Read all about it: I dream of LIFT.

I absolutely love the plethora of avenues for contributing and helping influence the conference; this site and the community blogs, the face photos, fontself, the Not So Empty Book...

Simply wonderful. Congratulations on authoring such a wonderful conference and letting us add our own embellishments. :)

I guess I chose the wrong hotel. I went with Hotel Capitole, which is recommended on the LIFT site. I've been here about an hour and in that time the only good thing was the friendly check-in girl (Lili). Otherwise,

• The non-smoking room reeks of old cigarettes
• The WiFi isn't working (I'm writing this with the ethernet connection of one of the PCs in the lobby)
• The manager just had a LOUD heated argument with one of the guests who apparently ran up a large bill on his tab and doesn't have a credit card. I'm sitting here in the lobby as a guest of the hotel and there's another guest here too and the manager didn't care one bit. After the guy left (to try and get some money to settle his bill) the manager kept venting his frustrations. Very, very unprofessional and it just created a horrible atmosphere. I would at least have expected him to apologize from us. And now it seems that they're calling the police.

OK, so from my personal little experience, I would avoid Hotel Capitole.

I hope my stay improves.

I'd love to hear from you if you're happy with your hotel. I might ask for a refund and move to a different one tomorrow.

Update: And it only got worse: Techno music piping through the walls from the bar downstairs (I'm on the 2nd floor) until 2am was a nice finishing touch to the evening and a shower that alternated between boiling and freezing was a refreshing start to the morning.

Please, someone give me hotel recommendations! I gotta get out of there! :)

It's my first time in Geneva, and I'd definitely love to hook up with some of you and do some sightseeing while here.

I saw a couple of things I'd love to do while here, the main one being a visit to CERN.

(The Patek Philippe museum ranks pretty high up there too.)

Any other ideas? What are the must-do things while here?

And where can I find the best chocolate to bring back home? :)

I arrived in Geneva about an hour ago and proceeded to withdraw way too much money from the ATM by mistake (darn exchange rates).

Hotel Capitole initial reactions: Friendly staff. Room smells of old cigarettes (or mold; I hope it's old cigarettes), and (surprise, surprise) the WiFi doesn't work! (Will hotels figure out how to provide Internet connectivity properly in our lifetimes?)

Oh yeah, and it's a good thing I checked about the time difference (I live in the UK) because there's an hour difference. Even though my iPhone is set to automatically change timezones it didn't pick it up.

And did I mention I picked up a lovely little Asus Eee PC at the duty free in Gatwick. I can't wait to charge this baby up and play with it a bit more. Ah, and I've added yet another charger to my rapidly growing collection (it's a good thing I've gotten into the habit of carrying along a multi-socket extension cable whenever I travel; that way you only need one adapter at the end).

So I'm at the hotel and I have no idea where the conference is -- or whether Thomas Vander Wal's ticket has transferred to my name correctly (apparently it has but I don't see my name listed in the attendee list.) No big deal, I'm sure we'll get it sorted tomorrow.

Which reminds me, I gotta stop writing this and get back to finding out where I need to go and what's happening tomorrow (I decided to come down on a whim yesterday afternoon!)

Oh and I've got oodles of emails to reply to about Singularity. What is Singularity? Why, it's the world's first large-scale online web conference :) We just announced it yesterday and I've been getting some amazing feedback on it ever since.

Looking forward to meeting some of you, seeing more of Geneva, and experiencing the conference tomorrow :)