First day in new apartment

Today I woke up in a new apartment. Just now I am sitting on the terrace behind the soon-to-be-mine room:
That's how it is in a hilly city! Currently I am still sleeping on the sofa in the living room - I had to leave the dorm already and my predecessor in the new room is staying one week longer.

First days

Ok, I'll start writing a German version additionally to the main English version!
I heard the story of how Google developed the projects culture by Craig Silverstein - the third Google employee, in a setting of about 20 people... read a lot about the internal tools which are just crazy and met nice people! And of course had super food...
I'm moving, too. Yesterday was my last day in Rains (dorms) at the University - now my car's in the underground parking full of stuff... waiting to be taken to the city and the new apartment! :-D
This afternoon will be the big every week all hands meeting where the new regulars and interns will be presented. Rare occasion to take pictures. Just wait a couple and check back here!

Kleiner test - und neue Arbeit

Ich werde jetzt mal gucken ob sich jemand beschwert wenn ich auf Deutsch schreibe. Ich glaube das ist im großen und ganzen die bessere Lösung - aber erstmal testen!

So, ich hab jetzt ne neue Arbeit. Seit gestern - heute sind drei Ballons und Schokolade an meinem Tisch ;-)
Gestern war also mein erster Tag - und da habe ich quasi nur Administrativa gehabt. Zum Beispiel wird man natürlich auf die ganzen Sicherheitsgeschichten eingeschworen - zum Beispiel darf man keine Fotos machen :-/ , deswegen gibt's hier auch keine. Hoffentlich findet sich ja mal ne Lösung...
Mit mir kamen auch haufenweise andere Praktikanten - auch ein paar die ich aus meinen Vorlesungen kannte. Dann gab's Papierkram, ne Führung, gutes Essen und talks. Ich weiss jetzt wie man intern Emails lesen kann - vielmehr darf ich schon nicht mehr sagen ;-)
Dann ging's zu meiner Gastgeberin Gwen. Super nett - mein Team spricht man alle größeren Sprachen.
Heute Abend gibts schon eine Kennenlernparty irgendwo in Mountain View. Übermorgen muss ich übrigens aus meiner Bude raus und rüber nach SF. Diese Woche ist noch sehr hektisch...

A small part of the lives of others here

Google raised some attention with pics from our Campus. Well that's the world of undergrads - quite distant from what you experience as grad student. You drive past, but otherwise - parties and so on - I haven't really gotten to much. Sad sad sad.
And now it's already over! One week and the second quarter will be over - and only work is left! Hum.
I have to get back to my paper... in my next life I am an undergrad.

Funny funny and some info

Pic and text behind this
That's some of what I'm doing - looking ridiculous.

Going on!

This is almost over! I got an intership for the summer with a big internet company - I am going to work on internationalization in a French team :-D

One of the first letters they sent me:
1. What would you like your username to be (i.e. firstname@, lastname@)? Please provide your top three choices.
2. What would you like your computer name to be? Please provide your top three names.
3. What size t-shirt do you prefer?

Oh yeah, I like "What would you like your computer name to be?"

And if you wondered where the palms grew here on campus, I have to disappoint you. They grow on trucks:


So lets see if I can bring up some more pix when the quarter finished in 3 weeks...

Some movements

Well, I got busy - Claire was here, I'm taking three lectures and I try to get ahead with my master work.
One software design class, one in information goods strategy at the business school and ... marketing at Management and Engineering.

I've been to Las Vegas (3 hours) and the Grand Canyon. [Somehow I don't find the pictures right now...]

Well, let's see when I will put some stuff up here. Tomorrow I will fetch Jan from San Jose - so I'll have a busy weekend!

That's it!

First quarter. Already!

Cleaning up, vacations...

By the way, the pizza is one of the 8 remaining after a final right next to the computer pool where I spent the evening. They didn't know what to do with all the left-overs. Thanks!

I don't feel like it. Just handed in the junior project - our car does not even overtake dead cars on a double-lane road. When we put it together it simply wouldn't work. At least we handle stop signs and generally following other cars.
Anyways don't feel like it because I just left my two project fellows, one of which has to start his 15 pages philosophy paper that's due in 15 hours and the other starts tomorrow his 24-hour-take-home final for some class. Then he's done and will start working for some game company.

