.

jet lag also jet·lag (jĕt'lăg')n.

A temporary disruption of bodily rhythms caused by high-speed travel across several time zones typically in a jet aircraft.


My trip is over. As soon as I started to adapt to the american lifestyle I hit the rod back to maynooth. Nothing special happened. I met some great people while I was in the states. I got some flavor of how it looks like to work for a big corporation. I learned something about myself and now I can say that these were useful three months. The only thing that bothers me right now is exchange rate of 1.5383 usd for 1 eur !?!?!?! F*%@~#¬ck ;-)

Thats it my friends. This blog is off. I might keep blogging, with a different name, but am still not sure.

When you have a hangover you will know it

This time next week I will be flying over Utah going forward to my sweet home (which is, by the way, a rather abstract construction right now, but hopefully daft will help me to make it real). This time next month will be the after-St-Patrick-sunday morning so I guess I will be sleeping in that imaginary sweet home. This time next year, it is too hard to predict. Most probably, will be on my way to Hamilton, perhaps riding my own bike, we will see...

This time last year was the first morning, after Jelena arrived in ireland. At that time I was teasing her for her making healthy food and practicing ownership over me in her strange way. Being as lonely as I am now, I wish I had the same owner and eating the same healthy food right now ;-) This time last month, I was watching Ana and Novak finding their way to the semifinals of the AO. This time last week I still didn't know how hangover feels like...

Ok, few weeks ago I thought I might have had it. However, I wasn't sure which means I didn't have it. When you have a hangover you know you have a hangover (the analogy with orgasm is obvious). In what follows, I will talk about my first hangover...

Last Saturday, I visited my high school friend, Isidora. We never hanged out when we were high school, although we know each other since 1994 or something. This was partially because we were nerds and didn't go out frequently, but also because she was too smart for all of us losers ;-) She lives in the US for 9 years, but she didn't change much since we finished high school (she probably wouldn't agree with me, though). After I met all those people I haven't seen for 5+ years I can say for sure that people change very slowly, and I just wonder when will us (late-twenties people) transform our teenage minds into grumpy-old-man's minds?

Then after we gossiped about our common friends, and ate some Thai food (you know much I like ethnic foods ;-) we headed towards place where Isidora's friends made a party. Funny thing about that place was that I had a history with one of the girls living there who is by some incredible coincidence also Isidora's officemate.

The party was made up mainly by stanford grad students, so I tried to behave. And I succeeded during first half an hour, after which alcohol started to reveal good-old-smalltalk-master me. The good thing is that most of people at the party were very relaxed version of erasmus people. The bad thing was that I drunk unknown drinks which means that I couldn't predict how long I could last. So the day after I felt drunk, thirsty, unable to walk or do anything meaningful.

Later this week, I visited BEARS conference at Berkeley. It was a great fun, plenty smart people and many jokes about palo-alto-junior-college. The BEARS is an annual meeting, where berkeley guys bring people from industry to squeeze some money for research, and from what I saw, it seems they are doing good.

I noticed that this blog is very incoherent, but whatever, I dont think anyone cares. Now need to go to sleep. Take it easy, and avoid hangovers this weekend...

Balkanization

I've just printed a recent paper, from CoNEXT 2007. The abstract finishes with the following sentence:

In addition, at the Nash equilibrium point, the routing and connecting/peering strategies maximize aggregate network profits, encourage ISP connectivity so as to limit balkanization.

The term repeats 5 times on the front page of the article and the first thing I did was googling to find out if this is a real word. Since it has a wikipedia page, I guess it is official.

Now I am going back to read the paper...

Two stories about silicon valley

Over last couple of days I experienced two independent stories capturing the pieces of life in the valley. The first one is related to the development of the most celebrated business type of the valley: startups. The second is kind of related to the way big corporations do their businesses and each of them is interesting in their own way.

Story one: fixmymovie.com. I know nesha half of my life. He is one of guys that can speak to every possible personality. I dont know anyone who can chat with random girls as gracefully and relaxed as him. Great character and equally good volleyball player. Well, you might believe that this story is about nesha, and in that case you would be wrong. This story is about his brother, nikola. I dont know a whole lot about nikola's personality, how successful was he with the girls, neither how well he played volleyball (btw. from what I heard he appears to be really good tennis player, but this needs to be checked ;-)). However, I will not talk about his personality, so this might not be a problem ;-)

So, nesha was this weekend in SF, and I met him and nikola. I had a really great time. Both of them look really great, and hanging out with them was real fun. While nesha was playing with little son of nikola, nikola spend couple of minutes explaining me what is his job. Well, he finished his phd 3 years ago, then moved to a small company and spend several months there before moving to his current job. Today, he is the CTO of a small starup, living with and solving real world problems in digital signal processing. Check out their site. Anyhow, he is one of those smart guys who has a very special skill: he can talk to people for hours without passing the line of becoming uninteresting. But what is amazing about him is his ability to step up and do what regular guys (like me) are afraid to do. One of the examples of this I can remember was him leading the student protests against Milosevic's faked results of the 1996 elections in serbia. At the time, it was a really big deal and nikola (21 at the time) did all the right things.

