Breakfast at Cafe Kranzler

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Beautiful sunny morning. Undertook expedition into the heartland of West Berlin and what a better place to go than to the temple of German cafes, Kaffee Kranzler, at the corner of Joachimstaler Strasse and Ku'Damm. For me this cafe will always epitomize the 60's and the grandeur of former West-Berlin. Of course, it has underwent quite a change, and is now just a reminder of its former self. Rebuilt by Helmut Jahn it now part of a gigantic ensemble of glass fassades that have become quite ubquitous these days. Only the rotunda of the cafe remains, overlooking the streets below. If you look across diagonally you glimpse a large pixelated screen advertising many useless things, except of course the iPod :) Breakfast was lousy but it was hard to beat the view and weather

D70: order cancelled - idiots!

Got this email today from Cyberport, where I ordered my D70 + 18-70mm lens 6 days ago:

Sehr geehrter Herr K. ,

Sie haben den Artikel Nikon D70 Kit mit DX 18-70mm Objektiv bei uns bestellt.

Wir haben jetzt vom Hersteller die Information bekommen, dass dieser Artikel nicht mehr lieferbar ist, deswegen mussten wir leider diese Position stornieren. Ich bitte um Ihr Verständnis.

Mit freundlichen Gruessen

Sven Reichel
Customer Contact Center
-----------------------------------
cyberport.de gmbh

What Sven at cyberport is essentially saying is that they cannot deliver the D70 Kit, because their supplier cannot deliver it. That totally sucks! So why did they advertise the product in the first place, why did they inform me that they would deliver my camera in 3 to 7 days? Were they just guessing and/or is that the standard answer they give to their customers when they don't have a clue if and when they have the product.

Of course I am a bit to blame for my gullibility and greed. The price (799 € minus 25€ rebate) was just to great for a big retailer like cyberport, there had to be some catch. And they tagged the product as "approx. delivery 30th June". I had the gut feeling that they would never deliver the goods. And I was right. Could have bought the same kit at computeruniverse.de for 819€, but I just let petty greed get the better of me. Lesson learned.

Beach Volleybal hits Berlin

Today I met Olaf at the beach volleyball world championships which is being held at the Schlossplatz, right smack next to the decrepit Palast der Republik. What a location!

Exceptionally great weather. We took some seats in center court and watched defending champions Emanuel Rego and Ricardo Santos of Brazil play against a Dutch duo. I left after the second set, but the Dutch surprisingly won the match.

An Evening of Classical Music

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Spent an evening with friends in the Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonie: music of Grieg, Nielsen and Sibelius. During the pause we met to discuss the movements. Guess who's the violinist in the picture?

D70: finally ordered

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Today I finally ordered my D70 Kit (D70 Body and F-S DX 18-70mm/3.5-4.5G IF-ED Lens) at cyberport. After the dubious discounts and including delivery, the camera costs 781,28 €. Quite amazing considering that the lens included in the kit is no fluky and this alone retails around 400 € here in Germany.

Eastern Oasis

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

We trekked across Berlin today, West to East, to spend a few hours with some friends in Lichtenberg. This part of the city is not regared as very green, but then you have to know where an oasis is. You wouldn't know it, but this little park is surrounded by appartment houses.

Poplar Fuzz

I think I started running seriously again, the first time in months. What made it serious? Hmm, maybe the fact that I wore my Polar watch and heart beat belt to monitor my hbpms (heart beats per minute). It felt really good to run, especially keeping my hpbm in the range between 130 and 140 bpm.

What good is this you may ask? Well, the the heart rate monitor keeps me from training too hard, as well as "sandbagging", i.e. taking it too easy. And initially it makes you feel just like that - running too easily. I would say that 80% of the people that I see running are just running too hard and thus training the wrong way. It's certainly not the way to lose fat, which is probably the main reason people start running in the first place.

Oh, the title of this blog entry. Well, as I was running I could hardly not notice the little fuzz balls floating through the air like in a light snow fall. This from the poplar trees that inhabit much of the path along the Teltow canal.

Got my Laserjet 6L working

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

I have a dinosaur of a laser printer which I have had since I started getting serious with my PC, i.e. when I started writing my thesis (1993?). The printer is just fine and works like a charm on the PC, but it has one drawback: it only has a parallel printer interface. So it has never been able to speak with my latter-day macs at all.

When I ordered my Mac mini at Cyberport in February, I also ordered a Keyspan USB Parallel Printer Adapter to remedy this incompatibility and perhaps finally get the laserjet running. Unfortunately, it didn't work with Panther, the printer did not respond. Thought I wasted my money on this useless gadget.

But now using Tiger and the Gimp 5.0 beta driver, it works without further ado. Wonderful!

Project Superdrive

About a week ago I got a package containing Mac OS Tiger and a dual-layer DVD burner, a Pioneer DVR-K05L.

Now that I have completed the preliminary transition to Tiger, I can concentrate on the hardware transition. Found an interesting 4 page PDF document (in German) with lots of pictures detailing the process of replacing the optical drive.

