today i called the insurance of the girl that hit me on tuesday and informed them that she did not hit a car, but destroyed a bike (they wrote: “please inform us, how expensive the repair of the motor vehicle is gonna be”).
the guy on the phone was really friendly, but also a bit weird: “oh, i cannot believe that your bike (something like this) costed 2000 swiss francs five years ago, it must be something really expensive then”. well, sure it was, it’s one of my work-horses, you silly! and when i informed him, that i’m also gonna buy a new helmet on the insurance, he also a bit surprised. but hey, i don’t wanna drive with a potentially damaged helmet, it’s just not safe (not that it’s safe in the first place :-)

and now comes the hard part. if the insurance is gonna pay me around 2k-bucks for a new bike i have to choose wisely, the choice is really big.

thömu has three really nice options.
price bikes has some of the slickest looking frames.
röschu has much more available and served me really well whenever i bought something there.
our shop has some very good deals on bmc bikes from last year.
or should i go for pinarello again?
decisions, decisions!

and why is the title of this entry new bikes?
today i went to the shop to get my other workbike (the one where i would be un-solaceable if it was damaged like the pinarello). the guys in the shop had to change pretty much everything except the frame :-)
i had to get two new rims, because the ones on the bike were paperthin, thus the also mounted new spokes and new brake pads. the main cause i brought the bike was that it needed a new set of chain rings because the ones on it served me well for about 8000 km, thus they also had to mount a new chain and new pinions (the cogwheels in the back). and because one of the shift-levers was broken, i told them to change that too. good that we have a decent rebate in the shop or else i would have paid much more than 577 bucks to get a literally new bike (all the major parts are brand-spanking new – exept the hubs, which were changed some months ago :-)

as you can see in the entry below i’m now able to post pictures directly from iphoto, it’s still bit quirky, but the software i used is still in it’s beta stage, so bear with the author.
the photos i blogged directly from my iphoto are from our stay in vienna, one is the town-hall with nina, the other pics are from the restaurant raan, which was more than lovely, i had a vegetarian sushi which was among the best asian stuff i ever ate! a big recommendation if you’re ever gonna go to vienna!

[via urs]

update: it doesn’t seem to work well in iphoto4 (which i installed this afternoon) so i just start using ecto, which has quite a nifty iphoto-integration…

[image via boingboing]

i’ll be in vienna for the weekend (actually until monday evening).
nina won some tickets, so we fly (and leave our eco-conscience at home) and thus we have four full days to enjoy castle schönbrunn (our hotel is near the castle), the hofburg, the prater, the stephans-dom and what else vienna has to offer.
and last but not least we’ll meet babsi, a friend i met in ’97 in australia (i can’t believe it’s such a long time) so i guess it’s gonna be really funny!
have a nice weekend.

do you need a memorystick for you pda? (because for a real camera they’re probably too small…)
i sell two of ’em: 16 or 8 mb.
grab them while they’re fresh (or send me an email and i’ll take down those auctions)

as engadget writes the grand challenge will not be so grand.
NONE of the eight entered robots completed the 1.25 mile test-course in the allotted time and none of all the entered robots will be able to complete the full course in the given ten hours.
what a disappointment!

as a comics-enthusiast the fumetto news-letter is always chock-full of links to check out (and has way too many recommendations for my budget, but hell i just got a gratification from work, so i can afford this one, and maybe this or this or this…)

but this one really blows it away!
the exercises in style by matt madden are an impressive way to fathom the possibilities of (online) comics. matt depicts a trivial situation in a lot of ways and turns every depiction into a different panel which can be viewed on the page.
he changes style, changes perspective, both visually and narrative which turns the whole into an impressive art project!

in the tradition of pinguin.swf here’s another extremely silly but annoyingly addictive flash-game: blow up the warthog to kill all the bad aliens.

[via weebl and bobs newsletter]

oh, and by the way: do you know the successor of pinguin.swf orca slap?

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]