I also sent in my paper for Terry's class. I know, some of you were interested. Let's see, I'll post the link when it's online.

That's it! It's over. Let's see the country!

Design summary (only this week)

Today is the last day of the quarter for me. One paper due and the project with Junior.
Doing the bibliography of my paper I have seen that this week Bill Moggridge has put the chapter People and Prototypes from his book Designing Interactions on the web. Get it while you can, it's a beautiful and informative piece of writing. It's solid: About 100 pages and 18 Megabytes. But that's the essence of what I learned here!

Bib, Bibo, Bibliotheque

Just coming back from working on my essay in one of the reading rooms in the library. This was when I left - people were also sleeping on the couches.

Anyways its a wonderful library - biggest and coziest I know. If you want to come over for a longer period of time and work some in the library, 7 days are free, afterwards $2 a day or $15 a month. This includes the law library!


(you can also get a cubicle, or a cellar post if you prefer!)

Midnight breakfast for the dead

This is the last week of class in the winter quarter. Next week there will be final exams. Projects are due these two weeks. Things like that. It's also called 'dead week'.

There are some nice traditions around this time, for example the midnight screaming, or the midnight breakfast served by university admin staff (as opposed to the regular food people). I was there on Monday night, 10 to midnight, and the cafeteria I went to (several where open) was crammed! Free scrambled eggs, sausages, bacon, viennoiserie, muffins, coffee, orange juice and tons of fruits! Cooool!

My first project was due on Monday: (Orbit)RED was our proposal. Scored somewhat - idea wasn't the innovative bomb, but it's just what the teenies want! We made lots of interviews and therefore half of our presentation was audio evidence. One team member is a radio reporter (YEAH, thanks again!).
Afterwards cocktail party at the design institute, meeting at 9 for the junior project and then the midnight stuff.
But the rest of the week will be less thrilling - at least as a story - deadlines can be rather thrilling for the involved!

Quarter finishing - energy conference

Just presented our super idea for (RED): chewing gum with messages on the wrappers! Apericube etc...? Yes, we were SO inventive! But it's the new cigarette - the kids want it.
In 20 minutes the party starts, then 4 ours later I have the next meeting for the Junior-project.
Oh, I've seen "The lives of the others" yesterday: wonderful! Can only recommend it.

But two weeks back there was this energy conference where I went to a talk with Thomas L. Friedman. They also had a small exhibition on campus:
It runs on batteries:

Friedman made some interesting points:
Energy has become the subject, not only for our future ("biggest industrial challenge ever") as for americans. Currently it is on "Main Street", so it has attention. But he is curious if it will "go down Main Street", meaning if people will change their behavior, or wear it only on their sleeves.
Attention was raised because:Temperature and because it becomes clear that Americans are financing both sides of the War on Terrorism: The army and the Saudis which finance radical Islam. Saudi Arabia is financing it because the rulers see themselves unable to battle it and so buy their security. This has started after the 1979 riots (Wright, L.: The Looming Tower.).
So Friedman makes out a conflict between the missionary vision of the US to bring peace and democracy to the world and the dependence on Oil. He supports that with his thesis of Petro-Authoritarianism: Rising oil prices lead to less freedom (see Russia and Gulf; by the way: Bahrain is the most liberal country - it's oil reserve has run out). "Price of oil is inverse to pace of freedom."
(Friedman talked at the Memorial auditorium - capacity 2500 - the only one this size. Classes are usually much much smaller!)

"Buying a Prius is NOTHING. Clean energy must become available at the China price" - this is his new credo. Quite right. This is the big industrial challenge.
He mentioned Germany by the way. "They're sucking all the silicon out of the market - because of goverment subsidies for solar cells." He believes in goverment regulations - also in Amerika. Example California: constant energy usage for last 30 years, other states: 50% increase. California has regulations.
I will stop here, this is not to become a politics blog. But I liked the American perspective on this all!
Now let's get some of this Thai food!

