What is it like to be a writer?

I'm afraid I have no idea - it's been over a year since my blog has been graced with my ramblings. But I do know a very delightful person who knows how to write. Catherine Banner has just started a web site to clarify how a writer writes, or,specifically, how the writer Catherine Banner writes. She started writing at a very young age and published her first book when she was only... but you can find this out yourself by visiting her site: http://www.catherine-banner.com/index.html .  She'd love to hear from you!

the journey

I received a bit of encouragement to start blogging again (thanks, Steve). While one post doesn't mean I'm back, it's, well, one post. As in the past, my thoughts about writing go to the most banal events of my life with a smattering of photovoltaics thrown in.
Central to my way of life remains the bicycle. This photo is from my commute, here coming home from work in the evening. I have a 200m altitude climb through the forest to get home. It's slow going, meaning I take time to enjoy the journey rather than being in a hurry to get home. Being in a hurry while bicycling uphill gets tiring very quickly!

Blogging vs facebook

I never used to use facebook but use it more now - at the expense of starting to blog again. There are a couple of things that make facebook preferable. I find it more interactive, whereas blogging was something I viewed as writing for writing's sake. Right now it's the interaction I prefer. I also like being constrained by the length of facebook status updates - it prevents the sort of rambling I'm engaging in at this very moment. Being forced to get to the point and eliminate superfluous information takes more thought than blog writing. However, blogging has allowed me to "meet" online people I would never have known otherwise. And I've appreciated all the comments on my solar cell work. But facebook only it will be, for now.

The year gone by

Yep, a whole year and then some since my last post. In the year and a half since leaving Sweden I've move my entire household three times and have lived in 9 different places for stays ranging from 2 weeks to 2 months. I now consider myself to be fairly settled, having lived in my *permanent* home for 4 months already. I'm actually quite pleased with my new digs, an appartment outside of town (Zurich, that is). Still, I can't find anything and I seem to be lost in a jungle of bureaucracy as I sort out all the governmental fallout from my travels. This, too, will pass. Just picked up my new Swiss residence permit this morning.

Developing flexible CIGS solar cells has, of course, occupied the bulk of my time this last year. I'm happy to say that the project is as full of challenges as I had hoped! Plain old CIGS on glass is already old hat to me. It's so much more fun to try and get energy out of a thin sheet of plastic!

Normally I'd say that I'll write more about this later, but I think I'll just stick to good intentions about writing more at this point. I do hope, though, that I'll be back to blogging regularly again.

Zurich...

...it is after all! 2 weeks to go before I move, again. The big world of solar cell production in Berlin proved to be a bit too distant from my sheltered research life to date. My whimsical and impulsive approach to experiments had been replaced with goal-driven planning and motivation. I learned how to write experiments in the smallest details and analyse and report the results without ever seeing a solar cell - a different world indeed. While my helter-skelter ways did need a bit of organizing, I'm afraid being 100% methodical is not a sustainable work style for me. I hope that I will be able to find a balance between the two worlds in Zurich. I'll be working with flexible CIGS solar cells at a tiny spin-off company from ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) with a tremendous amount of work needed before any solar cells roll off a production line. I think I'll like it!