in this months issue of wired there was a story about the great challenge.
although the whole thing is a military-sponsored thing it chatched me as a truly geeky adventure.
it’s a race from los angeles to las vegas. but the race is not a vanilla-flavoured race, instead it’s for driverless robotic cars which have to find their way completely autonomous.
the official course will not be known until two hours prior to race time and will only released as gps way-points. then the teams have these two hours to fiddle with their equipment, and then are forced to watch how their creation competes without the slightest possibility of interaction, the machine has to do it on their own.
it has to decide where to drive through, it has to decide how fast it can drive and all the other bits and pieces which a machine needs to consider to get from A to B as fast as possible.
of all the portrayed teams (scroll down a bit to see them), the berkeley-team has by far the most impressive setup: their ghost rider is a motorcycle, while all the other contestants rely on at least four-wheeled chariots of fire.
go and download the movies on the ghost rider-page (although they’re HUGE) and if you’re interested in that kind of stuff go and read the article in wired (although it’s far better on big pages and glossy paper :-)

gentleman, start your engines!

update: according to engadget (or actually extremetech) the ghost rider is not designed to win the race but only designed to get some government contracts, it’s not fast enough to complete the race in ten hours. what a disappointment!

after some guy left gizmodo he founded engadget to abandon himself to his gadget fetish.

the first entries on engadget (which is a really cool domain name, why do i never get those ideas :-) look really promising to fulfill my gadge-lust.
looks like i need to watch an rss-feed more!

last sunday my parents, my sister and me had a brunch in the marzilibrüggli (where nina works). during the brunch the nose of my father started running (not that this is an event that needs to be blogged :-) and then a comicstrip from mike van audenhove came to my mind.
zürich by mike is one of my favorite swiss comics, and luckily enough the züri-tipp – which publishes one strip per week – archives all the strips on its homepage.
so i skimmed through ALL of the strips there and finally found the strip that we talked about:
the nosedrop.

all the strips depict the life in zürich, but could also happen elsewhere. i must say that mike van audenhove has a real talent to tell those little stories that make you smile.
all the strips are in german or swiss-german so the selection below is only funny for those capable of that funny language:
some cheeky grannies
hacky sacky rules
messengers and traffic-lights
kids having simple but true fun
did you ever buy ikea furniture?
kids playing frisbee
winter biking
sometimes i feel like this in the morning

bear with me if the windows that pop up are in a strange size, i could not get it right, because i had to “hack” the links, the züritipp does not provide them in an easily bloggable format :-)

as i installed everything from scratch, clutter now lacks quite a lot of my albums pictures.
with expose it’s a breeze to update these. a quick google of the album tittle, click and hold, f9, drop onto clutter. et voila!
couldn’t be easier than this.
before i had to save the image to the desktop, minimize safari, locate the image on my cluttered desktop, get clutter to the foreground and drag the image to clutters window (direct drag and drop did not work, because through some mysterious bug all the images dragged to clutter arrived upside down.)

loretta lux photographs kids, scans their subjects and places them on a separate background which results in quite eerie pictures. most of the kids seem to be generated through cgi, but it’s all the real thing.

[via boingboing and the NY Times]

[by karin]

yesterday we went to see deep blue (german site).
an amazing film. go and see it!
fullstop.

if you want to see me perform live on stage, then you have to come to the bären in bümpliz tomorrow or saturday evening.

the skbe (the club where i swim) does host a lotto there and me and another guy are the speaker, so we will babbling numbers all night long. :-)
(not that it will be a remarkable evening, but nonetheless, if you like to play lotto (or want to win prizes for small bucks) then be there and say hello to me…)

btw: is it “the club i swim in” or “the club i swim for”?

btw: hämme or äbu, do you recognize the funny sign below (from the bümpliz-page)? i always have to chuckle when i drive past it.
do you know where in bümpliz it hangs around?

today we went geocaching.
my flat-mate wrote about that fun activity in the local newspapers (wolf obviously works there).
geocaching? what’s that?
someone hides something somewhere and you go and find it, it’s that easy :-)

you need a gps-reciever and some information from geocaching.com (or the swiss equivalent), look for the spot you want to get and then you just start.

wolf wrote about the cache hidden near the guggershörnli, so we wanted to go and discover that cache called “guggershorn hut” hidden by Admiral Whitetrousers.

here’s how we did it: i went to transa and rented an eTrex Legend (it’s not actually for rent there, but i used all my charme :-)
then nina and me took the train to schwarzenburg and from there a postcar (the tiniest one i ever drove in!) up to guggisberg. there we started the gps-reciever and found out that we’re about 1.8km away from the cache.
it was not that hard to go into the right direction, the hard part was, that it snowed pretty much the whole day yesterday and that today only one person was on the guggershörnli before we came, so when we arrived there our pants were already full of snow and our toes were ready to break off (we were there without high-mountain-tour-adapted material :-)
on top of the guggershörnli we admired the beautiful view, but the gps showed that the cache is still about 300m away, so off we went.
some slippery steps later we saw the place where the cache must have been, but the problem was that the way was heavily snowed in (up to the middle of my thigh) so nina made a break at the sun and i went looking for the cache. because of the snow i wasn’t able to find the cache (wolf told me just minutes ago where it was, it would have been soooo easy.) so the whole expedition was not that successful, but it was a wonderful afternoon.
thank you for spending that wonderful afternoon with me, darling!

