the grand-raid was really exhausting. renzo and me underestimated how hard it can get to ride 76 km on a tandem.
the picture below shows the profile of the race (which we finished as tenth of eleven tandems). we started from Heremence and drove to Grimentz.

update: datasport has put the results of the grand-raid online. click here to see how renzo and me finished (look for CTan in the lower part of the page). 10 hours and 12 minutes and a mean velocity of 7.5 km/h, how pathetic :-)

from the 6th september on you might be able to see pictures of our effort online at the fotolaboclub. i have no idea how it’s gonna work. in any case, we’ve been riding with the number 7005, this might help to search for pictures…

tomorrow renzo and me have a new project with his tandem: we’re gonna ride the grand raid christalp (76km mostly up and down :-).
i’ll keep you updated on how we manage to compete with the other ten teams.
and now i think i’ll just go to bed, cause we got to catch an early train tomorrow morning. maybe i can tell you something about the (surprisingly good) movie i just saw later on.
for now i just wish you a good night.

i’m back home, it was wonderful.
more on that later on.
now i start have to sift through all the mail i got. (i think about 800 mails are actually spam, mostly comment spam on this blog)

rachel from the velokurier bern has won the european messenger championships in poland.
yesterday she returned and then was superbusy instantly, because she had to give quite some interviews.
today she was in some newspapers:
– 20Minuten, complete with link to the suicmc04
– Bund
– BZ
and on friday there will be coming a telebärn-crew to make an interview with her, so she’ll be busy all week long.

congratulations rachel!

This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a blog posting spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate — the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq6 2010920352598gawstw98qwrt189849813907azq4 (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet; Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)
1. I found this experiment at URL: http://powerbook.blogger.de
2. I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing or Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software
3. I posted this experiment at URL: https://habi.gna.ch/blog
4. I posted this on date (day, month, year): 04 August 2004
5. I posted this at time (24 hour time): 10:07:35
6. My posting location is (city, state, country): Bern, Switzerland, Europe

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):
1. My blog is hosted by: gna.ch
2. My age is: 27
3. My gender is: Male
4. My occupation is: Bike Messenger
5. I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Net News Wire light
6. I use the following software to post to my blog: ecto
7. I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 17 October 2000 (but not here). Here my first post dates from 08 July 2003
8. My web browser is: Safari
9. My operating system is: Mac OS X 10.3.4

if you want to help us at the SUICMC04 then you might look at the letter pia made and send us an email to the mentioned email-address.

(this is also here for archival purposes, because if you read that here you’ve probably already gotten the letter by mail)

easy come:
nina and i are going on holidays, i paid for our tickets and yesterday evening she paid me back her half (1100$).
at least once i swam in money!
easy go:
i just got this fine (around 150$) for crossing three red lights with the bike.
it was quite funny in the end, because the police-officer looked really puzzled, when i answered “no” to his question (he asked: “will that be a lesson for you?”)

since you’ve been reading about the global gutz last saturday, i thought it’s time to explain a bit.
every year on the 17th july there’s a messenger-race which takes part all around the world. the rules of that race are that there are 5 checkpoints (not including start and finish) evenly distributed on a route of 21km length. the route has to be as flat as possible (quite hard here in bern) so that the results over the whole world can be compared.
so, last saturday the global gutz also took part here in bern. and in the end it turned out that bene and me (on top left) were the fastest of all messengers¹ that took part here in bern (there were also some messengers from the velokurier biel coming over). after some time it turned out that we were not only the fastest in bern, but the fastest in switzerland! (shouts to anja (on the right) for preparing a fast course!)
since Rachel and Pia came in just two minutes later than we both did, they are the fastest global-gutz-women in switzerland. so we had to fight over the train-ticket to the ECMC in Warshaw (fahrradkurier.ch sponsored a ticket). In the end it turned out that Bene and Rachel are gonna go to Warshaw with the sponsored tickets, because they won in Scissors, Paper, Stone. Nono, we didn’t need to fight, I’m invited to a wedding-eve-weekend of a very close friend and Pia is on holidays. (Good for Bene, because i’m unbeatable at SPS!)
that’s the explanation why i didn’t stay on the gurten to see nena and iam and lunik. this was probably much more fun anyways!

¹The only depressing thing is that we managed to bike those 21km in 34 minutes which means an average speed of 37km/h which is slower than what the guys at the tour bike for stages which are ten times longer….

a selection of my pictures from the gurtenfestival are now online in the pictures-section.

because of posts like these the powerbook blog is gonna stay on my rss-feed :-)
i’ve seen it before (when i tested everything in the system preferences years ago) but it’s a nice trick nonetheless!

[via powerbook blog]

sigi and manu and co.
i know that you cannot wait to see my pics of the gurtenfestival, but i have only so much time on my hands…
they’ll be here eventually.

coding something can be quite a long process for me.
anja mailed me some picture which i wanted to put on the homepage of the SUICMC04.
since i wanted to do it in the simplest and cleanest possible way i thought to make little table with links to all of the pictures, so that when you click on them, they pop up in a new window with the right size, with a nifty “close window”-link.
in the end it turned out to be a longer process than i thought:

here’s the way i did it:
– talk to b. about it.
– let b. propose some php-trickery.
– code something around:

<? $name = ereg_replace(“[^a-zA-Z_.-]”, “”, $_GET[‘name’]); ?>
<body>
<p align=”center” class=”text”><? readfile(“pics/” . $name . “.txt”) ?></p>
<p align=”center”><img src=”pics/<? echo $name ?>.jpg”></p>
<p align=”center”><a href=”javascript:window.close()” class=”link”>Fenster schliessen/Close Window</a></p>

– add all the pics to the subdirectory /pics and add a PICNAME.txt file with the description fer each and every file.
– don’t forget to use proper html-code.
– test to see if the link ../gelaende.php?name=PICNAME (aare for example) does work.
– be happy that aare.jpg and aare.txt do actually get put in the code.
– make a thumbnail of each picture (iphoto comes in handy here).
– build a 4 by 4 table with all the pics.
– don’t mess up the code that michel and äbu made.
– insert

<a href=”../gelaende.php?name=PICNAME” onclick=”window.open(‘http://www.suicmc04.ch/gelaende.php?name=PICNAME’,’popup’,’width=640,height=480,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,toolbar=no,
directories=no,location=no,menubar=no,status=yes,left=0,top=0′);return false”><img src=”../pics/PICNAME_t.jpg” width=”56″ height=”56″></a>

in each cell.
– substitute PICNAME with the actual name of the .jpg in each case (3*4*4 times) and don’t forget a single one.
– thank b. for being such a nice guy.
– look at the endresult.
– see that you need to look that the windows are in the right size (which they aren’t, but i have to go to bed, i’ll do that soon).
-go to bed.
-get up in 5 hours and 30 minutes.

since the timedifference between the finishers of le grand boucle on sunday is probably gonna be minuscule i thought it’s interesting to know how people actually figure out who comes in first or not after those 180km stages.
engadget has a nice little explanation on all the high-tech involved in the timekeeping of the tour de france.

[via engadget]