Ottonic, Stephan Brunner's blog

Playa Nights

Playa Nights 1, Acrylics on canvas, 36 in x 24 in

Painting

Started painting again, enjoying it a lot!. Here is one of the first pictures I did. It's acrylics on paper and is called 'Gangsters'. The inspiration came from a Manga book I picked up from a recycling bin in Tokyo a few years ago.

Yet again Burning Man ...

.. just that this reminds me that I did not post anything for a whole year! Anyways, Burning Man 2007 came and went and as expected, it was great. This year, the weather was quite more dramatic then last year. We had 4 rather intimidating dust storms and even some rain which caused a double rainbow to show up. The rainbow was a quite memorable sight. This year we brought a PVC dome tent to be used as our lounge and shade area. We used a parachute to cover it and the dome stood up all week despite the storms. I learned a lot watching it twist and bend in these storms and am planning to slightly re-design it for next year. I'll post some more dome related info in some future posts. Some of the pictures from this year can be found here.

Burning Man 2006!

Last week was the Burning man festival in the Nevada desert and I was fortunate enough to participate. What a blast! I took hundreds of pictures and you can find a few of them here. Neither dust, heat, sleep deprivation or absence of showers could taint the experience and there is no question that I will be back in Black Rock City next year!

Writely

After reading about Writely I decided to give it a try. I used Writely to edit and publish to my blog which is powered by Moveable Type. Surprisingly, I got it to work in no time and in fact this entry was edited and posted using Writely. The only thing that did not work out of the box is posting images. Also, the built in spell checker marks "Writely" as a typo. But appart from these beta glitches, I am quite impressed! The question though is: do I trust Google to be a place to store my stuff or is loss of privacy the price we all have to pay for free stuff? I guess we gave up long ago when we got our Safeway cards ...

Faxsnake

We were wondering why our fax suddenly had problems with transporting paper but we finally figured out why: after opening the case we discovered a 20 inch snake that apparently moved in a while ago. We ended up carrying the whole fax into an open space area behind our house where we disassembled the fx machine with a really long screw driver and used really long sticks to convince her to escape into the wilderness. The thought that it somehow got into our house and then moved into the fax machine is kind of frightening ...

Back from Japan ...

Here is are a few shots taken earlier this month during a short trip to Tokyo. The timing could not have been better since we just got there in time for the cherry blossom. The weather was mostly pleasant and as always, we had a fantastic time in Japan. In one funny incident, a large bird stole half of my bento box from my lap while eating lunch on the beach in Kamakura I guess we should have tried to read the all Japanese warning signs before unwrapping our food!

Happy Cows

Who said it was not true that there are happy cows in California? While driving south on Highway 1 along the Pacific coast in Sonoma county a few weeks back, we noticed a bunch of cows obviously enjoying the beauties of nature.

Photo Gallery

In the age of small highly portable digital cameras, we take pictures anytime anywhere which puts a new twist to photography. I recently started altering some of the snapshots I took with my digital camera and published them into my online gallery. This is an ongoing effort and more photos will be published overtime.

For those who still are doubtfull ...

"So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway. This is working very well for them." � former First Lady Barbara Bush, regarding flood evacuees at the Astrodome in Houston.

Sources: New York Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle

Tear Drops

Tear Drop travel trailers have been popular in the 40'e and 50's and recently caught some new interest. They can be towed by almost any car and with their simple setup let you take off on a moments notice. Read more about Tear Drop Trailers here. Dutchman, a manufacturer of RVs in a joint venture with a German company came out with T@B, a modern interpretation of the classic Tear Drops

Mustang

This is my new 2005 Mustang, lowered by 1.5 inches with 20 inch wheels and dual tone leather seats. I love this car! Not only does she look good, she drives and handles like a champ.

Highrise Arcades

Project Blinkenlights allows you to play some of the most popular arcade games such as Tetris or Pong from your mobile phone, using highrise buildings as your screen. For example, enjoy a quick game of Pong in case you happen to be in Berlin simply by dialing +33 (1) 44247351 on your mobile.

"With a matrix of 20 x 26 windows (resulting in 520 directly addressable pixels) and a size of 3370m2, the Arcade installation is positioned to be world's biggest computer screen ever."

Defend your cube!

Keep unwanted guests and managers out of your cube with the Room Defender. Gamers should be very familar with automated guard turrets, they can be found in most games and are usually hard to disable if at all. Not sure how tough this little friend is but it might be worth a try. Get your copy at Think Geek.

Revenge of the Right Brain

There is an interesting article on Wired about the role of the right side of the brain in the post-information age. I tend to slightly disagree however since creative skills have been substantial for human progress and personal success throughout history and not just now after we started to whine about outsourcing white collar jobs to Asia.