Still alive

Yes, I am still alive, I just took a small break from the blog for a while but I have not forgotten it.

We are still waiting for the real spring to finally come. The weather got a little better in the meanwhile but there are still quite a lot of days with temperatures below 10C.  Still, there were nice days too and we tried to take advantage of them. The best thing is though, when we come home from work is no longer dark outside, that’s a big plus.

As far as work goes, things are so and so. The so called crisis is affecting everyone and our company is no exception it seems. They are trying to cut costs from everywhere and while I can’t really say I blame them in a way, I definitely don’t enjoy it. I am currently still working in the “lovely” town of Rheinbach but there might be signs that I could be working again in München. That’s still not that close to home but it’s definitely better than now. It’s quite a bit closer (around 2h drive as opposed to 3-4h drive to Rheinbach)  and it’s a real city for a change, much more to do there.

Otherwise I enjoyed my new hobby and I took advantage of the longer days and better weather and went to all kind of places to make pictures. Among other things I tried my hand a bit at street photography (that points to a Deviantart group on the subject) but I am still not that comfortable with it. I find it a bit awkward to just go to people and ask them if I can take a picture :) So my attempts so far were from the distance or when nobody was looking. Sometimes it just works to walk around with the camera in my hand and snap shots while I pass people. Later on I usually have to trash quite a lot of them but a few are decent and worth keeping. Need more practice I guess :)

Below some pictures I took in the past month. As usual, a click on the image takes you to its page when you can view a bigger version.

Köln

These weeks/months, due to my project, I find myself again 4 days a week in the small and shitty lovely town of Rheinbach, somewhere in the west of Germany. Nobody really understands why one of the two main headquarters of the company had to be in this particular location but that’s beyond the point of this post.

In any case, I’ve been bringing my DSLR camera with me and I tried to do some small photo trips in the neighborhood. I was less than impressed by the potatoes fields around the town but there are 2 big cities within driving distance: Bonn and Köln. I’ve been to Bonn a couple of weeks ago, around the university area and it was not so bad. Yesterday I decided to drive to Köln and see if I can get on the observation deck of the “Köln Triangle” tower (103m high) and take some panorama pictures.

That’s the place. I kinda planned to go to the much taller TV tower but since a couple of years, the top platform is closed.

It’s only a 50 minute drive to Köln, most of it on the autobahn, so I started right after I got off work. 10 minutes later I got into a really bad snowstorm on the autobahn and my mood kinda dropped, there was no way I could take any pictures in that weather. But I didn’t have anything better to do so I pushed on and luckily I got out of the storm and found out there was none of the white crap in the city itself.

The tower has it’s own underground parking, which was cheap enough. I went up up, paid the 3 euros fee at a machine, got into the elevator, arrived on top and got out on the platform. Then got quickly back inside to actually close my jacket, put gloves on and some on my head ’cause it was cold as shit up there.

I quickly found out that this is not the ideal place for pictures. All around the platform edge there is a 3m tall glass fence and while you can see through it, of course, it’s not good for taking pictures because of  the reflections. There are also markings on the glass sections, with the building names which you can see in that particular direction. I  kinda expected a fence of sorts but I was hoping that with the help of the tripod, I could get above it. There is none of that, the visitors must be secure! The visitors must be watched too, there are security cameras all over that platform.

The view is indeed impressive, you can see the whole city from up there. And it’s probably even better when the sky is clear. I did take some pictures but due to the weather and glass reflections, they are not that great. First 4 are HDR pictures (made in Photomatix, 3 different exposures per picture), I tried to bring out some details.

I want to go up on the TV tower in Stuttgart, which has two observations decks at 150m and 153m and has a total height of 216m. But I have to wait for better weather.

New week

Yeah, this is what the weather looks like these days. It’s rainy, not warm and not nice. Not much is happening otherwise, the weather kinda makes you lame and you have to force yourself to get something done. I feel like sleeping the whole day.

In the meantime I am still studying for my CCIP certification, I plan on taking the MPLS+BGP exam sometime at the end of the year. I set up some gns3/dynamips labs at home and it’s going well.

I want vacation ;-)