Internship Midterm Review

I have reached the middle of the internship. 5 weeks to go. 

I have noticed that the last blog post had much less reader then the posts before. As an advertisement, this new post contains a ton of new photos. Tons of new photos. However, Facebook users or Google+ users could already see the pictures of quite some time.

The major issue of the last weeks is the unfortunate situation in the house. Long story. Too long and not appropriate for a blog. At the moment it is ok. Lets hope it stays this way.

We have a lot of new people in the house. Actually, only a single house mate is the same as when I arrived. When I arrived, most people were German. Now all Germans are gone and have been "replaced" mostly by law associates. U.S. law students are not that different from lawyers in Germany (as I know them from politic times), but even more competitive. A bit like "Boston Legal" characters made reality. Two two-years are working for large law firms in the Bay Area, one first-year is with this company that also have a office in Munich, when you understand what I mean.

I still do much sports. At the moment, we as a group hike nearly every Saturday in national or state parks, monuments or shorelines.  We have been in Sequoia National Monument (Warning: Link contains Comic Sans). The hiking path was great. Big Basis state park with really nice waterfalls and at the Point Reyes National Seashore. The hiking distance increased from 8mi in the two weeks ago to 13mi yesterday. Always with a significant hills. Really exhausting, but the sights make up for it. Last weekend I was rafting with a college from work, who also studied at UPB and friends of him. Except that the other car of the group was part of an accident, in which thankfully nobody seems to be hurt seriously, it was a great weekend.

Here is a link to my picasse albums:

Here is a best photos of the hikes:

One of the best properties of the Bay Area is that you have all this great landscape around here. Forests/Redwoods all over the place. One hour and you are in a beach. A few hours to mountains for skiing, a few hours to more desert-like places, one hour to "The City".

The Palo Alto Baylands are still my favorite running place. I try to run there two times a week around 1h to 1.5h.

On a Sunday a few weeks ago, I finally have seen a U.S. sports event. College baseball. The final game of the season with Stanford Cardinals against Cal Bears. Photos available, together with a photo tour over the Stanford Campus.

The first half of the internship is over. This was fast. I feel like a part of the team. I am not a lesser part because of my intern status. This is good.


This week, I got knowledge that one of my co-workers is only working for the company part time and is a full-time tenured professor at a smaller east-coast university. I actually have read some papers from her.

It is a really interesting experience so far. The company seems to see itself -- much more then EMC in general -- as a Silicon Valley based company and I found that really nice. I finally got my company gear (Laptop bag, T-shirt, ...). My observation is the most acknowledged proof of success in the Bay Area is not a Rolex clock or a Armani suit, but the company T-shirt.

The internship is a large test to see if I would like to work in the Bay Area after finishing school. While my overall opinion fluctuates a bit, my mood is good. It is not unlikely that I will return. However, I will not do a final decision before returning to Germany. 

What are the plans for the next weekends? Next weekend, I will probably do a small trip to Yosemite National Park. It is a must-see and will be a great hike. In the week afterwards, I have a day off. It is the 4th of July. I will go to the Amphitheater in Mountain View, actually not more then 15 Minutes away by bike, to see the San Francisco Symphony orchestra playing to fireworks.  

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.

First weekend after starting the internship

I am now three weeks in the US, two weeks in the shared house, and one week in the internship.

To destroy all preconceptions of the U.S.: It is extremely easy to get tons of good food here: Great salads, fruits, meat, everything. I like Trader Joe's much more than Safeway. The Aldi brothers should bring Trader Joe's to Germany. Food in general is expensive, but e.g. salads aren't really much more expensive as in Germany. 

I do a lot of sports. Biking to and from work, running in the Baylands, swimming. Today we wanted to go biking/hiking in the hills beyond the campus, but -- to be honest -- I am currently not fit enough for that. I will try again in a month. And: Everyone also seem to do sports too. I have seen dozens of cyclists today. You see people running all the time.

Third preconception to destroy: Crime. Crime doesn't seem to be a problem in Palo Alto. You see that e.g. on the fact that a lot of parked bikes have bike helmets hanging on them, but the helmets are not locked or so. In the swimming pool in the Rinconada Park is no way to lock your belongings. Also at night, e.g. on the way back from a pub, Palo Alto doesn't feel unsafe. It may be different in South Palo Alto, but I have never been there and I also don't really know where it is. It is probably somewhere in the South, but I am a bit south, too. Mountain View is not that far away by bike. I checked because I will go to the Computer History Museum eventually. I have to see which is bigger and better. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View or the Nixdorf Computer History Museum in Paderborn.

Back to crime: San Francisco feels totally different. I was there on Tuesday and on the bus back to the train station, there was an issue in an Fast Food restaurant near Market Street with four police cars and medical emergency vans. 

A lot of people say that Palo Alto is boring and San Francisco, normally only called "The City" here is the place to life. But I think I prefer Palo Alto. On the other hand, the crime map doesn't really look empty. 

