this morning I decided to visit the historical airfield next too temecula. And they have a nice collection of aircrafts from WW-I until the desert storm. This is also the big drawback of this museum. Instead of covering one topic, they try to cover all and it just becomes to much and you can't enjoy it anymore.

The planes are mostly outside and wingless. What means they are dusty and sometimes not a very nice view.

pictures

after a long time waiting my new lens finally arrived with my first filter ( except for uv's). And like always they send me the wrong stuff...

so now I have a ND 4x instead of an ordered ND 6x so I will order another ND later.

anyway, my new lens is a tokina 19 - 35 mm ( on D50 equals 28.5 - 52.5 mm). I got it for 125$ so it was a good deal and I prob. will sell it as soon as I finally manage to find a reason to buy the tokina 12 - 24 mm. I just don't like the idea to spend 500$ on a stupid lens. Lucky me this lens is always out of stock and never available.

But why I bough the other tokina in the first place? Basically I just want to have the possibility to shot landscape pictures when I'm going into the mohave desert on sunday and monday.

testshots 

finally, google introduced web albums. This means I can upload all my pictures to websites to annoy innocent visitors with them.

album 

yeah "my cluster" is working again.

now its time to get the current bugfixes into my sourceforge project

bbcs

my second "private" project is to get xen on my workstation and laptop to create a small personal cluster in case all the other clusters are backed or down like last weekend. Now I just need to figure out how to install the sun grid engine under linux or write a new 'at' based implementation for my cluster project with a minimal scheduler.

currently I'm trying to figure out how to get nice shots at nigth time.

my main problems are just, its so dark, you barley see anything in the viewfinder and I always have to be on my knees because of this strange angle. I think I finally will get an adapter for this in january.

its just such an insane ammount of money for a simple adapter and there are no off brands available sofar

At least I hope my neural density filter and the step up adapter arrive in time for my trip downsouth.


...we fill see... 

after we bought a bike for my girlfriend we needed a place to store them somewhere and they are a little bit to expensive to keep them outside...

so we decided to buy a rack to hang the bikes next to the wall. As you can see in the picture.

I'm just still kinda unsure if this thing will hold the weigt of two bikes, specially with our super stable paper walls...

top: 2006 fuji roubaix pro (gert)
bootom: 2006 swinn fastback (Lindsay)

the best thing was that the shop, where we bought the rack and the bikes gave me 100$ extra reabate for my bike because they had it on sale this day. So I ended up paying 1099 instead of 1399 for my bike.

...but sofar I had to invest 500$ in compounds like shoes, pedals, helmet etc.

only thing missing now is a bike rack for the car to get the backs down south for some rides during our vacation in two weeks. 

who would belive it, the software which we are developing since a couple of years runs on smartphones, like my htc wizard.

setupx & binbase

it finally happend we have our flat and making progress with cleaning it and moving stuff in.

we also did the main mistake when you got a new flat...

...we went to ikea and got the standard stuff

- fondue set
- wok
- chair
- thousands small things...

anway it starts to look nice and over short or long we want to replace the fouton with a nice couch. This should be arround january. 

the first servers are back up and running and working unexspected well under xen.

basicly we have on server with 2 cpu and 4 gb ram and running:

• oracle server
• mysql server
• mysql server and apache for monitoring using cacti of the network
  

the load is fine sofar and we are migrating now our other boxes to xen too to make the management and the backup of complete servers easier.

idea:

• pdc, ldap
• cvs
• devel oracle server
• production jboss
• devel jboss

it should take only 2 days as soon as i figure out where I store all the data from the pdc.

the bitch is dead,

the bitch in this case is a server called venus and decided 2 days ago to stop working. Sadly this is my database server containning our production database...

so it was time to find out if the backups are working. After 8h I finally had a temporaery database server up and running with a minimal loss of data ( arround 300 samples, are calculating right now again).


now I planned to create a new server using:

