just bought my TomTom Navigation System app for my iphone. Let's see if it works better than my trusted 4 year old hiking GPS...

I just picked up my rental car, a 2008 Toyota Avalon and while it's a nice and fun car to drive. I would rather have a passat. The Toyota is just so whisper quite and doesn't purr at all. But well it does has close to 300hp and accelerates quite nicely and I'm happy that I have cruise control set to limit my self at 80mph.

But otherwise, all plastic inside :(

And I wanted the promised nissan maxima....

last night was a slightly different night of going out dancing

 a friend of mine called me earlier that she is hosting a vip event

at the dream ultra lounge in sacramento and obviously I wanted togo

I did not expsect that this meant free alcohol of any kind and as much as you want

the vip party turned out to be only 8 people, including the head of security

and owner of the club and a couple of models.

short it was a fun night

this morning I started to research what this actually cost to host such a party. The smallest package is one bottle of alcohol, a couple of mixers and admission for 8 people. This fun cost 350$

now what did we have was:

2 different kinds of vodka

1 bottle of spiced rum

1 bottle of martini

couple of mixers

and we were between 8 and 15 people. Just coming and going. Which translates into  a custom package of 1100$ and 4 hours spend.

Way to rich for my blood...

it was the year 2001 and I was highly into HIFI and spend countless amount of money on this hobby. Now 8 years later I'm still missing one thing of my audio equiqument and thinking about buying it again over and over again. At least once a month.

My beautiful Sennheiser HD600 headphones which I used to own and had to sell in 2003 because I was short on cash.

Sure it was nut's to spend 600$ on a pair of headphones no question about it. But I'm still considering doing it again and buying a nice amplifier for them. The big question is just, are mp3 files good enough?

The funny thing is, I do not miss my Dolby surround system or my speakers, which are now glorious plant support...

well if I see the statistic of my saving account right I could assume that I can ditch my car in 4 month and buy a replacement.
Right now If somebody would offer me 2k for it, he can have it and I wouldn't loose sleep about it. It's just amazing what I spend on it in the last 6 month...

currently:

• blown ecu
• keeps killing crankshaft position sensors => see ecu
  
• flat tire
• still possible blown catalytic converter

I guess  I never ever buy a used german car again. The next car is an old jeep or mustang. At least they have no electronics which can die...

This one looks good..

Well I'm back from Cambridge.

And I can only say if you ever have the chance to visit it. Definately do it. Sadly I had not much spare time between meetings, preparing my talk, practicing and catching up on sleep.

But at least I spend 4 hours on Friday running around and making a personal tour on the Kings College Chapel Roof, which gave you an amazing view over the city.

Short I want to go there again sometime and see more off it.

in the last 62 month I've been on more airplanes than I ever though possible or wanted to be. Which included me staying at a lot of different airports and so I write down which ones are great, good or to be avoided at all costs.

The scale:

awesome - I was completely blown away
good - nothing really to complain about
indefferent - I don't really care
acceptable - minor issues, but ok
awful - never ever again

let's see

sacramento = acceptable

• diners/bars close to early
• check in is extremely slow
• free wifi
  

san francisco = good

• best airport food
• if you don't fly united, than great and quick check ins
• some more signs would be great
• lot's of bars to choose from
• slow customs/immigrations
  

chicago = indifferent

• great architecture
• slow customs/immigrations
• food is ok

portland = awesome

• extremely quick customs and immigrations, all done under 5 minutes
• good bars
• enough signs
  

los angeles = awful, avoid at all cost

• directions are awful
• extremely long in immigrations
• friendly personal
• impossible layout
• bars close before 9pm
• good clothing stores
  

ontario = indifferent

• it's been so long since I've been there, can't even recal good or bad things
  

charles de gaule, paris = indifferent

• slightly chaotic
• frustrating layout

frankfurt am main = indifferent

• frustrating layout
• fast customs
• quickish immigration
  

helsinki = acceptable

• slightly chaotic

kopenhagen = good

• great food
• pricey
• lot's of light
• decent layout

berlin, tegel = acceptable

• long checkin times
• confusing layout

washington, dc = indifferent
amsterdam = indifferent
london heathrow = good

• very good directions
• lots of walking
• nice shops and food
• friendly personal
  

so the last 2 days I ended up spending in cambridge at the 10/2009 metacancer meeting.

