Lousberglauf Training

Today 32 minutes door2door for the usual round without looping on the top but along the columns. That looks bad since the real Lousberglauf is even a bit longer. I guess I will not reach my ambitious goal to stay below 30 minutes for the first time.

The last two sundays I was running along the Pferderennbahn / Gut Leidenhausen(long round) and it took me 25:19 and then 24:25.

Medion MDPNA 510T

I bought this toy yersterday for 299 at Aldi Süd and I am mostly satisfied (so far, not having tested this on a long trip).

What I like:

• Cool SIRF III GPS receiver (if you have one of the pre 2006 Garmin GPS devices: This is like 1000 times better. I have full reception even in buildings (e.g. under a metal roof or under steel concrete, my Garmin would give up under the light shade of a tree). It seems to pick up all kinds of reflections and make use of them. Really amazing technology. It works perfectly even under metallized or heated windscreens.)
  
• Early and precise voice messages. You don't need the display at all. (Even things like and early 'keep left' or 'keep right' on multilane streets.)
  
• Bright display, high contrast colors for streets (the standard colors, yellow for motorways, red for Bundesstrassen and white for small streets).
  
• Easy to use touchscreen: I never have to use the pen which comes with it.
  
• TMC receiver helps to avoid traffic jams.
  
• Fast responses to user input. Fast screen update. Feels very responsive.
  

What I dislike:

• Navigation is limited to a 'map' (e.g. you have to manually change the maps when going from Cologne to Madrid).
  
• Can not simply navigate to the next POI (e.g. gasstation) just by pointing at it.
  
• Can not navigate to a point without having the address (e.g. by pointing at it or by entering the GPS coordinates).
  
• Is lacking even basic GPS device functionality (waypoints, tracks, ...) although a GPS receiver is built in.
  
• Can not move the map in 3D view (OK, the 3D view is not so important)
  

The only non-obvious feature I found so far:

• You don't have to enter the complete addresses. Just a few letters are usually sufficient and you can select from a list if your information was not yet unique.
  

If all this is worth 299 EUR I don't know. But it's a nice toy.

It's like flying ...

This is exactly what I feel like very often:

Flying is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
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Faroe Islands

The italians winning over australia in the last few senconds of the game reminded me of an even more extreme football game which took place on Jue 11th 2003 in Tórshavn: Färöer against Germany. I will never forget this: A beautiful stadium inbetween green grassy hills. The game was not good, but the athomsphere alone was touching. Both teams were unable to score for the first 89 minutes! This was a big achievement of the Färöer team which played well. There was no justification at all for germany winning this game 0:2 in the end. Anyway, I took a few television snapshots back then showing the stadium in Tórshavn and Gerhard Delling and Günter Netzer analyzing the game (Günter excoriating the german team of course, as always).

I would love to go to the Faroes someday ...

Swiss: What a pity!

The swiss team lost against the ukraine after overtime and penalty shootout. What a pity! The underdogs almost made it! However, the ukraine is no less and underdog and I wish them all the best for their next game(s). Hopefully we will se the swiss again in 4 years!

Australia: You had one chance and you blew it!

Australia lost in the 1/8 final elimination round of the football world championship against a very weak italian team. They had a realistic chance of winning this thing. I'm not saying the austalians played better football, but they were the underdogs and they were not far from winning this game. This could have been the sensation of the event.

Anyway: Austalia, you have my deep sympathy. Hopefully we will see you again in 4 years in South Africa!

The rock

Me holding a piece of rock in some tunisian desert. The rocks all looked black from the outside, so I split one to see that the color inisde is quite bright, like lime. Nothing of particular interest, except that it is one of the very few pictures in my archive where I am in front of the lens instead of behind the lens. It is just here to have a place for it in my blog profile.

Apple iCal without .mac account

Today I tried out icalx.com and it seems to work perfectly with Apple iCal 2.0.3. You can publish your calendar from one computer and subscribe (read-only) from other computers and you can view your calendar in any webbrowser (read-only).

To overcome the read-only limitation in this setup I also subscribed to Google Calendar, but the interaction is tedious. (I can add calendar items to the google calendar and subscribe to the google calendar in iCal from the other computers, but they are still totally separate calendars. I can then manually cut-copy-paste each individual google calendar entry into my iCal calendar using Apple iCal, but this is rather inconvenient and error prone.)

Anyway, if you create new events on one machine most of the time and simply want to review them from other machines this is perfect (since all automatic).

However, I still think I have to set up my own server to get all the functionality I want. Year 2006, and we are still in the stone-age of the computer era. ;-)