Todays News - Bikes

A bunch of a homework... as everyday. However, it's impossible to spend your whole freetime doing stupid tasks... Today I went to South SF to buy a bicycle I saw on craigslist. Actually I had bad luck all the other times I'd try to buy one... there was always anyone faster than me... especially the last offer I missed really annoyed me... there was a Cannondale road bike (2001 model) looked simply awesome and was ridden maybe a couple dozen times... for an fucking low price. As I said, unfortunately I wasn't able to get my hands on this bike... but today I finally succeded in buying me one (and a heavy lock). It's a Fuji road bike, size is okay and it rides quite well... i still have to adjust the saddle and optimize the brakes (I have to get some tools from the housekeeper, maybe tomorrow... the brakes are maybe the most important bike parts in this city... even more important than pedals...). 

So, that's the bike... Actually I haven't been driving very long in the city... but I can already tell that's even crazier than driving through Zurich (but that's actually not very surprising) The worst thing (besides the several thousands traffic lights... they're at each corner) are probably all the one ways... they're driving me mad!

Angelika also got a bike (actually since the weekend...!) , not a road but a mountain bike, it's in a very good condition an was even cheaper than mine was. Hope we'll find soon a chance to make a little bike trip to discover the bay area a bit more.

I also got my hands on the G1 cellphone... really a cool device as far as I can tell... the android software is the main reason. By the way.. my current cellphone doesn't work properly... even though I have a US sim card. Actually everything seems to be fine, but if I try to call a number or send a message there's always a "connection error", must be a stupid software error. Same with my old, loved Iriver MP3 player... since I'm in SF it won't play any sound files anymore... every other function like radio, picture video and so on works fine... there's no hardware problems. If anyone knew a solution for this... I'd really appreciate hearing it. Every attempt to get my player back to life on my part failed (e.g. loading Rockbox or update software.. this actually doesn't work too).

BTW: Commenting

First: everyone is invited to write some comments (just click on "comments" below the post you'd like to comment)

Second: I heard some people have difficulties writing comments, so I checked the preferences of my blog... I think now it should be easier to comment, as you can choose between several options, you won't need a google account or something similar.

Last: I usually write an answer to the comments, so check back later if you're interested in it.

The IMAX experience - Part I

I just came home after my first visit at the IMAX theater here in San Francisco... I guess it's unnecessary to explain what this exactly is.

Here in America it's usual to show normal Blockbusters in the IMAX, different to the only Swiss cinema of this kind in Lucerne where normally just special documentaries are shown.

In fact, the last Batman movie (The dark knight) was the first ordinary cinema film which was recorded by just using high-resolution IMAX-cameras... unfortunately we missed the chance to see it, a couple of weeks ago they stopped showing this movie at the IMAX.

Tonight "Eagle eye" was schedulded on the movie programs and we decided to watch it for 15$ in the Metreon IMAX. The beginning was quite cool, they showed the trailer for the new Madagascar film (Escape 2 Africa). Seems to be a very cool movie, and it will come to the IMAX too!

But now to the movie... To make a long story short, it was crap. Total shit. At the moment I can't think of a worse movie I've anytime seen in a cinema.

Watch the trailer of the movie... then you'll have seen what's worth watching. Go and watch Tropic Thunder, it might be not the best movie ever, but at least it's fun... I've seen it on the weekend. (By the way, it's with Jack Black, Tom Cruise and Ben Stiller... Toms role is already reason enough to watch it.)

Weekend: SF Fleet Week

This weekend a special event was scheduled, the SF fleet week. The whole thing started at Thursday, as the Blue Angels (similar to the Patrouille Suisse, but flying with F/A 18s) did some survey flights over the city. The following day they started to practice for the airshow at the weekend, so there was a lot of action in the airspace over the city.

Saturday we headed for Pier 39, near there we watched the show, it was absolutely amazing. The first aerobatic team was the "Snowbirds", nine canadian military pilots performing crazy stunts and formations... Before the Blue Angels flew, some other pilots showed their skills, mostliy alone.

The Blue Angels are the United States Navy's Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron... they're even better than the Patrouille Suisse. The stunts were breathtakingly. They flew in supine position, head-crossed with insane speed, performed perfect loops in formation and so on... I recommend to google it and take a look at some videos.

Nevertheless I post some cool pictures I made:

The Snowbirds

Blue Angels

soccer match last friday

Last Friday a a guy who works at the school had organised a soccer match against a Swiss veteran team (as already announced). A couple of guys from my class and me (and of course other students), as well as Konstantine who was the organizer, formed the St. Giles Team.

The result of the game was about 8:5 (orfor us... it was quite fun. We played two halfs of 40 minutes and were a rather unorganized team. Nevertheless we dominated the whole game and at no time we had to fear that we'd lose the match. 

The swiss veteran players spended most time shouting at each other, every player thought the other was playing completly wrong. It was so much fun to hear them:

"Hey Franco, spiel hine ume, hiiiiiiiiine!!!" *lol*

But the most funny thing during the whole game was that the veterans always played with an offside trap. Well, nice idea, but the proble was they were just too lame to play in this way. Often the offside trap was about ten meters behind de middle line and as soon as a passed the ball over their trap, they had no chance to outrun our players again. This state lead to other conversation on the part of the veterans: 

Player 1: "Hey, deck de doch mal!" 

Player 2: "Ja was sölli mache, sobald de ball animmt isch er 5 meter vor mir"

or like this: "Achtung, s 8i chunnt wieder."

Unfortunately they startet to commit fouls as they saw no other possibilities to stop some players... This lead to some verbal abuse on our part, maybe not very nice but it helped... At least we wont have injuries after a fun game because some stupid ambitious soccer players.

Translated into English it was like this:

Tobias: "Hey, that was a damned foul!"

Veteran: "Nonsense, he's just acting!"

Tobias: "And you're a fuckin jerk!"

Veteran looks very amazed... 

     Not very nice, but it helped! And still better than to start commiting fouls because the others also foul. It didn't take much time and they stopped fouling and started again shouting at each other... In the end they were really in a bad mood, actually they scored five goals, but they had about 10 times less chances than we had during the game.

To sum up, we enjoyed the game very much and had a lot of fun... the veterans probably will never play again St. Giles anymore. (At least these veterans)

misspelling...

Several days ago at school we could complete a form about our interests during our leisure time... One of the school's adimistrator apparently wanted to make a list of different students activities, so that you could get known to people with similar interests. On Friday we received the analysis this little... uhm, let's call it investigation, as a dossier with all the participating students names and interests.

Boring story... sure! But take a look at the way they spelled my name:

I mean... HEY! WTF!!! I knew that these Americans have problems with "ü" and stuff like this, and I usually never write the dots... This time I was just wondering what may happen... Surprise!          Nevertheless, my handwriting isn't that bad that they could make an excuse for this *epic fail* at spelling my first name.