Review sofar:

The meetings had some interresting talks, specially the impact of food and cancer. Like the risk to get some kinds of cancer is 75% if you eat 100g or more meat a day. Now the risk is reduced by 75% if you eat 100g or more fish a day.
But most of the meetings were a bit to abstract for me, since they are really not my field and I had the only talk about computer science.

Cambridge it self is a little wonderful town and it would be great to live here. The flair of the city is just amaizing and I really love the old architecture. That the local rugby team helped me at a pub to order food an drinks was just amazing.
Short the people are very friendly here and helped me countless times when I got lost...

I was only nearly run over twice. Thanks to people driving on the wrong side of the road. Well you could call it other side. But I did not exspect the way people turn into streets...


Picture wise, well I try to take some pictures today after the meeting is over. Because my flight is already at 4pm on saturday, which translates in me leaving Cambridge by 9am latest.

this morning I got a ride from Ashley to the airport at 4am and after an uneventful flight of 1.15 minutes I managed to arrive in Los Angeles. Which is the worst airport I have ever been too. It has barley signs, it's complicated. The service unfriendly and the food is just plain awful.

And the worst is that I got to spend 9h here reading/working/watching movies and people are coming and going and I just keep staying. I can't even find people to talk to, since my gate is completely empty.

Short I'm bored out of my mind and pondering since 2 hours the idea to just get a beer or two. I also bought my first time ever internet access pass at an airport.

We shall see...

But I can't leave my spot, since I occupy the only working powerplug in this area...

Picture on the side is me after only 2-3h of sleep in the last 24 hours and being proud owner of a new fedora and haircut...

well after a pleasant breakfast with my visiting friend Kim I decided to spend the rest of the day relax downtown or so.

Mhm but my car did not joined me into this and stopped working again. For some reason the speed sensor died yet again. So it's going to be parked for the rest of the month on the ramps till I find more money to put into. But what can kill a speed sensor in 60 miles. I'm running out of ideas and so does Dr. Google...
I mean last night the car was working fine without any flaws. Starting and stopping and over night it stops. I swear somebody is sabotaging me...
I'm so close to put the car in INOP and sell it as is for 1500-2000 as project.

The only thing which makes me happy if, is there is something blowing the speedsensors. It would had done the same if I brought it to a garage...

I was kinda undecided to go clubbing tonight, but it actually turned into a lot of fun and was nice to get out of dancing tonight and leave davis/troubles behind for a night.

Actually it was really fun, to begin it was Kim, Laure, Steven and me. Later we got joined by Kitty. Kitty is a glamor model I met last Thursday and can maybe introduce me to some people for possible shots. We sadly didn't make an even six as we planned, since she left her boyfriend at home. She said he doesn't really like togo out much.

club one: Social

it's more or less my favorite club in sacramento rigth now and was a lot of fun. Specially since we accidentally crashed a wedding and were happily dancing till we noticed that the average age was around 40 and people had smokings on, there were pictures of a couple displayed at every wall and the women had just stunning dresses. One in white...

club two: Dream Lounge

this was not so much fun since the DJ was rather bad and it was a touch to crowded. The highlight of this club was me chatting with a couple of Russian girls which thought it would had been funny to ask me in Russian for my name and that I was actually able to answer in Russian and politely asked them to speak English or German to me. Yes my first real world application of the 3 sentences of Russian I know.

club three: The Park

I'm not a huge fan of this club, since it's always to crowded. Because the dance floor is a touch small, but at least the DJ was good and we danced there for 2 hours or so. Well at least it was fun till some idiot decided it's cool to punch me in the ribs, because he felt like I'm invaded the space of him and his girlfriend.
I still don't know why I just walked away instead of doing something about it. Guess I have my smart moments and don't see the point of fighting in bars. Or maybe I just don't hit shorter people?