The shared house has no TV. I feel to miss out on an important part of American Culture. I look more U.S. movies and TV shows at home than here.

To the internship: A few thoughts.

The internship is a large, practical "experiment/test" on multiple issues: Do I want to get a job in Silicon Valley? Can I imagine living here for years? Do I want to work for that concrete company afterwards? Do I want to be go into "real" engineering (currently the most probable answer, but we will see. Nothing is decided yet), a company research department which a lot of storage companies have, or stay in Academia?

I failed to do an internship earlier. I should have done that 5-6 years ago. The time at arvato systems was good and very helpful, the paycheck was nice, but in retrospect I left a year too late. The stuff I worked there on is to different that it is not helping me now from a resume point of view. So maybe some companies fail to see a proof that I actually can develop stuff. I think I can develop interesting stuff. I think I proofed that before, but not in a visible, normal way. But the internship should help proofing that. I mean some companies where I applied for the internship didn't even bothered to answer, not even a negative response. This should not happen when I search a job after the PhD. Well, probably I will not apply at these companies anyway. 

I found it always stupid in Germany that you have to send (sometimes, e.g. at the Uni Mainz also officially signed) copies of all certificates directly at the beginning of a job application. IMHO, it shows a huge mistrust on the applicant. This is not the case at all U.S. based companies where I applied up to now. Which are basically one company twice and half a dozen or so for the internship. The big BUT here: the company hired a kind of private detective company to check my education background. This seems to be the normal procedure. This feels like a higher mistrust than the German way. If the alternative is external background scanning, I prefer the German way. Is this usual in U.S. tech companies? Why are these things done for an internship position, but not for CEOs? How to these screening companies find out anything? I think that the University of Paderborn would not be allowed to answer any information requests by such a company under German privacy laws.

The first days I read tons of design documents on the database. It took a few days to get the laptop and a few more days to get access to the Wiki, source code repository, and all the other good stuff that belong to a good development process. Now it can start.

I meet another Uni Paderborn alumni at the company. He is working on machine learning on top of the database. I think, it is really nice to see people from the same university a few thousands miles westwards, working in the same "small" company. 

The internship was a big bet on the fact that developing on the database access/storage layer is not really that different from other software-intensive storage or file systems. That seems to the true.

I have read on the Internet that at the company, there is something free to eat "three times". I thought that it is nice that you can also have breakfast there. What was meant was, three times a week, not three times a day. There is no staff restaurant. But there is a sandwich store in the office building. I was a bit surprised at first, but the company has grown so much in the last year and a staff restaurant, with real lunch, is really not on the priority list right now. On the other hand, a software development company in Munich that I "visited" last year has a free staff restaurant for only 50 staff members at that office. But you cannot really compare that.

My boss worked on deduplication before: In a discussion about a specific data structure, she said that they used it a lot at the other department for their deduplication. Yes, I know. I have read the paper dozen of times.

Dutch Queens Day

The Dutch Queens Day event in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park was fun. I was surprised how large the Dutch community is here.

We (mostly from the shared house) have gone there by Caltrain to the AT&T stadium and then by bike, through the complete city, to the park.

 The Golden Gate Park is so huge. 1km x 5km or so. so many runners, cyclists, groups, and families. After around 25km including SF hills, I will call this a day.

Frist week in Palto Alto

The first week in Palo Alto is nearly over.

It is difficult. I haven't up my mind about this city up to now.

So here are a few random thoughts about it:

• The streets, all streets, are very wide. This was expected, but a nice surprise are all the bike lanes (StreetView). It is ok to get around by bike in the city. I use the bike directions service of Google Maps to come around. The service is in beta, but I think it is probably well-vetted in the area around Palo Alto.
• The houses are nearly always, single or at max two-story houses and a lot of bungalow buildings. Mainly wood buildings. My room is in such a single-story bungalow. I haven't seen any multi-family houses like they are so common in Germany. 
• Palo Alto is rich and broken. It is strange. The houses and cars are here so huge and big, and S-class Mercedes looks like a small car. On the other hand, there are regular power blackouts. For days. It is in general more dirty than at home. There are so many small things were I think "Ohh, I know this from the 80's" like bank checks and trains only with manual sign about the train number and train direction. I also now really get what they meant with buffer bloat. I never noticed it in Germany, here, the ping times often, too often, go up into the seconds range.
• Food is ridiculous expensive. I understand now why the people in the TV series always order food. I feel that everything at Safeway doubles the REWE/Real prices. I like the Trader Joe market near the Campus. I don't know if it is cheaper than Safeway, but much nicer interior. Fun fact: Trader Joes is partially owned by the Aldi brothers. 
• With regards to "as seen on TV": I know this country mainly through TV/Movie coverage. So I so many situations are I think like "X is like it is shown in movie Y". E.g. the caltrain uses the strange two-story trains like in "Source Code".
• I was not out of dinner, but there are so many, nice looking restaurants in the City, e.g. at University Avenue: Burger, steak, far-east, middle-east. And of course -- we are talking about California -- a lot of vegan and organic stuff.
• The temperature differences within a few miles are huge. On sunday we went to Santa Cruz because it were 24 degrees (Celsius), but Santa Cruz only a few miles away over the coastal mountains it were 14 degrees, cloudy, and windy. After a short stop, we drove back. The weather was not good, but the beach 1/4 filled anyway and the highways to/from Santa Cruz were jammed. I simply don't want to know how full it is there on sunny summer days. One of my goals for the time here is still surfing. So I will have to find it out when it is a bit warmer like end of May or so.
• On Tuesday I was there a second time. The weather was much better. I really like the beach area and downtown. Santa Cruz is a nice mixture of a beach town, old mexican/spanish influence, and a collage town. I was back in the Santa Cruz bookstore. Got a biography about John Adams and a book about the Lewis/Clark journey. Besides, this one little bookshop in London, it is my favorite book shop. Lots of old books, small notes with comments about the books by customers and staff of the store. Nerdy stuff, history stuff, reading sessions, ….
• Everything in the city is about the University. Sooo many people with Stanford shirts, bags, and pants. It is not possible that all these people study or work there or have studied there. There are so many. I am -- of course -- wear my UPB shirt with pride. Well, and also my Slug shirt, even if that is cheating.
• My English (pronunciation) is probably not getting better. The shared house is shared with mainly people from Germany and the Netherlands (all Stanford visiting scholars). 

