Jeroen

A short list of who’s covering what about the Freestyle Worlds 2009 on the web:

• ICF Freestyle World Championships. The official ICF page with announcements in both English and German (pretty much mixed).
• Kayak Session is the official media partner of the event. They made a special page for news about the event where you can find regular in-depth reports as the events progresses.
• World Kayak is also reporting about the worlds, although the content they published so far looks like copies of the ICF articles.
• Freecaster.tv will bring live streaming of the complete finals. The page currently show a countdown.
• Various blogs are reporting from Thun. The most active bloggers are those paddling for the boat brands that are best represented at the worlds: Jackson Kayak and Wavesport
• Twitter has become very popular during the past year and is also being used to report short messages from Thun.
• Playak has a special page called the Thun Twitterwall, which lists and links to all news mentioned above and more (tweets, photos, blogs, videos, news, podcasts, and forum discussions in 5 languages). A condensed version of the wall is also shown on the right side of every page on Playak.
  The freecaster video streaming of the finals will be shown right on top of the Playak front page on Saturday and Sunday September 5&6.

If you know of more online coverage from the Worlds, please let me know and I’ll update this post.

Nice video by Keegan Grady. Consider this an ‘Introduction to paddling in Thun’.

Some pretty shallow interviews by Billy Harris

This is a nice wave train after the second lock in Thun, about half a mile from the Worlds Wave.

It’s here on the map: http://playak.com/map.php?om=32760 (webcam).

We flew in on Friday, from Zurich, through Atlanta, to Salt Lake City. Why is it that Atlanta always spells delays, inefficiency, and trouble? It’s almost impossible to get through customs there. This time we missed the connecting flight to SLC and ended up being on the road for a full 24 hours. Last time was even worse. That was 4 years ago. I had broken a toe 2 days earlier and the day I landed in Atlanta was the day that the infamous ‘shoe bomber’ was arrested. Homeland Security warning level Red! Imagine standing in a very slow line with a broken toe and major sleep deficit for 5 hours! I swear this was the last time I’ll travel through Atlanta!

Otherwise, all fine here. We’ll go have a look at the setup of the Open Air Demo today. It’s extremely hot though: yesterday was 104F / 40C degrees. The air is so dry, that it still feels comfortable though and I didn’t loose a drop of sweat. Just burned my fingers on the steering wheel and my GPS almost melted when I had forgotten it in the car.

Here are some photos from the temporary Playak headquarters in Salt Lake City:

I managed to add more than 8000 weather stations to Playak. If you go to a specific location on the Kayak World Map, e.g. the Pueblo WW Park:

http://playak.com/map.php?om=1964

you'll see the live weather and forcaset right underneath the map. I also added this to the Playak Spot Guide, so each spot description  shows the weather at the bottom of the page as well. See for instance Hurley Weir:

http://playak.com/article.php?sid=95

This only works for spots that have been added to the map of course, so in case your local spot is in the Spot Guide, but not on the map yet, double click on the location on the map and add it!

Another very exciting new Playak service is in the pipeline as well - more about that soon!

Enjoy,
Jeroen

I programmed a new feature that allows registered users to mark their participation in events.

To see what this is all about, go to the calendar, and click on an event that you plan to visit. You will then see a dropdown list called MyEvents, where you can select your involvement in the event, e.g. 'I will visit' or 'I will compete'.

All events that you add to MyEvents this way will show up on your profile page, under a new Tab called 'Events'. And so you can let the world know at which events you will be / have been.

I will probably add more features to this in the future. One thing that I really want is the possibility to add Playak events to Outlook or Google Calendar etc. Or if you have other wishes, please let me know and I'll see what I can do.

Enjoy,
Jeroen

Found this move - they call it the Magic Trick - in the Riot blog:

Now, this is all nice, even if the paddle throwing part of the trick smells a bit oldschool, but I think it can be taken to a next level, which I will call the Circus Trick here:

Instead of throwing the paddle forward, throw it way up in the air, and catch it again when you are done with your loop.

Now I can't tell you if it's technically possible at all (hack, I cannot even loop ), but it would sure look impressive and it's definitely worth a try….

Looking forward to the first video of a successful Circus Trick ….

Update January 27 2007:

Hurray, the video of that trick exists:

{mov}Fubu%20Flip%20-%20slum%20dot%20se{/mov}

Thanks to Mikael and slum.se !

A cool headcam video of the rhine falls descent, made for the film festival in Germany, February 2007:

Thanks to bondle.de