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

Wooooow!

Hi everybody, welcome to the new blog. Just be surprised what happens here, I cannot give any guarantees on punctuality or exhaustivity of coverage...
I arrived with all my stuff and without hassles Sunday this week at SFO. Without hassles! I had in December a perfect embassy experience and the immigration/duane etc were no problems.
So I was standing at the airport with my bags and told Jan that the foreseen battle plan had failed on first sight of the enemy: I couldn't take the train because my plane was a little late and my bags took some time to arrive. The failure was complete when Jan told me that he wasn't even home but in 'the city' (San Francisco) instead, having a dinner party with friends! He didn't have a mobile number to advise me... what a nice failure!
A couple of minutes later he picked me up at the airport and we returned to this dinner party with a lot of good vegan (!) food and about 15 very nice people. Space geeks, most of them. Many working at NASA - where else? By the way, that's the kind of people with whom Jan 'rooms', in his condominium down in Cupertino, 400 meters from the San Andreas fault line. After the dinner we drove home and I was shown the 'guestroom' an open space with on the top floor with 4 mattresses. What a gorgeous building by the way! Halfway up the western hills of the silicon valley, my windows are a great point to oversee the sunrise and the nightly glow in the valley. Only a few hours later I was wide awake for the sunrise - jetlag.

First orientation on the campus. Beautiful! Weather is brilliant, a bit cold but blue skies and sun sun sun! T-Shirt time in the sun, chilly in the evening. d.school just moved in a new location. Charlie of the d.school gets her deserved flowers, she helped a lot with all the visa paperwork.
The d.school is a big laboratory. It occupies a wide open space in a building, and the people see it as a big design challenge to subdivide the space. The school just moved and will still move twice before it will be in the final rooms. An opportunity to use the teached methodology of iterative design! Iterations happen not only during moves. Everything has wheels or is easy movable, the 'lecture room' called theater is usually empty and can be set up according to the needs of classes, students or visitors. It's fun to be rolling around all the time and changes are encouraged. Try try try!


Then Jan fetched me with his funny old Mitsubishy Eclipse and I spent the rest of the day at his work, meeting the other interns and searching for rooms in the city. He had a phone conference at midnight so I was in bed at 2 again...

Tuesday Anna, my fellow exchange student, and me met the CEO of the school and had an orientation meeting. Everything looks promising! I'm happy to know! Then I met a German PhD student of the computer design research team (CDR) here at the university. He was just introducing another German that is going to write his master thesis with the CDR. Moments later I had my student ID and met nice people. Then a nice casual lunch at the school and then some more orientation at the International Center.

In the evening the SAP people and me went into 'the city'. We met his room mates his condo(minium) and went out. Fantastic city! Beautiful and amazing with the victorian buildings and the hills! They got my beloved electric trolleybuses! Well, arrived home late again, have to remember to sleep once in a while, during the drive back I 'passed out' from fatigue.

Today finally the first class: Bootcamp! Short intro then first challenge: Design the best wallet! Presentation of the results and then more introductory infos. We'll be changing the world of instant ramen! More to come....

By the way, the top pic that's a view of shared spaces: space that can be used by whoever whenever it is free; given the user cleans it up again!

Now I'll check out a bike. Everybody's biking here! I've also got my first house visit tonight at around 7, here in Palo Alto. I switched from San Francisco, I think I'll get enough to do and I might go get a car for 'the city'...