Cern has two feathers in its cap today: it’s just produced the world’s first laboratory 7 TeV collisions in its LHC (Large Hadron Collider) and it’s shown the world that women can be a key part of big science projects. The Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research trotted out an interesting statistic for International Women’s Day earlier in March: 21 percent of the physicists in the Atlas project at Cern under age 50 at Cern are women.

The Cern Courier internal newsletter a year earlier took a look at what some of these women do at work. It’s good reading, but the real treat was seeing so many women scientists in the Cern control room this morning when the first collision was being prepared.

Best little cup of coffee in Geneva

It’s an entrepreneurs’ week, starting with the best little new coffee place in town – Geneva, that is – Boréal Coffee, in the financial district. Long live healthy competition! There’s finally a good Anglo-saxon-style independent alternative to Starbucks where you can get a great cup of coffee, have a sandwich or a salad and run back to the office with them or sit down and relax in a comfortable, tasteful setting. It just opened at 60, rue du Stand and my own experience is that it’s perfect for quick lunch meetings or slow novel reads, depending on your day.

The owners are two young men, Julian Caron Lys and Fabien Decroux, who met when they both worked as IT managers for Cross Systems, a large IT company in Geneva. The two caught the entrepreneurial bug and worked on one startup for a fruit smoothies company in central Europe, but they were short of financing and language problems got in the way, so they abandoned the venture.

Decroux headed for Australia, where he spent two years, and he fell in love with the coffee culture and the excellent coffee that comes in so many varieties. “Everything is an excuse to have coffee!”

Back in Switzerland he and Caron Lys decided in early 2008 that Geneva needed the Australian coffee touch. They spent several months learning the business, learning about barista coffees, touring coffee shops in the UK, Germany and elsewhere in Europe to get a good sense of what works and what doesn’t.

It took another few months to find the right location, knock out walls, and get set up, but they are definitely on the right track.

Webster offers entrepreneurship workshop 24 June

Webster University’s Hub for entrepreneurs is offering a workshop with contest for people who want to start their own businesses, 24 June. You need to present your idea to the public, which will discuss it under the leadership of a panel of judges and the winners that evening will be given mentors for their projects. Details

[Update, 7 September: categories added]

Facebook is letting in the search engines, wow

I’ve just read that Facebook is going public: we will soon be able to search Facebook entries, which could be the fastest way around to get kids to stop posting everything, uncensored, online. They can still manage their privacy settings, but they will eventually run into what I’ve just seen, trying to create a family memorial planning blog. Maybe Facebook has a secret a miracle solution which every blogging platform should then adopt. Going public is stretching a bit what Facebook is doing, but the unraveling of privacy is starting there, as Richi Jennings’s post and the comments there make clear.

The family memorial planning blog

When my mother died 12 days ago my sisters and I began to make arrangements together for all the matters that families have to think about. I quickly saw that, with four of us in different cities and me in a different time zone, we would build up a large pile of e-mail that I would find hard to manage. Searching for Jeanne’s reply to Mary’s questions, for example, would become time-consuming and difficult.

I set up a family blog which will presumably have a short lifespan, just long enough for us to sort out obituary and memorial service details. My experience with various blogs led me to WordPress as the easiest one for this purpose. The blog’s initial job was to provide a space where I could post a first draft of our mother’s obituary, written from notes they had sent, and my sisters could comment on it. That has evolved into a running series of comments on all the other preparations for a large family gathering and memorial service. Today we’re trying to work out about the music and what to do with ashes at the end of the memorial service, when we’re standing around outside the church. No one wants to be left holding the ashes while we chat. We’ve had a good laugh knowing our mother would have been amused rather than offended by this. It’s just one more strange detail to consider.

Instead of sending my sisters e-mails with my travel dates and those of my son, I posted them on the site. If something changes I can correct it there so I don’t have to worry that they will pull up the wrong e-mail later.

Advantages to creating a memorial planning blog

There are two advantages to this system, I think:

• Our e-mails don’t cross each other as we send them, causing confusion (a problem I’ve had at work on occasion)
• All the correspondence and discussion is in one place and can be consulted by any of us at any time
• None of my sisters are familiar with blogs and it took the first one just three minutes to get up and running.

The disadvantges

The one big disadvantage – and this is where I come back to Facebook – is that on a private blog you cannot set up feeds or automatic e-mail alerts.

Facebook lets its members do this, more or less, but unless they have a hidden, magic solution they will lose this, I think, when they open the site to searches. I considered Facebook instead of a WordPress blog, but it’s not really designed for family consultations versus social networking.

I have set up the memorial planning blog so that only the sisters and some of our children can view it and add comments. Given the private nature of the running conversation we’re having, that option is nice. We’re of a generation that doesn’t look at websites constantly – I’m the exception – so everyone wants to know, via e-mail – if a post has been added. I’ve just posted a reply and sent a message to the three sisters that simply says reply posted. They can then delete my message. It would be nice to skip this step. I checked the forums and wrote to WordPress and was told that there is no way around the problem, for security reasons on private blogs.

