Alain M. Lafon

Lately I discovered some more reasons on why Switzerland really is the greatest country of them all; it ranks nicely in the following statistics:

1. 6th on the Human Development Index(HDI)
2. 6th on Gross Domestic Product per Head(GDP/per capita)
3. 3rd on the BigMac Index(1st in 2006 and 2007)

That said, I want to point out that there is a sheer incredible number of reasons why Switzerland is becoming my home of choice on a personal and non-statistical and non-monetary level; but those only work out their magic when experienced in persona – if I tell you that people are just so much nicer, obliging and overjoyed, you might just say that this is a subjective matter(;

Doing what ppl do  in the morning, I just ‘membered that one of my very entertaining conversations from yesterday was worthy to commit to the worldwide community that has not yet found it’s courage to move entirely to Switzerland. I’ll make it short and let the words talk for themselves.

Knowledge to have in advance: Right now, I’m doing an internship and am therefore earning only a somewhat small 4-figure amount in CHF.

me: “Btw, I paid 7% taxes on my last wage.” (Internally I was shaking with excitement, because of the great bargain)

co-worker: “_That_ much?” (Physically shaking his head in unbelieving despair about how incredibly unfair this big toll was to me)

Isn’t this the greatest country of them all?(;

I just finished revising my interim layout. But still.. there will be a lot more work to be done in the future.

Right now I probably won’t have the spare time to write a lot of interesting techie-articles, since I’m working fulltime as application programmer/intern and having trouble on a couple of personal matters. But that won’t keep me from having some interesting projects on the side; actually my work has been mostly in Python and Ruby on Rails where I made a nice prototype which has confirmed the capability of Rails in a legacy environment to me and my direct superior.

Being able to use my newly advanced skills in Rails, I’m working on two nice projects with my dear friend André from versatilemind.com. As soon as there are any beta releases, I suppose we will start talking about them in the open – they might stir some public interest if we do a good job implementing our ideas.