Tuesday, July 31, 2007


just playing with the 25 year ol d 200mm F/4 AIS. Which always suprises me how good this lens is. Specially for the price I pai last year, it was around 60 or 70$ and is completly manual, which means you need to:

- estimate the right exposure
- manual focus it
- estimate the exposure for the flash

which was quite easy, cause I only can use F/4 right now, otherwise the scratch becomes visible, and I just need to adjust the power of the flash.

Btw bottom picture is straight out of the D50, top picture is slightly enhanced.

I'm also really impressed with my database system at work, it just works right now. Scheduling/Import/Export, starting of cluster jobs, quality. All just seems to work.

So I finally can concentrate on some parts like Frontends and more statistics.

you are also never, ever supposed to google your own nickname. I use my nickname now since close to 3 names and boy I got a lot of hits with stuff I would had not expected.

- reference to photo forums, yeah I expected this
- reference to my mistake with feature pics, ok happens
- reference to my xbox gaming profile, I did not expect this, but it shows that I play not very much
- reference to work related stuff, ok seems logical
- reference to eve-online.com stuff, this now really surprises me. I was way to addicted to this game

0 references to my blog, time to change this

berlinguyinca
berlinguyinca
berlinguyinca

...maybe it's working...

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ok another week, another fight with oracle procedures.

This time I figured out that I need some materialized views to speed up my statistics. So what you do?

You create a basic script...

bla bla bla

...create materialized view ...

bla bla bla


now you execute this script and all is fine and dandy, except...

the next time you execute this script, it crashes because of the obect exists already.

A simple fix to this problem is:

--check if the view exist and if this is the case drop it first--
open get_results for 'select count(*) from all_mviews where mview_name = UPPER(''MY_FANCY_VIEW'') and owner = UPPER('''||user||''')';
fetch get_results into maxCount;
close get_results;

DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('count is: ' ||maxCount);
if maxCount > 0
then
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('dropping existing view');
execute immediate ('drop materialized view '||user||'.my_fancy_view');
else
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('no view exist with this name');
end if;

...create materialized view yada yada yada...


you can find the infos...

...about all registered views using:

select * from all_views

...about all registered materialized views

select * from all_mviews

...about all registered tables

select * from all_tables

Sunday, July 29, 2007

ok I just got back from the wonderful party and It's so much fun not to drive. I think it was one of my best ideas lately to just walk instead of drive to a friends place.

I finally could have a couple of cuba libre and enjoy some fun rounds of flip cup...

Ok for the people who don't know anything about flip cup. Basically flip cup is all about flipping cups which can be described by a couple of mathematical formulas. But lets keep it simple, what do you need for this game:

1. a backyard/patio/garage
2. an even number of players
3. an matching number of plastic cups
4. lots of beer, preferred corona or hefe weizen
5. a table as long as possible

how to play it:

1. every person gets a cup
2. every cup is filled with an inch of beer
3. now the players are lining up on each side of the table, each side defines one teams
4. once this is done you decide on which side of the table you start to play
5. the first two persons flush down there beer and try to flip their cups
6. because they are clumsy, they have to try it again and again till they finally done it
7. once they flipped their cup the player next to them flushes their beer and flips the cup
8. people start shouting go go go
9. the first team who flipped all their cups is declared winner of this round and you start a new round
10. now you define the victory conditions, 3/5/7/9/11/.../n rounds. it has to be an uneven number
11. don't forget to call names on the other team...
12. make sure you don't have Jon in you team :P

result of the evening:

Team europe: 2 (martin,Natasha,helen,keith,mel,gert)
Team usa: 1 (jon,jon,sharon,dave,miss X (Danielle?),another person)


right now I'm sitting here and reading Tom Hogans Nikon D80 book...

...still sitting and reading, 230 pages done, damn this camera can do way more than my D50. The only real difference between the D80 and D200 is

- 3fps vs 5fps
- plastic body vs metal body
- unsealed body vs sealed body

so I think I really go with the D80 instead of the D200 and keep the change for some nice trip.

Lindsay and I even thought about making a scuba diving license (the second for me, but I feel I need to take the lessons again, since its so long since I was on my last dive) and you can dive with contact lenses these days, which puts me finally in the situation to see something under water...

...now I just need to learn to deal with the sharks, my idea was diving in tahoe, but friends told me tahoe is basically very clear and cold and empty water. Barley an fishes to see.

