© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: deininger weiher, lake, swamp

Munich is a city where the infrastructure is excellent for riding a bike. There are bike tracks almost everywhere on the roads and sidewalks. And in addition to that, there is the Isar river which goes through the city. On its banks there are bike paths all over the place, paved or gravel, so you can ride all day long if you want.

That is where I did most of my riding. My hotel is somewhere at the east city limit so I would just ride to the Isar (only 15 minutes away) and then I would just go either north or south along the Isar. And of course, I would always have my camera with me because the whole area is just beautiful. Just see for yourself, some of the pictures I made along the river:

I also thought it would be a good idea to track my rides and since my N85 has a GPS unit inside there is an easy solution for this. Nokia used to have a beta program called Sports tracker, a small application which would run on your phone and it would record your route, along with stats like speed, altitude, distance, etc. The program was discontinued but recently a new company picked it up and improved it a lot. The application itself has been improved and a new service was launched at http://www.sports-tracker.com. The routes tracked on your phone can be uploaded to the service and then you can view it on the website on a map with all kind of interesting statistics. The pictures you take with your phone during the ride can be also uploaded, so whoever looks at the website can see what it was like.

And the nice thing is, all this is free. The company makes their money by selling a heart rate transmitter belt which you can pair with your phone over bluetooth. Then the program can also record info about your heart beat which allows you to train more efficiently. While nice to have, it’s somewhat expensive and nobody forces you to buy it.

The program is of course not only for riding but for all kind of other workouts: walking, running, skying, working indoors, etc. For example, you can see what one of my  typical ride looks like.

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: bike, isar, munich, nokia, Pictures, riding, sports tracker

This is considered an attraction in this area so people come, and they come by the truckload. For 5 days, from friday until tuesday, these events last from morning until midnight. Some might even think this is a great thing and a great place to have fun.

Well, NOT if you happen live here, I can tell you that! One of the stages is right in front of our house so unless you happen to live in a bunker 100m underground, then there is no way in hell you can have a moment of quiet and peace, even with the windows closed. Which we could not really do because there were above 30C outside. This was really horrible.

Last year we planned to take vacation days during this period and just get out of the city. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned and we had to stay home and endure for 5 days this madness. And they play this horrible fanfare music shit they seem to like to much here in Germany, beer tent music we call it. I imagine if you are completely drunk, in a mass of equally drunk people, then this music might appear appealing to your beer-soaked brain. Not our case.

And when they are not playing the beer tent music, they play those old stupid pop songs or “schlagers” how they call them here. I really don’t get this, maybe they were popular 30 years ago but now ? How come they can’t bring some normal bands which could appeal to people younger than 60 ?

Then not only do we have to cope with this auditory cacophony but they play it so damn loud. The volume is so loud you can hear that shitty music booming through the house even with your hands over your ears, you can feel the house vibrate, hell you can feel your insides vibrate. There were a lot of complains about that last year and they promised they will try to keep the noise down a bit this year. Bullshit, nothing happened.

All this until midnight. And once they stop, it’s not over yet. It takes another hour until the banging stops, until the drunks stop yelling at one another, until they stop pissing in trash cans or in flower pots.

Here are the people who organized this “wonderful” event:

What is the most obvious part of the picture ? Yes, the beer. What a shock. Thank you for 5 days of my life that you wasted!

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: beer, festival, music, noise, schlager, schowo, shitty

I usually work either on my computer at home or on my laptop when I am away. I could either keep the images on the laptop/desktop and sync them when I am at home or just work on a portable hard drive. The portable disk made more sense so I got myself a 320GB Seagate FreeAgent Go USB drive, storage is quite cheap these days:

The drive is nice, physically small, fast and big enough for what I need. I just connect it to whatever computer I happen to be using, the desktop at home or the laptop while I am on the go.

To manage the photo collection I use Adobe Lightroom, which is in my opinion the best tool for the job. Lightroom organizes photos in “catalogs” and I personally have 4 of them:

• Incubator: this is where I import the pictures from the camera. Once the pictures are imported, I go through them and delete the trash right away. Then, the most important step, I edit the pictures’ Metadata which is made very easy by Lightroom. On import I already insert common copyright info (my name, website, etc) but now I also update the image location, the city and country. Based on this info and the image timestamp, Adobe makes managing very large collections quite easy.