- gentoo as base system
- xen for virtualisation
- lvm for storage management
- redhat/centos enterprise linux as virtual machine for the oracle database
- minimal gentoo as virtual machine for the application server

the final plan is to migrate all my server to xen with an atttached nas to allow the migration of servers without any downtime.

whats up and running on my wizard

• bluetooth headset motorola HS820
• synchronisation over bluetooth
• synchronisation over usb
• skype - headset not working yet and its kinda slow
  
• email
• gmail synchronisation over pop3
• outlook synchronisation using active sync
• gprs works but took forever to disable it, cause trys all 5 minutes to connect to the internet
• wireless lan works fine, got it to work in a/b/g with a registery hack
• voice dial works over bluetooth and freehand also
  

impression sofar

• once you are able to kill all background tasks its fast, but slows down when you have more than 5 programms open
• never ever go into the windows folder and say sort by type, 20 minutes later it was finally done...
• phone works quite well
• active sync needed to be update to avoid that outlook crashed, version 4.2 is ok
  
• the bluetooth stack is a little big buggy, sometimes hard to get the synchronisation to work
• battery live is ok, 24h bluetooth on and still 50% left
  

one of my new toys. The cingular 8125 also known as t-mobile mda ( think the german model is mda III ) is quite nice and the speed is ok. Just the display is like always way to small. The size is ok sofar. Could be a little thinner. But in this case I would'nt have the keyboard, which is the nicest part.

The synchronisation works with the x60 and I'm working on the synchronisation over bluetooth right now. Suprisingly my headset connects with both of the toyes easily, but sofar I'm not able to get it running with the phone. 

the daily joke appeared again.

I finally received my new laptop and it's damn nice. Only that the order was wrong again.

- they delivered 2 more batteries than I ordered and they don't fit at all...
- they delivered only 1 GB of ram insted of the ordered 2 GB

why is it so difficult to get an order once right .

anywa sofar I'm really satisfied.

- very light
- display is very bright, the first time I actually work with a display where I reduce the intensity
- battery liftime is arround 4h with wifi and bluetooth on
- pretty fast, gotta test how it performs under java
- that you need the docking station for a second battery/hd or a cdrom kinda sucks, but when did I ever need a cdrom anyway
- it has a sd slot, so perfect for my camera

right now I look at smart phones and found one thats nearly perfect

the mda from t-mobile/cingular for 249$ before taxes. so in total with activation fee and so it should be arround 300$. The size is ok, little bit larger than a motorola razor.

the main question is do I need it or does it another phone too?

basicly any phone thats not a flip phone cost arround 100$ and you can call and play mp3's with it.

The mda can more and has nearly the same size.

- full pda
- plays mp3
- extension via mini sd card -> gotta sell my sd card and switch over to mini sd in case I buy it ( i think I go shopping soon)
- can use wifi to browse the internet ( and automatical receive my emails all 45 minutes)
- i can write programms for it what makes it really interessting to maintain my servers
- with its full sized keayboard i can work over ssh, what makes it really sweet

mhm I think about it, ist only 150$ difference to a normal phhone. (I also could spend this 125$ on a short trip with my girl...)

we will see... I have 600$ left for this month and the half is already gone.

I also came to the conclusion that I don't need a heart rate monitor and a cadence monitor. I could ride my bike quite well with out it at the weekend...

i hate computer/cellphones/programming/databases right now

since 30 days I got every damn day another problem:

- laptop dies
- wrong parts get delivered
- phone died
- all server died at work after a power failure
- database drives me crazy with the stupid 32bit limitations
- barley any storage space and figthing for every byte here
- eclipses crashes all 5 minutes for no special reason

at least I made a nice 60km bike tour on sunday and went to bed at 3 pm, cause i was so tired. It was supposed to be a nap, but i slept until 2 am ( maybe I should have slept from saturday to sunday more than one hour...) and now I'm sitting at work because there are samples what need to be calculated by this afternoon. So no rafting for me :( (ok I wasn't sure if I go anyway, but thats not the point)

so we will see what comes next. Now I'm in the hussle to find a new phone...

smartphone or normal phone. I want basicly

- mpg3 player
- wifi
- pda
- sd slot

for not more than 300$ and for a model not older than 6 Month.

the only thing that has the features are:

palm treo 700p except for wifi
mda except for sd slot ( what should I do with mini sd, I want one standard)

at least my laptop is supposed to come today...

an crazy idea...

my girlfirends birthday is at the 21st of setptember and she decided to celebrate in San Diego Area. Now I had the idea to go there by bike and drive back by car. Basicly riding down the route 1 should'nt be to bad.

