Where is Klaus?

The Chase - reporting from railway heartland

Saturday, August 21 2010 was the big day for the STOP RISK film crew involving a hair raising chase of a couple of helicopters sneaking up from behind on a freight train for a dare devil jump of Hollywood stuntman Oliver Keller. It all worked out to perfection, as you can see from the attached Vimeo clip, in spite of 35C+ sweltering temperatures testing the actor's and crew's staying power.

At the end of the day, another hollywoodesque action scene was in the can making for a teeth clenching intro for the Swiss Railways safety promoting movie. You will find an innocent bystander's take on the day's actions by clicking on the video clip below

The Chase from Klaus Huber on Vimeo.

It's all about a Tarp - reporting from railway heartland

Last Friday, August 20, 2010 the STOP RISK film crew assembled again to start shooting on location the third sequel of the Swiss Railway's award winning campaign. The "usual suspects" gathered somewhere in the midst of the Swiss railway heartland again under the leadership of Michel Girardin of Creative Consulting, the producer Stefan Christen of Addictive Films and Michael Huber, the director from Boutiq, the Swiss animation and motion design firms.

It was a great opportunity to watch this experienced crew, which included again Oliver Keller and his Hollywood based K-Stunts team, in vigorous action. Click on the link below to see my first day's impressions.

It's all about a tarp from Klaus Huber on Vimeo.

Down Memory Lane

Down Memory Lane from Klaus Huber on Vimeo.

After the various blogs this summer reporting my impressions from a road trip to Crater Lake and along the Northern and Central California coast, finally here is the movie. Joining me in calling the CA coast as probably THE most spectacularly beautiful pieces of real estate in the world? If in doubt, you should go and check it out yourself.

Global Warming - America, a throw-away society?

A European traveller in the US cannot but be amazed about how much waste is produced in American hotels. The above snapshot is a typical example of the sort of waste created in the "classical" family hotel chains "Holiday Inn" and "Best Western": tons of styropor cups and plates and plastic cuttlery produce mountains of garbage which could easily be avoided by using porcellain plates and cups and a dishwasher. And the guests' eating pleasure would be greatly enhanced!
Next up: air conditioning setting. Instead of 19Celsius setting the thermostat at a more bearable 23 C would save tons of energy.

Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup 2009: back from the races on day two

I finally got around to putting a short YouTube video together from the "homecoming" of the maxi yachts on day two at Porto Cervo. It's quite a sight to watch these superb racing machines and their crews after a long day fighting 20 + knots of Northeasterlies in the Maddalena archipelago. Enjoy.

Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup 2009: Dialing up and start of final regatta

It was Sunday, September 13 2009 around noon time, when the glorious maxi yachts were dialing up for the start of the last regatta of this year's Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup at Porto Cervo. Neville Crichton's Alfa Romeo eventually won the event in the Mini/Maxi Racing Group while the litigious "Mr. Skype" Niklas Zennstroem's RAN won in the prestigious overall category. It was an electrifying scene of all these beautiful maxi yachts jockeying for positions at the starting gate with at times hair raising maneuvers to get to the best spot before the gun went off. I watched it from the top of the helipad high above Porto Cervo's old harbor and here are a few highlights:

 

2009 Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup - Day 2: Luna Rossa ahead of the pack

It was one of those glorious days off the Costa Smeralda where traditionally in early September the Rolex Maxi Cup is held. The worlds most prestigious yachts, stacked with the best sailing crews money can buy and its super rich owners congregate at Porto Cervo for this Formula Uno gig of sailing. It's an awesome sight to follow these beautiful machines through the rock strewn island archipelago of La Maddalena up north to the Bocche di Bonifacio between Northern Sardinia and Corsica at a steady Northeasterly of up to 20 knots. Unfortunately, I had no boat to follow the race this time. Hence I did the second best to do under the circumstances and caught these awesome racing machines when they reentered port after the battle.

For the second day in a row, Luna Rossa, Bertelli's yacht (1999 winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup) with the Brazilian Olympic stars Torben Grael and Robert Scheidt at the helm came back from the finish line ahead of the pack. Luna Rossa, the Ferrari of Italian sailing, traditionally assembles the best of crews who know the waters around La Maddalena like their pockets.

