Daily Life
Fuck the Czech! – Road Trip is Over!
Sorry, but I have to be rude today. I just need to write it down.
Fuck you Prague, fuck you Czech! Fuck you all! I have never seen people being that unhelpful and disinterested.
My girlfriend and I went to Prague for a night and this morning we wanted to leave to Vienna, Austria. But no, we didn’t do that. The parking situation in Prague and the entire Czech Republic is horrible, so we parked in a side street a few hundred meters from our so called “Hotel” where we had to pay the parking meter every two hours. Not just that the Hotel (Old Time Hotel) was horrible (dirty, ants, …), between 01:00AM where we last checked our car and 09:00AM when we came back, one of the windows have been smashed and every single piece of clothing I own has been stolen. Everything. About 2000€ worth of clothing. Not to mention my girlfriends Laptop. And don’t tell me we should have taken it out! We put all visible things in the hotel and stored the rest in the trunk. You also wouldn’t have carried your stuff that far to the Hotel for just one night! I think they came for the radio – a cheapish built-in one that comes from the manufacturer. They have even taken the coverings in the car. WTF?! And the charging cable for the navigation system, that we had a hard time getting out of fucking Prague.
We must have been standing there for like 15minutes. I was yelling and smashing everything. There were several people around us, no one came. We called the police. And then we waited in the rain and waited and waited with all the stuff we had taken to the hotel room (4 additional bags!). No one came. No Police. No one came to help, no one cared. They all pretended they didn’t speak English or German.
Three hours later a policeman finally came, but pretended he doesn’t speak a fucking single word of English, or German, or even Polanski! In the end he sent us home, telling us we should file a charge at home. Great!
Back home I wanted to buy at least some underwear and clean shirts, when the car’s engine also broke. And it was raining cats & dogs…
Holiday canceled. Good night.
Summer Vacation 2010
It’s hot here in Germany. The sky is blue and the sun is shining… Actually the plan was to go on a road trip on the US Westcoast… California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona… u know. But due to time problems my girlfriend and I are making a road-trip trough Europe:
Starting in Saxony, heading east towards Kalovy Vary, then Prague, then southern to Vienna and finally trough the Alps as far as we get until I’ll be back in Frankfurt on August, 1.
That’s the plan at least 
Take care and enjoy the summer. I thin I’ll post from time to time.
iOS 4, my iPhone 3G and me
It’s been almost two weeks since I upgraded from 3.1.3 to 4.0 on my old iPhone 3G and I must say: it’s slow!
iOS 4 feels much slower on my old 3G than 3.1.3. Apple, do you want to force me to upgrade by that? It’s annoying! I am willing to upgrade, but T-Mobile doesn’t want me to! They lost my pre-order… damn you!
Hello Post 100 :)
I can’t believe this already is the 100th post here. Also over the past 6 months visitors have doubled. Awesome!
Welcome new readers
I don’t have much to say today, just a quick preview of some upcoming topics I have in mind:
- Night Photography
- Long Exposures
- Filters (especially the ones you can’t reproduce in the digital darkroom)
- Digital Life
Backup! Backup! Backup!
I managed to carry my gear for the entire last month without any damage, but Sunday night at the train station my camera back fell off my other baggage down on the ground. I hurried and checked my camera gear… everything O.K. *phew*.
Today I wanted to copy my images from the mobile HDD that I had to carry with me (because I didn’t have a Laptop with me, Thanks Dell!!!) to dump my images from the cards to it whenever possible. But… Click – Clack – Clack – Clack. DAMNIT! Headcrash!!!
Well, you can imagine that I was about to throw the HDD out of the window, but then decided to make a copy of it using ‘dd’ first. ‘dd’ went through the first 50GiB without any problems… but then the HDD started clicking again. I was able to recover some photos from the unfinished dump and there is still 4GiB of photos on one of my SD-Cards, so cross your fingers! Hope it’s just the video clips on another partition that I lost!!!
What does this tell us? Always have a backup!!!
On my past trips I always had one copy on my Laptop and then dumped the photos to an external HDD which I carried in another bag. But without a Laptop this wasn’t possible this time.
Here’s what worked best for me in the past:
- Import and copy your images to Lightroom as usual
- Close Lightroom, go to Finder/Explorer and copy your Picture & Library folder to an external HDD
- Store the external HDD somewhere safe
- Now you may format your memory cards
This way you always have two copies of your photos. I also usually formatted the external HDD every night before I copied my backup over. If you’re running Mac OS X you could also use TimeMachine to automate it.
Mobile Office 2.0
I am back home! Well, at least until June
After 6 weeks without a Laptop I am finally mobile again. The new MacBook Pro has been delivered last Saturday and I am totally happy with it. I sold my Dell XPS M1530 because of it’s unreliability and the ignorance of Dell, and switched back to a Mac. Build quality is so much better, and let’s not talk about the Touchpad, I don’t think I’ll need my Bluetooth mouse any longer!
The new MBP with it’s Intel Core i5 also feels much faster than my one year old Mac Mini. And the display seems to be more accurate than my old 22″ Samsung LCD, so until I get to replace that one I think I’ll edit my images on the laptop. (Display calibrator is next on my shopping list)
Take care. I’m now going to copy last months images from the mobile HDD.
Eyjafjallajökull and my Travels
I’ve been on the road the entire April so far and faced some issues due to the Volcano eruption in Iceland two weeks ago myself. But from a photographic point of view it must have been awesome to be there.
There is a gallery over at Boston.com with many awesome pictures. I know it’s been hard for our local economy, all the tourists that couldn’t come back and especially the Icelanders, their animals and their agrarian economy, but man I really wished I had been there. Here’s a quick time-lapse of the flight situation over Europe I came across at the Intelligent Travel Blog
Stay tuned! April has been silent, I know. But my Birthday, travels and the fact that I’m without a Laptop since six weeks and my new MacBook Pro arrives next Monday the earliest (yeah 
) made it quite hard to blog. I’ll post some articles and pictures in early May.
Take care and enjoy the great weather. Chris out.
Blogging about this Blog – The sixth
Wow this march was the busiest month ever at this blog
I think that was it with the technical topics for the next time. I’ll be on the road for at least the entire April, but I’ll post some of my travel photos and other stories as often as possible to keep ya’ll up-to-date. And I’ve already drafted some photography related posts.
So stay tuned. Subscribe to the new enhanced rss-feed and please click on my Ads! Chris out.
Blogging about this Blog – The Fifth
There finally is a full rss-feed. If you subscribe in a feed-reader like Google Reader, you will now see the entire post which is great for offline reading. You might also notice that feeds are now being redirected to FeedBurner.
Switched my Hoster… again!
After a full year with OVH and it’s shared hosting I switched my hoster once more.
During the last two hours I moved every single of my domains from OVH to Hetzner.
It feels like the entire site loads much faster. Nice
Take care.
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Hi, my name is Chris. I am a wannabe photog, traveler & geek that is again a student and lives in Hesse, Germany. more about me...
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