Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Portland was defiantly the most relaxing town of our road trip. Since we spend the complete 1.5 days with
- looking at head shops, no they don't sell hats as it turned out
- testing white Russians
- playing the worst game of pool in the history of portland
- looking at fancy art in the Portland art museum, my highlight was defiantly the 'tattoo - the art of Portland' Not because of the tattoos, just some of the photographs were stunning.
- being in one of the largest bookstores ever and promptly buying a book
- having good food in the morning and excellent coffee
- buying a tent at REI which we didn't end up using. I'm happy that I bought a cheap one, but will use it soon.
- attending a comedy show in the evening, which had some excellent parts

the last 5 days I spend with traveling again. This time we conquered another 2 states of the USA, which means I drove now over 33% of the west coast states.
We originally planned to stay a couple of days in Portland, but since I was not to impressed with the city we quickly made a complete road trip out of it and checked out Seattle and Olympic mountain national park
- thursday: redding,portland
- friday: portland
- saturday: seattle,bainbridge island
- sunday: olympic mountain national park (border to canada)
- montay: back to davis
Lesson: do not be in the blind spot of a semi, it would had been his fault, but I doubt that a passat is stable enough to survive the impact of a 40+ ton truck
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Sunday, July 26, 2009
if I would had the chance to start over with my whole photo equiqument I would now have a rough idea what to buy and what I want:
- D700
- Nikkor 85mm F/1.4 ( I want to buy this lens since 2 years now and can never convince my self to spend the 1300$ on it, maybe for my 28th birthday)
- 50mm F/1.8 (own it, 1.4 would be nice, but not really needed)
- 35mm F/2 (my most used lens on cropped sensors)
- 3 x SB-600 (got them)
- 1 x SB-900 (got it)
- D700
- 85mm F/1.4
- 70-200mm F/2.8 - 600$ (love the quality, hate the weight + AF)
- D200 + Grip 500 - 600$
- D80 + Grip 400 - 500$
- sigma 10-20 - 350$
But hey you never know what live throws at you...
Sunday, July 19, 2009
so we are back in davis and I learned something new.
I seem to like camping and honestly after buying all this stuff I had no real choice. But yes it was a lot of fun.
lessons learned:
- my stomach can't handle only dried fruit, I need fresh stuff too
- contacts worked surprisingly well, but quite a hassle in the morning/midnight
- getting the brightest light I could find was an awesome idea. I actually could see something in the dark
- ebooks and rivers are a bad combination. Get a waterproof bag for it
- camera and rivers are a really bad combination, I found some great spots and couldn't get there with the camera, get a waterproof bag...
- using only 2 lenses was a great idea, 35mm F/2 and 90mm F/2.8 worked very well, but I could had used something in the 20mm range like this
- buying the right equipment the first time was a really good idea, it was expensive but I will have it for years.
- bringing a reflector instead of flashes was a great idea
- putting water bottles in the sun for 2 hours => hot nearly boiling water
- waterfalls => much colder than rivers => store beer here...
- do not sleep on a slope...
- lots and lots of trouts in the river => bring fishing pole next time
- if you do rock climbing during the day => bring gloves to avoid burned hands...
- portland/oregon coast in 2 weeks
- next year hawaii or yellowstone (once i got over my fear of wild animals eating me, like bears/pumas)
- Yosemite in September?
- Scotland in October?
- discovering which food is the right food
- bring more tea
Well this weekend was a bit expensive, since I had to buy all kinds of stuff, but it was a lot of fun and I wanted to get most of this stuff since a couple of years. At least now I have it and can take it on future trips.
I also managed to rent out my old apartment for the next month, not for the price I wanted. But 350$ are better than nothing.
Friday, July 17, 2009
camping...
well the plan for this weekend was to go camping, and ever endless tries to avoid It I caved in.
Means shopping time :(
Which made me realize yet again that it sucks to not fit the standard.
- sleeping mattress, normal person : 40 - 45$, gigantic tall people like me 85$
- flash light, people with good night vision: 15 - 25$, people who are more or less blind in the dark, 'sir yo should get the extra bright one', 55$
- super small lightweight pillow and sleeping bag 180$ (the one I borrowed did not fit in the car and was to big to be hiked in.)
