This summer’s weather has been quite disappointing, it has been raining to the point I was reminded of the rainy season in Japan. Because of this, there were fears that the street parade would get doused, like it was in the two previous years, but in the end, the weather was fine. There were also fears that people from neighbouring countries would not come to the parade because of the strong swiss franc, but in the end 900’000 people came to the street parade, a quarter of a million more than last year.

The party was nice, and felt somehow more relaxed than the previous years, in fact my first impression was that were about the same amount of people that in 2010, and in a way better mood. I also had the feeling that the costumes and the floats were less extreme this year, for instance the pirate boat last year was built fully out of wood, this year it was just a painted tarp, but maybe I’m becoming a bit jaded.

This year we had friends from Geneva who came over for the parade (among other things), it was nice to have guests, some of which were quite surprised by the amount of chaos this number of people creates, and quite amused by the idea that by Sunday morning, everything would be cleaned.

The laser show on the stage handled by Carl Cox was nice, but I’m not that much a fan of Carl Cox. I certainly miss the smaller stages, were you can actually see the screen and what the VJ is doing. This year, one of the VJs pattern involved rotating html code in stream. On one hand this shows to what extent code is now integrated in society, on the other it was html. Somehow it is strange to see that the VJ’s work is still quite low tech in regards of the what can 3D graphics can do…

The other thing that struck me was the sheer amount of smart-phones in the crowd, if you think about it, thousand people with each an iPhone 4 represent on terahertz of raw computing power. The mere fact I thought of this in the presence of seriously underclad ladies show how much of a geek I am. A huge amount of picture were taken, and, like mine, ended up being quite bad. Having a way to combine them into one high quality data stream of the event would be very nice…