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.