the afternoon and wandered around the old city, which really feels like a playpen for tourists. We went to Wolfgang Mozart's childhood residence, which turned out to be kind of a ripoff. They didn't really have much interesting stuff there, since it was all reproductions and replicas of objects that are actually on display elsewhere. I also learned more about Leopold Mozart (Wolfgang's father) than I did about Mozart himself. Oh well.

Well, we just wrapped up Munich. I'm in an Internet cafe across from the train station, where we will shortly be catching a train to Salzburg. Once again, I am stuck on a miserable computer with broken keys. This one has a non-functional spacebar, so it's particularly awful. I am also having to deal with the fact that Y and Z are switched on this keyboard. Sigh.

Luzern was wonderful. We were planning on staying at an ultra-modern hotel known simply as "The Hotel." I'm glad we didn't try to take a cab there, as I'm not sure how we'd have communicated that we wanted to go to "The Hotel" and not "A Hotel." Anyway when we got there, we found out that there had been a problem with the reservation, and we had no room. Luckily the folks at the hotel booked us a room at the Hotel Schweizerhof at the same rate. This hotel overlooked the lake, and was really something.

We ate dinner that night at the hotel restaurant, where we were served by a guy who looked just like Todt from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Every time he smiled I was convinced that I was going to die. Scary waiters aside, the meal was wonderful. In the morning we rode the steepest cogwheel railway in the world to the top of Mt. Pilatus (48% incline!). I got to sit in the caboose with a whole array of buttons and levers that I resisted fiddling with (but only barely). We had lunch up there (with a spectacular view) and then hiked around for a while. It was freezing on Pilatus, which would normally bother me, but the change after Italy was welcome.

Carey took the train in from Zurich, so we hung out in Luzern that evening and had a wonderful time. The next day we headed to Munich. We stopped for lunch with Carey in Zurich on the way, so Becca and I actually got a brief taste of that city before hopping back on the train to Germany. In Munich we wandered around the Marianplatz, saw the Glockenspiel, and went through the Toy Museum (100 years of teddy bears, woo woo). While resting in the Marianplatz, we noticed an adorable dog one pillar over from our spot. I said something to the effect of, "Awwww, isn't that dog adorable." The mutt looked at us, stood up, sauntered over to a set of shopping bags left on the ground by an oblivious German couple, and proceeded to pee all over them. Not so adorable after all I guess. :)

The rest of that afternoon (and the next day as well) were spent in the Deutches Museum, the world's largest science museum. It was extremely awesome. My favorite area was the Musical Instruments section, where we got to see a demonstration of all sorts of player pianos, from devices that physically struck the keys themselves to ones that used studded disks and even wooden boards (planchettes) for playback. The big finale in the demonstration was a phonola that could also play three violins simultaneously! A combination player piano/violin system! The mechanism for playing the three violins was ingenious.

Ok, running out of time. Will blog again from Salzburg. Auf wiedersehen!