Third week

Ok, this post was started as the post for the second week. But then the time ran out and it was again the next weekend. So it is the week three post.

3 people from the shared apartment left this week. While that is definitely bad, it has its pros: The house is not over-full anymore. New people will arrive eventually, but still no CS people. Strange, I expected to meet some more here. On the other hand the mixture in the house is nice: Sociology, Eduction Science, Physics, Philosophy, and Biology. Update: The new people actually arrived. Two law students.

Here is a picture of the (old) group:

(Used with permission of L.B.).

The last week was filled with work, and BBQ. One BBQ as a farewell party, once because good friends from Germany visited me.

At work: After the relative boredom of the first week, I am now doing something: Designing and prototyping. Deep in my conform zone. It is pretty much like grad school. I think I have a nice system design for the problem. But in the next weeks, let's hope that we can get me out of my comfort zone a bit. I am not in the US to stay in my comfort zone.

On the second weekend, we were in a club in Palo Alto (nice, but it closed as early as two) on Friday. On Saturday, we were in the Mission in "The City". I still don't feel that this part of SF will ever be something were I well comfortable. Too dark, too dirty. The StreetView link is actually the nicest and cleanest place because it is directly at the BART station. On Sunday, I needed a day off, a day of solitude. To took my car and drove a large round. To Half Moon Bay, over Highway 1 (also called Pacific Costal Highway) to Santa Cruz, and then back to Palo Alto. It was really a nice trip.

Here is a picture of a nice place between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz:

This weekend was also really nice. Did I mention the always nice, but not to warm weather with 20-25 degrees?

I have seen the Champions League finals at an fraternity house on the Campus. Free beer and free pizza. :-) 

Today started with a challenge: Biking from Palo Alto to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View without seeing a Google office building. Please, see this map to visualize how big that challenge was. I failed that challenge. Probably it is not even possible, but furthermore I got lost and drove to the next white building because the museum is also in a white building, but that was no the museum…. In the end it is a 5-mile bicycle ride, directly following the bay shore line.

The museum, which I reached eventually, was really, really nice. It pays off that nearly every company within 30 miles contributed a lot in money and exhibition stuff from their basements. For example, the storage system room, which e.g. presents a IBM RAMDAC, was partly sponsored by XIVs Moshue Yanai. The fully functionally Baddage machine was also nice. It doesn't seem to be larger then the Nixdorf Museum in Paderborn, but certainly has the more interesting artifacts.

After being back, we drove (and then hiked) to "The Dish" to see the partial solar eclipse that should happen today. The dish is a 150 feet radio telescope, located in the hills behind the campus. However, we haven't seen the solar eclipse. But the area is really, really nice. It is actually a very popular running site.

Here are more pictures of today:

Palo Alto

There are other nice, mixed (non published) pictures:

PaloAltoMixedPictures

Next weekend is fully planned. We go hiking on Saturday and see the baseball game Stanford Cardinals vs. UC Berkeley on Sunday. I don't unterstand baseball. Well, that is not totally right. I understand that is mainly about beer and hotdogs.