roadtrip

since we are going to spend thanksgiving in vegas this year means that I will be down there for like 7 days. Or in other words, I need to plan a roadtrip, to get out of this city.

So the current idea is to create a smaller version of the roadtrip I did last year and to include antelope canyon finally...



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camping - the car version this time



in the last couple of years I realized there are different definitions for the term camping

1. drive a car up to the campground and unload everything what you could fit
2. hike to a campground and all what you need and want is in your backback. The hike can be 500 yards or a couple dozen miles
3. drive an RV to a campground and position the satellite dish the way you want it

So after we did number 2 a while back and spend a weekend in Yuba, it was time to full fill my promise and do number 1 too.

So Robin and I decided to join her Dad and little Brother on a Weekend camping trip in the mountains, which gave me enough opportunities to take some more pictures.

refelctions

water

ducklings

travelling to vegas using a different route

now this blog post is just a little bit outdated, since this event happend about 2 month's ago. I think this might show how busy we have been, that I didn't manage to pull these pictures from my camera any earlier.

Basically we wanted to visit Robins sisten in Henderson (A little town close by vegas) and also combine this with a fun drive. After all we all know that the quickest way to vegas is going down the 5 (2 curves?) or the 99 (4 curves?) and than on the i-15.
That I can recall the actual route means, I have driven to Vegas to often in the last years.

So instead I went with robins suggestion and we drove over Yosemite.


View Larger Map

Now this gave me the amazing opportunity to drive over Tioga Pass and so complete my 'driving over all passes in california' goal, half of them on a motorcycle.

And we even stopped for a terrible, terrible and overpriced lunch at Priest Station

and of course there was the standard picture of a waterfall too

after all the trip was totally worth it the extra 2 hours of driving!

computer

over the past couple of  years I nearly exclusively worked on laptops and I'm quite sure I didn't own a private computer since 2002 or so.

So I thought it was time to build a computer again and let me say a lot of stuff changed. Specially size wise. I used to build my own pc's and learned this when I was around 9 years old. While helping out my dad. Well mostly when I did not accidentally put something together in the wrong way and blew up a motherboard or power supply. I guess it's called learning by doing?

So after I was researching the current pc architectures for a couple of weeks, I came to the conclusion that I need to know what I want todo with it first.

So let's see:

1. fast enough to run virtual machines
2. fast enough to play any game now or in 2-3 years
3. able to support at least 2-3 monitors. After all I want to use it to work from home
4. needs to pay for itself, with something called bit mining. So it needs excellent graphic card(s)
5. lot's of memory, so I can work on it
6. possible to use for photography and to be able to support 20-30MP files, which will come someday.

So after I looked at this, it was obvious it's going to be rather pricey. But thank's to bitcoin mining, I should be able to recover some, if not all of my investment over the next year to two. So far the GPU mining made me a bit over 500$, so both graphic cards are already paid off.

What did I end up with?

• 4x1TB Hard drives as Raid10, I love my data...
• 1x128GB SSD to host virtual machines
• 16 GB Ram
• 1x i5 quad core cpu running at 4.5GHz
• 2x6900 AMD Radeon graphic cards, not necessarily, but I always wanted to have dual graphic cards...
• to many coolers, to keep this system running stable

I am rather happy with the performance it creates and the possibilities it opens up. Now I just need to find the time todo some GPU based calculation's with openCL. It did take 4 month till I finally got all the parts together and everything up and running.

But the size of modern graphic card's is slightly disturbing. As reference there is an iPad in the picture.

yes one graphic card is heavier and longer than an iPad2...

waffles

since we got our kittchenaid for the wedding we keep try to use it whenever possible and now that christmas time is approaching and it slowly get's cold in Davis, we decided that it's time to make some tasty waffles.

The first problem with this was, that we had no waffle iron and so I started researching these to find the perfect waffle iron...

A bit latter I ordered a simple 30$ waffle iron

Presto 3510 FlipSide Belgian Waffle Maker

which has outstanding reviews and is so simple to use, that is amazing.

Now the next step was to find a good recipe, which is not to complicated and doesn't take to long to make.

So after some googleling I found this one:

Ingredients

• 2 cups cake flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 4 large eggs, separated
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
• 2 cups milk
• non-stick cooking spray
• Directions

Preheat the waffle iron according to the manufacturer's instructions. In 1 medium bowl sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. In a second bowl use the wooden spoon to beat together the egg yolks and sugar until sugar is completely dissolved and eggs have turned a pale yellow. Add the vanilla extract, melted butter, and milk to the eggs and whisk to combine. Combine the egg-milk mixture with the flour mixture and whisk just until blended. Do not over mix. In third bowl, beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until soft peaks form, about 1 minute. Using the rubber spatula, gently fold the egg whites into the waffle batter. Do not overmix! Coat the waffle iron with non-stick cooking spray and pour enough batter in iron to just cover waffle grid. Close and cook as per manufacturer's instructions until golden brown, about 2 to 3 minutes. Serve immediately.

