oh, and if you want to see all the other pictures i made at the frisbee-tournament this friday, then they’re online in the pictures-section.

do you own a windows xp machine and want to be able to look at the same nice desktop as i do all the time?
do you have a winXP-machine at work, but miss you nice os x box at home?
then you only have to take the steps described here and you feel at home instantly. but be aware there is still windows running under the nice looking shell, so you might need to reboot from time to time :-)

[via engadget]

hämme made a smart comment on a recent an old post on nicks blog which made me think about the “why do i blog”.
is it to show you all my new pretty things or is it to tell you all what i think about the world?
i think the whole thing started really slow for me. it was not a decision, like: “yes, from today on i want to blog”. my first experience in blogging (although back then nobody called it that way, it was more like a diary) was influenced by shannon the brain behind BME, which was one of the places where i spent many evenings. sometimes late on one of these evenings i discovered, that shannon made some kind of place for body-modification-adepts to gather and to exchange. withouth thinking much i logged in to IAM, registered my username (at the moment i’m the user number 98 of more than 14400) and was caught from the first moment on.

<digression>
here i think i need to explain some things inbetween before i go on. bme is – as far as i know – the oldest and most complete resource on body modification on the whole internet. if you know me a bit better, then you know that i’m modified (multiple piercings and one tattoo), so BME was a huge piece of information for me, and still is amazing to see what other people do achieve with their bodies (although i have to say, that some of the modifications i’ve seen are far off what i think is beautiful and achievable). i remember spending countless hours reading the qod’s and indulging in every piece of information i could gather on piercings and alike.
</digression>

when i signed up for iam.bmezine.com three and a half years ago (my first post’s date: 2000/10/17 17:49) i never thought that i’d be caught in something deeper that will lead to the website you’re reading now, it was something completely different back then. all those minor blurbs and infos on my life, most of them completely useless to anyone, just my little footprint in the vast universe of the internet. then gradually, i shared much more information with all the readers of the page (probably 5 people or so…) including some really personal stuff (breakups, falling in love, good things and bad things that happened to me on a personal scale). it used to be some kind of a diary for me, and still is, because i think most people i personally know do not read it, because nobody knows of it.
what comes as an addition is that the features of IAM are limited, if you’re not a member, e.g. there’s no zooming on the images, you cannot go back more than 5 posts, and you cannot see all the features that make it a really good place (i won’t tell you what it is). so the whole thing is a bit like a close-gated-community. have fun inside, get to know all the other people inside, but share a limited piece of yours with the outside world.

then the day came, when i bought myself a digital camera. the problem is, that sharing the pictures is the biggest part of the fun with digital pictures, and so came it that i needed a wee bit of web-space. because i can be quite picky on the details of my projects it had to be web-space that was ad-free, with an easy to remember address (for all the lazy friends of mine) and open for all my needs.
after busting my traffic limit on habi.port5.com quite easily (telling 30 people at once that the pictures of …. are online did it) i talked with b. about my little problem. he suggested that i can use a fraction of his and chris’ experiment-server (gna.ch) to host my pictures. that’s what i did. (and i am eternally thankful to both of you and still owe chris a beer, but have never met him in real life).

then berni talked me into letting him install moveabletype on my part of the server, so that i could try out that fancy thing called blogging (he didn’t know i’ve been doing it since october 2000).
soon i was looking for a method to circumvent the cumbersome editing-form of moveable type and found kung-log (now ecto), which i’m still using to generate and edit all the post on this part of my part of gna.ch. because using kung-log is as easy as writing an email with your email-program i’ve been blogging massively ever since.

but remember, there’s even more going on behind your eyes, because whenever i make a post with **IAMONLY** over at IAM.bmezine, it’s hidden from your prying eyes.

ps: hämme, i’m really impressed how you manage to put that much information in one or two sentences. it’s a great gift i’d love to have.

ps2: i still want to get that second tattoo (and the idea for the third is growing, too…)

ps3: see also this (german) post on moving-target.de [via berner gazette]

ps4: why do i blog in english? as an exercise, nothing else!

if both posts below are not your thing, then you have to read today’s calvin & hobbes.

urs gehrig reports that one of the mobile phone providers here in switzerland starts with an 5 bucks “all you can download”¹ GPRS-plan. i’ve been looking forward for something like this for a long time (because everywhere else on the world there are a lot of flatrate GPRS-plans (just look at phil torrones moblog for instance, he uses it massively).
let’s hope that this step starts the competition between the three mobile providers here in switzerland: sunrise (my provider) and orange and swisscom, i’d love to fill my moblog with unnecessary crap the whole day long!

oh, and did you notice the “latest moblog” in the sidebar? this is new and untested, but a nice little hint from piece saved me messing around with mt-rssfeed and other plugins for moveable type. i’ll write a little (really little) documentation on this soon.