The really nice thing is dive equipment cost like 50$ for a day which includes 2 air bottles.

Saturday, July 28, 2007

ok today I spend all my day time working on a self portrait of me. This seems like the final result and I'm quite satisfied with myself.

I also figured out that I give myself a Nikon D80 + MB-D80 for (early) Christmas and trying to see what I can get for my D50 before I invest the money to fix it.

Time to go to a party now :)

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ok so I played the last couple of hours with:

stripes
eclipse
myeclipse

and testing how simple it is to develop applications. So far I have to say that vraptor2 is much easier to use than stripes, but stripes itself is pretty mighty and easy to use. Specially compared to struts.

Sadly the combination of myeclipse + stripes + jboss doesn't work very well together which means I need to have two installations up and running.

first developing using myeclipse, the jsp editor is just wonderful
second deploy and testing with eclipse wtp

time to find another jsp editor, which is at least as good as the myeclipse editor...

Friday, July 27, 2007

this week I spend most of my time with paypal.

The basic idea was to create a couple of accounts to synchronize my banking accounts in the us with the accounts in germany and other way around. Which was supposed to be a easy task turned out to be a freaking nightmare, we will see if it worked mid to end next week.

I also checked out a couple of nikon cameras and got several estimates to get my camera fixed.

Final solution:

I get an IR filter as soon as i get my paycheck and switch the scratched element with the help of a friend. He does the soldring, I take the thing apart and lucky me, I have access to a dust free enviorement at work.
I never belived that it can have so many advantages to work in a lab.

The weekend will be pretty boring, just a party on saturday evening and the rest of the time I will end up working. Like always, the todo list gets longer and longer and I want to learn some new programming standards.

Last but not least,

http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripes/Home

seems like a pretty cool webframework.

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Sunday, July 22, 2007

Dear readers as you can see I have several advertisements on this website. These are created based on content in the blog and I would highly appreciate if you click on these advertisements from time to time.

This supports me with some money which I can put in better camera gear...

For example this is the report for the last couple of days:

Date Page impressions Clicks Page CTR Page eCPM Earnings
7/10/2007 10 0 0.00% 0 0
7/11/2007 4 0 0.00% 0 0
7/12/2007 9 0 0.00% 0 0
7/13/2007 15 0 0.00% 0 0
7/14/2007 14 0 0.00% 0 0
7/15/2007 25 2 8.00% 30.46 0.76
7/16/2007 10 0 0.00% 0 0
7/17/2007 4 0 0.00% 0 0
7/18/2007 4 0 0.00% 0 0
7/19/2007 5 0 0.00% 0 0
7/20/2007 1 0 0.00% 0 0
7/21/2007 30 2 6.67% 44.88 1.35
7/22/2007 5 1 20.00% 134.64 0.67
Totals 136 5 3.68% 20.45 2.78
Averages 10 0

0.21

Which means I already got 2.78 for doing nothing, just because somebody clicked on some stupid links...

Ok thats the best I can do to remove the scratch on my camera using photoshop.
Basically the scratch causes reflection which darken specific pixels and in return you have the dark line of the picture. Now I can lighten this line with very careful dodging...

The problem is this is really time consuming and took me close too 2 hours to correct.

So I came up with following plan,

1. order an infrared filter
2. replace the scratched element with the filter
3. sell the converted nikon D50
4. buy a nikon D80/D90, this will be around august/September

The reason that I convert the camera instead of fixing is, the IR version have a higher resale value than normal versions.And I'm quite sure i can find an electrician who is able to install me this filter for 50$.
After I read more about this procedure it seems fairley easy, except for the soldering part.

i'm also starting to like the vivitar el cheapo flash.

The bad

- sucks batteries dry
- not many adjustments possible
- very large and ugly
- problems to trigger with the optical trigger

The good

- it does what its supposed todo
- very easy to use
- very powerful compared to the sb-600

Over all I prefer the SB-600 compared to the vivitar. Mainly because I can adjust it in very fine steps and works perfectly with nikon cameras. But the SB-600 cost also 189$ compared to the 89$ of the vivitar, which does what it's supposed todo.

And its wonderful to have a second flash, as you can see with the fish pictures. These shots would have not been possible with only a single flash. it also works very nice to highlight shadows in case of 'teddy' portraits.

