it’s funny how much can change within a year, if you just decide to change.
on march 23rd 2004 - one year (and a week) ago - i wrote a little memo to myself, the content being something like this:

i want to be more spontaneous. i want to see the world. i need to get rid of some obligations.

with these simple three lines branded/carved deeply into my (sub-)consciousness, my life began to alter.
over time, i shed some parts of my life that i wasn’t 100% sure i wanted to continue, and i rearranged my priorities. with this landmark decision finally made, everything seemed so easy - and from what i remember, it was.
soon, some friends and i made a trip to munich, just because.
since then, i have been to south tyrol/italy, hamburg/germany, berlin/germany, denia/spain, budapest/hungary and south tyrol/italy again (not mentioning the trips&excursions within tyrol).

i guess what i’m trying to say, is, that i’ve made a 90° turnaround, and i’m glad i did.
it may not seem that thrilling, but from what i used to do before (especially before fall 2003), it’s a radical change.
you can only win, except if you die from a traffic accident ;-).

in another burst of short-term-ness, nadja, günter, fabio, lorenz, andi and i decided to spend easter monday in the car.
well, not just in the car - in the car, on our way through south-tyrol.
(unfortunately, andi didn’t feel too good, so he couldn’t go)

imagine a complete day of latent ambiguity and continuous equivocalness. :grin:

 
the route was set like this: innsbruck - brixen - salurn - bozen - meran - naturns (chapel of st. prokulus) - reschen - innsbruck.

because somebody (err... ok, it was me) overslept, we had to skip salurn. but we wouldn’t have had time for it anyway, since we lost 30 minutes due to my lack of sleep, skipped salurn (=saved at least an hour) and still arrived 1.5 hours late in innsbruck.

in brixen we had a nice, sunshiny breakfast at the cathedral square. and although we were just about an hour away from home, we had a considerable amount of fun with ...dialect differences.

english: kaisers/rolls >> german/innsbruck-tyrolean: semmel >> south tyrolean: semmarlan

afterwards we drove down to bozen and strolled around for some time, taking fun touristy pictures and had lunch in one of the very few restaurants that were open...

meran was a little crowded, but nice. taking pictures of "arches" would be one of the nonsensical highlights. LOL
we₁ (all of us) also found meran’s nice little protestant church where we₂ (nadja, fabio, markus) decided to sing some songs.

unfortunately we had to skip naturns, and its tiny and very old st. prokulus chapel (german link), but we were short of time...

we did make a quick stop at the village schluderns, where we had some extra fun.
we obscured some letters on their place name sign and created "luder" (german for hussy), jokingly pointing at nadja.
the best part about it was that suddenly there was a huge column of cars driving past us and watching us take that picture...

our final stop, reschen, is interesting as well: about 50 years ago a whole village was perished (after the inhabitants were relocated some 100 meters uphill) when a new storage lake was created. today, the original church’s spire is still sticking out of the huge lake.

nearly 12 hours later we arrived back in innsbruck.

 
for pictures, check back in a week or two. i’m waiting until we have them exchanged, so i can post the best ones.

i’ve done a new time-lapse project on frog spawn, because i spotted some in my pond.
the first post about this can be found here.

[skip all of that and download the video]
 

the phase i wanted to capture, was from the egg until slacking.
it would be too hard to record a pollywog’s growth in time-lapse - too much effort and clearly not ethical.
you’d have to give them tiny living space so they wouldn’t jet around all the time, or even slow them down somehow. there would have to be a special (=unnatural) way of feeding. water cleanness and oxygen problems would arise, and of course plants etc. would give them unwanted hiding places...
and i don’t presume to do that. (the environmentalist is shining through again ;-))

anyway, i did some internet research and found out the duration of my project would be about 2 weeks. in springlike-pond-climates, of course. it turns out, at room-temperature those little creatures leave their gelatinous eggs in less than 2 days!

