picture of the week

this weekend i wanted to go kiting with bruni. the problem was that the wind was really bad at the bielersee. we hardly managed to keep the kite in the air (although it’s a 12 squaremeter-thing) and thought it’s no use to try it in the water. then we just couldn’t find a suitable place at the neuenburgersee (i’ve been checking out kitegenossen just now :-( ) so the whole weekend was (kite-style) a big disappointment.
nonetheless i made a nice picture in neuchâtel which you can see below.

DSC01212
i think we need to spend a weekend in silvaplana (bad bad website for OS Xers), where we both learned to kite-sail soon.

spiderman 2

thomas allenbach from the bund wrote a pretty good review of the upcoming movie spiderman 2 (although he managed to call peter parker – who is spiderman – peter barker at least six times and no-one noticed…).
the fueled my desire to go and see the movie, because i always dug spiderman comics and think sam raimi has a good hand with fiction-films.

to relieve some pain of waiting, you can watch the trailer, that apple provides on their trailer-page.
but better (and a lot funnier) is to watch the movie spiderman: the peril of doc ock from spite your face productions which is as hilarious as it is brilliant, because it’s a full-featured, albeit short movie done fully as a stop-motion lego animation!
amazing!

[via todays bund and boingboing]

[update2] two links for you

the first one is funny: the point of the online-game on wagenschenke.ch is to walk back home with well too much alcohol. i managed to walk 75 meters this morning, when hämme showed me that game, but i cannot seem to replicate the result now to post a screenshot, maybe i’ll be able to do that later.

the second one is interesting in a physicists way: the new scientist points out that the speed of light might have changed recently, which would change a lot in traditional physics (read the article to get the point of “recently”). the change in the constant c would imply some problems with other constants, but is quite handy in a greater view, e.g. if you want to explain some interesting things like the horizon-problem in our universe (again, this is a physicist kind of problem, so you don’t need to worry :-)

[update]
i managed to grab a screenshot this morning: 77m! how much do you get? leave a comment.
wagenschenke

update2
max made it to 88 meters!
88meter

DIY

radial2 radial1 in the true sense of do it yourself i laced my own front wheel today. remember that i bought a frame from poland quite some time ago. now that i know all the relevant parts are gonna fit i’m in the process of turning that frame into a lean, mean riding machine :-)
because i want it to look nice, i laced the wheel radially, so it will look good (although lorenzo doesn’t like it…).
a good trained wheel-builder can build a full wheel in about an hour. it took me twice that time (and let me tell you, radially is much simpler to lace than the normal way, where the spokes intermittently cross each other) but now i’ve got a front wheel which i built myself, which makes me quite proud.
and now i just need steve to send me that rear hub, lace another wheel and i’ll be riding my [insert cool name here] soon. i’m really looking forward to it!

ps: if you’ve got a cool name which would fit for a black bike with golden logo, then leave comment!

new apple displays

cinemadisplaysapple updated their displays. they are friggin huge and stylish like hell! if you want to take the new display for a spin, apple provides a 360°-quicktime-movie of one with a g5 attached. a pity i don’t have 3k$ lying around to buy myself the 30 inch beast… (which would involve getting rid of my ibook which is far away from having the graphical power to juice the 4.1 megapixels on the biggest model…)
[via everywhere]

picture of the week

today i went down the river aare with sigi and some friends.
the picture below is cölu, lukas and whatwashisname schrigy leading the pack of four boats, trying to catch those kayakers (i don’t think they went war kayaking, the didn’t look like that :-)
a pity the aare wasn’t so warm like it could be in late june. nonetheless i swam from the eichholz to the marzili because i didn’t want to walk down that approximately 2.5 km. not too bad for 15.7°, aight?

DSC01139

la mala educación

yesterday i wanted to go to the theater with fränzi, but the whole evening came different than planned. since it was a birthday gift for her, we wanted to go and have a little drink before, so we met quite early. but when we drove over the kornhausplatz her bike got caught in the tramway tracks and she fell really hard. fortunately she wasn’t injured much, “only” little rashes on pretty much every protruding part of her body (hands, elbows, hips, knees).
you can guess that she wasn’t in theater-mood anymore. so we returned to her place and she cleaned all her wounds. when she recovered from her mild shock we decided to go to the movies instead.
in the end we went to see la mala educación. quite some time ago i discussed to go and see that movie with bruni, but then we ended up watching another movie, mostly because i thought that la mala educación was much to heavy for that certain evening we had then (which was really good, but not in a sunny, happy good way).
but now, that i’ve seen it i must say that i’m (as always) impressed by pedro almadovar. first the movie starts out quite funny, even histerically funny sometimes, but then turns in a pretty intense movie about misuse of kids with a pretty complex time-structure, so it’s not an easy movie, but nonetheless worth seeing. but go and see it on a good day of yours, not when you’re in a grey mood!

oh, and i might go and see empfänger unbekannt on tuesday with my parents…

mixed tape

mercedes benz (yes, the car maker) has released 15 nice tracks as mp3’s for your pleasure, you can download them for free and they all add up to a mixed tape.
a 60 minutes collection of downbeaty, ambient and jazzy tunes, with one song especially produced to announce the new cls-class of mercedes-benz.
if this is the new form of marketing, i’m all up to it. and there’s even a second collection coming up, sometimes in the beginning of august.

[via somewhere i forgot, but elbewerk also blogs it.]

ps: elbewerk also post the direct link to a 90mb .zip-file which includes all songs.

deleted pictures

to save chris some space and to prevent bloating of my picture archive i deleted some pictures from the /pics-section.
so, if you miss pictures from millau, from the trainingsweekend, from terraventura, from the juli-bruch, from the last party @ bärni and from evionnaz then send me an email, i might burn them on a cd for you.

michels abschied

aus aktuellem grund mal wieder in deutsch: wenn du michel bernard vom velokurier bern kennst, dann komm diesen freitag doch auch an seine abschluss-sause. nach 11 jahren wird er auf ende juli den velokurier bern verlassen. ihm zu ehren werden wir ein alleycat durch bern machen, hoffentlich kommen kuriere und nichtkuriere von überall.

alleycat

bike porn

i’m in the process of looking for a fixed gear hub for my polish frame
on one of my late-night surfing rounds i found these links:

– circle a cycles (pictures)
– solo velo
– chub hub
– goldtec
– harris cyclery
– paul component engineering (click on hubs in the navbar)

oh, and this article from nonduality magazine made me research for a fixed gear hub and not a singlespeed freewheelin one….
maybe i’ll explain the difference later, but now i’ve gotta go to work!

ps: you want real bike porn? then drunkencyclist is something for you

musical convulsions

so here’s something funny for all of you which don’t want to be bothered with my rant below.
björn mailed me the movie below.
it’s a movie of a french guy which mounted some horns on his jumpsuit and manages to actually play songs through his convulsions (2.6mb .wmv-file)

musicmaster

now i’ll go to bed, because i’ve got to get up in something like six hours. good night!