Its about 500 miles. So I need to cover 50 miles a day, which should be doable. I will make a test ride this weekend from davis -> winters -> berryessa to see how well I can handle mountains. This is basicly a distance of 70 miles and should be doable in close to 4 hours for an untrained person like me.

6 more days until I get my new laptop, I can't wait. Without it I can barley do anything,

- no pictures cause can't edit them
- no internet at home
- no email at home
- can't work at home (writing documentation and papers)

but a couple of days I already recieved my battery for my new toy...
and yester day two more batteries...

laptop = 0
battery = 3

so we see what our ordering system else got wrong. I don't get it whenever I order something over this system I get the wrong stuff like

- dell server for database purpose = no scsi adapter and cable
- storage server = wrong network cards
- nas = suprisingly no mistake
- workstation = wrong harddisks
- minimacs = wrong fire wire wires

so 1 out of 5, damn thats sad...

oh by the way new project: BinBase Cluster System

its time for the next tour, now I nearly have everything what I need

• spare tubes
• bottles
• bottle holder
• helmet, maybe its as good as its expensive, at least its very light, anyway you have only one head
• two jerseys and pants which demonstrate very well how skinny i am, damn it
• a small saddle bag to put all the stuff in

and I'm only missing

• lights
• second bottle holder

time to get some soon...

after I was enjoying my bike for one week and still did'nt received my repair kit from the shop. ( never order online when you can go to the shop itself in 30 minutes...) I decided lets try to make a bike tour and if something happens, you have a phone and lindsay was ok to pick me up.

After I got 6km my water was empty and I was damn down from the temperature here. We had 113 Fahrenheit ( 45C) in the shade.

It was maybe not the smartest to drive down the road to woodland. Where no shade is at all.

I give it another try tommorrow. Cause the road was nice and I could maintan an average speed of 27 km/h over 10km.

The goal is to be in berryessa at end of september with the bike.

after I went the last time to lake berryessa and looked at all these guys riding there bikes down the mountains and up again I decided maybe its time that I finally doing something for me and my body and start biking again. Problem you need a bike.

I was thinking how to afford this, cause like always I have many dreams and can't afford to buy everything like:

• nice stereo system
• a surfboard with 140 liters
• a bike
• a new car
• vacation

as we can see thats its quite a nice list. So I was thinking what makes the most sense, I would love to buy a surfboard, but for a matter of fact I can't afford to go more then 2/3 times a month surfing and my board what I just bought (115 liters) is nice, but its barley windy enough, So I delayed this another year.

• A stereo system, is not really neccessaery and I already spend way to much time in the flat...
• vacation, yeah nice, but on the other hand I'm in california and there is much left where I can go, specially arround davis/tahoe/yosemite
• A new car, very nice but my car works and drives me everywhere and gas gets more and more expensive. So for the next 6 Month it should be fine, once I fix the left bearing and my airconditioner (fan broken)
• A bike, its actually the only thing where I can save money, can do something with my girlfriend arround davis (once I fixed here bike, or we get her a new one). And if I ride it everyday to work, I would save arround 150$ a month.

Finally I decided a nice bike ( should last over 5 years, so no walmarkt stuff) would be great. Problem what kind and how do I get one in my size.

