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'...