these guys are wild!
(here are more infos on the G5 supercluster at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)

update: read more on apple.slashdot.org (also for some funny comments on this)

today i reached 4454 km on my bike (i didn’t have my camera with me at 4444km, so this was after i finished to work today…).
i got my odometer sometimes around the beginning of april this year. so this means that i drive around 10000 km a year on my bike, hence 1.141553 km/h (only at work, i drive quite a bit when i do not work…)
i could do a lot more calculations with my odometer: i consistently drive around 100 km during one work day, and make a bit more than 200 CHF on one day, so for each kilometer i drive at work i earn something like a cheap little bread or one of these king-size mars bars or half a coke in the restaurant or 2 CHF.
i need to get a shower :-)

this sounds a bit strange for me: i knew that text messages are not the hype-thing in the us of a, but that it’s considered big news by mobiletracker, that one can send SMS to other countries does sound a bit like oldfashioned news indeed…

btw: read this entry on gizmodo for another view on this :-)

today i went shopping a little bit (free afternoon, because all my classes are already on holidays and i’m only biking around 50 % of my time…): some little stuff for the upcoming week, i’ll be in greece, and then went to jäggi, because you can read all the comics you want without bein bothered.
near the comics FUST has an electronica-shop which i never can resist and always go and have a little look: today i spotted the perfect replacement for my old VCR, which is not far away from dying: the Panasonic DMR-HS2 , a combination of HD- and DVD-recorder which can fit up to 52 hours of video on its disk.

then i was looking things up a little bit and found out, that there are some other rivals of the DMR-HS2:

• first, the DMR-E80S, also from Panasonic which “Replaces the DMR -HS2 and also adds MP3 Playback and doubles the recording time by having an 80GB hard drive.” and funkyly costs 300$ less (according to froogle.google.com)
• then the TVS 100 from Fast, which has no recorder, but a network option, so you can FTP your recorded series to your Mac or PC to burn it to VCD, SVCD or DVD.
  Its bigger brother can even be programmed over the web.
• the computec dm-d100, sitting on the same shelf at FUST (with no avaliable info on google :-) which is cheaper (1000 CHF as opposed to the 1500 CHF one has to pay for the DMR-HS2) but has no recording nor networking ability. it sports a 120 Gb-HD and seems very plasticky, but hey, who needs archiving :-)

so we get to the conclusion: if you got some bucks to spare to help my geekness, then drop me a line :-)

update: gizmodo just wrote about the new ultraslim HD-recorders from sharp, which includes a firewire-port… (click on sharp to see a babelfish-translation of the page…)

i think my geekness could only be satisfied if i lived in japan.
i wonder when the new clie ux50 is gonna come out here in switzerland (with integrated wifi, bluetooth, keyboard, camera, a big-ass screen and a polished palm os…)

update: well, it actually does come out here somewhere in october for a hefty entry price of 930 CHF. dream on dreamer!

gizmodo (one of my favourite gadget site) talked about a mysterious USB-powered noodle thingy (here and here) sometimes last week. now look at this really strange USB gadget i found on brando’s shop while looking for some other USB–stuff.

i need this shirt for that event, but there’s no time to get it until then :-)

from here to there.
coming back happy.

i just ripped an old cd i had lying around here: Overproof from Rockers Hi-Fi.
And after i synced it to my ipod, i found out, that i need a bigger one, it’s nearly full!!!

btw: the vast majority of all the songs on my ipod (i guess more than 95%) are legally owned/bougth by either me, my flat-mates or another friend i borrowed the CD. i admit that i have some songs that i got through poisoned or aquisition (three songs from Seeed, which i saw on the Gurtenfestival last year and Tour de France (the 1983 version, not the new one from 2003) from Kraftwerk, are some i remember out of my head…).

i believe in music artists, and i am quite happy to buy cd’s, so it’s simple: don’t steal music…

i have one little story about filesharing: do you remember that old commercial from apple when they introduced the ipod? (click on “commercial” to watch it. it’s hilarious!!!)
i’ve seen it in the openair cinema a year ago and had ages to find the song (take california” – propellerheads). i was searching hours on kazaa (i had a windows-machine at the university, and wasn’t aware of a good file-sharing application on my mac.) to get it and was really happy when i finally could listen to the song.
then, some weeks later i found out that i actually got the song on a CD i own, on the OST of The Dancer, a movie which i never heard of, but the songs are very good!!!

