2 weeks to go

3 month are pretty long. It is not so much work or the U.S., it is life in a dorm style environment is wearing me out a bit. Saturday, I took a day off. Nice solitude in the garden.

On Sunday, I was finally in San Francisco. Doing touristy things like Ferry Building, Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf, Dim Sum in Chinatown. In the following a few nice photos:

The focus of the last week was networking or at last a try to do networking. I was at a BASE meeting on Monday. BASE stands for Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts where Scala is a nice programming language. I used it for example for to write tool which helped me to acquire the data for my Supercomputing 2012 paper. It were two nice talks, but no good networking.  Some people I talked to were strange guys "between jobs" (aka unemployed) that go to tons of meetups in the Bay Area to get free pizza and beer.
Tuesday: Beers with colleagues at a fish restaurant near work.
Wednesday: Wine tasting at Google's Mountain View office. That was really nice. Our Google law intern invited me. Thanks.
On Friday, I had a important presentation about the work I done during the last weeks. It went pretty nice. Afterwards I had good talks with different engineers. I meet a whole bunch of good, really skilled engineers. It is fun working with them. Free beer afterwards.

The weekend before that we were rafting a south fork of the American River. The river itself had much less rapids then the cache canyon a few weeks earlier, but better ones. A big advantage of this setting: The company, we rafted with, was so professional. The meeting place was clean and in good shape, the the guiding was per-boad, the self-prepared food for lunch: Good. What impressed most was the reaction when some fall into the water during a rapid. All the guides coordinated their boots within seconds so that was easy to pick the person up afterwards. We were pretty impressed so that we will do it again. This will be so much fun.

Why do we do so much? For two reasons: 1) there is so much fun stuff to do here in the area. 2) My internship salary is so much higher then my German university salary and I cannot buy e.g. fun gadgets without getting trouble with the German border robbery. So I spend a low percentage of the bi-weekly salary I buy fun experiences.