Another Skiing Weekend with Flo

Yeah, well this time Roli joined us as well and we went to Russbach in the Dachstein West region. Since it was snowing hard I did not take any pictures of the mountains (I was already happy when I was able to see 30m) but one of myself and some of the street on our way home. BTW: The street was clear when we got there some hours ago.

Order from Home of Poi arrived!

Finally (mail delivery was fast, but it took me some time to get it from the post office) I got the stuff Roli and I ordered from Home of Poi. Additionally to all the other stuff now I can practice with 2 new fire staff, cone poi, contact juggling ball and a LED frisbee disk.

In this picture you can see most of my toys so far.



From left to right there are:
- Pivit balance board
- Home of Poi LED frisbee disc
- Fire staff (disassembled)
- Contact juggling ball (blue/purple)
- 2 Tennis balls (for poi)
- 2x3 juggling balls
- 3 LED juggling balls (the better ones)
- 4 Juggling clubs
- 2 LED juggling balls (the first ones)
- 3 Steel juggling balls (2kg each)
- Sock poi filled with water balloons (borrowed from Roli - thx4infecting me with poi)
- New cone poi
- Selfmade meteor
- Flowerstick
On top of the image there is the second fire staff (assembled) and on bottom there is a band of wood I use for balancing practice.

Skiing weekend with Flo in Salzburg

Flo and I went snowboarding (Flo) resp. skiing (me) this weekend' sunday and following monday.








First day we went to Zauchensee with perfect weather and nice snow. In the evening we went to a new asian restaurant (huy cook & eat) in Salzburg which serves japanese, mongolian, thai and chinese on a really big all you can eat buffet. Definitely worth mentioning is the possibility to pick from many different kinds of raw meat, vegetables and sauces and to get it prepared by the chef on a big cooking plate. One of the best dinners I had for quite some time!


On the sunny second day we were at Hochkönig nearly alone on the piste with perfect snow conditions.

Chili Seeds Growing

Yeah! The seeds I got from Flo at his birthday party are finally growing! They are still quite small but hopefully that will change soon...

Lap belt finished - First test

Yesterday I finished my selfmade lap belt. It was quite a piece of work but now it's done! See the pictures for yourself.









After tieing everything together the belt looks like this. But this is actually done when wearing the belt.





I got the feeling that the belt really fits and distributes my weight equally. It also stays in place and you don't have to reconfigure it after some time. That's very important for me because I need both hands all the time to fly the kite.





Today it was time to try it out... It worked very good - some joints broke up - but with some small modifications it should hold my weight and in overall I am quite confident with the test result.



What really was surprising for me was that one of the ropes (the first I found at home) I used to connect the handles with the belt broke. As you can see in the pics (where you can see my complete kiting set: the kite[blue background], handles[red and blue to the left], kite killer[bottom right], lines[on the eight]) this rope was much thicker than the ropes used to handle the kite. So, dudes: Size does not matter! ;-)



Found another rope for this part. Next time there is more wind - and when I found another starting meadow because the nearest one has too high grass - I am going to try again! I am very excited how it finally works out...

MiX Essentials Event - Vienna

Yesterday I was at the MiX Essentials Event by Microsoft in cooperation with Siemens. Main topics were web technologies and user experience and there were many interesting speakers. I met some colleagues from university and some long-not-seen co-workers as well. It was a really nice but (I got up at 5 in the morning and got home at 8 in the evening) exhausting day.

The tracks I listened to were:

• Web development with ASP.NET 3.5 by Mario Szpuszta
  
  As usual very refreshing because of the incredible talking speed and humor Mario gave a good overview what's new when upgrading from ASP.NET 2.0 to 3.5. Basically there are LINQ-Support, 3 new Controls (ListView, some paging-control and the LINQ-datasource) and something I already forgot again.



• A Design Vision for Microsoft Surface by August de Los Reyes
  
  A very open minded presentation about the role of emotions in the design process. Can't say more - it was very intersting but I still have to sort out my mind about this one.



• 2 tracks about Silverlight 2.0 and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) by Max Knor
  
  In my opinion now Silverlight is technically advanced enough to invest time in it. Now it is possible to create UI's with WPF and code-behind in .NET languages. Interaction between embedding HTML/JavaScript and Silverlight is possible in both directions.
  
  The WPF also features some nice functionality which makes even more fancy UI designs possible. I am very excited what will come out of this in the near future...

As usual I was too overwhelmed by the event itself that I completly forgot to take some pictures.

Pivit and Juggling @ Gaumberg

My whole body was still aching from the wakeboard camp, so I decided to fly with my kite at Gaumberg to loosen up my muscles. But when there is no wind, a guy has to carry around some not wind dependent toys as well. So I did some pivit and/or juggling tricks. At dusk the oak tree looked like on the foto. A beautiful place to unwind and recharge batteries.

Wakeboard camp @ Krk/Kroatia

Since a friend of mine knows someone who knows... well, you know the story. I got to know someone (basically because he owns a fashion and wakeboard store) who organizes wakeboard camps.



The first one of this season was in Kroatia on the little island Krk. The island is accessable via a bridge or by ferry. On the foto we are (after paying the obligatory toll) right about to cross the bridge.


We (Robert, Wolfi and me) met there with 6 other Austrians and enjoyed the perfect weather the first two days.













The other group of Austrians.

Robert and Wolfi wakeboarding together.

We took a day off (because of very airy weather conditions) and made a trip to Krk city (if you want to call a small town like that city).











Since the weather god was not very well meaning to us, we packed out bags before plan on thursday and returned home again.

Flo's 30th birthday bash

Well, we all turn older in time and so Flo celebrated his 30th birthday in a bar called 'Hopsgarden' in Freilassing. There was a (for my opinion too loud) life band, a nice (quiet) outdoor area and I met many friends I have not seen for quite some time. Since I was too busy getting up to speed with all all these long lost faces (and due to the fact that I am not used to having a camera - got it that weekend) I totally forgot to take some pics.



On the day after we just stayed at home and cured our hangovers.



In the late afternoon I went to fly my kite where I met Evelyn - another long-not-seen friend - and her daughter. We had a nice but short talk about good old times.



Afterwards we grilled in the garden. Since it was raining for a short time the real sommer feeling got lost somewhere...



We planned to go out again on this evening but after an endless discussion where to order food and dinner we were all to lazy and fell asleep.



On Sunday I went to Golling to meet with Roli and Vreni. Roli was getting his first kite experience while we took a walk in the nearby meadows.

Moreover I bought my first ice cream of this season. A real nice day!

On the way home I shortly stopped by at Flo's and got home real late. But it was definitly worth the journey.

My first fotoshooting ;-)

Yeah! Got my business cell today and just tried out the "post to blog"-feature. This is it. The straight ahead view when looking up from my laptop. Nice, isn't it?