Conclusions

the best part of the evening was defiantly crushing the wedding. Which was a total accident. At least we were nice and didn't take advantage of the open bar.

Once we came back to Davis we had a couple of panninis at my place and called it a night. Now getting up in 5 hours is going to be a pain. Since I'm supposed to have with Kim, my former neighbor, some breakfast.

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

So after driving 60 miles it looks like

• no starting issues or funny noises
• no leaking oil anymore
• no burned oil smell

So seems it paid off that I worked on it a bit.

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

About me and clothes,

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

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

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

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

What did I do different?

• I knew where the part was located, 4 hours saved
• I cut the old sensor in the middle instead of fideling with it for an hour, 59 minutes saved
• I did not remove the coolant reservoir this time, 10 minutes saved

now the bill in total come out to:

• wrong part 80$ - thanks ECS for providing this, you send me the part for a 1.8T...
  
• comfirming diagnostic 90$
• right part 40$
• so 230$ total

compared to the quoted 360$ of the shop

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

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

3 Points

and we started with 3 points.


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

Well at least I got out and relaxed a bit.

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

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

Ok let's think about it.

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

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

Is it?

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

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

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

result?

this!

now why are all these pictures black and white?

cause they look great like this!

the bright side is that my hands are finally ok enough that I can climb a bit and workout again.
But without my favorite rock climbing partner there is just not much fun in it, since nobody is there who motivates you or shares your accomplishes.

well today my new scale arrived, since I wanted to start to monitor my weight and live healthier. Including eating less meat, working out more and keeping balanced diet.

So first thing I noticed that I finally hit a BMI of 20, so I'm officially not longer underweight.
The second is that I'm getting fat in an unhealthy way. 19% Body fat content is way to much for me and I want to get it down to about 10%, without loosing mass.

I also listened to my best friend about my eating habits and will take my daily Dosis 'ensure' even if it taste awfully and is disgusting, but I can keep it in the office for a quick snack.

This stuff if basically a replacement meal and should help me to get the required amount of calories without taking to much fat to me, as I did lately.

since the first speed sensor blew up, thanks for being the wrong part, I order now the hopefully right part and got it even on sale for 35$
Sometimes it's worth to shop around.

Disadvantage is that it needs a week to be delivered. But at least I can now write my first how to fix the internal of your car tutorial, if you have 2 left hands!

And it's never wrong to spend more time learning to write or to use your hands. Who knows maybe I learn enough, that I can sometimes even fix cars, if all other backup jobs fail.


Now I just need to borrow a car to get some new stylish clothes.

another uneventful sunday spend with trying the fix the car and watching the second rain in the year.

This time I only needed 45 minutes to replace the suction pump and the only hassle was to figure out how to cut the brass connectors without a tin clip. Turned out massive tree cutter do this rather well...

In total I saved around 400$ this weekend doing all the work my self. Which is nice and I start to get more confident with fixing my car. The big question is, does it fix the oil leak? The suction pump i took out was completely stuck and so responsible for the overpressure in the pvc system, which blew my gaskets. Now I just hope that the gaskets are not that shot that I really have to replace them. We will see in 1000 miles...

Last night I decided to grab some frozen yogurt with a new friend and were joined by a couple of other friends for a rock climbing session afterward. Which turned into a lot of fun and hope to repeat this soon.

Well besides the part that my car refused to start and we walked afterward to a bar for a refreshing beer. The rest of the night I ended up watching a very strange movie, but happily I don't remember much of it. What shall I say, some kind of early Tarrantino.

Now the 'fun' project was to get my car going again and a job which was supposed to take 50-60 minutes turned into a 6 hour project. Five hours of this were spend with actually locating the damn speed sensor. Which is located at the bell housing of the transmission at not at engine block as it was written down in the manual.

The good part is that the car is starting now and the bad part is that it sounds really strange and the noise seems to come from the serpentine belt, which is really tight. I didn't even work in this area of the car... Guess I do this tomorrow and replacing also the suction pump. Which I have laying around since a while.