My dream for next year: Tango on a slackline!

About 6 weeks ago I started slacklining. A great sport!

As I don’t have a good natural sense of balance I’m not a exactly talented for this sport but, with practice, even I have managed to make progress and my current record is now at 20 steps on the line without falling. No jumps, nothing fancy, just walking on a line 20cm above the ground.

Apart from slacklining, another free-time activity I enjoy are my tango classes. One of my dreams for the coming year is to combine the two and to find somebody to dance tango with … on a slackline!

As tango puts a lot of emphasis on “keeping your balance” it quite naturally lends itself to this endeavor.

So, if you’re in Barcelona (or near) and you can already slackline a bit and are generally interested in dancing, do get in touch!

If I can’t find anybody to dance with, I’ll have to stick to more mainstream/boring ideas such as juggling on a slackline. But so far that is still at least 4-5 months in the future …

What a Wonderful Girl

I’m really proud of my mom. Even though she’s no longer as young as she looks she’s still “childish” enough to send me a postcard like this.

You know that it’s Monday …

… when you arrive at your office door and you try to open/unlock the door with your remote control car key. Strangely, this didn’t work and it took me a couple of seconds that this was not the office door’s fault.

If you see my brain running around in your neighborhood, please point it in the right direction. Thanks.

How are your today? – But at least with extra chocolate!

I’m currently in Boston for a conference. Though the last time I went to the US is less than two years ago, I’d already forgotten how annoying it can be if everybody asks you how your are … while obviously not giving a X or not even waiting for the reply.

On the upside, I also found something which I have unfortunately never seen in Europe so far. Pain au chocolat – with extra chocolat topping on the outside! Sweet!

YABP

Yet another boring post: I’m now on the starters list for two double ironman triathlons this summer. (Or rather just “double triathlon” as otherwise the company ironman might sue me for abusing their trademark.)

E.g. check this or this list.

One of the funny things is: I think it might be enough to finish one of the two races to make it to the top 100 of of the IUTA ranking of ultra-triathletes – last year there were a total of less than 80 registered nuts.

Of course, my goal is just to finish within the time limit (36h) – ideally with a smile. If I’m last, all the better. The first and the last person to finish traditionally get the most cheers.  🙂

A picture says more than a thousand words

So a thousand pictures must be saying more than a million words.

You can find the corresponding (photo) story here and here.

And, no, it is *not* a photo love story but just lots of pictures I took over the last couple of months.

Check my numbers and maybe save my dream

For some time I’ve been toying with the idea of buying *lots* of Helium and balloons. I was not really planning to fly (as this would be far to dangerous) but rather just to reduce my effective weight by, say, 50-60kg so that I could easily jump to a height of 2-3 meters. The balloons would be attached with strings to a climbing harnest.

Now I just did the math. Please double-check it. Hopefully, I made a mistake.

The density of air is roughly 1.2kg/m³ which is (check!) 1.2g/liter. Now if Helium had no weight at all, then I would need to displace about 50kg/(1.2g/liter) = 42,000 liters = 42m³

This is about the volume of my whole office and would take tens of thousands of regular-sized latex balloons to hold. Price-wise it would probably boil down to about 10,000 Euros just for the Helium (… though I could probably get a considerable discount when buying that amount). Of course, filling tens of thousands of balloons is non-trivial in itself.

What a shame.

Of course, there are lots of other options (parachute jumping, paragliding, …) to “fly” a bit, but I wanted to have a more ground-based method just to lift me up a bit in a safe but yet fairly unconstrained manner.

Why jugglers are lucky and why I’m a nerd

Last weekend I went to see the Swiss national circus Knie here in Lausanne.

In their amazing show they also had a juggler, juggling with tennis rackets. While I was watching his performance I was thinking: “Man, he is sooo lucky that there is gravity. He should try that in outer space!”.

Nouns as verbs, or why Lausanne is a dangerous place

I used to think that Lausanne was surely one of the safest places in the world. But this has dramatically changed.

About a month ago my taste buds (figuratively speaking) were viciously attacked by a young boy here – he mooned me! In case you didn’t know, yes, moon can be used as a verb.

Only two weeks later I was then attacked again, probably also by youngsters. Somebody tried to egg me when I was walking down the streets of Lausanne with a couchsurfing visitor. (Usage number 17. at the link above.) Fortunately, they missed. But judging from the traces left on the pavement, we were not their first victims.