Basically what you are going todo is put the vivitar somewhere to provide enough light to fill your object of interest. And use the second flash for removing unwanted shadows or setting highlights.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

today I decided to play a little bit with chanel based saturation. And for this I decided to annoy lindsay fish 'diablo" a little bit which is by now 33 cm long.

So we put on flash to the right site of the tank, one flash on top of the tank and taking 10 - 20 picture to find the right exposure for this job.

Sadly I was not able to use autofocus, cause the water was playing havoc with the system from my D50. If you look at the picture, specially close to the Fin you can clearly see the scratch, which I still need to correct in photoshop, but this will take a little bit. The fish is fairly complex with all his scales.

now about these specific look,

this is actually very easy to accomplish you just need to reduce the saturation of each color channel. In this case it was green/yellow to remove the color from the plant and blue/aqua to remove the water color.

did I mention I love light room? It is so simple todo these kinds of things. And like always we have trouble with the blown highlights. Because the scales are so reflective. I tried to compensate for it, but it doesn't always work as i want and these where the only usable shots out of 100 pictures or so.

oh last, but not least use a circular polarizer to remove reflections from the fishtank. This can be even improved if you turn off all lights in the room. The used aperture was around F/8 and the used shutter speed around 500 to get rid of the ambient light. The flash's where triggered over pc cord or an optical trigger. And the pccord is just frustrating, you need to check the connections all 2 minutes

ok now after trying a couple of hours to remove the 'scratch' in the picture I gave up. i'm just not able to remove it and all what happens is that the picture looks fake. i tried dodging and cloning.




ok these two pictures are the same. The left is before "photoshop repair" the right is after repair. It took roughly 20 minutes to fix these simple picture up and tommorrow I going to shoot some birds to see how hard it is to fix these up. And afterwards I will figure out what next.
At least I learned for the future dust cleaning is easy, but I wont do a wet cleaning again.

Just to dangerous...

http://www.nikonians.org/nikon/d80/nikon_d80_2.html

here we can see an overview off all camera systems. The D50 and D70s are not longer produced and only used available for around 400 - 600$. Which means it makes not really sens to fix my D50 because it is already close too 2 years old, has a third of its lifetime down (15k releases, rated arround 30 - 45k releases before shutter needs to be replaced) and the flash is dead.

So it will be most likley the D80 or if they announce the new model i will prob with this. The 1500$ for the D200 is just way to much for a hobby. And the main difference is shooting speed (would love to have 5fps) and all controls are accessible over buttons instead of a menu.

And 869$ vs 1500$ is quite a difference...

So I read a little bit more about the idea to replace to scratched sensor element with an infrared/new element and this element cost around 95$, but the problem is you need to take the camera apart in all little pieces which scares the hell out of me for obvious reason. The instructions are here

http://www.lifepixel.com/IR.htm

I could do it except the soldering part, where I'm missing the tools and the practice. So it seems like I have to pay the fee for it, if i go this way.

Ok this is the result after a simple test series of some stepuprings on a white cutting board.



And as we can see the scratch becomes clearly visible at f/5.6 and barley visible at F/4.0. Which tells us we can use the camera for portraets, but nothing else. So I need to find a solution for this problem.

The pictures are at aperatures of f/1.8, f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6 and I used a sb-600 on ttl settings for this pictures.

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ok the first test of making a realistic picture with a scratch sensor as we can see we can't see anything because the aperature is to large. We used 6.3/7.1 and one flash in the top picture. As you can see you got some very hard shadows on the right side and all over the 'teddy'. For this reason we fire the second flash bounced of the the ceiling. It takes care of removing most of the unwanted shadows.

The setup was a sb-600 from the left connected over a standard pc cord and set too manual. The second flash was triggered over an optical trigger. Sadly the trigger works only once out of 5 times. Now the question is, is it related to the cheap vivatar flash or is it related to the trigger. The trigger also wont fire on my sb-600.

The main problem was that the flash both where to powerfull. Specially the vivatar, cause I can only set it to 1/16th output. The sb-600 can be set to 1/64th and can be adjusted in 1/3 ev.

So the vivitar flash does what it is supossed to be, but I could need 45 feet of pc-cord and a y-adapter so I can trigger both flash over the synccords. Which is more reliable, than the optical trigger. Basically I need to adjust the trigger so that its show directly to the sb-600 or it wont fire.

Time to make a test series at which aperature the scratch in the sensor becomes visible. I still don't understand how it happend, it makes no sense. That the specialiced cotton pads are able to scratch the sensor. Maybe it is just residue, but it certainly does not seems so. I tried to remove it with several sensor cleaning solutions, but nothing works.