Tiger installed, with slight bruises

Finally got around to installing Mac OS 10.4 Tiger. I chose a so-called "clean install" option, i.e. erasing the internal hard drive of my Mac mini and installing a fresh version of the OS on it.

Of course I took precautionary measures. First of all I prepared a backup volume on my second external firewire drive, aptly called "backup". Used CarbonCopy to make a clone of my "old" Mac Mini system. To make certain that everything went according to plan, I even ran it through the Apple Hardware Test (Quick). Everything OK. Booted from the clone volume, OK. Had some coffee.

Now that I had a working fallback position I deftly installed Tiger on my mini, went quicker than I thought. Left out all the superfluous languages and printer drivers (just Epson and Canon for me). And, voilá, there I was with a fresh system.

The trouble began when I decided to use the Migration Assistant, a new helper app to be found in the Utilities folder. For one of the reasons I often balked at upgrading to a new OS was because of moving all my apps and personal settings over to the new OS. Sure, Apple has the "Archive and install" option, but I was forewarned not to use this (see this article and I just like to have a clean slate when I start using a new OS.

Since I was not migrating from another computer I chose as migration methodFrom another volume on this Mac. After selecting the correct working volume mymacmini and some encouraging purring from the harddrive - it just hung. The daisywheel kept turning and turning and I was not able to continue the process of migration. In fact I had to force quit the app. Tried out many different things, to no avail. Then it occurred to me that maybe the it had to do something with screwed-up permissions on the clone volume. So I booted into this volume, repaired permissions, returned to my Tiger volume, ran the Migration Assistant again and then after a brief second of suspense - it worked.

So do your homework before migrating and repair your permissions.

A day in the forest

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Contrary to popular opinion, Berlin is surrounded by wonderful pristine forests. So it’s not really exceptional that we try to alot some time in the green, our son loves it.

Spent long portion of the day in the Grunewald forest. Our initial plans were to meet Anette and Valentina at the Ökowerk, a turn of the century water pump station now a ecological information center. Unfortunately their opening time was 12 o’clock and we arrived there at 11. To pass the time we had a little picnic at a small lake in the forest, whilst our kids frolicked in a gigantic sand mound.

Nikon D70: coming closer

Well it's Saturday and I'm still vying for the D70, after having verified that the only real big difference to the D70s is the 2-inch monitor (the D70 has a slightly smaller 1.8-inch screen). Ken Rockwell delivers a good comparison between the two look-alike models and concludes that "as far as I'm concerned it's the same camera as my beloved D70 just with a bigger LCD and a remote socket but no MS-D70 disposable CR-2 battery holder".

He even finds a positive side to having a smaller LCD:

Bigger LCDs are more impressive and fun to use, but actually smaller LCDs make you work harder to make better, stronger images. That's right: if you can make the image look good on a tiny screen it always looks even better bigger. Since you can zoom on any screen to see sharpness I don't find bigger LCDs better as far as the final image goes. Bigger LCDs just make the camera more fun while you're in the field.

One slight unsettling problem with the D70 is the USB interface. According to the specs it is USB 2.0, but then it is also said that it only has the speed of USB 1.1. This seems to be a paradox, and deserves more research. I'm not sure if this poses a problem, but then again the file size of the images are much larger than my Coolpix 990, so I will have to prepare a larger mug of coffee.

Having settled the LCD-issue I am off to do some price-checking. The internet offers a galore of price-checkers, so finding the right price with reliable service is like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack.

Think I'm gonna go DSLR

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

and it's about time. I have never been quite satisfied with the pictures made with my Coolpix 990. Under difficult lighting conditions the colors seem to be way off - fiddling with the white balance doesn't really help.

My favorite DSLR as I a writing this blog entry is the Nikon D70. Prices have tumbled since introduction of the successor, the D70s.

Got my Tiger today plus extras

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Well I finally wound up ordering Tiger, just couldn't resist. Got the package today, which also contained a firewire cable (boring) and a Pionner DVR-K05 slimline dual-layer DVD-R Recorder. The last gadget is exciting, because I intend to use it in my Mac mini. The guys at dsp-memory told me that it would work directly with the iApps - we'll see. Nice job of packaging I must say, thank you DSP-Memory (dsp-memory).


So I have two jobs ahead of me, migrating to Tiger from 10.3.9 and exchanging the internal Combo DVD-player for the DVD-writer. I'll keep you posted.

Beautiful Blue Berlin Sky

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Originally uploaded by iMaculate.

Dusk in Berlin, as seen from our top floor window. The blue was fabulous, but the color changed swiftly as I ran to get my camera and work the controls.

Smoking is a dangerous pastime

Vor ein Tagen stolperte ich im Tagesspiegel auf diesen Satz, erste Seite:

An den Folgen des Rauchens serben noch immer täglich mehr als 300 Menschen in Deutschland, bis 120000 sind es im Jahr.

Raucher sollten 120000 mal diesen Satz aufschreiben...

Lacie Mobile Hard Drive

arrived. bought at Gravis. Deciding wether I should use FAT32 or HFS+ for formatting.