“Easy!” I thought and signed in.

The first day started with a total mess at the office and I just had time to do a snapshot of a fire engine that I ran through Lightroom to give it some kind of a lighting setup and color retuche. This snapshot should somewhat accompany me for the rest of the week.

The second day I had some more time. I thought it would be a good idea to grab the fire engine again (honestly I had the “great” idea of adding the fire engine to all of the remaining 41 photos) and see, where I could place it to get a nice shot. Finally I came around our kicker where I tried several perspectives before I came up with the final shot. It again ran through Lightroom for better lighting and colors. This was the first one I really liked.

Day three I had my camera and the fire engine with me when I went for lunch. I had the idea of putting the fire engine in front of a real car to utilize the difference in size for a good perspective. Long story short: it didn’t work out. I had to come up with another picture setup. I tried several shots at the bistro I had lunch at. None of theme really convinced me. But again some Lightroom touch up did the trick.

Day four. Busy at the office and not a single idea on what to shoot. I finally shot the fire engine on my notebook’s keyboard and let Lightroom do the rest.

On day five I wanted to wait for the evening to take a picture on my way home or at home. At home I tried several still life setups using vases, candleholders and stuff like that. I also tried several different persepctives on the fire engine crawling on the floor or standing on a ladder. It all looked somewhat odd or even boring. Finally I placed the fire engine on top of our dinner table’s lamp. It is an alloy ring with frosted glas on top and bottom so the light shines in both directions. That gave the fire engine a really nice look. Lighting is everything! Only small digital enhancements needed this day.

Saturday, day six. Awaiting guests on Sunday I had to prepare dinner. Some time after 8 p.m. I finally managed to start shooting. This day I wanted to play around with lighting a little bit more. So two pocket torches were a must. And also a boombox that has some blue lights to its sides should be placed on the picture. I tried around in complete darkness using a tripod and self release. On the camera’s display it looked great, especially the blue light (I usually hate all those gadgets with blue lights, but this time it helped). Sadly enough it looked poor when viewed on the screen. I started all over and found a blue plastic trash can. The fire engine looked nice inside with the two torches lighting the can from the outside. Lightroom and a radial blur did the rest.

Sunday, day seven. While cooking the dinner we chatted about the 42 days project and came up with a simple still life setup in the kitchen. Nice and easy. And definitly the last shot with the fire engine in it!

What I learned from this first week is that it is really hard to come up with new ideas every day. And that it is even harder to integrate the same item on every photo. But the most important learning was that even this kind of work is much easier with people around brainstorming together.

In August 2008 me and my team went to London for a Web Analytics training. During that time we had much fun, got really good insight in the latest wa technology and I also the the opportunity to take some pictures of London. This one I like best.

Tausende IT-Profis leiden unter prekären Arbeitsverhältnissen. Jetzt gibt es einen Ausweg.

Watch Gunter Dueck’s speech (in German) at SinnerSchrader’s next08 conference.

After killing the Explorer I started a shell (Taskmanager -> New Task -> cmd) to regain control and to be able to start some programs. First thing to do was a system file scan (sfc /scannow) – but as you mght have guessed that didn’t find any problems. Next stop on my way to getting the machine back to work was the Windows System Restore function that is available from the control panel (Shell -> control) or by starting from the original Vista-DVD. I went back four restore points – that killed my graphics driver, but the Explorer….argh!

Every six months the german computer magazine “c’t” has some kind of security CD add-on with a Linux that boots directly from CD and some virus scanners that can also scan Windows’ NTFS drives. My computer had enough time during the night for scanning… and found nothing!

The usual steps didn’t work, so let’s fire up Firefox a ask the web. I really found several postings about endlessly crashing Explorers on Vista and those where produced by some malware. For those ugly things SpyBot is my tool of choice, but it also didn’t find anything.

I further searched the web and tried several things out, but wasn’t successful and really got frustrated, as it took several days and my computer wasn’t really useable during that time.

What I never noticed was the leftover part of the aborted download on my desktop! And that finally was the solution. After removing the file (Shell -> cd /Users//Desktop -> del ) and restarting the explorer (Shell -> explorer) everything worked fine again (except my graphics driver…).

A really can’t understand why Vista can’t handle this more nicely.

As the tube strike was still on, we had to get there by bus. I wish I had had this nice, free Metro PDA application, that knows all public transport connections I many major cities around the world, then – that would have made it all a lot easier. However, after browsing the available maps and timetables we finally got to Old Street Station. “Right up the road and then right at Westland Place.”, where the directions I got from the reservations agent on the phone. Well, Old Street Station is at some big T-crossing, so we were not quite sure which street to walk down. We started to ask passers-by. I thought everone would know this famous restaurant – big mistake! It took us half an hour to find someone who could give us decent directions and to finally reach the restaurant.

The restaurant itself was worth a closer look: The ground floor is taken up by the “Fifteen Trattoria” – a relaxed place to meet and eat without all the usual hassle you have in those “famous” restaurants. You can get breakfast from 8.30am to 11.00am or have lunch from 12 to 3pm. It’s also “affordable” with pasta starting at £7 and main courses starting at £14. Yep – in London one Pound is worth the same one Euro is elsewhere.

Downstairs is the actual “Fifteen Restaurant” – a very stylish place in some retro-space-mix design. A very cool pink airbrush painting decorates the main wall right to the open kitchen. Also all the sofas are made of pink leather, whereas the tables are dark wooden and the chairs are those magic white s-shaped Philippe Stark 70s platic ones. It definitly has it’s very own style – like it or not.

We had some very good lunch starting with some fresh made bread with very good olive oil. After that we had some very good fish served, accompanied by some red wine. On the finishing line a great vanilla and grappa panna cotta was served as a majestic finish. All-in-all the food was from very-good to high-end and the services was extraordinary – that’s very well worth another visit!

We arrived at Liverpool Street Station at 12 o’clock. I reserved a table for lunch at the Fifteen for 2 o’clock. The Fifteen is located near Old Street Station, just two stations away from Liverpool Street Station, so we had plenty of time and decided to head right south to the River Thames and the London Tower. Just then, we heard the bad news: No tube today. The whole tube staff was on strike the one day we where in London. Thanks a lot guys!

Nevertheless we headed south by feet and had a very nice walk through the city to the London Tower and the Tower Bridge. I really like the bridge’s architecture and it’s impressive bascule mechanism. If you ever spend some time in London, you should take the guided tour and view it.

Have lunch at the Fifteen…