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after I spend now some time with the scratched sensor it is possible to fix it in post processing but it takes arround 5 - 10 minutes to fix the scratch in simple pictures like to the left.

Time to grab the flashs and a lens and do some real world tests to see how well it works.

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after I received my wet cleaning kit it happened that it scratched my sensor or in other words I can throw my camera now away.

life sucks :(

Now I try to figure out what my options are.

1. I send the camera in to get it fixed and pay 300$ for it
2. i send the camera in and get it converted to IR which includes a new filter (which replace the scratched) and it cost 300$ + I need a new camera
3. I buy a nikon D80 which cost 900$ - need to save money a month
4. I buy a nikon D200 which cost 1500$ - need to save money 3 month

for the moment I wait till the new Nikon products are released and decide than what I gonna do, but it truly sucks. It also makes no sense to buy a used D50 which cost 500$ and the Nikon D80 is better, but i would prefer the D200 which is a truly better than the D50.

time to save money...

the big question is can I justify spending 1500$ for a camera body. And the D80 just is missing a couple of features i really want to have. For example the 5fps or that you can set everything with a button on the camera instead of browsing the menus.

So basically what is different:

- 5fps vs 3fps
- weather sealed vs non sealed
- metal vs plastic body
- can meter with all lenses instead only with newer AF lenses
- d200 has no problems with metering vs the buggy matrix meter of the D80
- D80 feels wrong in my hands and needs battery grip to feel right

But for the 1500$ instead of 900$ I could also get my D50 converted, which would allow me than to shoot infrared and a nice lens. I also could afford the D80 in august/september compared to the D200 which I could not afford before Christmas. And I would hate to have a vacation and having no camera...

So most likely I do the smart thing and get a D80 or the new model which is supposed to be released next week. And send the D50 in to get converted to RI and use it in this mode or sell it over ebay. Maybe I can recover 200$...

Thursday, July 19, 2007

yay, not

today I received my flash and I have to say I should have ordered a nikon SB-600 instead. It works nice but its so bulky and the sb-600 is way more accurate. So I think I will play with it over the weekend and in the worst case it goes to ebay to recover some money.

i also ordered to much stuff with it. Like 2 adappters instead of 1 needed and 2 wires instead of one because i could trigger it with a integrated slave...

lesson learned only buy nikon flashs in future.

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Monday, July 16, 2007

and another 50$ spent for a wet sensor cleaning kit. I so hope it gets the damn camera cleaned. I think I tried everything now...

All what happens is that I very successfull spread the dust from one corner into another corner and the blower is not strong enougth to get the stuff of the sensor.

i'm honestly getting broke on shipping costs. maybe I should make a plan for the next time to get all in one shipment and don't order useless stuff like 30 feet flash wire when I need 3 feet. lesson: don't shop at 4 am in the morning, you tend todo stupid things...

Maybe I find somebody who needs flash cables or hotshoe adapters...

Btw the las vegas paris to the left. And I need to find a programm to correct the distortions in my ultra wide angle pictures.

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Sunday, July 15, 2007

live is evil,now I got an offer to sell my D50 and upgrading to a D200. which has a 100$ rebeate right now.

what todo, oh what todo...

I decided now that I keep it for a while The D200 is nice, but its already quite old and I think I keep saving my money.

The nice thing is just you don't have to access any menus and so you actually use all functions of a camera. If I need to walk throw 3 menus, I just wont use the function X i wanted because by them the shot is over...

Btw shipping form us to germany is insane.

quote: (indian guy at upss - american version of post)

we got two quotes for international shipping 40$ or 90$...

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in the last post I was saying that the noise in the pictures was awefull because the exposure was off. The picture to the left is an example how good the nikon D series handles high iso noise if the exposure is spot on.

in this case the picture was taken at iso 800 and is basically noise free, but the composition is slightly off, the lamp is not centered as it was suposed to be. Normaly you could crop this slight mistake, but a we want to get it right first and b we shooting at 10mm which means you have disortions on the sides and it looks wrong if you crop it.