¹ watch out! the “all you can download” plan only includes:

[…] ausschliesslich das GPRS-Verbindungsvolumen, welches bei Rahmen der Benutzung der mobilen Portale von Swisscom Mobile anfällt. […]

so no email-checking and “free” moblogging anytime, just a lot of downloads from the swisscom-portal (but i guess you could use your swisscom-portal-email for moblogging, so it’s no big deal…

[via circle.ch]

oh, and if you don’t want to go and watch troy (which is what we haven’t done on friday evening) then you should better go and see coffee and cigarettes, i presume that it must be much better than any sandal movie ever made (and has no goof as opposed to the at least 27 goofs in troy).
i went to see it yesterday evening with bruni and must say that it – although the movie has no real plot – i was really charmed by the movie. it consists of multiple short stories, which are connected only by the fact that the protagonists talk over some coffee and cigarettes, but if you think twice (or three times) then you see the stronger connection between each and every story. (and just the story with GZA and RZA and bill murray is hilarious and worth the whole entry fee)

this weeks film tip: coffee and cigarettes (trailer), cinemastar

my picture of the week is coming soon, for the moment here are the pictures of the past year.
a lot of them are burnt into my retina, i remember quite vividly having seen most of them once in a while. is that because gettyimages is the provider of most of the pictures of the weltwoche or because gettyimages is one of the biggest provider of images per se?

if you want to see all the 2003-defining images you have to have the flash player 6 and need to click right here: defining the moment…

[via tobistar] a new swiss blog i’ve run over lately and added to my rss-watchlist.

it’s been raining so much the last days here in bern, that the pope can be happy he’ll stay so high up here (actually in piece’s neighborhood).
i’m quite happy i didn’t need to bike today, because the nether regions of bern were not bikeable today and because i’m ill again. so i’m not gonna stay up any longer, but go to bed and stay there as long as possible tomorrow.
nightynight!

simu wants to ride the alpenbrevet, so he talked some of us into that little tour.
so, yesterday morning, ismu, michel, urs, simu and me started sometimes after nine o’clock in kehrsatz. somewhere down in the simmental we met päscu from the velokurier biel who drove up to the jaunpass with us. from there we went over the mittelberg.
(if you dare, here are two movies from the mittelberg-descent)
where soon after ismu and päscu went back home and michel, simu, urs and me attacked the col des mosses (i could hardly attack anymore :-). the last descent from the col des mosses to aigle was the most rewarding of the whole trip. 17 km downhill. then we arrived in aigle, where we went to visit the cmc and then waited that the patron came to open the hotel (guess which one) just for us.
after a really big diner (and i mean BIG) we all went to bed and slept like babies :-)
on the second day we started with the col de la croix (the steepest and longest one on our journey) and then went over the col du pillon. then we managed to get until gstaad where we had to make a break because we were all freezing our asses off (i tell you, driving down to passes with a racing-bike in heavy rain is no fun..)
after a good meal we took the last part of our journey under our wheels. with one little break to fill our bottles (just shortly before i fell off my bike) we drove back to bern where we arrived with a big smile on our faces (and an overall average speed of 27.7 km per hours (hence hämmes comment), which is way better than i thought we’d have).
if you’d like to see some pictures, they are online in the pictures-section.
and now i should go to bed, because i’m working the whole day tomorrow, which is definitely gonna be hard!

here’s the itinerary (provided by finaroute.ch)
day1:

day2:

resulting in a grand total of approximately 300 km.

how do you like my new belt?
it’s tha perfect gift i got from new york via my nice sister. her version is a bit more blingbling, but nonetheless i think mine is the coolest :-)
thanks nina!

today the newest wired arrived. as always, when scanning it for worthwhile stuff to read, my eyes get caught on the “fetish” page. nope, it’s not your normal fetish like latex and leather and stuff like that, but shining and gleaming gadgets and gizmos.
this time, the wired staff portrayed the toyota volta, a hybrid concept car. the volta is the bigger and much much spiffier brother of the toyota prius, which is a really big hit in the us.
i presume that hybrid cars are the only way electric cars are ever gonna be popular. (heck, even gearbits loves it :-)
a hybrid car is – for all those that do not know – a car that has both a conventional engine and an electrical engine. both share the work, the electrical engine all the work where a conventional one is not good, e.g. accelerating and small burst of power, and the conventional engine comes to help when maximal power is needed, like on auto-routes. thus, such cars manage to be really fuel-efficient and environmentally safe (at least many of times safer than a normal car) while leaving the man or woman behind the steering wheel with the experience of a real car, so no charging of the battery or searching for that hydrogen filling stations.

and hey, who could argue with a sports car (0-100 km/h in 4 seconds) that uses only 1 liter of fuel on 100km? (and is named after a famous physicist :-)

oh, and by the way, i’m not really a car-fan, this is just as geeky as it can get…

in case anyone of you didn’t go to the kraftwerk-concert^* last wednesday or thursday in the reithalle or didn’t see the pictures of it in the blog-o-hood, then here are the ones i made:

^*as i told reto the day after, it was not really a concert, more a performance, because the visuals actually blasted me away, the music was pretty the same as on their records. as piece notes, a video of the show would be amazing (he links to two smallish videos in his post)