susi sent me some pictures which she made in millau
it shows me on the start to 200m crawl:

if you watch closely on the second image, then you can see that i’m quite a bit ahead of the other starters in my heat (i’m the one on the second lane from left).
but the referee still thought it’s a valid start, so i had an advantage :-) nonetheless i came in pretty much as last :-)

yesterday i was in rodersdorf, playing ddc with jochen.
jochen stayed over at a friend, so i was on my own in the train to basel and in the tram to bättwil/flüeh.
in the train i was listening to some music on my ipod, when a guy in the opposite compartment scrolls away on the wheel of his ipod trying to find a good tune. then when i walk out towards the tramway i see a girl with the revealing white headphones on the escalator. and to end that silly little story, the girl enters the tramway Nr 10, which i also needed to take and sits in front of me, so i was constantly surrounded by ipods on my journey :-)
the ipod is actually so hip, that it starts to show up in music videos, watch 50 cent’s p.i.m.p-video over at mtv to see 30s seconds of ipod, 50 cent and ladies with white clothes (not very much clothes…).
one point i’d like to make is that altough this little piece of engineering and design has a quite high geek-factor i see more and more girls walking around sporting their personal digital player. so albeit the high geekness it has, it’s also a very good music player for the masses (which is very easy to use, as opposed to other mp3-players i’ve seen bevore. the ipod’s UI is so clever even my mother could use it :-)

ps: if you want to see some action-shots of how ddc looks like, then you find some photos on my pic-page or on damons excellent ddc-page.

ps2: after jochen and me came second at that tournament, i’ll probably have a better ranking on the world ddc rankings than 245th soon :-)

pure envy!

i found the fun link of the week (while looking at the website of iguana tatau; for no apparent reason (yes, i’m thinking about a new one…) :-)
natalie has it in her link section: uglyfootballers.com.

and yes, the ugliest of all is there: Trifon Ivanov.
Some of my blog–readers might remember it, i had Trifons Pannini-pic from some worldcup on my pen-case during a long time in the high-school!

the pictures i made in Millau at the Swimming Championsship are online here.

PS1: my results in the pool can be found here (i’m david haberthuer by the way :-). The open-water results here (i’m not really happy with the time i swam in the lake (5.2 km in 1:43, but i had a major cramp in both legs which made me make a break for about five minutes, so it’s not too bad…)
PS2: this site here has a lot of infos on the bridge you can see in my pics..
PS3: because i visited one of the caves where they produce the roquefort-cheese i’m gonna cook that tomorrow.

when i came home from the european masters championship i started up my trusty ibook to read the mails which came in through the week.
and was quite puzzled :-) 135 mails in one week…

after skimming some of them i found out that the vast majority of them were virus-mails (the virus is sobig-f).
after follwing one of the hints on osxhints.com (btw. one of the best sites for hints regarding a truly beautiful os) i only had something like 25 real emails in my inbox, which was much more what i thought it would be :-)
i didn’t use the mail rule proposed in the hint, which seemed a bit harsh, but followed the last comment to that hint)

some pictures and other stuff from the championship are coming soon, now i need to go to bed, because i only slept for four hours the last night and have to teach some kids physics in about eight hours… looking forward to my bed!

Next week i will probably not update my blog at all, because i’ll be at the European Masters Championship in Millau, France.
I’m quite a keen swimmer and am going to swim some disciplines there (200m Crawl, 100m Crawl, 50m Butterfly and a 5km open water swimming in the Lake Pareloup)
So don’t be mad at me if i do not update at all next week, i have no idea if i’ll have internet access at the place we’re staying (maybe this is also a good thing for me so i’ll be able to read and sleep a lot :-)

cheerio!

check this out (read in partynews)

yesterday there was a flash mob here in bern (and i missed it, i thought it’s today, i confused the date…)
and today there was a little article in two newspapers (in the BZ and in 20min).
b. and me were thinking about “organising” a flash mob some weeks ago. he pointed out a link to me about the first flashmob in manhattan. (actually we talked about it on the 18th of june, because i was just looking up the conversation we had over ICQ…) and it seemed like a really funny thing to do. as berni points out, the flash mob in bern was not a full success, but i think this leaves room for more ideas…

how do you like my new dock?

a funny little app named skin a dock makes this possible. and it’s even donationware, so double the fun :-)
SaD needs the application enhancer from unsanity (go check them out, they have a bunch of cool OS X apps) to run, but it takes care of downloading it, so you only need to download skinadock, the rest is a walkthrough…