Other stuff I had to buy
- a hat, 25$
- a folding knife, 55$ (after negotiating 16$). I'm not going anywhere without a knife! I watched enough MCGyver to know this...
- 2 x water canteens, 20$. After now people who went hiking with me know I freak out, if I have not enough water
- bug spray 15$ and they still will bite me...
- ultra portable pillow, 15$
- compression bag, 25$
Short another 40$.
And I still forgot a lot of stuff, I know me...
Thursday, July 16, 2009
well our weekly gamenight turned out to be something special this week.
This time we got:
- fantastic food, like always
- a fun group of people, like always
- a new game
here it comes,
live music from the touring band "Jen & Abby", which promptly let to an improved photo shoot, while they were performing for us, since they needed some pictures.
Now this put me into a challenging position, how the hell are I'm supposed to take pictures...
- awe full location, a cluttered living room is just plain bad
- not able to move anyone around, since I don't want to interrupt there beautiful music
- no subject/background seperation
Note for later, I could had used a 85mm F/1.4 so badly...
So they are not my best work, but for the circumstances they turned out pretty well.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Saturday we decided to make a 'short' trip to pine lake nearby. The idea was to hike and swim abit.
But for some reason it turned out to be a 10mile+ hike, since we walked around the lake. Which has 10 miles shore and our side trips and shortcut's did not really help. So to judge how I felt the next day, we walked roughly 2500 miles. Which translates into 12 - 15 miles, after some careful consideration.
Anyway it was a beautiful day and I had the chance to take some pictures.
how to describe twain harte, I guess wikipedia gives it a try, but can't say much about it.
My best guess is to look at this picture to the left. I think it tells you all in a very simple story.
Basically it's a small very relaxed and down to earth community. Celebrating the American way of live. Beginning with the old trucks and proud flags to small American dinners with deer heads on the wall and a waitress running around with a classic coffee pot, serving gigantic amount of breakfast for decent prices.
Everything closes by 9.30-10.00 pm and skunks are running around at night, trying (successfully) to escape me an my camera...
after we arrived at twain hart and got the cabin ready, which included hunting down several kinds of different spiders.
Yes gigantic monstrous spiders, the kind which I hate! They decided to move in since the last time the cabin was used. Ok it's been a year, but still they are not supposed to be there.
Anyway we both ended up (Ashley and I, not the spiders and I) relaxing in the cabin and reading a bit.
Friday, July 10, 2009

well last night was fun, we just ended up going for a concert in the park and playing uno with friends.
The concert was, well different. It was supposed to be latin music, so I expected something like Santana style and instead we got some very strange and unexciting acoustic guitar player singing English songs.
Well at least we had fun with friends.
The picture on the left was only taken, because the light was so pretty...
Thursday, July 09, 2009
since people starting to complain that this blog is to much about work and coding and so, well there is now a new blog, only about coding.
Coding and More
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Thursday, July 02, 2009
well after years of grilling tri-tip and pan fried tri-tip we tried something new and involves the smoker (what a surprise)
We made an amazing smoked tri-tip and I think this is the way togo. Well the guest's seemed to be pretty happy too and we ended up making so much food, that I have a whole smoked tri-tip left to my self :)
Anyway the recipe:
- get yourself a good looking tri-tip with some nice marbling and about 1.5 - 2lbs trimmed, or 2.5 - 3 lbs untrimmed (and trim it a bit)
- make a dry rub out of salt and pepper and rub it onto the meat. You need roughly a cup of dry rub
- toss in a zip lock bag and leave it in the fridge for 5 - 6 hours
- remove it from the fridge when you are setting up the smoker, ca 45 minutes prior
- fire up the smoker with some hickory wood and let it settle at a temperature of 220-250 Fahrenheit
- toss in the meat, add the remote meat thermometer and enjoy a couple of hefeweizen (roughly 1 hour a pound, so about 90 minutes or 3 -5 hefeweizen)
- do NOT open the smoker and look all the time, that's what's the remote thermometer is for
- once the meat reaches 145 Fahrenheit, take it off the smoker and let it rest for 10 - 20 minutes so it's as juicy as possible
- slice it into thins slices, alone in the kitchen (everybody else is outside...) and serve to the hungry pack
since I like to keep things simple and quick I just made a spicy (for germans) yogurt based dip.