Today I was chating with steve, and at some point he said something like "in our business, everything is about DBLP... you search someone's name, you get his DBLP page and you judge him by counting the number of papers at DBLP...". Well, right point, assuming that you are in academic business its all about DBLP. However, Nikola got his hands out of DBLP business. Its not easy to run your own business but the potential personal accomplishment can be huge. Having met hundreds of phd students, i can say its very seldom to see such a spirit of a fighter, and thats why I need to give credit to Nikola and guys like him. Being in Silicon Valley doesn't guaranties the success, but definitely helps building that I-can attitude.

(I put up the pics online. This pic is taken with nikola's super cool camera)




My second story is about life and work in big corporations. Yesterday, I was doing regular stuff, unsuccessfully trying to come up with something smart ;-) Then Anand, guy from my group, came to me and asked me if I would like to see a NBA game... there was a free ticket and the guy who was supposed to go canceled and there was an extra ticket. Well, I said why not. The history behind the tickets is lengthy, but on a high level, a big corporation called TI has its own box at Oracle Arena, and they use these seats to befriend the potential business partners.

The box means that you have your own room with a dozens seats, infinite amount of food, beverages, and deserts, and great view of the game. However, compared to the court seats, the deficiency of box-seats is in fact that you cannot fully appreciate all the elements of the cheerleaders. The game was great, the box services were great and if I was someone important I would definitely try to develop business with TI people. I have never heard of people using sport shows to build up their business, but cmon, this is the Valley... Everything is possible ;-)

Some pics

As I promised some time ago... a few pics...



The custom of cisco executives is to put flags of the countries from which the visitors arrive in front of the headquarters. That probably gets them an extra million per customer or so. Anyway, it seems, there were some Serbian guys buying some package from cisco, yesterday ;-)



This pic is unrelated to the previous one. I see this bmw almost every day on the way home. It is the answer to the question, "What is the first think a gastarbaiter buys when he reaches income of 100K-a-year?"



This one is by slovenac. In his place...



Those are my fellow cisco employees, using public transportation. Can you spot any non-southern-asian? :-)



My badge. Not too clear, but who cares...



I was playing with picasa features. Its at my train stop.

Lucky day for outsiders

Last couple of weeks there is nothing happening in my cubical. I had some ideas couple of weeks back for improvement of some cisco products. The euphoria didn't last for long, as I couldn't test my ideas over realistic traces. Those, full-payload packet traces are extra hard to get, as they could contain some private data (such as which kind of porn you prefer or why your wife chats with her ex-boyfriend in 3am). So now my work is stuck, and since I am here for only 3 more weeks I cannot start doing anything significant at this point. Ok, you got the picture about how my job is going.

Last week I had a serious trouble with my tooth. Its not really a tooth, but rather a gum. Its annoying and annoying and annoying, but a good side of it is that you can live with it: it doesn't hurt that much. Well, I wanted to fix it at some point, but whoever I talked to told me not to go to american dentists if you either: (1) have no insurance(which I don't have) or (2) look like someone who has a serious trouble (which I have). So I skipped dentist last weekend and now it is getting better. Hopefully I will survive until I leave country, otherwise I am prepered to waste a grand on fucking dental mafia(some of you probably know what I think about dental/health mafia, and for others I have to say that there is no positive words to describe those sophisticated clans building their social and financial empire on the misery of ill people).

Putting down my weaknesses (or stupidity) here on blog, help me to observe it and make some actions to recover from it. Well, I booked the ticket for nyc and got a beautiful weekend there. It started with great flight with jetblue.If you ever have a chance to travel with JetBlue airlines, give it a shot. This is especially important for those of you taller than 190, as it gives more space than any airline I have ever used before. Great tv program, great multivitamin beverages, and cabin crew is natural: too friendly but not unfriendly at all. Overall great experience.

When I arrived in nyc, I took the subway to Manhattan (5$+2$). Dejan was already up by the time I arrived ad his place in mid-lower east side. He went to see his boss at nyc and I slept whole day. First thing I saw when I woke up was 19-year-old, underwear-model flatmate. Very interesting character but keeping him as a flatmate is dangerous: imagine your girlfriend sharing a house with some random super-hot-model-wannabe girl. Its tricky.