 
the eggs would float around a lot, so i needed to fixate them somehow.
[more...]

i’ve just started a new project.
my pond has been ice-free for about a week, and i’ve already found frog spawn on the ground.

my f717 is still in spain with my older brother, the f505 he gave me in return doesn’t have a socket for the jg-rc2, so i decided to use my old webcam (dlink dsc-350) and a program i just discovered two days ago: ConquerCam.

i’m telling you because there’s a neat-o function in ConquerCam: automatic upload of the latest image.
you can see the current progress, up-to-date and live 24/7, here. [link removed, since project is completed]
(i don’t have time to look for a script that clears the image from the cache every 5 minutes, so i’m linking directly. otherwise there would be some refreshing-problems...)

[more...]

tonight, on what could be called "easter’s eve" (maybe it is even called that, no idea.), i was singing with our Osternacht Jugendchor (easter’s eve youth choir) - a project for "young" local people to have a festive easter celebration. i think it turned out well, and it *was* pretty festive!
 

i realized once more how bustling/hectic my life has gotten, because i couldn’t really concentrate for more than ten minutes at a time. after a short while, little things, glimpses, facts, memories, ... just popped into my head. that’s why i suddenly smiled several times without an aparrent reason, just in case someone noticed and wondered.
i just did it again. :grin:
 

i took a few pictures, again - i’ve added them to the previous photosession, because there were only three again.
here’s the link:

[view photos]

yesterday was good friday, and cantus borg sang at the evesong in the church of pradl.
we were singing mainly bach chorals, which is one of my very favorite types of polyphonic music!

i’ve uploaded two songs, and at this point i have to make my standard statement again:

the quality isn’t the best, because i’m only recording with my mp3-player. we do sing with (loudness-) dynamics, but the auto-level-function of my Iriver iFP-390T adjusts itself to the volume...
on the other hand it’s really handy because i probably wouldn’t get the proper settings to record *everything*.

[listen to samples]
j.s. bach - wer hat dich so geschlagen - zip [mp3], 670KB
h. schütz - aller augen - zip [mp3], 870KB

 
afterwards we were standing outside, chatting, and i met (entre autres) lorenz and my former high-school computer-science teacher mr. koller (wow, i’m sounding like an adult :neutral:) - which was really a nice surprise!

i did take photos as well, but not too many.
on the one hand there wasn’t really much time to take pictures. on the other hand, i’m currently using tom’s camera (the Cybershot DSC-F505) because i let him have mine while he’s in spain. i’m really not used to his camera, which has a lot of differently located buttons and a completely other structure of menu... besides, it doesn’t have the later invented hologram autofocus, which ensures well-focussed photos taken in dark locations.

i’m really shortened, technologically: first, my beloved t610 dies, then my precious camera is "taken away" - what’s next? i probably shouldn’t ask...
 

anyway, here are two pics that (a) are worth showing, and (b) are sharp ;-)
***edit***
i’ve added the few pictures from tonight (march 26th) as well... just seemed like a waste of space.

[view photos]

that’s about it, for now.

you know how many chips are in a usual 200g-package?
just about enough to crackle and rustle for the whole busdrive from innsbruck to rum without seeming *not* greedy.

how about something else now?
i’m sure you know the phenomenon that cats always land on their feet and jam&bread always lands on the jam-side... the guys over at www.izetit.de did an experiment on how to equiponderate the two basic physical laws (link) :grin:
other projects include trying to find out

• the distribution of letters in alphabet soup (link),
• how much fizzling is inside carbonated beverages (link),
• how much aluminum-foil is needed to wrap up a car (link), and
• the ratio of cars and skin in a playboy magazine (link)

those people are truly creative!

unfortunately, you probably won’t get the secondary jokes because the whole site is in german only...

but let me translate this for you: when eating alphabet soup, try avoiding the combination a, c (2), e, g, i, l, r (2), s, t, u - it leads up to gastric ulcer. :wink: