I just had to post this 2 silly photos from this weekend. Thanks for the two gift hats, Alex. Next will be the plastic parrot I can imagine.

(click to enlarge)

Just another weekend at lake Leman. With my sister this time. Wind was basically absent this time so lots of swimming (and sunburns). She also finished her “pimp my boat” operation with white (faux) leather all over the place, getting rid of the orange overdose.

At last. Seems like we jumped directly from a crappy “feels-like-Winter” Spring season to real Summer. But Friday it was really hot so I decided to spend the weekend on the lake with my nephew and niece. My sister and brother in law joined us Saturday for lunch and a quick stroll on the lake.

Here’s a few more pictures. Most of them crappy since they were taken with the iPhone.

(click pictures to enlarge)

It was really sunny, no clouds and the water temperature in the middle of the lake was 21°C which ended up inviting me (and my nephew) for a swim. Looking forward for next weekend. And for my face sunburn to look less obvious by Monday.

Despite what it looks like, I had one of my best dinners ever, yesterday. This was at my colleague Zubaria’s wedding. Post to come soon when I join my picture’s with Tina’s, who did the official paparazzi role. I am a fan of Pakistani food from now, officially.

By the way, sorry for the post slowdown but I am in my second week with my nice whooping cough (coqueluche, pertussis) so what I want most when not coughing and specially after back from work is to rest.

Yet another CastroVerdian visit (getting really common lately). Chic Alfred’s and Dealer’s Silvia (Silvia do Chico Alfredo e da Dilar) this time. And for a change, we (that’s Me, her and João) ended up in the alps, Jungfrau region. No snow anymore but weather was great and sunny for a nice hike… 22 Km downhill all the way from Mürren to the Hotel in the valley. Probably they hate me now. Obviously this was after knocking at the producer’s doors at Gimmelwald for cheese, dry sausage, bread, milk and homemade yogurt. And eating like there’s no tomorrow with quite an interesting view, as the photos can show on the gallery below. We even were able to take a picture of Heidi’s grandfather smoking his pipe on his balcony. I took the opportunity to paint Marta’s (Simões) ribbon for her end of studies ceremony, “Queima das fitas” (finally). I tied a cow bell in on of its ends and draw a picture of Heidi (afterdark version). Congratulations by the way (Marta, not Heidi). The last day we visited some waterfalls inside the mountain, quite claustrophobic, draining 25 square quilometers of glacier and snow. Our ears were buzzing for quite a while afterwards. Then we headed towards Geneva again, stopped three hours soaking at the Lavey-les-bains SPA/thermal baths and after completely set in zombie mode, drove to Evian and had some pizza at my boat (with sunset included) before ending in Geneva. OK, enough blah blah blah. Click below for the gallery.

So here’s my first post from Milan, where I arrived yesterday and had a few hours to look at the city with my personal guide, Entrances’s Little Susan (Susaninha de Entradas). We didn’t saw each other for more than 10 years. She is in first picture below:

Second picture (above) it’s me smashing the balls of some bull illustration somewhere in the Duomo’s mosaic floor, which they convince me it would bring me lots of luck doing so. I wait for my turn after a dozen of other tourists and do the ritual. I was not that convinced about the good luck thing but I gave it a chance. It would be harder to convince me if it was a real bull, specially in a public place. There was already a huge hole on the floor. The balls were not visible at all, and they told me they just did a restoration of the mosaics less than one year ago. Poor bull.

I am kind of exhausted at this moment writing a post in a less than 10 minute break between two sessions. Kind of exhausted because after arriving and dropping my stuff at the hotel, wired everything and left the laptop doing a never-ending data restore from an external drive (details below). Then was walking around the city with Susana and Gian-Luca (her boyfriend), shopping at Armani for some gifts for my niece and nephew, and arrived back to the hotel a bit late after eating almost 1 Kg of Susana’s excellent home-made lasagna. And lots of cheese and sausage before that. With beer. And she was able to force me to eat a huge bowl of fruit salad, after all that.

After the food overdose I had to recover data and reinstall everything since my mac laptop, the one where I had everything, decided to die Friday afternoon, and Saturday my company got this new one I’m using now since it’s weekend and the dead one has to be sent to apple. By the way, recovering data trough migration tool into a new installation from time machine backups doesn’t work that smoothly, so don’t trust it religiously like most mac users. Specially applications seem kind of erratic and I might have to uninstall and reinstall everything in order for them to behave normal. The one I need most (Flex) had to be reinstalled about 7 times before everything was OK. I was burping lasagna (silently) between every installation. The sessions for 360 Flex started quite early and to be able to get in time for breakfast (as if I wasn’t still digesting that lasagna) I had to sacrifice even more the few hours I had left for sleeping. Anyway, coffee does wonders. The giant pizza I just had for lunch is probably having a chat with the lasagna (and maybe the full english breakfast) since my stomach is doing odd noises randomly (very convenient for being at conferences).

By the way, for everyone thinking that programmers and computer geeks in general do not have any kind of sense of humor look how Koen engaged people before starting his session, against 3 in other rooms (click picture to read):

OK, there’s still one (long) session to go today, then I just wanna sort out some stuff online and get out for a Tiramisu, or two. Arrivederci (or whatever it is for goodbye in Italian).

[PT] Ontem tive uma curta visita, só de um dia, e em que eu estava a trabalhar. Mas deu para meter cerca de 30% da conversa em dia durante o almoço (pato à Pequim), e numa visita guiada (de carro) seguida de jantar (italiano, selecção de várias “pastas” de onde saímos quase capazes de rebolar). Ainda sobrou algum tempo para o gato e tudo, como se pode ver nas fotos. Felizmente, vou ter mais visitas para breve pois ela acabou de entrar para a TAP como assistente de bordo (já agora, parabéns) e vai andar a “aterrar” por aqui de vez em quando.

Just a late-night cut and paste video of the best (or worst) moments of the big weekend.

For this Easter micro-holidays, comprising Friday to Monday, I had Erica and Andrew (top-left picture) as my Canadian guests (they are living in London now). We had an abusive cheese raclette for lunch-dinner, since their flight arrived quite late, and finished the day in a lazy way (well, we couldn’t move anyway) watching the full season 4 of The Office (US).

Saturday, we left Geneva really early in the morning towards the Jungfrau region, after Interlaken. We arrived to our hotel in Stechelberg, dropped our stuff and took the cable-car up to Gimmelwald, were we planned to stay but the mountain hostel was fully booked. After the typical knocking at the locals doors to buy Cheese (from Esther) and dry Sausage (from Erika). We walked around Gimmelwald, stopped in some panoramic-view-bench and started eating… more cheese (bottom-right picture). Heinz, the cat (we named it like that almost 2 years ago) appeared as usual in the same spot while we were eating.

We took the other cale-car up to Mürren, where after a short walk and thousands of pictures we rented some sleds and moved further up to Almendhubel, taking the funicular train. First day we only sledged once (the slope is quite big) and got enough bruises. There was some trampoline randomly in the middle of the snow (top-right picture) so we stopped and waited for 3 kids (aged 6 maximum) to get out of there, complaining to their grandparents that “that was not for adults to play”. Well, after they kindly leave, the “adults” gave it a try. It was quite fun as the pictures might show and the video will for sure, as soon as I find some time to cut the best-of for the weekend.

Back to Stechelberg, in the valley, we get drunk at the hotel. Licor Beirão with snow works very well (middle-left picture). For dinner we eat until we are almost able to roll. The food at Hotel Stechelberg is outrageously good as usual. There’s accordion swiss country music until late but we are back to one of the rooms, drinking more.

Sunday started kind of early, with me defrosting the car with some good 3cm of snow on top (middle-right picture). After annoying Erica and Andrew knocking on their window we had a (40% cheese) breakfast that would be almost enough to feed 4 families for a week. We check out and get to the cable-car station to go back to Gimmelwald-Murren-Almendhubel and go on the sleds again for a few times. After collecting some more bruises (specially Erica) we eat some more cheese and stop for a coffee. Instead of taking the cabe-car from Mürren to Gimmelwald, we buy an extra plastic bum-sled (sku). We go downhill on our bums trough snow, ice, asphalt and even wooden stairs. My jeans get a huge hole and end up looking like some Village People’s outfit (bottom-left picture), with the difference that I have underwear. Some tourist films us on the last slope just using a hill as shortcut.

We drive back to Geneva completely exhausted. We have cheese fondue for dinner. And chocolate fondue with fruits for dessert. We rest a bit on Monday morning, to have an abusive Röstis lunch with cheese and sausages and more cheese. Afternoon is spent boiling in Lavey les Bains SPA, between Jacuzzi, Whirlpool, Sauna, Turkish Bath and whatsoever. After we are cooked, in zombie mode, we get back to Geneva but driving on the other side of the lake, to stop in Evian and have 2 huge pizzas (more cheese) in my boat. We head to the casino afterwards and quickly back to Geneva (none of us won anything, apart from awareness that gambling is stupid).

Today we were planning to have roasted Peking Duck (at a great Chinese restaurant close to my workplace, but ended up changing our minds to something lighter (I wonder why) and ended up having sushi.

Andrew and Erica are leaving in a few hours and are now doing the last shopping for tons of Rösti, Cheese and Chocolate to take to the UK. They bought a raclette machine after lunch time. Click the mosaic on top to see a picture selection. Video will be coming soon on the next post.

Pictures from the party itself (and a few freak videos) will be posted later… meanwhile I am posting just the “Family Portraits”, which we started calling “Fotos Estudio 2000″.

This all started over 3 years ago when me, Erica and a few more friends in Geneva had the idea of taking “Family Portraits” in “Les 5 portes” bar every time we were drunk (the golden mirror and a few artifacts in the background helped). The style was that kitsch/tacky kind of shots that annoying photographers (nothing to do with Estudio 2000) and our parents insisted during our teenager times (so long ago), making us pose in the classic odd positions and with odd backgrounds (flowers, fireplaces, whatever). Would get really worst if you had brothers or sisters. Here are 2 examples from those times in Geneva (click to enlarge):

Well, enough said, yesterday, as soon as we got tipsy enough, and getting worse while we were drinking more, we took an outrageous number of “Estudio 2000″ pictures. Here they are (click the scary picture below to open the album):

I’ll be retroposting a lot within the following days, since I’ve accumulated too much stuff and had no time or chance to connect during the road trip.
First post will be dedicated to the madness at the Chemical Brothers live performance at Montreux Jazz Festival, the day before we started the road trip.
This is the “Saturate” track, my favorite from the new “We are the night” album. I was expecting this reaction while playing live.

If you have a chance to see them live, during this tour, be sure not to miss it.

Since there was not really a lot of time to spend posting and uploading pictures, here’s a selection of the best ones and videos will be posted soon. This selection includes Italy, Monaco, Cannes , St Tropez and Avignon.

> CLICK HERE FOR ALL THE PHOTOS

My friend Ines Tail-Cutter just arrived today. I’ll post a few pictures and will add post comments later since I won’t be at home often and the after the road trip actually starts we will only have time to post in the hotels.

Ok, after all the waterfall hiking (kind of), barbecue, walking, jumping, kid’s playground, we stopped in Lavey-les-bains thermal baths & SPA. If you ever go to Switzerland, don’t even thing about not visiting this place (warning: you might get addicted and return every weekend, specially when snowing)!

It was supposed to be relaxing but as always we ended up getting even more tired after swimming and goofing around in hot water for three hours. All of this after everything we’ve done during the day. Well, most of the insane mood was due to me deciding to test my ATC2000 mini sports camera underwater. It says in the booklet and in its site that it should not be used underwater, but after taking a look in the way it is build, I took the risk (anyway I keep ruining cameras, palmtops and other gadgets by letting them fall in water, cliffs and sitting on them). I used it a lot in the snow while airboarding, clipped to my helmet. Should post those videos one of these days. But was really curious to see how it would work underwater. Anyway here’s the video, with some “intense” moments and a lot of silly ones. My hair without gel also looks really scary.

And here are some photos from Lavey-les-bains. The only bad thing about this place is that you feel like a zombie after soaking in hot water for hours (ususally 3 or 4), then jacuzzis, sauna, the ice room (as in the post photo), Turkish bath and so on. They even have a swimming pool with classical music underwater and occasionally dolphin and whale sounds. Ok, and when we are there we try to sing Ninfa Artemis gatôoooooo underwater to annoy everyone.

Overall it was fun and relaxing at the same time, turning my return to Geneva (driving around 100 Km) a nightmare (thanks Red Bull). The camera worked well underwater and did a good job. Unfortunately Youtube also does a good job ruining video quality. But you get an idea. The original 640×480 running at full screen, which the camera records directly to the SD card looks great, specially for a cheap sports camera. You can find this gadget on the link below, in case you are interested.

Where to get a Sports/Underwater camera?

We really needed to go for a walk after eating (outrageously) a lot. I had the idea of taking a few shots and play around a little bit more with jump/frozen photography.

I should do a dedicated post for this subject really soon, since I have a lot of good shots already. This is inspired by the work of Lois Greenfield, a great photographer I really admire, whom I had the opportunity to meet since she does some photo shoots for a campaign from our agency every year. The technique is quite simple: using an extremely fast shutter speed (1/1500 of a second in my case), you try to catch and froze the “moment”, since there will be no motion blur (or almost). It is quite difficult to catch the right instant in the beginning, but you get used to it and to your camera shutter lag. I just use a “cheap” Samsung camera here, but usually there’s not a lot of cheap cameras with manual shutter override options out there. Below are some examples of a few shots (click them).

Warning: Jumping a lot after eating too much in a barbecue might be dangerous (and messy). Try not to barf on nearby people.

In the end, after all the jumping and fooling around in general, we decided to have some masochistic moments in a kid’s playground nearby. Here’s the short video, obviously, I am the one behind the camera:

By the way, I saw this post from Sonia and I realized she has a great “toy”to do excellent frozen/jump photography. Couple that with the fact she’s a professional photographer and her camera might be ten times better than mine and go further in shutter speeds, and add some lighting gadgets probably (strobe flashes?). She has no excuse to post some interesting shots there…