There a basicly 5 kindes of bikes out there

• road bike
• mountain bike
• city bike/cruiser
• bmx
• hybrid (mix between road bike and city bike)

Because I want a daily driver I can't get a

• bmx (way to small and I'm not into this making crazy tricks)
  
• mountin bike (when do I get into the mountains offroading and way to heavy)
• hybrid (I don't like 50/50 things and they look ugly)

So we are left with cruisers (cheap,slow,heavy arround 500$) and roadbikes (expensive,fast,light to medium weight, starts at 700$)

Cause I like it fast and my dad always talked me into getting light things (like shoes and so) I decided to get a roadbike and my banking account hates me for this.

After I reasearched in the web for a couple of days and came to this list:

• minimum shimano 105 shifiting system, better ultegra
• click pedall system instead of strapes
• shoes
• helmet
• computer
• lights
  
• combination of carbon and aluminium frame
• the softes saddle possible
• under 10 kg
• changeable cranks
• at least 60 cm frame size ( I'm between 60 and 63)

During the shopping I talked to another salesperson, and he offered me a membership in a bike club, what means I get on everything I buy in this shob 10% of for 20$ a year. A second later I accepted and have now a club card with enough money on it to reach my magic goal to afford this bike...

what I got ( got an end of summer deal after long fighting with the salesperson) :

• combination of ultegra and 105 shifting system
• forte clicks, looks pedals where to expensive, forte a based on the look design
  
• shimano shoes
• carbon fork
• Aluminum Frame with Carbon Seat Stays
• 8.53 kg heavy
• simple computer, not wounderfull does the job
• a bottle and a holders
  

after I was able to setup the clicks and figured out how to get out them again ( I'm glad I practiced where somebody could hold me) I went 5 miles and stopped at the next shop and got:

• a lock, cause kinda sucks if you need to go somewhere like a store to grab some foot
  
• some shorts, my butt hurts and I was way to warm in the pants I had one

whats still missing are:

• a trikot, cause you sweat terrible in the shirt I use right now
• a helmet, top priority, will buy it in the next week or as soon as I go into the mountains. I wanted to buy one at the shop, but could'nt get a fitting one.
  
• a larger crank once I get used to this bike, cause the front crank is a little bit to small for me. I will by it in a couple of month, once I reach the maximum and are in good enough condition to actually use it
• lights, I'm not going to buy some, cause the tires are so thin, if you miss one hole in the street you need a new tire. So no biking in the dark
• i need a permit to ride this bike on campus, what I refuse to buy, cause I'm not putting an ugly sticker on my bike
• a small wais bag, cause this stupid pants have no pockets for keys and so
• a second bottle holder with a bottle for obvious reason
• an ipod nano with wrist holder so I can enjoy music during the ride
• a stand to put the bike into the flat
• a couple of spare tubes in case of a flat tire
• contacts, cause with my glasses its kinda anoying to bike in this racing position
  

I think I will get this over the next couple of month and finally try to save some money. For vacations next year.

...now my girlfriend only needs a bike so we can make tours...

after nearly 2 years in the usa there are two things which are just wounderfull for gadget fans.

1. netflix

a service which sends you as many dvd's as you want for 14.99 a month.

2. gamefly

a service which sends you as many games as you want for 14.99 a month.

now people tend to argue with me, but I prefer to own the game, so I always can play it over and over again. Sure if you this kind of player it makes sense, but in my case I play a game once and than grab another one.
The average game has 10 - 20 hours of playtime, means I need 2 - 3 weeks to play this game and than get a new one. The other thing with console games is, they are series and every year cames the next part and the older parts dust in the shelf... 

a small story about what can happen to you in the us during sitting at venice beach.

Oldtimer to the left was swinging his flag with the indian on top and was also selling some stuff.
As we can see he looks not very wealthy so now we try to figure out what could have happen.


After he was sitting there a while, a cop come by with his bicyle. And talked to oldtimer. After a short while he called for backup. So oldtimer stepped to the left and start swinging his flag like hes mad and shouted something nobody could understand. The cop was just next to him and did nothing. 15 minutes later backup arrived.
Now we had 1 oldtimer, 1 bicycle cop, 2 suvs with 3 other cops. I guess they tried to much his age to make it fair for him.