  After I do that, I work on the images and I edit them in Lightroom as needed (brightness, contrast, exposure, noise reduction, sharpening, color correction, etc). Depending on what I want to do, I might send them to an external editor for further processing: Photomatix for HDR or maybe Adobe Photoshop for more complex editing. Only after the processing is done I decide what to do with the image. I use 2 color labels for that:

  • Green: images which I consider to be “keepers”, this is where I choose the pictures I might publish on Deviantart or other similar websites.
  • Blue: personal images. They are things like portraits, family pictures, and so on.
• Selected: This is where the images labeled as “Green” go.
• Personals: This is where the images labeled as “Blue” go.
• All Raw: This is where I copy every image from the Incubator catalog. It includes images of both blue and green labels as well as the raw images. This is a sort of backup catalog and I don’t usually look here often unless I need the raw version of a image to recreate something. This is also the biggest catalog since it contains all the pictures I made so far.

Each catalog has its own folder on the USB drive and images are organized based on the date: Year – Month – Day. That is done automatically by Lightroom when the images are imported from the camera. The powerful filtering makes it quite easy to sort through thousand of image:

I almost always shoot in RAW and not in JPEG. Yes, the resulting image can be up to 20MB, much bigger than a JPEG and you need to spend some time to post process it in Lightroom but you are much more flexible and the end result is far superior. I only export JPEG copies of the images I want to upload on the web. So far I don’t have problems with the space, the biggest catalogs are the AllRaw and Selected, with 42GB and 17GB.

Once the images in the Incubator are copied to the other 3 catalogs and I make sure they are correctly imported there, I empty the Incubator. This whole process works ok for me. The portable hard drive makes it easy to switch between laptop and desktop, where I have the same tools installed.

Of course, backup is important too. The catalogs themselves (which are actually the Lightroom databases) are backed up on my home NAS server, as well as the physical images. I may switch soon to backup to the cloud backup everything on the Jungledisk account. The whole portable drive is fully encrypted with Truecrypt  so even if I somehow loose it, nobody can really rummage through my personal collection.

That’s about it. I don’t know if this is the best solution and I am sure it does not work  for everybody or it might be overkill for some but it suits my purposes ;-)

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | 10 comments
Post tags: adobe, backup, catalogs, digital, images, lightroom, photoshop, workflow

As usual, whenever I can I try to do some photo walks each week and since we visited that lake the previous weekend, I thought I should see what lakes are there within reasonable driving distance from Munich. It turns out there are quite a few.

There is a chain of lakes some 50km outside Munich so I went there before the sunset, so I can have better light. And less heat. This was not one of my better ideas because there was no easy way to get to the lake shore. When I finally found a way, I also found a camping spot with lots of them camping buses and lots of people. But the worse part were the mosquitoes. I could not believe how many they were. As soon as I would stop to set the tripod up or to make a picture, I would literally get attacked. I am all for sacrifices in the name of art but this was way too much, only the first two pictures are from there because I decided to cut my loses and leave before I become a bloody pulp.

I did some more research and the next day I went to Walchensee, one of the deepest and biggest alpine lakes in Germany. The lake is some 70km south of Munich, in the Bavarian Alps and this was a much better idea. It didn’t even take so long to get there, took me more to get out of the city than to drive the 70km since there is one of them no-speed-limit autobahns going south right towards the Alps. Oh, and there were no mosquitoes whatsoever. Not even one of the little punks.

The place is simply beautiful, the weather and the light were perfect and everything looked so serene and peaceful. There is a road going almost all the way around the lake so I just drove around, stopping every now and then to make some pictures. I left when the sun went below the mountain ridges. So here they are, the images:

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | 7 comments
Post tags: lake, munich, photography, serene, summer, sunset, walchensee, water

There is a path going all around the lake, it took us almost 2 hours to walk it but I would say it was well worth it:

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | 4 comments
Post tags: adelberg, forest, germany, green, lake, nature, stausee, sunset, water

Since the kitchen is now close to being finished, I recently I got some sort of approval from the powers-that-be to make pictures. I personally thing it’s a huge improvement :-)Part of the kitchen:

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: house, kitchen, renovation

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: firetruck, old, oldtimer

Things are not very cheap around there but I guess that was to be expected.