A second disadvantage is that trying to introduce family members to actively using blogs is probably not best done at a time when someone has died. All four of us have the right to create posts and comment, but having posted one comment everyone seems to have decided to just continue adding comments to the same original post. The idea of having one thread on the obituary and another on the memorial service has therefore not really worked out.

What else is out there?

There are alternatives to a memorial planning blog like this. These are mostly memorial service web sites where you can buy space and they have templates for you. You can plan services and publish information online. Some of these, in case you’re interested, are:

• memory of
• last memories

Personally, they are too American in style for my taste and it’s hard to picture my 95-year-old mother’s friends visiting something like this to sign the guestbook. Meanwhile, I discovered that if you’re of an age where friends are dying, or maybe you just like to read the obits, you can subscribe to newspaper obituaries in the US through Legacy. You get e-mail alerts from Obit Messenger.

We’re now grappling with the astonishingly high cost of publishing obituaries in several US cities, since my family moved often. We could, I’ve suggested, publish short ones, with the address of a new blog. This would be a memorial to our mother, with a longer obituary, memories shared by family members, photos and room for approved comments from family and friends. We would make it public. But are we really ready for this? Not for the first or last time we’re asking, what would our mother think?

View of Geneva’s jet d’eau on a weathery day in July 2007 (see a series of weather-changing shots taken from the Kempinski terrace in the space of an hour)

The first time I set foot in the Noga Hilton was in 1985. It was cold and gray: November is not Geneva’s best month. I was part of the Time magazine crew sent to cover the Reagan-Gorbachev summit, the meeting that was the beginning of the end of the Cold War. My job was not very exciting for a journalist, but I was told it was essential. I had to guard the table in the Noga Hilton restaurant that gave our photographers the best view in the city of the jet d’eau. The big American television networks had claimed the rooftop area. Between bouts of holding down the table I wrote about Nancy Reagan’s visit for People magazine and walked around Versoix, where some of the meetings were held, looking for local color to add to the Time files we sent to Paris and New York. The Noga Hilton remains linked in my mind to the wallpaper of history’s great journalism stories.

More recently, my impressions of the hotel have been that the hotel’s charm was fading to the point of being almost but not quite funky.

Last week I interviewed the new general manager, with the hotel now under the Kempinski label and a makeover nearly completed. I decided to piggyback the appointment with a late afternoon meeting with another businesswoman. The meeting with the manager was moved up and the second meeting moved back, so I suddenly found myself with one of those unplanned three hours in the middle of the day, too short to go anywhere useful, too long to fritter away. The weather kept changing.

I decided to become one of the new Kempinski’s local customers, sitting down to work in the lounge.  Here’s my verdict:

During the afternoon I was able to find a quiet, well-lit corner of the large lounge area where I could plug in my laptop and work, using the wifi network, which worked fine. The lounge was comfortably busy, a good backdrop for work because the noise level never bothered me. I could see plants in the courtyard and trees and a bit of the lake when I looked up. A good work space. The staff was pleasant and helpful.

It was mid-afternoon, an odd time for a meal, so I ordered a sandwich. I loved my club sandwich, which is something I never order except in hotels, and the French fries were excellent. My favourite touch was the mini Tabasco sauce bottle, cheerful on a wet day. These are the small, stolen pleasures during a work day that make life a bit more fun.

Then I went downstairs to meet my evening appointment at the reception. She was late so I opened my laptop – and failed to get the wifi back. Three people at the reception didn’t know what the problem might be, so I decided it was time to stop working online. My friend arrived and we headed upstairs to the bar. She said someone else had told her the new decor is cold, whereas I had found the lounge just the opposite. But the evening was early, the somewhat empty bar a bit stark and we decided to have drinks outside.

The terrace area is delightful, a mix of wood and aluminum that works. The view of the city is great. She had a glass of wine for SFr6, which is pretty good in the centre of Geneva, and I splurged on a more expensive Pouilly Fuissé, pleased that you can order it by the glass. We sat and watched several weather patterns in the space of a few minutes and continued to sit under our large white umbrella despite a ring of water on the floor outside our table. We agreed there were two negatives, some confusion on the part of the waiter, who seemed to be a trainee and did not know much about wine, and the birds. The waiter will presumably get more training. The bold pigeons and sparrows will need more than training and I will be interested to see what miracles Kempinski can perform to get them to leave guests alone.

The hotel needs a little more time to warm up and iron out small problems, but even with that proviso, I’ll be making more appointments to meet people there. It has parking, is just before the worst of the perpetual city centre traffic jam,  and I like the feel of the place. There’s also always that magic, endlessly changing view of the city’s waterspout.