Late night foreigner

That's how I ended up tonight. Late night snacking. Just after coming back from a party at a undergrad dorm(itory).
Nearly the end of another one of those weird days. Woke up and got the mail that the draft of a paper I have to hand in today (mind the time, already past midnight!) should be "a real paper, no sketch or outline. Hard deadline!" Hmmm, what's a draft that then? So I went off with a Singaporean to do some user interviewing in the mall. That's the reason I have fresh bread to snack!
Then meeting, class, afterwards some meeting for a small small project I do for education - they need a small webapp - which (the meeting) nearly got screwed up. Wrong room... then lots of talking about the old "computer guys" - charming.
Then rather depressed in the center for design research, waiting for the research group meeting to start and writing very little on my paper. Meeting starts: Great! Three people have been a week in India to do rural development, they tell the story. Just fantastic!
Finally I cheer up, someone announces a party later on - will I go... ? Probably, what am I here for? Also I get to write quite a bit before we start to the party. One dorm, small live band; then to the next.
Big Stanf live band!

And now I'm back and have to finish my draft. So a little snack, some tea and go! Lets see. Its for my philo-hci class (typo, sorry!).

That's the story of the student abroad. You never quite know what will happen - always a little unsure, changes all the time, surprises and lots of encounters!
Ups and downs, roller-coasting!

Cool stuff

Today in my Multi Agent Systems class we were offered to try out some of our stuff (Multi-Agent Game theory, mostly) for the new DARPA Grand challenge. It's about Junior!

(You might want to look at the old material, particularly this is, ahem, funny (75 Mb video, careful, (my) Firefox tried to display it; use "Save As..." - but just funny) ;-) ).
We can do that for the paper that is due to pass the class (you need to do an exam and problem sets, too).

And then I was at a talk by Rana el Kaliouby, from MIT. That's really cool stuff: her software is recognizing facial expressions! :-) She's devised it to train autists about facial expressions. Autists are not disinterested in this stuff (they tend to look to the floor and cannot empathize - meaning feel with other people, communicate adequately and generally act socially), but are just overhelmed by the input from the environment. She teaches them slowly by showing them how they reacted and how the other people reacted in different situations and what that meant - this last part comes from the computer!
There's other applications - more later I guess :-)

Now what do I do? Only 3 weeks of the quarter left...

Ongoing work and other sites

Oh ho, I have to meet this prof here for the research for my term paper and he got a blog! Wow, that seems to be a cool guy, read his article on "Why specialists are grumpy and generalists are happy" or the rest of his blog!
Hope he'll have time to meet with me!

And then I found my friend G-Tech describing his HCI course: Projekt in meinem HCI-Kurs.
It's in German, sorry for all the German-illiterates, but I want just to point out some specialities of the approach to design I'm learning here. You can take them as is, or if you know German you may contrast them with what my friend describes.
We also do

Understand -> Ideas -> Prototype -> test -> start over!

But in 2h! At least to start with. We generate an insight that is usable for brainstorming, 50 ideas or something. Then we make (say) 6 prototypes. Then we test - and we are happy if they fail! Then we have learned something, we do not want those "Oh yeah, cool.....!?"-type answers.
Learn by doing prototypes. Learn by talking with the people. And throw them away afterwards - do not be emotionally attached to them! So do NOT invest too much work into a single prototype! Fail fast, fail early, fail gloriously. And LEARN!
(Georg prototypes a user interface - new screen: flip page! It's the only one lying around here - I'm not proud of it, but you get the idea! You make people talk with it, that's GREAT!)

The Stanf. principles

Just coming back from the presentation of Hasso's class of next quarter. Good food, some people from Hasso's company and Terry a prof from the University. After the talk of Terry he asked the students to make a short presentation and afterwards he laughingly quoted a principle of this University:

Bring together exciting students in a course and let them learn from each other.

A third of the people is already running at least one business, others come from research managing backgrounds, have several years of experience in something else - you get the picture.
The course looks great. We'll have to improve the administration of the cities of PA and MV, how will be our task to find out. No limits! The core teaching team is comprised of Terry, Hasso, two higher level guys from Hasso's company and some teaching assistants. Of course there will be visiting profs. And we'll be going to this year's big customer event of Hasso's company, in Atlanta in April! Hey, some reader of this blog should be happy now that I might visit his place!
Hope that I'll be in this class!
Oh, I try to keep complete names out of here, as you might have noticed.

(RED)

Also: Spend and destroy, Fact 1, Fact 2

Social marketing ::= Use business techniques to create good.
(RED) ::= Create a (global) brand that other brands can wrap around their brand to profit from social marketing. Split the profits 50/50: 50 go to AIDS projects in Africa 50 to GAP, for example:

My next design school project is all about that. Starting today.

