The snow began just after arriving at the Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Vienna. It was the first snowfall of the year and at least some of the citizens were happy about it. After reaching my room I looked out the window and saw many people enjoying the ice skating rink. After an interview with Format Magazine and then a press conference with a dozen or so journalists, both to talk about the Future of the Internet, a small group of us had a delightful dinner at Zum Schwarzen Kameel (The Black Camel). The menu was traditional Austrian and elegant — it was hard to resist the dessert.
It was an honor to offer the opening keynote speech for the Internet Service Providers of Austria Conference at the Kursalon Wien in the morning. I talked about the what I see as some of the most important developments of a fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted Internet. (A PDF version of the presentation outline is here). Some of the technologies I discussed included broadband power line capabilities, IPTv, podcasting and tagging, Ajax, OpenDocument Format, the Open Invention Netowrk, and Linux. At lunch time I was pleased to be able to get some feedback and also discuss some of the issues in more detail.
After the coffee break I was determined to find a geocache called Central Vienna. A quarter mile walk through the Stadtpark got me to the exact latitude and longitude but in spite of the best search I could make, the cache was not to be found. I had one more chance to be able to log a successful geocache find before leaving for the airport and fortunately the Johann Strauss cache was close by. It was to be my first webcam geocache. In order to be successful it was necessary to stand by the statue of Johann Strauss and then call a friend, ask him or her to visit the live webcam site and refresh the page. This would cause the camera in a tree nearby to capture the proof that I had been there. A further requirement was to be wearing a shirt or carrying a bag or something to signify being a true geocacher. As luck would have it, my GSM phone was not able to make an outbound call for some unknown reason (having something to do with Cingular).

As an alternative I posed by the statue with the Magellan eXplorist in hand while a young man was kind enough to take a picture with my camera. Hopefully, the owner of this cache will consider the picture adequate proof of my find! Then it was time to fly to London and then on to JFK to get home in time for Thanksgiving.