public disobedience?
count me in!

explanation: dj danger mouse remixed the white album of the beatles and the black album of jay-z which of course makes grey.
dj danger mouse (the man himself) explains it like this:

The Grey Album is an art project/experiment that uses the full vocal
content of Jay-Z’s Black Album recorded over new beats and production
made using the Beatles White Album as the sole source material.
Danger Mouse insists he can explain and prove that all the music
on the Grey Album can be traced back to the White Album and its
musical content via sampling. Every kick, snare, and chord is taken
from the Beatles White Album and is in their original recording somwhere.

the grey album has been hailed as a real hip-hop-triumph and i have to say that it’s really awesome. only 3,000 copies of the album are in circulation, but nonetheless EMI sent cease and desist letters to danger mouse and the stores that were selling the album, demanding that the album be destroyed. so a bunch of people host the album today as an act of public disobedience.
go and grab it, it will only last for today!

i haven’t posted a funny link in a long time, this one here is funny! (but only in german)

[via mara‘s email i got today]
(scroll down to see her, mara bucko (btw: the sister of mike, with whom i’m going to the movies in a minute…)

update: silly, me, forgot to link to the link :-) anyway, now it’s there..

while browsing ipodlounges new photo-gallery i found that design for the iPod³ which linked to an amazing movie. it’s a really fine piece of imagination and science-fiction (and quite big, but i couldn’t get any information on the filesize).
you should definitely check it out!

and maybe you also should check out kdlab.net the page of the blokes that made that amazing movie (their demo-reel makes you want to be good at stuff like this!).

tonight i’ll go and see lost in translation (or was it some other title?) with mike.
i wonder if it’s worth the four stars the local newspaper gave it.
as a asia-ophile i really look forward to it. one of my dreams is to go to tokyo or some other big and rumorous asian city (be it honk-kong or peking or whatever). hopefully the movie will fuel this desire even more.
we’ll see if that dream comes true…

update: piece asked if i liked the movie: yes, indeed! the “love”-story that unfolds between charlotte and bob is so romantic that i almost regretted watching the movie with mike :-) the movie is not an action-packed movie, there’s not much stuff that really happens (in terms of hollywood-happening), most of the time you just watch bob and charlotte spending time together in all the weird places tokyo seems to incorporate. my rating: go and see it, you better hurry!

because i had no plans for tonight (except burning 25 cd’s with the oberwald-hitparade) i started to fiddle around with the design of the blog and now it looks quite different.
it was the first time i actually looked at my css-file (the original one came with my installation of MT, the final one is now released under my cc-license) and started to fiddle around with it.
i was quite surprised that it’s so easy to change the design of the page completely!

in addition i deleted the calendar in the sidebar. the calendar messed up the layout on windows-systems (thanks äbu) and i think no one will really miss it, because i want to incorporate some other mean of showing my blog-habits (hint to b. :-)

and i also cleaned out some bugs in the sidebar code while leaving some others. for example i cannot seem to get rid of those 40 or 50 pixels above the “me” on the top left, and just couldn’t make a line on the right side of the sidebar between the bar itself and the blog entries.
leave a comment if you find some bugs on your system or can help me with the two issues mentioned above!

update. the annoying 30-pixel-break is gone, it was just a simple misplacement of margin-top:30px vs. margin-bottom:30px (thanks arni!)

the pictures of my last week in oberwald are online in the pictures-section.
it’s quite a bunch of pictures, because i wanted to get a picture of nearly everyone of the class online.
enjoy them and have a nice saturday, i’ll be here for the afternoon (it’s an exhibition in the old people’s home where my grand-mother lives)

update: the sensorium was really nice.
even if don’t have a grand-mother that lives in the rüttihubelbad it’s worth a visit (especially on a bad-weather-day). you can learn how to cast colorful shadows and do much more interesting stuff with all your senses!

using b.‘s code he wrote for my itunes-trackback-thingie i prettied up the comment stuff a bit. (i hope the code he sucked out of his brain is “freeware” :-)
now you see who and when posted the last comment.
i like it, do you?

anyway, here’s the full code for your abuse:

<?php
function datediff2($datestr)
{
$r = array();
$d = time() – strtotime($datestr);
if ($d > 86400*2)
array_push($r, floor($d / 86400) . “d”);
elseif ($d > 86400)
array_push($r, “1d”);
$d = $d % 86400;
if ($d > 7200)
array_push($r, floor($d / 3600) . “h”);
else if ($d > 3600)
array_push($r, “1h”);
$d = $d % 3600;
if ($d > 120)
array_push($r, floor($d / 60) . “min”);
else if ($d > 60)
array_push($r, “1min”);
if (!count($r))
return “now”;
else
return implode(“, “, $r) . ” ago”;
}
?>

<div class=”side”>
<$MTComments lastn=”5″$ sort_order=”descend”>
[<a href=”<$MTBlogArchiveURL$><$MTCommentEntryID pad=”1″$>.html”><$MTCommentAuthor$></a>, <? echo datediff2(‘<$MTCommentDate format=”%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S”$>’); ?>
]<br />
</MTComments>
</div>

i really hope berni does not mind if i post his code here.
just to make it clear: my only achievement are the last lines between <div class=”side”> and </div> the rest is fully credited to the code-master b.