- 1 lbs of yoghurt, not the fat free kind!
- 4 cloves of garlic, minced
- Salt, Pepper, Basil, Oregano to taste
- half a red onion, minced
mix everything together and let it rest in the fridge for an hour. It works really well with meat, since it enhances the taste of it, by adding a slight sour and fresh note.










well today I took of the day to move to my new place for this year and I hope to stay longer here. Depending how everything goes with the roommate and my wonderful girlfriend.
So here are some pictures of the front and backyard and I post pictures of the rest of this house as soon as possible.
My room basically has barley any stuff in it so far, since i need to remodel my bed and so. But once it's done it's going to be beautiful.
The backyard and frontyard are nice and I smoked my first tritip tonight, which was just amaizing and pretty cheap at 20$ for 4 lbs.
I guess I have this kind of sandwiches for the next 4 - 5 days.
Anyway it's late and time for bed.
Monday, June 29, 2009
well this is something new, a very strange behavior in one of my tests cases:
List
assertTrue(result.isEmpty() == false);
int size = result.size();
int exspected = testSize * addres.length;
logger.info(size);
logger.info(exspected);
assertTrue(size == exspected);
now why do I get this error message...
[17:37:02,007] [INFO ] [main] [LoggingServiceTest] [400]
[17:37:02,008] [INFO ] [main] [LoggingServiceTest] [200]
junit.framework.AssertionFailedError: null
at edu.ucdavis.genomics.metabolomics.binbase.logging.server.LoggingServiceTest.setUp(LoggingServiceTest.java:73)
at org.jmock.core.VerifyingTestCase.runBare(Unknown Source)
at org.junit.internal.runners.JUnit38ClassRunner.run(JUnit38ClassRunner.java:81)
at com.intellij.rt.junit4.Junit4ClassSuite.run(Junit4ClassSuite.java:99)
at com.intellij.rt.execution.junit.JUnitStarter.main(JUnitStarter.java:40)
error in this line:
assertTrue(size == exspected);
ok it's supposed to fail because 200 isn't 400, but not with a NullPointer exception...
now I have been working with intellij for a bit over a week and it have to say it has it's highs and it's lows.
- refactoring is just great
- override/implment function works good
- I hate the code completion, it's just strange behavior wise
- the junit plugin is nice, but a bit strange
- the grails/groovy support is exceptional good
- the performance is good if I work on a single project, if I work on my average 40 projects at once it's impossible to work with
- nice support for for python, works quite well
- uml support is great
- ant based build are a nightmare, but we want to use maven anyway whenever, where ever
- maven plugin is great in therorie, but with complex pom's it's extremely slow.
- python development will be in intellij
- groovy development will be in intellij
- scala development will be in intellij
- java development will be in eclipse
- pom writing will be in intillij and I generate the project directly via 'mvn idea:idea eclipse:eclipse' instead of using the pom as project file
Sunday, June 28, 2009
ok it's not hot in davis,
it's ridiculous hot, 47 Degree Celsius....
I mean seriously...
lesson:
- do not buy a car with black leather seats...
- do not buy a car with black leather...
- do not buy a car with black...
- do not buy a car with...
- do not buy a car...
- do not buy a...
- do not buy...
- do not...
- do...
- ...
- ..
- .
Also no smoked meat today, I will not sit for 12 hours next to this thing fighting with the heat during the day or the roaches at night.
Now time to run for a restaurant and get some tasty food. I'm in no mood to cook tonight.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
to cancel flight's is fun...