Now it was more complicated than I expected and quite a bit of work, specially cleaning up all the bowl's afterwards.

But the result was wonderful tasty and my darling quite liked it.

yay breakfast waffles

now we just have to find a better topping than apple sauce or powdered sugar.

now that robin and I are finally getting settled and life calms a bit down, I have time write a bit in this blog again and so I have to fillin the last weeks, where nothing was posted.

Our current main form of entertainment is going beer tasting once or twice a week. Yes we downgraded from wine tasting to beer tasting.

This is mostly related to the fact that a litte shop opened in davis, called the Davis beer shop. Which has a huge selection of beers, from all over the world.

For example today we tried 'fruity' beers and there were surprisingly tasty

?,apple,cassis,strawberry,cherry beer

1. Choulette Framboise - very refreshing
2. Lindemans Pomme - interesting and incredible strong apple taste
3. Lindemans Cassis - tasty, but very strong cassis taste
4. Timmermanss Strawberry - tasty molded and undrinkable
5. Lindemans Kriek - tasty and rather complex

We actually liked the cherry beer that much, that we ordered a whole bottle of it, which was a first.

and at 8$ a bottle a touch pricey. But definitely a better experience than last week the IPA tasting. Gosh these were so bad, it wasn't even funny.

IPA's - definitely not a fan

1. Alaskan - drinkable 
2. Mammoth - terrible
3. Ale Smith - terrible 
4. Caldera - terrible
5.  Ranger - terrible

Obviously since I'm a german and trying to introduce robin to more german things, there was no way that we could skip the most important beer tasting.

The german beer tasting, which we did a couple of weeks ago. Needless to say, she loved most of it.

a selection of german beer

1. Spaten Original
2. Paulaner Hefe Weizen
3. Ayinger Ur-Weisse
4. Weihenstephaner Korbinian
5. Reutberger Dunkel

But her favorite Beer so far, is Franziskaner Dunker - Weissbier. In as big as possible glasses... I might just have to pickup some dedicated Franziskaner beer glas for her in germany around christmas time.

Playing with circuits

Over the last 45 days I spend quite some time working with electronic circuits.

And now I finally managed to wrap my head around point to point soldering, schematics, resistor, capcitators, regulators and potentiometers.

Well it's not pretty, but it's a start and works.

First result?

Adjustable voltage regulator using voltage dividers.

+5V/-5V/G output
0-12V adjustable output

Now I still have to figure out the correct capacitor ratings...

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moving time...

now we finally are ready to move into our little condo tomorrow. Well little is a slight understatement, after getting the keys today and walking throw it. I noticed that it's rather big and spacious. Except for our homeoffice, which is so tiny :(

anyway no internet for 3-4 days now...

Getting away - Bucketlist

Over the last couple of month Robin and I created at bucket list, what todo this summer and to ensure this all is going to happen, before her schoolwork starts again. So far we are making fair progress and also did a lot of things which were actually not on the list.

forgot the tripod at home...

This weekend for example we wanted togo camping with friends for 3 days at the Yuba river. Since I always loved this spot for it's beauty and since it's so hidden, that not many people know of it.

Sadly our friends promptly ditched us with the lame excuse 'sorry I need to work, the q-tof needs babysitting' so it was just robin and me.

So after finding a nice camping spot next to a waterfall and some rapids, we pitched our tent and relaxed a bit, before settling in for the night.

waterfalls tend to be a touch loud...

At about ~10.30 pm. It always amazes me how early you go to bed, when you are camping. Maybe it's something about the fresh air, which just makes you tired?

the view is just amazing here

After a restless night of sleep, it turns out that waterfalls are so ridiculous loud that you can barley sleep and smart as we are, we didn't bring any ear plugs either... We woke up in the morning and packed up the tent. There is not that much space on this spot and we didn't want to clutter it with all our stuff. And I kinda like to have it all together, specially since it's only takes 5 minutes to setup or pack-up anyway.

2 hours later it turned out that Yuba is not that private anymore and dozens of people were swarming the area and searching for gold and gemstones. And proudly showing off the tiny pieces of jade they found. 5h later Robin and I were so annoyed by this, that we decided to pack-up and hike back to the car.

