Sergio's Birthday

Sergio is getting old. What a great reason to celebrate and visit the Brown Iron Brewhouse.

Sunday Coffee

There is nothing better than a coffee at Great Lakes Coffee Roasting in the middle of a walk through Midtown on a cold April afternoon. Okay maybe a beer at HopCat but that’s for another time.

Fool Moon Parade

A couple of days ago, I had received an email from Dietmar who lives in Ann Arbor and had joined the local photoraphy group Ann Arbor Shutterbugs. They planned to meet at the university to watch the Fool Moon Parade. I hadn’t taken pictures in quite a while and it worked out very well because I could just go there on my way back from the proving ground.

San Francisco

Last week I flew to San José for a business trip and decided to spend the weekend in San Francisco to explore the city. On Friday morning I took the Caltrain that runs up to San Francisco in about an hour. It stops in different locations on the way in the Bay Area, one of them being Palo Alto where I took a break. I was a bit limited with my suitcase so I only spent about an hour visiting the Stanford campus. Then I walked to downtown Palo Alto to get some ice cream and to have a Google automated driving vehicle drive past me.

Midtown

Yesterday, I picked up Jessie from her new work location in Midtown. We walked around a little bit and got dinner at Traffic Jam and Snug. I used this to come to Midtown a little bit earlier and walked around for an hour or so.

It still amazes me how much more you notice about the buildings and small shops and cafés in places that you’ve already been numerous times when you just walk instead of driving or even cycling.

Nuclear Waste Storage Near Lake Huron

Today, I read an article (German) about a deep geological repository that is planned to be built in Canada and the controversy around it. When looking up some English sources for this, I noticed the disconnect between the English term for this and the actual meaning. Who would think of a nuclear waste dump when hearing the term “deep geological repository” for the first time? What’s being dumped in there isn’t even part of the term. For all I know, it might be used to once and for all store away Tim Hortons coffee to protect the country’s taste buds.…

Harz Hike

During our winter break, Jessie and I visited friends and family in Germany. While staying in Wolfsburg, we went on a hike with Marc, Ines and Tobi to crest the Brocken which is the highest “mountain” in the Harz. Ines had already posted the pictures that she took and here are a few of mine:

Aquariums are Fun!

Jessie and I spent the Thanksgiving weekend in Toronto. One of the things we wanted to do was to visit “Ripley’s Aquarium of Toronto”. I was not super excited to go but it turned out that aquariums are an awesome place for photography. It took me a while to figure out the right settings to take pictures under these conditions but after that it was pretty straight forward. I was chasing fish while they were swimming to reduce the motion blur and Jessie was so kind to point out interesting things to me because I was totally focused on taking the pictures. Thankfully, the aquarium did a great job on keeping their glass clean so the photos came out pretty clear.…

Ubuntu as a bhyve guest

My home router/server runs FreeBSD and recently got a CPU upgrade that allows for some more advanced services. I don’t have any machine running Linux at this point but I currently need one for some tasks. That’s why I thought setting up an Ubuntu virtual machine on the server would be neat. Luckily, FreeBSD 10 comes with the neat bhyve virtualization solution.

Prerequisites

Load the kernel extension and create a tap interface for the 192.168.2.1/24 subnet to use with the virtual machines:

Rob & Nikki's Wedding

About two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to be a wedding photographer for the first time. At Lindsey & Aaron’s wedding, I had just brought my camera for fun and they had hired a professional photographer. At Rob & Nikki’s wedding, they had asked me if I would take their pictures and be the photographer. After we had a discussion in which I told them that I wouldn’t want to be the guy that messes up their wedding pictures, I agreed to risk it. Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t too good that day but nevertheless it was a great party and I had a lot of fun taking the pictures.…