Flight cost summary
Flight cost - 6/16/09
| Airfare #XXXXXXXXXXXXX | $679.25 | |
|---|---|---|
| Flight cost | $679.25 | |
Exchange cost - 6/25/09 | ||
| Airfare #XXXXXXXXXXXXX | $688.78 | |
| Previous airfare | -$679.25 | |
| Airfare difference | $9.53 | |
| Orbitz exchange fee | $30.00 | |
| Airline change fee | $200.00 | |
| Total exchange cost | $239.53 | USD |
Grand total itinerary cost to-date | $918.78 USD |
|---|
boy my checking account truly hates me right now...
so it look's like the raid is now running, so this next step would be an lvm2 layer on top of it.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
currently I'm fighting since 4 weeks with a retarded server, well whenever I got some time besides
- fixing bugs
- keeping the system running, because the main server is offline since 2 month now
- helping people with problems
- fighting with power outages
- fixing servers
- and actually coding doing research in the left over time
- removing existing raid stuff: mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sd[c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p]1
- stopping a raid: mdadm --stop /dev/md_d3
- getting some info's about the raid: mdadm --examine /dev/sd[c-p]1
- trying to assemble a raid: mdadm -v -A /dev/md_d3 /dev/sd[c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p]1
- creating a large raid0 for testing: mdadm --create --verbose --force /dev/md3 --level=raid0 --raid-devices=14 /dev/sd{c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p}1
- creating a raid6: mdadm --create --verbose --force --name=data /dev/md3 --level=raid6 --raid-devices=12 --spare-devices=2 /dev/sd{c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p}1
- storing the generated configuration: mdadm --examine --scan --config=mdadm.conf >> /etc/mdadm/
mdadm.conf
Sunday, June 21, 2009
well since this month turned out to be much more pricey than planned
- ticket to germany 700$
- visa fee 200$
- conference fee 200$ (should get reimbursed in the next view weeks)
- smoker 350$ (including needed stuff like coal and wood)
- rent deposit 500$
- last month rent 500$
- paying rent for 2 places 750-1000$
Friday, June 19, 2009
so what's new,
- my experiment to live on 100$ a week worked quite well, only 2 days left and I still have 2 whole chickens in the freezer, which are going to visit the smoker tomorrow
- for some reasons my back is killing me time to try a different workout and I'm looking forward to swimming again
- booking a flight to germany and a visa appointment and screwing it up, now I have only a 2 day window to get my visa delivered
- trying to learn and understand ajax
- trying to work more with groovy and grails
- learning a new IDE (IntelliJ 8) and so far I love it
- switching from firefox to safari for internet related stuff, since firefox is so slow
- looking for a small ultra portable laptop with 10 hours of battery live
Saturday, June 13, 2009

just another saturday, well since I decided to skip carmel this weekend and stay in davis, since friends are in town, well I decided to use this weekend and give the smoker a run for it's money.
So today we make trout spread for bagels and smoked trout.
- buy 4 trouts = 10$
- buy cottage cheese and cream cheese = 5$
- buy 12 bagels = 6$
First we brine the trouts for an hour in sugar and salt (lesson for next time, brine 2 - 3 hours, they are a bit dry and needed a lot of salt), while setting up the fire. It turned out that the new york times is an aweful starter, so let's try another newspaper the next time.
The trouts are now happily smoking for 3 hours at 220-240 Fahrenheit and I use this time to be productive, equals watching cheesy movies.
Once the trout were done, we had one for lunch, put away one for dinner and mixed 2 for the spread.
- sellery
- onion
- garlic
- cottage cheese
- cream cheese
And I also have about 2 pound of spread now, which has to be eaten in the next 4 days, so 2 bagels for breakfast everyday and if somebody want's some spread, call me.
(It has some fishbones, blame the blender...)
About the smoked trout in general? It's is amaizingly tasty and quite a fat fish. I like it.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
so the smoker finally arrived and so we started to cook our first dish.
The lesson of the day? It's not worth it to cook a single chicken, since you need way to much charcoal and wood for it. It was like 5$ worth of charcoal.
lesson 2:
one chicken is not enough, they are so damn tasty you want a second one 5 minutes later
how too?