Now I mentioned hike. The thing is to get to this spot, you have to hike a rather steep and narrow path for 25 minutes or so. Which should rather repel the average camper with his beer cooler, chairs and inflatable's. So we were both really stunned to see all the people there, specially 2 years ago when I was there it was totally empty and peaceful.

Guess it's time to find a new spot now...

it just keeps going...

The next plan is togo camping at point reyes, maybe 6 mile hike in's give you more peace...

homemade pasta...

since we are going to move in two week, we decided to deplete our stocks of stuff and produce some homemade pasta.

So what do we need for the pasta?

• 3 1/2 cups of flour ~400g
• 4 eggs
• some salt
• 3 tablespoon of water, give or take

now the first step is to build 'mount eggy'

mount eggy

after kneading this for 12 minutes by hand we surrendered and the let the kittchenaid do the rest of the mixing. Now the fun part was to let the dough rest for about 30 minutes and than roll it out, till you can see throw it.

It turns out to be quite a workout and after 5 minutes I started to complain that I want a pasta machine, that this is so not worth the effort and so on.

15 minutes later I finished the first bath off the rolling out and started to cut up the pasta...

1/2 the dough is cut into stripes

The idea was to have tagiatella, since this seems to be the easiest possible cut todo.

Now while I was doing all the pasta mixing and rolling and cutting, robin volunteered to make the sauce, based on a recipe from my sauce book

• 2 cloves of gralic
• lemon olive oil
• vodka to marinate
• chicken breast, cut in stripes
• spinach
• basil
• white mushrooms

and our result looked something like this.

all in all not to bad for 2 hours of work and delicious.

Now the big question, how did it taste?

Robin: I like it much better than store bought pasta

Me: it's really tasty, but a touch chewy. It's just different than store bought pasta

pictures...

We know it's been a long time, but after the wedding there was just so much stuff todo and we had to sort so many pictures. It was incredible.

Like to drink all the leftover champagne, I mean it is a tough life to start the day with scrambled eggs and mimosas or to end it with a glass of champagne to celebrate how happy we are in our marriage.

But we do not forget that we have to share all of our pictures with you and we finally managed to finish sorting  and post processing them. And robin is heartbroken that we only ended up with 99 pictures out of 2000 initially and so we are going to sort and post process them till we found a happy medium. I assume the number will be around 1999 pictures...

But here are the 99 favorite pictures of our special day.

Thanks again for all your wishes and help!

Pictures...

well we are working on it and by the end of the week we hopefully have all the 2000+ pictures together and sorted, so that I can postprocess them and create our wedding album.

But we do look rather cute and adorable, from what I have seen so far.

Normality

Now close three weeks after the wedding all the visa stuff is filed and robin and I had finally sometime to relax a bit.

We managed to move all of her stuff using a 22 foot long truck (7.5 meters), which she somehow was able to fill...

And we still had no time to sort all the pictures.

But at least we managed to make some eggs Benedict for her, after she stayed with her sister at the hospital all night.

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picking music

well one of the last tasks we have to deal with is to pick the right music for the entrance, the walk away and  background.
Rather frustrating and leads to me not being able to hear certain songs anymore...

Wedding Menu finalized

yip our menu is finalized and that's what we got

Salad

Bruschetta toppesd with Olive Tapanade, Fresh Tomato, Basil & Garlic

EVO and Parmigiano

Entrée

Pan seared Salmon, Vegetable Ratatouille, Chardonnay Rosetta Sauce & basil Oil

Or

Pan Seared Filet Mignon, Garlic Potato Puree & Braised Greens

 Burgundy wine Reduction

Or

Rigatoni Pasta with home made Sausage, Green Peas & Granda Padano

 Roasted Tomato Cream sauce

Dessert

Tiramisu

engagement picture

last night we met with my friends Sara and Martin and Martin was so nice to take a couple hundred pictures of us, so that we have a bunch of shots as engagement pictures and while being out there I realized that I haven't been shooting or posing people for a long time. And he kept asking me where to put us and I had honestly no idea and felt so plain helpless...
Guess that's an excuse to shoot a bit more again and maybe get my photo business up and running again.

Anyway here are some of the pictures I personally really like.

she's not going to run away...

old gray men need some rest from time to time

we always hanging out somewhere

you are never to old to go down a slide

but than we didn't have to slide that far

our relationship is defiantly more stable than this platform 

made it at last

thanks Martin for these beautiful pictures! I hope you don't mind the postprocessing I did!

Capuchino aka Zipfelmuetzen

well it was time to show off my progress in the art of espresso and capuchino. After all the definition of a capuchino is

a harmonic blend of esspresso, hot milk and foam

which can mean basically anything, but I kinda like it heavy on the foam and espresso, while being low on the milk.

