my weekend
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 pascu 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 pascu 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 hammes 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!
yeehaw! (picture of the week)
osxhints made that little hint on Descent2, that has brought me back to old ages. if you’ve never played descent2, then you don’t need to bother actually clicking on the link, but if you spent countless hours in front of a glooming monitor trying to master your spaceship while zapping through complicated tunnels and blasting the enemies with CONCSN MISSILE’s, then you absolutely need to! i think Descent2 was the best 3d-mission game, i remember playing it for hours (i think that was actually one of the few computer-games i played more than two times or so, i never was a gamer…). i cannot wait to actually finish a level and be blasted out of the mother-spaceship. miklos and b. do you remember? flashback ahoi!
blingbling
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!
i want that car
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.
amazing!
yesterday evening my ibook crashed. it locked up when i started realplayer to listen to some late-nite tunes while having setiathome running (so the processor was on full duty). normally such lock-ups are not a big deal, it will recover from itself, i thought, just give it some time. i thought, maybe if i unplug it, it will go to sleep soon and be a happy puppy again. so i lay on my bed and started to read in my book. sometimes later i must have fallen asleep without actually looking how my ibook is doing. this morning the ibook was sitting happily on my desk, turned off. it did not go to sleep, which is what it normally does when the battery power is too low, but was turned off. so the battery must have been completely drained. no big deal, it only lasted 5-6 minutes anyway, because my ibook is about three years old, and was used a lot on it’s own juice. the amazing part is that when i rebooted, i saw that the battery icon mentioned that the battery needs about two and a half hours to fully charge again. hmm. that’s much much more than it ever said before. then after these two and a half hours i unplugged the ibook from the juice and the icon says: (after some “calculating…”) that i got an hour and 16 minutes left on battery power. amazing. i guess the battery was not so bad then. lucky i’m not the winning bidder here :-)
picture of the week
as cranes seem to be popular at the moment, my picture of the week also features a crane. as you might know, i was in winterthur last weekend, on the sulzerareal. the picture below shows a crane on the area, the right one has a carrying capacity of 25 tons, impressive, isn’t it?
kraftwerk
in case anyone of you didn’t go to the kraftwerk-concert 1 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) ↩︎
handy dandy!
after submitting a comment spam to the MT-Blacklist, i stopped by at jayallens blog, and found an interesting link. bopuc proposes a way to view all the comments on your blog as a rss feed, spruced up with all the relevant links to despam and edit the comment and info of the commenter. here are the directions: go to your MT-HQ and make a new template. call it something you remember and insert a filename for it (e.g. something.xml) paste the code below into the text field.
funny link of today
this slideshow here is especially for my sister. you know why :-) anyone other than my sister might not think it’s funny. sorry. [via boingboing]
SubEthaEdit 2.0
SubEthaEdit made the jump to version 2.0. As fsck-log notes, even if you don’t need it, it has to be on every mac, one of the most amazing pieces of software, and extremely fast and helpful for writing down stuff (even simultaneously together and alike). oh, and after looking at the screenshots, i’ll even use SubEthaEdit to code that occasional latex-file i write… [via mactechnews.de]