after I discovered several dustspots in my pictures and checked my sensor. I figured its time to clean the sensor so i went ahead and get some cleaning products from adorama.com, my favorite store and ordered them.

They also got a nice little buton which says: order history and showed me I spend roughly 3500$ sofar on this hobby. In the last 24 month.

maybe I should have bought a compact camera instead of a DSLR, nobody ever told me it's such an expensive hobby.

On the other hand its only 150$ a month which equals going out 3 times a month.

this time the lens was in focus and damn I love the 90mm tamerom macro. It's so incredible sharp.

Btw he stole a peanut!

this was the perfect opurtunity for a wounderfull picture of the day and I screwed it up. Accidently the flash fired and the lens was not focussed correctly.
So it was the best what I could make out of this picture and it would have been awesome if it would have been in focus and without flash. I still like, but to unsharp :(

during our park visit we where so lucky to find a deer. This was roughly a 1/2 - 3/4 mile away fromour car on a short hike. Like always I was lazy and had only my wideangle with me and so I sprinted back to the car, got my 300mm el cheapo zoom and got back ot the place and tried to get some shots of the deer.
Like always there was not enough light available and my el cheapo is not well known for incredible sharpness or detail. So this was the best I got do at ISO 1600 using a tripod and being 30 yards away.

One day I find a used 80-200mm F/2.8 for under 400$. I can't see me spending more for this on a lens.

it finally happens after 2 years of endless planning we finally managed to visit yosomite. And it's wounderfull.

We only did a visit to find out which places are nice and what can you see and how the roads are before we go camping there.

As first the roads are extrem narrow and curvy. My record was 1 and 1/2 turns of the steering wheel to get arround the curve and at less than 20 mph. So its a fun drive.

What ya need:

1. good sturdy boots
2. sun lotion
3. 2 par of free hands

What ya get:

1. waterfalls
2. climbing
3. hiking

The trails are all 4 miles+ long so about 4 - 5 hours a trail. So you need to plan a 2 day visit at least. You can catch fish and there are several small rivers. We did not find any bears, but a couple of deers and where engaged by a gang of squirrels. We got away, but it was damn close. The sqiurrels got away with one of the peanuts.

Picture wise it's wounderfull and you can make lost of nice composistions. I just felt a little bit limited by 3 factors.

1. you need a waist belt to carry your stuff, backpack is not a smart idea
2. a tripod is perfect as wander stick
3. damn I wish I had a 10 - 20mm ultrawide angle from sigma. 19-35 are just not wide enough.

picture wise i getting better, only shoot 80 and kept most of them. But like always you can find the bestoff on my picassa web site. I'm happy that I invested the 120$ last year for a nice circular polarizer. It works wounders with all kinds of reflections.

The picture was my favorite shot of the day.

hey we got another visiter in our apartment. And I start to getting a little bit better with my macro stuff. Still the DOF is far from perfect, related to the angle and not much I can do anymore. I was already at F/36 but the picture itself is damn sharp and its a hairy little beast...

today was the day i finally received my new toy, my tamrom 90mm F/2.8 macro and sofar its fun. Specially in the combination with the TTL wire which I received a week ago to get the flash of my camera and I wished i spend these 20$ a long time ago. It's amaizing what you can do if you can move the flash around.

Now I'm trying to get my pictures as sharp as I want. The lens is incredible, but I lack the right technique. So time to pracitse.

To the left one of the first trys of a small 1 inch large flower which looks ok, except for a lack of sharpness zoomed in at 100%. Related to my manual focussing, I guess.

today I read a nice article about a wounder full toy, http://www.sonos.com/ It is kinda useless in our apartment but i see a lot of potential for this little thing if you got a house.

Like one for the patio, one for the bedroom and one for the living room. And all can managed over a central remote and are connected to any NAS.

The problem is only a system like this including NAS cost easily 2k. But it's a nice idea.

sofar my xbox does the job just fine, if I ever use it for music cause is a waste of energy to keep the pc running...

after I looked at my wallet this morning I decided to take the offered deal on a tamrom 90mm F2.8 macro lens and waiting that it get's shipped to davis so I can play with it. Sadly I wont have it before the memorial day weekend is over, but I gonna play with it afterwards.

the power of pgsql.

I hate writing database dependend code. It's a nightmare to change it when you need to move to another database system. My current situation is that I need to update millions of values in a table because we changed our data model.

So I was thinking writing a script in java or python, but this was to much work and would cost me 1 - 2 days. Instead I wrote a small plsql script which does what i want.

declare

cursor SAMP_CUR IS select "sample_id","class" from samples;
v_sample_id integer;
v_class varchar(256);

begin
open samp_cur;

loop
fetch samp_cur into v_sample_id,v_class;
exit when samp_cur%notfound;

update RESULT_LINK set "class" = v_class where "sample_id" = v_sample_id;
end loop;

close samp_cur;

end;

it took maybe 10 - 15 minutes and does what I want.

Sadly I hade to write some insane applications in plsql on my database to synchronize it over webservices with another database which Is a pain in the ass to move to a new system. I'm honestly thinking about making test with 3 database systems in future to find a new dbms.

H2
postgressql
mysql
cloudscape

H2 and cloudscape have the insane adavantage that they are based on java and I can develop java based code in the database to enhance it.

so long time no post so a short update what's going on. Basically live is like always busy with work and going to move from my loved oracle database (ok love/hate relation ship) to a postgresql in the next couple of month. So starting to read up on postgresql issues.

my plans for summer are

- camping in joshua tree
- going to germany to get a visa
- riding my bike more often
- maybe stopping in england for the 26th birthday of an old friend
- finally scraping enough money together to get this damn macro lens

more comes later...

currently I have fun profiling my application for a couple of memory leaks and issues with performance.