Not too far behind in second place came Ran skippered by Tim Powell which lead from start to finish but got a time correction to put it just behind Luna Rossa . Its owner, Niklas Zennström, the person behind Kazaa and Skype, must have been a very happy man indeed. Money can buy quite a few things in life... Any way, it looked like he was anxious to "skype" his boat's glorious performance a.s.a.p.

But Mr. Z. was not the only software tycoon grabbing attention at Porto Cervo harbour. Hasso Plattner's (the SAP founder's) Visione, at nearly 150 feet is the biggest yacht in this year's Rolex Cup. It is a strikingly eye catching beauty as you will appreciate.

"Formula Uno Yachting" takes it's toll after a grueling day off lumpy Porto Cervo. A well deserved time-out for these Sagamore Enigma crew members to be ready for the evening's social program!

Observed on US 1: gas guzzlers still king!

2009/Q1 statistics suggest, that for the first time in US history, small & medium sized cars achieved about 20% of new car sales. As a casual observer on our recent trip Highway 1 southbound from Vancouver, WA to L.A. I can hardly confirm this statistic. On the contrary, particularly for a European, one gets the impression that gas guzzler are still "king of the road". Particularly in rural areas, you can hardly see any small-sized, fuel efficient cars. 

Interestingly enough, though, the closer we got to California, the more smaller cars we could observe. In fact, on CA roads, particularly in the urban areas of San Francisco and L.A. one can observe plenty of smaller-sized cars. I presume this must have something to do with California's stricter fuel consumption laws, because country-wide, Ford F-Series truck, GM's Silverado and the Dodge Ram together still made up more than a third of 2009 new car sales. Look west, US congress. 

Snow Leopard: Services is worth the upgrade!

After a frustrating day with Snow Leopard yesterday in getting my network printers working, a look at the totally changed implementation of services brightened things up considerably today. Without exaggerating too much I can state that the revised services and automator implementation in SL alone is worth the $29 you have to pony up for the software. In Leopard and earlier implementations of services we all knew that the feature existed but never really used it. Now in SL, this is an entirely different story. But rather than trying to explain to you what it is all about, I suggest you watch a couple of movies prepared by Alex Lindsay of Pixelcorps with Sal Soghoian, Apple's creator of "Services" and "Automator". I bet you will enjoy them.

Snow Leopard: Apple Talk R.I.P.

Early adopters invariably get punished! It's a lesson I had learned the hard way several times before. But the "thrill" of being among the early birds to test Apple's new operating system this time around was again stronger than reason. The result, as you expected, was serious trouble in getting certain things to work properly. This time it was my network printers (an old HP Laserwriter 4050 TN and a relatively new Canon PIXMA 5200R) which simply refused to work.

Apple Care Support, although very friendly and supportive, could not get my printers working either. Their advice: "put pressure on the print suppliers to update their drivers".. Apple Care offered to "push" the problem within Apple, although with little hope for a solution within a reasonable time frame. That left "googling" as my last hope.

It didn't take prolonged browsing to obtain confirmation, that I was far from alone with my problem. APPLE had unceremoniously dropped its age old proven network software "Appletalk" without even mentioning it. As a result, network printing no longer functions with a great number of printers, as manufacturers could not keep up with providing modified printer drivers. After reading through several dozens of Apple Forum pages full of irate early adapters with non-functioning network printers I finally found a solution suggested by a HP engineer which worked. To save you time, I shall repeat it here:

Take the following steps to mount a HP network printer: 1) delete the "old" printer icon in the "Printers" window of the "Print & Fax" System Prefences tab of Snow Leopard. 2) select a new printer by pressing the "HP Jet Socket" tab under "Protocol"and enter the printer's IP address into the "Address" tab. 3) The system then automatically searches for and finds the HP Laserwriter printer driver (for which an updated Snow Leopard compatible driver exists on HP's website and I believe also on the Snow Leopard system disc) 4) with the new printer driver selected press "Add" on the "Add Printer" tab in Print & Fax System Prefs and you are good to go. The HP driver only works with this procedure. By inputting e.g. the printer's name and selecting "Internet Printing Protocol" the system finds the appropriate printer driver, but the actual printing gets stuck every time as the printing queue triggers the printer to go "off".

I hope this will be of assistance to other frustrated "early snow leopards".

Unfortunately, this procedure did not work for my other printer mentioned above, since Canon has not yet provided an updated printer driver. Be patient, early adopters ....