Last but not least I went to ritz camera again and was gone 5 seconds later. I just wanted to get some replacement lenscaps, cause I lost another one. And like always I got the answer, sorry this is a special order and I can't help you. Please order it online. Serious how does this store stays in buisness, they have never any customers and the people who wants to buy something there are just not important enough to get some standard parts in store. Like lens caps of color correction gels for nikon flashs. I order the rosco sample correction catalog a couple of days ago which comes with hundred of sample gels for color correction.
These catalogs are free, because the company hopes to sell 4 x 4 feet large correction sheets which are used to tone windows or studio lamps down. Now my flash head is arround 2 x 1 inch large and one sample is 3 x 2 inch, means perfect to cut these samples into small pieces to attach to the flash.

The problem with this you need the gel in the correct shape. Thats the reason I wanted to buy one of the awefull expensive nikon gels (20$ for 4 pieces) to use it as a mask and cut all the samples to the correct size. But like always the sales person told me:

...sorry special order...

maybe I can find a mask online for my flash. In the worst case I just gonna spend a day in San Francisco to get them there.

edit:

Ok at 5 am in the morning I ended up buying these filter online, its actually 12 filter and also grabed some minor related stuff. Like a 7$ filter holder.

the hunt for the water drops....

what can I say I was bored and couldn't reach anybody to go out, so I shot drops of water. Which turned out to be more difficult than I exspected.

Major problems

- you focus on something you don't see
- it's extremly hard to work out an exposure, i was not successfull to nail it once, all pictures are extremly noisy, needed to adjust it by up to 4 stops in post processing
- one flash is not enough light and after I burned my fingures on 2 ikea lamps I got really frustrated...
- my sensor of the camera is extremly dirty...

so out of nearly 1000 shots I got 4 shots which are nice from the composistion and somewhat sharp. Sadly they are really noisy and have dust spots all over them.

Now you could say I should have cleaned the sensor after the first picture. Which I did and gave up after 2 hours, it just got worse and worse. So maybe I need to send the camera to nikon to get it professional cleaned.

Which is also very nice is that I get more and more used to the fantastic adobe lightroom software. The software makes it so easy to work with raw files and I just wished I always shot using raw instead of jpeg. Now I just need to convince lindsay that she buys the software for me, because she gets a student account which makes it 200$ cheaper. And to pay 100$ for a programm instead of 300$ is way nicer. I just wished there was an open source solution for this problem.

now it's only 1 week till my little cousin gets married and i really wish I could be there, but thx too these awefull flight prices right now this is not possible. At least I will see them arround christmas time.



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Saturday, July 14, 2007

for some weird reason all people ditched me tonight so I spend a nice evening home and watched some tv and read some articles. Long story short I read about a technique to make details in paper visible related to the angle of flash. So I started to play with light and shadows and got soon some first results. They are not perfect yet, I miss some more details in the lettering, means I want that the single letter have a kind of 3D effect. But for a first try it was not to bad.

These shots specially look very nice at 100% when you can see the fine structure of the paper.

btw the first person who finds out which book it is get a cookie, which is quiete easy if you know how to use google...

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Friday, July 13, 2007

duck breast with zuchini in tarragorn sauce for 4 persons

you need

1 liter chicker stock/broth
60 gram flower
60 gramm butter
2 lbs duck breast
some fresh tarragorn
salt
pepper
1/2 cup whipping cream
2 zuchini large

how to do it

the duck

- season sautee pan
- sautee duck
- serve hot

the zuchini

- sautee zucchini in well seasoned pan
- once they are done serve it as side to the chicken


the sauce

- heat the broth in a 2 quart pan till it slightly boils
- take a 2 quart sauce pan
- gently melt the butter in it
- stir flower into melted butter till you have a toaster smeeling paste
- add the hot broth from the other pan in small steps and keep steering
- gently cook it for 2 hours
- skim of the fat from time to time

- 10 minutes before you serve the dish take some tarragorn and use your pestel and mortar to "crush" it
- add a little bit of your sauce to the crushed leafs in the mortar
- keep working the motar and pestel for 5 more minutes
- add these deep green liquid paste now to the rest of the sauce and gently cook it
- add the cream to the sauce and salt/pepper to taste
- keep it slightly boiling for 1 - 2 more minutes

serve it to the duck and the zuchini. And again I recommend some bread to the dish.