Feynman, far future and crazy valley people

I just came home from a talk here. There are always all kinds of weird and/or interesting people coming to Stanford to give talks. This time it was Alexander Rose, the lead engineer of the Longnow Foundation. They want to design a clock that runs for the next 10,000 years (at least). They already built the mountain where they want to set it up in. Their first prototype went straight into the London Scientific Museum.

The original idea is from a guy named Danny Hillis who has co-founded thinking machines, a thousands-of-processors-computer company, in 01983 (mind the extra zero against the next bug!).
So what I found nice is this quote from Richard Feynman which Alexander cited as an inspiration of his:

I believe that it is quite reasonable for humanity to be making mistakes - it is still so young! (Free after Richard Feynman)

Maybe someone can find the original quote to this. I was unsuccessful.
It is even more interesting as Feynman had worked on the Manhattan project and was generally known for his feeling sorry about any new bridges and buildings being built: "What a pity, this isn't going to survive for long..." alluding to the bomb.

Anyways, we had nice stormy weather during the talk, lots of thunder and lightning, and someone in the audience could not refrain from remarking: "Your great adversary is speaking!"

They got me locked down! (House pix)

Yeah, I am fighting currently. It could be easier: How much time for university and how much for the city and so on? The blog is already suffering, I know.

(There it is, the bridge. Pic from Felix. Check out the links!)

Anyways I had quite an interesting week! Just this Friday we had a grad party on Campus, after that I was at a house party till later that night, three people stayed at my home... Saturday team meeting, work and the city in the evening. Been to a white trash bar/party. White trash are people in trailer home cities. Cheap beer - but the bar was in SF downtown, no sweat. Somebody came over from Potsdam last week for a month's worth of Internship at that big German software company. Coool!
Apropos, you meet those people from said company everywhere. One talked to me after the halfmarathon from last Sunday, because he recognized us as Germans when he read the imprint on my jogging suite and later this week when going swimming on campus a friend and me stumbled on him when he was leaving the aquatic center. Small (German) world.
(Picture from their campus with Fefe and Tomtom)

By the way there was the Golden Gate halfmarathon last Sunday and I participated! 2:02 for the interested. Very easy going! Look:
(Right after the start: Golden Gate Park)
(Finish in Golden Gate Park: Heba, Chris, Mary and me)
All runners prepared with a pasta dinner at Mary's house, which happens to be Heba's, and slept there to be ready for the early start. The rest was smooth running through the park, a little bit of lower SF and ocean beach. No mountains! And I had prepared for mountains...

If you did not notice sport is a big thing here. I am infected. Frequent running, swimming, dancing and - newest - squash! There are amazing, truly incredible facilities available free of charge to all students. Look at the aquatic center:

Two 50 m, one 37 and one for jumping with 1, 3, 5, 10 m towers. Outside. Heated! Yeah. Tennis courts, multiple stadiums, 9 squash courts, halls, gym, golf, yachting...

But I am often here, too:


And I have got to return there soon. We still have a meeting tonight. Have been in the city to do some prototype testing in the company's shop. We are to redesign their customization experience. Tomorrow is presentation.
Here are pix of my room.


And now after having been to IKEA:



Well, and this I wanted to share with you. Opening the fridge for the first time offered me this view:

(The preferred drink of my rommie's girlfriend)


And now I gotta go. Sometimes I look like this now. By the way, the wall behind me is already covered with more post-its! (See you) later!

The dish and my room

I just payed my room! 1,797 for three months, wait, 2 and a half in fact, since I moved in late. That's still quite ok, I'm living on campus and it could have been worse. It was actually pretty easy to get this room. In fall quarter (September-December) it would have been very difficult. More later!

Here are two more dorms, complete with parking and a palm tree (who finds it?):
The campus is basically surrounded by dorms. Graduates (Master or PhD) and undergrads (Bachelor) are separated; there's fraternity houses (actually here student fraternities are regarded as being"cool"), those Kappa-Sigma-Beta or Omega-Gamma or whatever named things. Add some faculty housing and something like "embassies" for countries or religion-related groups and you got the idea.