The 4 cops now cuffed him and searched him. They discovered a pipe and called for reinforcements... 10 Minutes later 2 other cops arrived. And moved him into the suv and moved his stuff into it too.





Finally the local band tried to support oldtimer and started singing a song.

Jonny Cash - Folsom Prison.

what we still can't figure out, what did oldtimer wrong in the first place, but we needed 6 officers to arrest him. Truely a scarry oldtimer.

After I went the last weekend to venice beach california I had the possibilty to take some nice shots of a couple of bikes.

I think everybody heard about the famous muscle beach and the street performance at venice. Its kinda overrated, the muscle beach is really disappointing and the performance, is not really so impressive. I was only impressed by 6 breakdancers, who put a damn nice show up.

I also have to admit that its not true that there are many rich, famous, good looking people at venice beach. Honestly, the most should change into clothes thats hides there body, and not show so much. Its like always, fat american laying on the beach. But they are defnitly rich...

what else to say about venice, you can buy stuff, you can spend a lot of money for food. Parking is expensive, arround 25$ for a day. And it's crouded.

nothing is so important like a good breakfast.

so lets make a classic tri-tip sandwich.

Sandwich:

2 - 3 lb tri-tip
baguettes
salad
onions
...

Dry Rub:

salt
pepper
thyme
chayene pepper

Sauce:

bbq sauce
coconut milk

Recipe:

take the spieces and mix them. Mix the cocnut milk with the bbg sauce to taste. Afterwards remove unneccessaery fat from the tri-tip and rub it with the spieces.
Let it rest for 2 hours at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 350F and roast the tri-tip for 70 minutes. Brush it from time to time from both sides with the sauce. When the meat is medium done turn on the broiler for 5 minutes each side. To give it a nice sizzeling crust. Than take it out of the oven and let it settle for at least 20 minutes! This is important, so that the meat can collect its juices and don't dry out when we cut it.

Slice the meat in the thinnest slices possible. A slicer would be prefered, but you can do it with any sharp none setteratted knife in your kittchen.

now build your sandwich and enjoy!

the last weeks in california,

at first my parents visited me and toured a little around and discovered vacaville...

A little bit later they produly showed me what nice stuf they got there and how cheap it all is. It reminded me a little when my girlfriend was in berlin and discovered how "cute" shoes you can buy at deichman ( cheap ass shoe store in germany )

anyway I'm glad my parents had fun and so we drove a little bit arround with them to sonoma county, lake berryessa, san francisco ( we joined them there for a couple of hours only) .

Shortly before they left, I got me a new toy, called Xbox360. I'm kinda suprised about myself to spend money on such a toy, cause I always preferred a pc. But after playing with it for nearly 2 weeks I really have to admit: It just do the job...

so a short review:

graphics: wounderfull in HD mode, kinda weak in SD
noise: this thing is very noise so you need to set 8 - 10 Feet away or turn the tv very loud
games: I just got oblivion, and I love it
demos: its very nice that you can download demos for free, so I tried a couple of games sofar.
online: battlefield 2 online is just a hell of fun. But still unsure if I gonna pay 60$ for it
media extender: I didnt had a windows media center available, so I just used the windows vista demo and its way to slow to navigate with it. Sofar I need to find somebody who has a mediatester to see if its worth the 100$ to stream movies and dvd from harddisk. 

after the bbq was done on saturday we were relaxing in the sun and got a nice visitor. A 6 feet long boa was moving arround in our front yard.

Ok as we all now pythons and boas don't live in california in free nature. It was my neighbours boa enjoying a little bit this nice weather before she had to go back in her tank in the inside.
And my neighbours was watching the snake and asked us if it would be ok to let her in the grass for a couple of minutes, so she could clean the tank.
At least it gave me the possibility to make a couple of nice pictures.

It's summer again, that means time to bbq. The problem with bbq's is you need a grill. So I had a little gas chrill last year, but somebody decided to steal it... Anyway I saw saturday morning this awesome weather and decided time to get a grill. Now the big question gas/electric/charcoil what to buy.