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chicken in white wine sauce with zuchini for 4 person

you need

1 x cup heavy whipping cream
1 x cup white wine (pinot grigio/sauvignon/chardonay)
some flower
1 x fine chopped onion
4 x chicken brest filet
2 x sliced zuchini
salt
pepper

how to do it

chicken + sauce:

- season pan with some salt and pepper
- sautee chicken breast till its done in a sautee pan
- remove chicken from the sautee pan and put it on plates
- add onions to the sautee pan
- put some flower over the onions and keep hot for 2 - 3 minutes till the flower is all spread out and nice and brown
- add wine and cream at the same time
- put to low heat
- stir it a couple of minutes till it has a smoot texture
- add salt and pepper to taste, if you seasoned the pan enough you don't need todo this
- filter sauce
- put sauce over chicken

zuchini

- sautee zucchini in well seasoned pan
- once they are done serve it as side to the chicken


the complete dish takes arround 10 minutes to prepare and 20 minutes on the stove. Enjoy. As I tip I suggest to provide some bread to the dish.

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Thursday, July 12, 2007

currently I'm sitting bored at home and decided to check lufthansa.com to see how the safety regulation changed since last year and how large a backpack can be. And suprise my favorite backpack is not longer allowed on board because it exceeds the new limits.

Thx lufthansa for doing this to me.

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Wednesday, July 11, 2007

today I read a new article at one of my favorite sites, strobist.com. Vivitar just introduced a cheap all manual flash which I promptly ordered.

I want to try to work with several flashes since a long time, specially related to macro stuff. But i just refuse to pay 320$ for a Nikon flash which would allow me todo this...

...so i paid 80$ for the vivitar which does the same and just looks ugly and is 100% manual. So i gonna learn something and don't have to toy with this fancy i-ttl from nikon. I use the i-ttl with my nikon SB-600 which is nice but not really needed.

now it just needs 7 - 8 days till its delivered. So I gonna play with it at the weekend afterward. I also ordered some color filter samples which where free of charge (0.01$)

to the left is a picture taken with my 50mm f/1.8 lens of ceasars palace. Like always its not straight. Some day I will invest 20$ for a bubble level...

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Sunday, July 08, 2007

an example for las vegas prics. The cube on the left is arround 1 inch x 1 inch x 1 inch and was filled with ice cream. You also can say it was maybe 1 - 2 scoops of ice cream.

This little cube cost 10$, if I had this known before, I think I would have skipped on this. But so we got two of these and yes the ice cream was good, but not worth 20$ in my opinion...

...yay caesar palace is fun, but what you exspect from a hotel where the cheapest room cost 500$ a night?

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two days ago we went to las vegas to check it out and figured, its a very nice place to be, but boy its expensive.

Lindsay's mum was so nice and paid for a very nice room in the luxor (picture to the left), so that we had once a nice hotel. i'm just always to cheap to pay 150$+ for a night for a hotel room (no breakfast or sood), motel 6 was always ok...

Food prices where interresting, the cheapest we got was some tacos for 10$ or a quesadia for 11$. This was our lunch...

For dinner we went to the luxor buffet, cause the steak resturante where I wanted togo was a little bit to pricey. I'm used to pay for a good ribeye or filet mignon arround 30$, but that sirloins are starting at 35$ and filet mignons arround 50$ was a little bit to steep for my wallet. The buffet was "only" 20$ a person and damn bad. At least we where full afterwards.

For a obvious reason we only spend a day in vegas, which means we where walking arround a lot (120 Fahrenheit/48 Celsius) cause we wanted to avoid traffic and some walking could be only good...

six hours later we where sitting in a corner, lindsay feets hurt and something was wrong with my hip, basically i'm still limping which is just rediculous. So we went back to our hotel, had dinner, dressed up and went back outside. Idea was to check out the club 'coyote ugly' which has quiete a good reputation. So we went there and had to bribe the bouncer to went in. Which was a waste of money, cause the club basically just sucked. imagine an empty room with a bar and 0 tables or chairs. So we left 2 minutes later and had some drinks in our hotel. The bar was nice and each drink was arround 12$, which was pricey but not too bad. We where supposed to had fun and we had. I was just disappointed that it is not lik you see in the good old movies (casino...)

To say short, if you see one casino, you saw them all. no free shows, the show we wanted to see was 85$ a person, so we passed on this. We both thought later that we maybe should have spent the money. But still its a rediculous ammount for the cheapest seats. We didn't even bothered to ask what the blue man group costs.

What else to say I drove back to davis today and only need 6.5 hours for the trip, new record and needed to stop 3 times to fill my tank up. Which is rediculous for a 400 mile drive. I think it was related to my average speed...

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