Right now I'm training for the half-marathon on Saturday, and I'm doing that in the "dish" area. That's the terrain directly behind campus located in the foothills of Palo Alto. The foothills are the south-western slopes of the valley - beautiful region with villas right next to the San Andreas fault line. You start in suburbia, which covers most of the valley "floor", than some day maybe... or you just run there. Look:



Ok, the last picture is back on campus - you can see the walkway. Those funny squirrels are all over the place! Playing in front of my window, running up the trees next to the students - really nice!
You have kind of a view over the valley from the hills of the dish, check it out:
So as you can see the hightech companies right at the side of the campus. It's pretty full there now, Google for example built on the other side of Palo Alto.

Something I wanted to share. Isn't that a living room?
The kitchen is impressive, too:
(Recently they had a NASA empoyee's party, if you wonder about the green little...)

Oh yeah, they also have those:
(trash bins that open with a proximity sensor - if you move your hand (with trash) close to the lid...)
That's how americans live... well, hopefully one day I won't forget to take pictures of "suburbia"; this is from a friend's space-geek condo in the foothills.
Now I'll go on preparing my seminar on Thursday. This week I'm doing the questions to guide the discussion. A guy doing a "Symbolic something" Bachelor and me. He was at CMU before, says that it's lousy - food, dorms, weather, people. So he changed. Good that I'm here!
See you later!

Wow, AM I busy

(San Francisco from the twin peaks)

Ok, sorry for the slow start of the blog. Today a homework was due and I had to read a lot for this lecture in the afternoon... so now I feel FREEEE! For a short time presume ;-)

A great lot of things happened. First of all I got a bike:


I really like cycling around here - everybody in fact likes it! Bikes everywhere... I'm quite integrated as far as that is concerned, well, I even kissed the floor already. Today someone stepped in my way after a feint in the other direction... touched him with my handlebar and my bike went wild. Took soome off of the resell price for my notebook (though it's still working) and the front wheel - but you can see that. I didn't hit anything in particular! But it's already been replaced, I'm up and running again! :-)


The most important stuff otherwise: I have got a great room mate, he's into design and parties. The first one happened yesterday evening when a friend of his was celebrating the end of the PhD-calls exams. That's exams in which students for the PhD programs get selected... huh!

(Meyer library again)

But I had to complete a homework assignment for Multi Agent Systems, one of my courses. Currently I'm doing MAS, the d.school bootcamp and Phenomenological Foundations of Cognition, Language, and Computation ;-) and I'm hopping in on other stuff. The bootcamp is the real reason why I'm here, the class about innovation, design and teamwork. MAS is weird artificial intelligence computer science and Phenomeno... is a seminar (lots of reading, essay every week). Lets see if and what grades I can get out of them!
(Memorial church from behind)

I initially visited some more classes, but particularly the design classes have a heavy project workload and fall all on the same afternoons. Furthermore my chinese aspirations I had to dump - would have to have done a lot more last weekend to catch up with the class -- and I was practically all weekend in San Francisco or working on a project which I took with me from Germany.


All in all I still had a tough time getting things done. Yesterday night I completed the homework at 5 in the morning - but I did nearly everything! I met once with a guy taking the class with me and we checked everything through and we got along. I wasn't as far as him, but he encouraged me to go on. Maybe with a little bit more routine...
(German newspapers in one of the enormous bibs)

The thing is that it's not only the parties - it's also the wonderful reception I am getting here that is taking my time. In fact I am now already in contact with two faculties: the design research team and the d.school team. Both are having regular outings and meetings, for example today I went with the d.school team out to lunch in Palo Alto, yesterday evening was the weekly meeting of the design research team. That's great and I would rather go to more of those meetings and do less classes.

Ah, in case you're wondering what I did for my design class:
(Georg making an instant ramen experience)

Last but not least: What does this picture reveal:


HAHA :-)) Georg is learning snowboarding! Why? Because he didn't yet learn to do cool posing with the board - it's in the dirt.
Two weekends ago I went with some Germans to Lake Tahoe for two days of skiing/snowboarding. Wonderful nature and a great areal:



Oh, in case I didn't mention: San Francisco is beautiful, wonderful, great. Very complementary to the busy (as in business and work) Silicon Valley:


See you later, gotta learn sketching now ;-e