So the first step was to install a profiler for my favorite ide, called eclipse...

...3 days later I gave up with all the stupid error messages under linux 64bit and installed netbeans 5.5 from sun. The profiler works somehow, but the IDE is an absolute disaster. It is inflexible, ridiculous slow and just not able TODO the job in any fast way.


i'm very disappointed so far and using the old system.out.println approach again :(

long time no post,
a new year started,
christmas is over and my wallet starts to recover,
car makes still problems,
still tons of bugs in my programs,

as we can see the new year is just like the old year. So a review of the last month...

ate food -> got sick
drove to temecula -> stuck in traffic jam forever
shopping for gifts -> lost my car -> freezing -> 60 minutes later still freezing-> found car
Christmas -> tons of gifts :)
drove to Davis -> awe full storm on the highway
stop at gas station -> fell in paddle -> freezing and hurt
still driving to Davis -> getting more windy
got a cold -> life sucks
new year -> laying down with cold -> life still sucks
went snowboarding -> got sick -> drove back to Davis -> life is just not getting better
power out at work -> PC died -> I have to fix it -> lesson learned -> 10 ups ordered
sitting at work -> fixed a bug -> discovered 2 new bugs
trying to get a coffee -> cafe closed -> soda machine broken -> being thirsty

so thats my life right now :(

on the bright side we had a wounderfull evening with a cheese fondue and a couple of friends...

being bored in the traffic jam.

today I had the exciting task to drive down to Temecula. A relaxing 500 mile ride...

So I left davis at 7.30 in the morning to be at the starbucks at 6.45 and on the highway at 7.00

A couple of hundred miles later (420 to be exact) I passed Los Angeles and got stuck on the 91 east. 2 Hours later I finally arrived at the 15. From here it's just 35 miles (or 40 minutes) to Temecula....

if the egoistic bank robber would have decided to not rob the bank this day and getting shot another day. It turned out that the cops shot him on the Higway 15 South and closed the only connection to Temecula for me. So I was sitting here and moving at incredible 1 mph, till I got to the section and they (The cops) winked all cars from the highway. As I learned in the DDR, if there is a line, go at the end and wait, you will get something. In this case a police officer led us around the closed part of the highway to a section which was open and I finally could continue my journey to Temecula.

1. left a 6.30
2. arrive in Los Angeles at 12
3. arrived in Temecula at 7.30
4. went shopping
5. lost my car and was searching it for an hour ---> its cold in a t-shirt
6. 10pm arrived at Lindsay's house

So during the time waiting I shot some pictures and the best you can see on top. The taillight of a 2000 Ford Thunderbird.

Christmas is coming soon so my parents though it would be nice to have some pictures from me and Lindsay. A professional photograph was a little bit expensive and hard to find in Davis so we decided to shoot them our self using a simple flash, a remote release and a lot of time. Once we had a handful pictures which where acceptable we optimized them in photoshop, cropped them, transformed them to black and white and done. The hole procedure took about 5 - 6 hours and the next time I need to make sure that the focus point is better and for portraits of more than on person, I should use an aperture of 8 - 11 instead of 5.6. But for the first try I'm quite satisfied.

Right now I'm spending my time in Davis waiting for packages, cause amazon was able to send them everywhere, except to our flat. Which also means that I had to delay my Christmas trip and Lindsay flew already to Temecula :(

fun on a Thursday

• Thai food - 8$
• one beer - 3$
• two slices of pizza - 5$
  
• stealing sushi from Lindsay - 0$

laying down with food poisoning - priceless

• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish

it looks like I'm getting somewhere with my photo stuff. More and more people are telling me that I take wounder full pictures and I even sold pictures...

na I sold only 3 pictures so far, but its a start.

anyway time to take an old pictures which I took when I got my camera and analyze it.




Ok whats wrong with this picture?

• the white balance is off cause of the lamp in the background
• its very unsharp, problem is the cheap tripod which I had at this time and the long exposure
  
• there is no clear defined goal in this picture, where I'm looking at, what gives me this picture
• the crop is kinda bad, we could need more space on the right site and take off some of the top part

so what can we do in post processing to optimize it

• we can change the crop
• we can sharpen it a little
• we change the whitebalance
• we can convert it to blacl&white to give it a better mood and play with the contrast
  

today a friend offered me an incredible deal. A complete pc for 100$ So I asked him whats in the box?

A pentium IV 2.4 GHz
1 GB Ram
60 GB Harddisk
A shitty graphiccard
A wireless pci card

so short I bought this box, so that my girlfriend can play her sims game, we have a place to store movies and songs and I can play my stupid eve-online....

But when you buy a pc you also need a Monitor and a graphiccard. So I went to Frys and got a nice 20" Dspaly from samsung and a Geforce 6600 OC + some speakers.

complete price for the package was 500$, which is perfect.


...and tomorrow I go to the garage and get my car fixed.

why do I post a picture of a dinner,

the reason for this is quite simple. On thursday evening I got home and my lovely and now very proud girlfriend suprised me a dinner. It's basically tiny little chicken ( better known as very tasty snacks...) with zuchini and a good glass of wine.

The chicken's are called game hen and which is translates to "Rebhuehner".

mhm what can you do on a visit in temecula late in the night...

basically nothing except for keeping an eye on the shotguns, but thats another story. So I used the chance to hunt the antichrist of photographie....

called cinnamon the cat.

why is it the antichrist? Because it's fast, never stays for a second on one place and have so many different colors. The problem with the colors is if I expose for the white the pictures are under exposed, if I expose for the black, they are overexposed.

result of an exciting hunt at midnight....