The nightlife in nyc is a frustration rather than anything else. This particularly holds for guys like us: late twenties, accompanied with no girls. After living in ireland for so long, I couldnt get used to being rejected at so many places, just because we were guys only. I cant see conceptual difference between this and segregation in the fifties when afroamericans couldnt get onto buses or pubs. I can see buisness logic behind it, but its frustrating and I cannot see why those rich male new yorkers tolerate those ignorant bouncers. But it seems that americans are used to that kind of money-squeezing from their pockets, so they are not too willing to complain.

We (me, slovenac, vlada and ivko) somehow found a place, got drunk, got double pizza, and after all went home. At that point, probably because of my addiction, I took laptop just to perform my routine of meaningless uploading half a dozen webpages. Thats when I saw a single unread email: "Congratulations, your paper has been accepted at ACM SIGMETRICS 2008 as a full paper!". Fuck, at the same moment my drunk-happiness has been replaced with euphoria, screaming, kissing dejan, and promising things I didn't fulfill later. It was a relief. That was the first paper I wrote in more than a year and being accepted at such a big conference is an achievement... for outsiders like me.

Tomorrow we woke up at midday, and dejan was trying to convince me that I had a hangover, but I dont think that was the case, you can decide for youself:

Later that day, we went to a 25-minute gig of The Teenagers. This is a shot of some hipsters in waiting for the event;-)



Dzhuna arrived from Boston, early in the evening, and Vlada cooked for us some serbian sausages and we were ready for another miserable set of fights with bouncers. Nothing special happened, the routine from previous night was followed, but this time without any paper-acceptance notifications.

Getting to the airport tomorrow morning was tight: someone pulled an emergency in the subway and it wasnt moving for some 25 minutes and I almost missed my flight. But, luckily it was late for 15 minutes and I got there on time. Flight features superbowl, and my least favorite NFL team (NE Patriots) came into the finals as huge favorites playing to outsiders: NY Giants. In the fourth quarter, most of the people in the plane were screaming and cheering for thier team: Giants won by scoring a touchdown 35 secs before end. Lovely game.

When I arrived in san jose, it was raining. My room was cold. My tooth-gum got better. My country elected a new president. My acceptance letter was still in inbox and I soberly read it one more time. After that I calmly went to the bad and for change had no problems sleeping.

Serbian elections: a virgin suicide

I didn't blog lately. I didn't really feel like writing and even if I did, I wouldn't know what to write about. Ok. Now is sunday night and for the whole weekend, I went twice to the local Carl's Jr, tried to read something and watched tennis.

In my real life there is nothing happening so far, and the events I was focused about during last two weekends are remotely related to me: presidential elections in Serbia and Australian Open Championship. You can read on many places how great those serbian kids were playing in australia. Here I am about to write how I feel about this ridiculous choices offered on the last-week elections.

First, I would like to say a few words about presidential elections in serbia. Like, all other elections in serbia, this one didnt lack demagogic messages of all sorts addressing appropriate voting spaces. If I tried to compare this particular elections with the earlier ones I can remember, I couldn't find anything conceptually different. There were two big guys, and a bunch of small fishes. The two big guys had two completely opposite views on almost everything they talked about and the final results of the first stage (happened last week) are in agreement with the observation that on every single topic one can think of, the serbs will be divided in two parts of virtually identical sizes.

What annoys me is the incredible inability of serbian politicians to react on real problems, and there are so many of those: education (from primary to adult), legal system, corruption on every layer of society, and so on. They rather choose to talk about abstract notions of Kosovo, "our pride", "better life". And then I ask myself, how could anyone vote for those demagogies. The only thing I am certain of is the insufficiency of explanation.

By chance, just a few days after elections I watched Virgin Suicide . I have seen that movie several times before, but this time I noticed a scary resemblance between those teenage girls (living in a small American Midwest town strictly isolated by their parents from the rest of the world) and people of serbia. In such conditions of isolation, refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them seems inevitable. And then the infantile voting for demagogies is nothing but a pathway to the suicide of the nation.

Although, I wasn't directly involved with those elections, the implications for my life are very, very strong. Simply, as long as majority of people in serbia votes for demagogies, I cannot see myself living there; where police need to check my ID every couple of weeks like I am a criminal. Therefore, until the serbian society grow up I would rather be a polish guy in a foreign country. Sadly, but even being a polish guy in ireland seems as less miserable option.

I will try to get some photos next week and post them soon. Be good.