Zipfelmuetzen

food tasting in San Francisco - Zingari

there are terrible things you have todo while preparing a wedding. One of the most frustrating thing is you need togo out to nice resturant and are forced to taste there delicious food.

So after testing 2 different italian resturants in San Francisco we decided on...

Zingari

why?

there food is really tasty, it doesn't break the bank. They basically give you a 20% discount. The dinner we had was very good, the decoration was ok. And the owner of the restaurant actually joined us, showed us around.
They also provide us we an ala carte menu and so there is something for everybody. Be it vegetarians or carnivores.

Anyway, let's cut to the chase, The review of the food

Appetizer:

one of the appetizer was the classic italian dish bruschetta. Which was enhanced with an olive paste as a foundation. The bread was really crisp and the topping incredible moist, while the olive paste stopped the bread from getting soggy. Instead of plain garlic, they used roasted garlic, which gave the dish a certain sweetness.
Short it was the best bruschetta I had so far.


Entree:

For our main dish we chose something I refer to as a tasty bolognese. Sure it has a more fancy title. But it was basically Rigatoni with a meat sauce.
Now there were a lot of exciting dishes on the menu, which I'd had loved much more. But not everybody has the desire to eat something exciting or something they can't pronounce. So this was basically the most boring dish they had.
And it was absolutely tasty and delicious. It was incredible flavorful, the peas were very sweet and I was just really really impressed by it and all of our testers liked it. This is also the only dish which is offered as vegetarian option.

Desert

As desert we had the all time classic dish, Tiramisu and we all had plenty of these in our life. Sadly I did not take a picture for some strange reason.
Even more sadly it started out very very tasty and than it became really soggy. Now for there defense, Robin and my Friend Kim bothed loved the dish and did not understand why I'm so critical about it. It's just every time I bit down on one of the embedded cookies, I felt like biting into a capsule of water, which killed the experience for me.

The espresso

well after a good italian dish you need a cup of esspresso. I thought. Well I have to the change this statement to

you need a good cup of espresso

Sadly the espresso was one of the worst I ever had. It was just bitter and had no body at all.

Fazit

appetizer 5/5
entree 5/5
desert 3/5
espresso 1/5

After Zingari we went to another restaurant, called Credo

For some reason Robin and I both felt not to good and were just exhausted. So we ordered an appetizer and an entree. Which were both ok, but nothing special. The resturant was just pale compared to the first experience, it was a nightmare to get to the bathrooms and it was so loud in the restaurant that you could barley hold a conversation.

reception and ceremony planning

portals of the past

this weekend we took the opportunity to have another look at our venue and to start planning where to sit the guest, since the place is rather small. Smaller than we initially thought and so we will maybe have space for 10 chair.
Basically I'm trying to find the time now and make a 3D model of the whole area and see how this works out, since we wont have the possibility to test it with chairs.

Basically the path is only 3 yards wide and we need to have enough space for the bride to walk the aisle.

benches and makeshift table

Another Benefit is that there is a big green box, which we can cover over with a white table cloth for the champaign and maybe some crackers or water for the guest. Since we will be for 2 hours at this location after all.
And there are some benches too for people to sit and relax on and we can maybe incorporate this into the photography session.

Speaking of photography, this is one of the big unknowns right now. How to execute the shot, what has to be done and where are all the locations.

robin, smiling in front of the waterfall

Possible spots for this are:

• the portal
• the small spring/waterfall
• walking up the at the lake
• the benches

heron

While taking pictures of the location and try to work out the details a heron landed a couple of steps from me and so I had to take a couple of pictures of these gigantic birds.

They are just such beautiful creatures and always so skittish and keep flying away. I do wish I had a camera/lens combination with a more precise and reliable autofocus. Since of about 50 pictures, only 3 where in focus.








And last but not a least a shot from the other side of the lake

Portals of the Past

back from san diego

us two in the limo, prior to Robins friends wedding

we somewhat managed to survive the wedding in San Diego and it's kinda obvious. This ridiculous 40k$ is nothing what Robin or I want and way over the top and not personal at all. Sure the food was amazing, the best tri-tip I ever had!

But the venue looked like any other cookie cutter professionally planned wedding. And in 4 days I might got to spend 5 hours in total with my fiance, which is pretty sad.Because she had todo so much as a brides maid :(

At least I finally got to ride in a stretch limo again and I was surprised how cramped this stretched expedition was. It just made no sense that there was so much less space than in the Stretch Town Car I was in last year.