Electric is no choice, to dry, not portabel. And we all no a gril has to be portable to get it to the beach. So charcoil has the best taste, but the disadvantage of exensive preheating and lots of ash. So I went with a gasgrill. Its fast, its clean and somewhat portable. Obviously gas grills are the most expensive grills out there. They start at 25$ for something what you cant call grill and go up to 5000$ what I would call insane.

So it should be:
- portable
- from a good brand for replacement parts and propan supply
- under 200$
- large enough for a couple of burgers and crabs

mean it's sounds like a weber Q series and the small ine is just to tiny and the big one ( preffered by me) way to expensive ( 360$ or so ). So I decided to go with the medium one ( Q200 ) which was still somewhat portable ( 18 kg ) and has enough space for all what you can think of. The price of 179$ is close enough to my limited and with some propan, tools, food... we hit 300$ in total for the weekend.

A first test:

- crab legs -> jummy
- jumbo prawns -> jummy
- shrimps -> chewy, go for prawns next time.
- steak -> tasty
- corn -> tasty
- spare ribs -> to fat, I stick with my oven ribs
- turkey burgers by my own recipy -> perfect
- trout -> perfect
- calamary steak -> i don't like calamari, awefull....

result: me laying lazy and round in the sun for the rest of the day.

Now the burger recipy for 4 Burgers:

- 30g butter choped in small pieces
- 1 clove garlic chopped
- 1/4 onion finley chopped
- 1 cup vermouth
- salt + fresh pepper
- 1 Pound ground turkey
- 1/2 wet bun, ripped in little pieces

mix the ingredients in a bow for a couple of minutes and make 4 pattys out of this. Put these on the grill for 5 minutes each side. Now grab some buns, cheese, onions, lettuce and build you burger.

During my time in monterey I tried to get some shots of cormorants and as we can see these little bastards are hard to catch. Its nearly impossible to get a nice sharp picture with a 300mm lens. Anyway the main problem with birds is they are moving, moving objects tend to blur so we have a lost in details. To fight against this we can use either a flash to freeze the motion ( to far away) or use a really high shutter speed ( problem underexposure) so we change to higher sensity (grain). So to find the right balance is the main question.

This picture was shot at 300m, F5.6, 1/800, iso 400

Another example for the grain of a higher iso is This picture was shot at iso 800, cause it was during the late afternoon and it was cloudy. I prefer to have some grain in my pictures and more details instead of just a blurry unsharp picture.

When you zoom into this picture you will notice the small ammount on grain, nothing serious and it also could be removed with some software like NoiseNinja if you want to spend 40$ for it.


This picture was shot at 300mm, F6.3, 1/2500 and, iso 800.

This picture was a shot in from a fishtank in the Monterey Bay aquarium.
First mistake was to shot from the side. Cause so we have a gradient in the picture. But the nice things are the wounderfull colors in this shot and the main jelly fish is crisp and sharp ( for the conditions ) We dont have a high problem with noise here ( shot at 800 iso) because there is a very high contrast in this picture.

As we can see the other jellyfish are kinda blurry, cause stupid me forgot to set a higher F than the camera decided. I tend to forget this. The right would be F8/F11 to get an overall sharp picture of them. Maybe I should switch back from the Programm modus to Aperature priority modus. This would give me under this condition way better shots. One day I will learn this to analyze it right before I shot a picture. Another problem is my lens. As you can see on the corners on the pictures it tends to vignet ( damn whats the right work, dict.leo.org is ofline). This is lens specific and I paid for this lens 80$ or so. I think I can accept that its not perfect and step up to a better lens ones I can afford this. You can reduce this effect a little with removing the UV-Filter.

This shot was taken at 28 mm, F3.5, 1/50, ISO 800

As far as filter go, I don't have the money to use some right now. I want to get a circular polarizer and a nd-gradiant filter arround 0.3 - 0.5. A warming filter would be an idea, but I can create the same effect afterwards with photoshop/gimp. Also important to mention is to buy the right size. Its better to by all filter in the same size, 77mm in my case and get some step up filter. So you don't have to buy the filter again when you get another lens.