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | One comment
Post tags: germany, lake, nature, sunset, tegernsee

That was not so bad in itself because the weather was rather bad that day, it rained a lot. So we only went a little bit to the city to look for some things at Tesco, one supermarket which is not present in Germany. Even though I did read a lot about this before, I still did the mistake of trying to park in the city center. That was a bad mistake, the timing was bad and traffic was horrible. We did find a place eventually but it was very annoying.

The next two days we had really beautiful weather. This time we parked some ways from the city center where parking was really cheap, at least compared to Germany (something like 60 cents per hour). And then we walked through the city. A LOT. We spent about 7-8 hours that day in the city and most of that was walking, except some breaks for food, stores and stuff. Even though we were kinda dead at the end of the day, we liked it a lot and it’s one of the best ways to actually “see” Prague.

The city is beautiful. Even though it also suffered some bombing from the americans during the 2nd world war, the damage was far less extensive in comparison to other cities which were bombed during that time. As a result one can see a lot of very beautiful old buildings in very good condition. You also see a lot of cobblestone roads which reminds of Bucharest, there are quite a few there too. But unlike Bucharest, Prague is a very clean city. It’s actually quite a lot cleaner than many German cities.

As prices go, Prague is in quite a lot of aspects cheaper than Germany. Food is cheaper, cigarettes are cheaper,  diesel/benzine  is the same, accommodation is much cheaper. As everywhere, you can pay hundreds of euros for a room if you really want to but the normal prices are much lower than in Germany. First night we stayed at a hotel closer to the city center for 55 € and second night we found another hotel, little bit farther from the center for only 39 €. That is for a double room, breakfast included. There is no way you find that anywhere in Germany, not in a city anyway.

On saturday, before we left for Germany, we went and visited one of the biggest flea markets in Prague. The place is huge indeed and we went there thinking we will  get loads of nice and cheap things. We did not, unfortunately. The flea market is big indeed but most of it is full of junk. I mean that’s what you usually find at flea market but here things were really junky.  So we were kinda disappointed with the whole huge flea market thingy. I did make some pictures though:

Anyway, overall it was really nice and we plan to go there again because there is a lot we haven’t seen. And of course, some of the pictures I made in the city:

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | 2 comments
Post tags: architecture, flea market, getaway, holiday, houses, Pictures, prague, travel

• Last weekend it was really nice and warm outside, almost like a summer day. So we went to the nearby town of Waiblingen to walk a bit around. Waiblingen is the also the main city of the Kreis we live in and it has a nice historical city center. Yep, I made pictures too :)
  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• Next week is a really short one, thursday we have some sort of national holiday in Baden Württemberg and I took friday off so we have a long weekend. We decided we will go to Prague and spend two days there. None of us saw the city so far. I hope the weather will be nice.
• Last week I saw surfers in Munich:
  

  

  

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: germany, Pictures, prague, surfers, waiblingen

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags:

The part of the big project my team was working in will be over soon, for various reasons. That in itself is not good or bad, it had to end sometime I guess, it was just rather unexpected. One of the good things is that because my background in network security, I’ve been able to switch to another project (unlike my team mates so far). The project is for the same customer which is good because I know the place, the people, etc. Which leads to the next good thing, the Rheinbach days are over!

The bad thing is, the project is in München and still not somewhere closer. But I guess it could’ve been worse and I think things could change for the better soon. Good things come to those who wait, eh ? Or so they say.

At least there will be new challenges which is a good thing. I am involved now in firewall administration and deployment which is refreshing, it’s kinda what I was doing before I joined this company but this is on a whole different level. I am working with all the good things I learned while I was doing my Cisco CCSP certification: ASA firewalls, IDS/IPS Sensors, MARS (the monitoring and analysis tool from Cisco), etc. So, we’ll see how it goes.

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: asa, bad, ccsp, cisco, good, ids, mars, project

Some 3 weeks ago I took a small trip to Düsseldorf  so I can visit the Rheinturm , a 240m tall telecommunication tower, the tallest building in the city. At a height of 170m there is a revolving restaurant and an observation desk from where you can have a very nice view of the city. There was a beautiful sunny day outside so I took some pictures from the tower itself and also from the nearby area.

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: düsseldorf, germany, marina, Pictures, rheinturm, spring, sunny, tower

© 2010 Stefan Radovanovici | Permalink | No comment
Post tags: germany, rheinpark, spring