Simon says ... - garbasail tag

Garbasail project, part 3

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Finally! After some last works on our garbasail we made it to the beach and let it fly. :-)

The last things we had to do was taping the diagonal lines, making the corners a bit stronger with more duct tape, preparing the handlebar (we used one from a bike :-) ), cutting the strings and tying them to the handlebar and the garbasail.

Yesterday we tried it out on the beach in Zandvoort, Netherlands then. The weather was perfect, there was lots of space, strong wind and the garbasail did exactly what we hoped for. It was strong enough to drag us across the beach but not too strong to handle or to break.
Though, after the first two "flights" it did get all tangled up. Untangling it wasn't easy since we didn't want to get into the strings while it was blowing up. We would have needed more people to handle this. Nonetheless, we had about 4 to 5 really good rides and a lot of fun.

I put the photos of our flights and some construction details up on Flickr. This is the first time I use Flickr - I didn't know their interfaces are such a mess. But all in all it's easier than just having a few pictures in the blog entries.

Blogging, the Semantic Web, languages and the garbasail

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:27:00 GMT

I don't really blog much which has a reason: I have planned a lot of blog entries about many different things and they all build on top of each other: I want to explain the things I do to my readers. But I never get to finish any of the entries and so I figure blogging doesn't work this way. I just have to write. Whenever I feel the need to explain something I can still do it later on. And there are other people to explain things anyway.

Well so I have read up on a lot of Semantic Web stuff over the last year and it has given me a vision of what I want to do with computers. I will explain this step by step. But first some random posts about parts of the technology around it which you probably might not understand immediately if you don't know what it's all about.

By the way: as you can see I actually have two blogs, one in English and one in German. Normally I will try to write posts in both languages and then interlink them. But sometimes there are topics which are specific for one language audience (e.g. German politics and press) and sometimes I'm just lazy. :-)

Oh and: the garbasail project hasn't died! We had some bad luck with finding dates for trying it out last year and every time we wanted to there was rain announced (just like right now, it's raining cats and dogs). I hope we'll have more luck this year.

Take care!

Garbasail project, part 2

Sat, 12 May 2007 15:06:19 GMT

Yesterday we found some time to work on our garbasail again. There's not much exciting to say about that but I've got some neat little pictures for you, so read on! ;)

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Garbasail project, part 1

Sat, 05 May 2007 20:57:00 GMT

It all started when I randomly browsed the Urban Dictionary (I think I was collecting data to find out how their ranking algorithm works) and came across the term garbasail. Since I found the pictures there quite cool, I googled a bit about it, read the garbasail website (warning: Flash) and eventually told a friend about it. He was quite enthusiastic about it and said we should build one too one day. So the idea for the project was born but some more time went by (it wasn't the right time of year anyway) until my friend planned to celebrate his birthday at the seaside. Until then we wanted to get it done so we started planning the garbasail in detail. A few sketches later we started looking for the right materials and yesterday we finally got there: we had everything we needed and the first construction phase could begin.

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