- soak chicken in solution of salt and sugar for 2 hours
- try chicken
- put pepper on chicken
- preheat smoker to 250 degrees fahrenheit
- leave chicken in there for 3h
- try to understand where you need to put the thermometer and figure out why it constantly looses connection
- figure out a way to kill the coals and wood once you are done, since it makes me nervous as hell to leave the bbq on over night and going to bed
- carve the chicken, executed by ashley!
get more chickens and repeat!
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
step two:
the smoker is ordered and on its way...
and so is the meat thermometer
(no more dining out this month...)
step three:
get wood and charcoal
step four:
get some ribs and smoke them tomorrow night till the early morning
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Saturday, June 06, 2009
well I'm back from phillidelphia and the first thing we did was a nice picnic in sacramento. We also looked at some town houses and discovered a small honey store.
It's amaizing how different honey can taste. From delicious to disgusting is just a spoon apart
- orange blossom - yummy
- clover - yummy
- sage - ok and very mild
- eucalyptus - disgusting
- several other kind's I can't remember
...time to make some tea...
Friday, June 05, 2009
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
so it's always sunny in Philadelphia? Nah it's a freaking lie! Never believe in TV Shows! Why are I'm surrounded by thunderstorms and rain.
I should had brought shoes besides sandals...
Anyway the poster presentation is done and the response was quite nice. It also looks that everybody starts to agree with our point:
You need a database for your results!
So the last 7 years start to pay off. Several people congratulated us to the software we wrote and are highly impressed. I'm still surprised that I was brave enough to actually participate in the discussion, in front of 300 people about the different approaches to annotate massspecs. Who all have fancy titles and are accepted experts in the field of metabolomics.
What else, the first people which were fun to hangout with already left and so I have to work again tonight to find new people to talk too.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
current location: philidelphia
current food: gyros
food of the last days: philli cheesesteaks
busy with: looking so far at 1400 posters, 1400 more are comming
mistake: not staying the weekend here and driving to new york = bad planning from me
why such a short post?
got no time, have to run to a talk and the internet is so damn unreliable...
Monday, May 25, 2009
sometimes things take a bit longer, like create a raid6 system over 16 harddrives 1TB with software raid...
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md2 : active raid6 sdp[12](S) sdo[13](S) sdn[11] sdm[10] sdl[9] sdk[8] sdj[7] sdi[6] sdh[5] sdg[4] sdf[3] sde[2] sdd[1] sdc[0]
9765518720 blocks level 6, 16k chunk, algorithm 2 [12/12] [UUUUUUUUUUUU]
[>....................] resync = 0.1% (1393856/976551872) finish=25232.3min speed=643K/sec
25k minutes? I really hope the estimate is a bit off. Cause I'm not going to wait for 17 days after each test of the raid system...
Sunday, May 24, 2009
getting up at 5.30 -> arg!
waiting for 30 minutes in the cold -> arg!
spending an awesome day in nappa -> awesome!
basically we had a wonderful winetasting event, thx to the metacancer team, in nappa. The wineries were sterling (Oh I love there pinot grigo and sauvignon blanc) and rubicon (to much red wines for my taste and the chadonay was to sour) Short I'm a white wine person, but it was interresting to taste the different kind of red wines.
And we finished the day with a nice dinner a buckhorn.
Now If I just had a reflector with me, I could had really make some stunning pictures. There was so beautiful light!
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
after working for more than 10 years with sql based languages I discovered something new again. The case statement, which is pretty damn slow (table of a couple of million entries) but it saves me the time to work with some statistical software.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
it's been quiete lately, which is mostly related to the fact that I discovered that Alexandre Dumas wrote a complete series about the adventures of D'Artangan.
And so I'm slowly fighting my way throw his books and love my ebook reader more and more and can't understand how I could live without it. I mean it's so great to lay at the pool and read gigantic novels in the sun, in such a tiny device.
done:
- the three musketeers
togo:
- 20 years later
- the man in the iron mask
- the vicomte de bragelonne
- 10 years later
- Loiuse de la Valliere
so all i can say if you like to read and like to read classic novel, get your self an ebook reader, but be prepared to go missing...