The best example for wrong focus setting we have in the picture of the left. The idea was to have the seagul and the wave in focus. As we can see the waves are nice and the bird is sadly blurred. This happens because of the depth of field of large telezooms when there wideopen. In this case if would be perfect to stop the lens down to F11 . We have a shutterspeed of 1/2000 in this picture, so we would be ok with down to 1/1000 or even 1/500 to get a sharp crisp picture and still have the waves breaking without blurring.

This shot was taken at 300 mm, F5.6, 1/2000, ISO 200

  This weekend we finaelly went to Monterey to have a look at the aquarium and was kinda disappointed. It has so greatcritics and there were some awesome jellyfishs and some tank were impresse. Cause they mixed so many different fish in there. Like sharks, tunas and so one. Means they mied predaetors and there prey together in one tanks and balanced it somehow. But for 22$ a person entrance I exspected a little bit more.

in total we had a nice day and some pretty goo food, but we paid 200$ for gas, food, entrance fee... 

damn a long time ago I posted something, but it looks that lives goes more and more busy right now.

Its rainning time, that means you can't do anything in davis. So I started to play a stupid computer game, what is so amaizing that it eats a lot of my time...

Anyway today I was watching Ice Age 2, and damn it was pretty nice. They tried sometimes a little bit to hard to be funny, but there where nice jokes and the animations where sometimes just awesome. I sat there and where thinking, how did they do this clouds trees, water.

...I think I see it again next week....

what happens the last weeks since I'm back from germany?

That's a good question my so called clean roomates, are as bad as all other roomates I had before. And I figure more and more out, I don't like it to live with other people in one flat. Sure they are cleaning there stuff, the question is just when?

In Davis it's rainning season, but at least I found my new favorite resturant, Bistro 33. The fun part bout this is, that my girlfriend was working there. Up to now I only can say that Davis has 2 nice resturants and 1 nice cafe. Everything else is standard american food chain stuff. Not very good and fast.

The picture on top iss my kittchen sofar, maybe it will get better... 

Today I received my birthday gift, and yes I know my birthday is in a couple of days, but I couldn't resist and opened it today.

It was a nice backpack, specially designed to carry a slr, a couple of lenses, a tripod and a laptop. Actually I'm pretty amazed how well it is constructed and about the adjustments you can do. It's extendable, so you can plug other stuff on it like bags or lens holder.



The picture is the Okland By Bridge in San Francisco.


I also read a couple of articles about my new hobby, photographie and come more and more to the decciscion that the hobby gets more and more expensive. For example I always thought a filter cost 20 - 30$ and you can simulate the most filters with software like photoshop or gimp. Thats quite true, but neural density filters, graduated neural density filtes and ploarisation filters can't be simulated for obvious resons. I think I order them used and a couple of stepup rings, so that I buy one filter and can put it on every lens I own.

The picture was a random shot in Berlin, from the "Potsdammer Platz Arkaden".

I also made a couple of hundred shots from a skycraper, but no one of them was actually so as exspected. The reason for this was that the sky was to bright and darken so everything else. The solution would be a gradute neural density filter and a circular pol filter. I tried to simulate these effects with photoshop, but they turned out very bad. As we can see to the left.

after spending a week in germany, celebrating my dad's birthday I'm back in the us and had a nice suprise. I have 2 new roomates now and they are so clean. Every day I come home now I have a nice polished flat and they even had the idea to adjust the bills, so that everybody pays a fair ammount of money and not way to much like I.

Sad thing my car passed the smogtest and now I have to replace the front bearings. This car is ripping me off. So I reschedule my plans again and get my car fixed now.

ok first point done, my room is now a little bit cleaner, so I thougt lets give photoshop another try. And I have to admit the magic ward tool, is just great. It selected the areas of the different pictures exacly in the way there where supposed to be.

