i spent the past weekend with renzo and eveline which competed in the gigathlon, a race across switzerland involving swimming, inline skating, road- and mountain-biking and running from locarno to basel via luzern. all the athletes and their supporters were housed in two camps, the picture below shows a panorama of the tents in the camp in airolo.

oh, and don’t blame me for the barrel distortion, i was standing on a heap of scrap wood, while i took that panorama and feared that i’m gonna fall down, so i could not align the pictures any nicer…

update: all the pictures from the gigathlon can be found here.

technorati tags: gigathlon, panorama

you might have seen the pictures already over at flickr, nonetheless i’m showing one here again, ’cause i really like it, the moon fits nicely between the two wings of the luftstation. warm colors, nice lighting and shadows.

this week i got a letter with the picture below in it. some photographer took pictures of the people running at the gp. included was a payment order for 12.80 chf. i don’t think i’m gonna pay 13 bucks for a picture of me pulling up my pants, i’m gonna spend the same amount of bucks to a ticket to the movies tonight and a new towel :-)

summer is here: we were having a little boat trip down the aare, passing heavy waves, hanging around from bridges and then chillaxing in the eichholz.

the picture below shows manu and his sister just before jumping from the bridge (2.3 mb .mpg-movie) and lukas just hanging around below.

technorati tags: aare

i went to a brunch at julias place yesterday. she has a really nice backyard with a big bunch of flowers. those in the image below were well past their expiry date, but nice nonetheless. do you know their name? leave a comment.

technorati tags: flowers

i love her.

’nuff said.

technorati tags: nina

this wednesday i went to luzern, to spend a day reading comics and stare onto hundreds of panels from different comic authors.

i went to luzern quite early, so i could visit the offices of swissconnect and the velokurier luzern. the picture below shows the bridge going from the trainstation to the offices of sc and vkl. that silly guy just didn’t want to go away.

what a pity.

finally i got some time to sort through the pile of pictures i took on vacation in london. it’ amazing how many pictures you take, when you don’t have to care about any restrictions. the one below was taken in the tate modern, a very impressive old power-station converted by Herzog & de Meuron, two swiss architects. the main hall (see a panorama here) serves as the “main floor” for exhibitions and was only filled with some loudspeakers (by bruce naumann) (that exhibition was about as good as the link is…). nonetheless i was able to get quite a good shot of the eerie afternoon glow outside.

summer started, it’s true.

i again spent a weekend on the slopes. this time i spent it with some folk from work.

the image below is a crop from an image from the bunch i shot this weekend, hence it’s quite grainy (keep in mind, it’s shot with a puny dsc-u20), but still i like it, mostly because the cable cuts nicely through the image. and it makes a nice desktop background.

if you’d like to see the rest of the images, then head over to the /pics section.

the past friday was absolutely amazing at work. as you might know (or not…) the swiss messengers have a collective product: swissconnect. hence, if a customer wants to send a parcel to any other town in switzerland, he just gives us a call, and we do the rest.

pick it up at his door, drive to the train station, put it on a train, and another partner grabs it from that train and delivers the parcel. anything goes. passports from lausanne, movie rolls from ostermundigen to zürich.

normally all those swissconnects are a little relief from all the other pickups and drops you do, you get a little break at the trainstation and stuff like that. but this friday was absolutely crazy!

on a normal day we get at most around 18 so called velocities. but on friday we had 34 in total (24 exports going from bern to wherever and 10 coming to bern). if you click on the extremely tall image on the left you can see a screenshot from the internal swissconnect site (with masked details…).

every parcel has to be entered on that central site, so every partner (and big daddy cm in luzern) is informed with all the details and everything which can be quite a tedious process if the recipient is not entered as a customer in the database. so the whole friday was filled with entering all those details. so many details that it was hard to keep up with hurrying around six messengers in town. at least it was good fun and we made

the best day-revenue of the whole year up to now. way to go!

the funniest parcel involved a passport, a russian diplomat, and some mühsam zuschlag from our side, but as i said to dom, it was only one of those 3 swissconnects per hour we had this friday.

ps; if you wonder how i took the funny screenshot of the internal swissconnect page: i used paparazzi [1], an extremely lightweight tool for taking complete screenshots of any webpage. i know you can just print the page to pdf, but then you break it up in separate pages and i thought it looks ways more impressive that way… (oh, and don’t worry, i didn’t install it on dispo1 or dispo2, i made the screenshot here at home…)

[1] the website seems to be down, i tried to use the coral cache-version, but it doesn’t work either. you can grab it on versiontracker if you like…

since i just cannot stop skiing i went to grindelwald on saturday with pesche and sabine. no single picture stands out, so i just uploaded all of ’em to a new set over at flicker. if you’d like to see them, go there.

i just can’t stop skiing….

my parents spend a week on the bettmeralp and i’ve been visiting them for three days. the weather was quite bad, but the snow was perfect, and i really start to like my new skis.

the pic below shows me having some fun in a locker at the cable car station (yes i’d have fit in, but then the picture would be only half as funny…)

i spent the weekend in lech with mara. we thought we’d go skiing a lot, but then it turned out to be really bad weather. on saturday it rained heavily and yesterday there was quite a lot of snow (they closed the road leading to lech just after we left, so we were pretty much the last ones to get out of there…). the picture below shows the view on the slopes yesterday :-)

like you’ve seen below, i’ve been skiing with tom yesterday.

in adelboden i took the 4000^th picture with my digital cam(s)^{[1], [2]}. i would have loved it to be the one with the wires, but it was a self-portrait of me on the chair lift. so i’ll just post both.

^[1]: i know, i took much more, since i also delete a lot, but the picture of me is number 4000 in my iphoto library

^[2]: the first picture is from end of may 2001, so i took around 2.5 pictures each and every day. wicked!

first of all i noticed, that my notation was wrong, so i changed the title to all the posts in the category “picture of the week” of this year. the title now describes what the image is, namely an image of the past week.

so the image of the last week shows you the rotten watch of the trainstation in gensingen, where pesche and me have been this weekend. we both went to the 16th international masters competition of the ssv ingelheim. since the poor swimmers don’t have a pool the competition was held in the cozy city of gensingen. since there was absolutely nothing to do, we were so bored that we spent two hours in the local mall, which was not really funny, but warm.

oh, and by the way we both swam quite good, i made 100m crawl in 1:06:45, 50m crawl in 28:73, 100m medley in 1:19:00 and 50m butterfly in 32:something…