Saturday, September 19, 2009

well since my car is finally running again I decided to go shopping and buy some casual clothes for events, conferences and going out again. Since my wardrobe was not perfect anymore... Well it's never been.

So after driving 60 miles it looks like

  • no starting issues or funny noises
  • no leaking oil anymore
  • no burned oil smell
So seems it paid off that I worked on it a bit.

The big question left over is just, why can I fix this oil leak issue and diagnose it right, when a VW mechanic who works on VWs and Audis since 20 years is not able to find the cause for it? I mean I never touched a car prior to 4 month and still don't know what I'm doing. I just type the symptons into google and find possible causes.
Yes he fixed the leaking gasket, but he did not fix the actual reason for the gasket leaking. So frustrating...

About me and clothes,

Now why is it not possible to get 36 length pants at calvin klein anymore. They had gorgeous needle striped pants, which were 2 inches to short.

Well guess I have now a new pair of dress shoes, 2 new dress shirts and some normal shirts more. But I still need pants...

because my spare part finally arrived last night I could attempt fixing my car again this morning and it took....

12 minutes in total, slight an improvement to the last time, when it took 5+ hours.

What did I do different?

  • I knew where the part was located, 4 hours saved
  • I cut the old sensor in the middle instead of fideling with it for an hour, 59 minutes saved
  • I did not remove the coolant reservoir this time, 10 minutes saved
now the bill in total come out to:
  • wrong part 80$ - thanks ECS for providing this, you send me the part for a 1.8T...
  • comfirming diagnostic 90$
  • right part 40$
  • so 230$ total
compared to the quoted 360$ of the shop

Tonight I was kinda wondering what todo and so a friend invited me to join him playing settlers of catan, with the knights extension.

Well for some reason I was not really focused on the game and lost with having a total of...

3 Points

and we started with 3 points.


Short it was the worst game I ever played in my live.  Afterward we went to a local bar and played a couple of rounds of pool. Didn't do much better there.

Well at least I got out and relaxed a bit.

last night I went the second time to the davis firedance and took the camera with me this time.

And have to say I got some awesome pictures which were incredible hard to take. Why? Well you want to have the motion of the fire without it blowing out the picture and to have the body sharp and not blurry of the fire dances.

Ok let's think about it.

We have fast moving people - fast shutter speed
It is pitch black - low shutter speed
we have a an extremely bright fire - fast shutter speed
we don't know where the dances is going to move - small aperture
we want to capture the motion of the dancer moving the fire around him - slow shutter speed

short It's an impossible combination to take a picture off...

Is it?

well we can roughly predict where the dancer is going, so we can shoot at F5 - F8 and get him somewhat in focus

we can us an exposure which puts the flames nicely into the picture and don't overexpose it. And to capture the motion.

So after some test I ended up with 1s at F/5 to get a nice pictures of the flames, but the dancer was totally underexposed. So I fired a flash at him, next time bring a grid so it's only on him. But now we have a ghost, since the flash fires to early. At this point I remembered something about rear sync flash. So we capture the motion of the fire and the dance is underexposed. Now before the shutter closes we fire a quick burst of the flash and tada, we expose the dancer now.

result?

this!



now why are all these pictures black and white?
cause they look great like this!