My originally idea to the pictures was to take the plane from the blue sky and put it into a sunset. Afterwards I added some trees and more clouds. I surrounded the plane with a nice blurry shadow to hide the cutting corners and to emulate movement. I also pasted a house in the left corner. And blurred everything, except for the plane, couple of time until it looks nice. To give it a drastic look, we converted it to black and white and played a little bit with the insensity channels.

It was a breeze, tomorrow I will try something similar with gimp. And the working speed of photoshop is great, except for the raw file handling what takes forever and a day.

it's a damn cold night...

actually not I just got home from dinner with my girlfriend and where supposed to clean my room, pack some stuff doing my taxes and go to bed, but after I started to clean up, I got so bored that I was reading a little bit at a website about the method: convert color to alpha. Sounds interessting. So I took some pictures, converted them to black and white to get some similaritys.
The result of 45 minutes of playing you can see to the left.

Now I could go back to the important stuff, but no I had to read another website about taking pictures and night time... this was even more boring. But I got some really nice results and the only reason that I stopped doing this, was that my cam run out of power, time to buy a spare batterey for 30$ for the next time. ( I only made 6 shots in the bulb mode with a totally senseless noise reduction afterwards. The exposure was arround 10 minutes each shot at iso 200 and F-Stop 11).

The other pitty was, whenever I tried to make a pictures of, say many stars at once. I was stopped by my cam: sorry you need an ultrawide lens for this kind of pictures. Now is the problem, there are only 4 lenses for this on the market (to get an ultrawide range with a nikon) and they are all arround 500$, or even worst the nikon brand (recommended, if you ever want to update to another nikon D-series) at 900$. Ok I could live with 350$, 500$ are way to much (out of the toy range.) and 900$ is insane.

The last 2 problems with pictures at night are, It is cold, so I finally have a reason to buy some new shoes (yes even I consider to wear something what's not called flip lops ) and even worse.: Why are stars and leaves moving. Please how is it possible to have a nice sharp picture at night, which needs a long time exposure, of say several minutes. And the wind moves the leaves and the stars are also moving somehow (or the earth was moving)

After beeing at work all weekend long, I tried to compare photoshop cs2 and gimp 2.10. What I wanted is to convert a simple picture of a sunset to black and white (ir) mode. The reason for this was just, that I need a nice programm for maipulating my pictures and I always want to go with the opensource version, so why should I use photoshop, except that I have more experience with it.

For example the picture on the right was created with photoshop cs in 2 minutes of adjusting some layers.

In gimp it was a little bit more difficullt. At first I had to play with the channels and afterwards I needed to optimize the curve to get a nice picture. The gimp version (left picture) has also a little bit more noise in the picture compared to the cs2 version. And less details

anyway I don't see me buying a photoshop license for 700$ just because some things are simple.

I also fixed my problem with the "Nikon Capture It" software by using a gimp plugin what can convert the files for me from nef to jpg, or just shoot in jpg mode anyway. Sure the software provide some nice features, but like always, gimp gives me at least one alternative.

To the left again is the original picture taken with a D50 and my 300mm zoom. I also figured out what I really need is a wide/superwide lens, because I tried to make some landscape pictures today and with my smalles zoom (28mm - 80mm x 1.5 factor). It's just not possible.

That means up to now I can take nice shots of flowers, can take shots of birds and airplanes, if I get them close enough. Sure these shots are all kinda unsharp, because I can't make a picture of an airplane, flying 300 mph with a stativ. Because the airplane is than already gone. And birds are even less patient! I think they had fun, watching me assembling everything, setup up the cam, setting the right settings for the light and finally I wanna press the shutter and the bird flew to the next tree. But on the other hand.




I just don't see me spending money on a 80 - 400mm VR lens from Nikon what you can buy for 1400$ from amazon. And the cheapest wideangle, cost also 400$ ( due the factor of my cam).

So lets focus on things far far away and not moving... Because for this I have everything I need, except for a flash. But this comes later, I have to learn to take pictures without a flash first