Scott Morey

Signs of Geneva – Part 2

Happy Swiss National Day! To celebrate this important holiday, I present the next episode in my “Signs of Geneva” series. If you missed part one of this exploration of these strange street signs, you can check it out here. Special thanks to Wendy Apfel for contributing the photos for this post.

As this sign suggests, some parts of Geneva do not welcome any form of dachshund or wiener dogs. While other canines are approved of and celebrated, any form of “long dog” is meet with condemnation. This has resulted in small, wiener enclaves throughout the city.

Geneva, like many other European cities, contains More >

37Siginals: Getting Real

37Siginals is a pretty awesome IT organization. Not only did this seven person team create Basecamp, perhaps the greatest online project management suite available, but in doing so they also created Ruby on Rails, my favorite development environment by far. In 2006 they published a book titled Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application. You can read it online here.

The bottom line is that you need to read this. Though written for an audience of web application developers, this text is relevant to any IT organization (and really any modern business). Just like 37signinals’s software, More >

Hiking Cinque Terre & Falling in Love With Italy

After spending a weekend traveling to and then hiking Cinque Terre, I understand why so many travelers have fallen in love with Italy.

I could probably write an entire blog post about just the journey to Genoa (or Genova as it is spellt in Italian), but ultimately, part of keeping a blog (and I guess life in general) is choosing what to leave in and what to leave out. Suffice it to say that once we surfaced on the other side of the tunnel through Mont Blanc, our small band of travelers were amazed by the beauty of all the small More >

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler

Tomorrow, I depart with a couple of my graduate school friends to Genoa, Italy. After establishing base camp, we will be traveling via train to Riomaggiore, the village where we will start our hike of Cinque Terre. Winding along the Northwest coast of Northern Italy, the trail that connects the villages of Cinque Terre is famous for its dramatic vistas of the sea, ancient coastal communities, mountains, vineyards, etc.

After I get back you can expect a solid blog post and lots of good pictures, but for now I wanted to kick off the culture section of this blog by sharing More >

Signs of Geneva – Part 1

One of my favorite things about walking around Geneva is seeing all kinds of bizarre signs on streets, store windows, etc. I, along with a couple other folks in my graduate program, have gotten in the habit of taking photos of the best of these signs and coming up with unique explanations of what they mean. Below are a few of my favorites.

This sign indicates that children are not allowed to cross the street unless they are accompanied by a man wearing a hat. The Swiss take this rule very seriously.

This sign warns drivers that medium size breasts are ahead. More >

Google Translation Widget

So while meeting with one of my project groups today, the need to translate our site into Spanish came up. While having a human translate all of our entries into Spanish would probably result in a more accurate translation, the feasibility of doing this was questionable. Tasked with coming up with an auto-magic style translation solution, I fired up the Google and stared searching. It didn’t take long to find something pretty awesome.

Google Translate is free, easy to implement, and, based on my limited understanding of Spanish, fairly accurate. You can follow the link for a full fledged tutorial, but below More >