My current impression is: I think it is ok to live here, but it is not so impressive that I have to convince my whole family and friends that there can nothing better then living here. Actually, from the living situation and quality of living situation I like Germany more. It is all about the jobs that are here and not there.

On the other hand, I know that I really need time to adjust to a new city. 

The news of the week for me is that the University of Mainz allows me only to start when I sign the employment documents in person in Mainz. This is so great. They knew before that I am not there, that I am in the internship. So great. In the worst case, I start late, and loss time for the PhD and a ton of money. I love Mainz.

On Tuesday, will be the first day in the internship. I was there for a first visit on Wednesday. The offices look really nice, but everything is a bit smaller then expected. The office room of the team is a large cubicle room -- as expected -- but extremely quite. There is a shuttle service from and to the Caltrain station, but I am not yet sure how good it works out. On Wednesday, the shuttle bus arrived 1/2h before the next train left into my direction.

Shared Appartment

Two days ago, I arrived in the shared apartment. My home for the next three months.

Here it is:

Größere Kartenansicht
The first thing I bought was a T-Mobile sim card for my phone. Running around in a large city without GPS is no longer an option.

Palo Alto is a big (50.000 residents), flat city with enormous houses, enormous cars, and (surprise) bike lanes. Sometimes it feels like that the complete city is circled around its university, the Stanford university. Most of the people I share the apartment with are visiting students there. So many, many people wears Cardinals shirts and even the Trader Joes is full with paintings with large Stanford-S symbols.
I, of course, wear my University of Paderborn shirts, but I only have one of it.

However, I would like to view a Cardinals game. It seems to be the baseball season. Maybe a could get cards for a game there.

Now I search the nearest Starbucks. I have to finish a paper and there is no coffee maker in the apartment.

MSST 2012 is over

The MSST 2012 is over. Next, I have a week free. Free meaning I have a paper to finish before the internship starts.

I just arrived in the shared house in Palo Alto where I have my room for the next 3 month. Perfect, 24 degrees (Celsius).

Here are first photos from the conference groups.

Finally! Arrived in Pacific Grove after 13 delay

Finally, I arrived in Pacific Grove.

My flight from Frankfurt to Chicago was 90 minutes later. No chance to get the connecting flight to San Francisco. However, I really wanted to attend the MSST tutorials today. But the last flight that night was totally overbooked and I didn't got on that. Night at an Hilton Airport Hotel and first flight today to SFO.

In the end, I arrived 13h late. Bad start.
However, the conference ground is great. Small wood-like houses between trees. It swells totally after resin ("Harz").

Reactivation of dirkmeister.de

Next month, an interesting time begins.

After presenting some recent work at MSST 2012, I will do a three month internship at Greenplum, the data analysis part of EMC, in San Mateo: Three months California, three month Silicon Valley, three month sun, three month coding.

Some of my friends requested photos, updates, and proof of life. I could also use Facebook, Google+, or even twitter, but believe it or not, not all my friends use Facebook or Google+. Blogging feels very much like 2004, but it is ok for such a trip. For this reason, I will reactive this blog.

I don't know the blogging policy of Greenplum/EMC, so I will stick with being on the safe site by doing two things:

• Stressing that all views don't represent my current, previous or future employers or project partners, including EMC, the University of Paderborn, and the University of Mainz.
• Not even acknowledging that there could be something like a Greenplum Database.

Therefore, no technical content here. All the internship posts will be about photos, life in Silicon Valley (from my point of view), and weekend trips. 

This will be fun.