Ordinary people

California is a long country. Ok, it might not be a real country, but it is very long. Just one week ago I decided to go for a road-trip with my friends: from san jose to los angeles through PCH. Well, this PCH stands for Pacific Coast Highway, so I thought it should be a great idea to do it. My way of thinking was: (1) its "Highway", so it must be quick: mistake!!!! Highway is not a Freeway, so most of the time we actually had only one lane of road in each direction with uncountably many S-turns. (2) "Pacific" stands for silent and calm ocean without many waves and gentle environment. wrong: most of what I saw of pacific was quite scary, and I doubt that even bravest enthusiast would dare approaching that part of "pacific". (3) finally I assumed that "Coast" is the same as beach, and from the photos you can see that that's not the case. Thus, although it was a sunny day, there was not a single bikini to be seen. So the trip took us some 12 hours from SJ to LA with several stops. Each couple of minutes there is something called Vista Point(VP); VPis something like place for enjoying the landscape (Vidikovac in serbian). However, the landscapes exhibit self-similarity but that didnt protect us (neither a dozen of asian tourists that we saw at each of VP) from visiting each one of them striving to find an extra angle to shot that-beautiful-rock. I am afraid that one day I will become a florian; (not as talented though, just ordinary guy chasing the right angle and shade). Then people in maynooth will have to live with both of us :-)

People I traveled with were Milan (phd student at UCLA; geek, like most of my high-school friends) his sister Milena (english teacher) and her husband Steven (dutch guy, postdoc in TU Munchen, biology department). So the road-trip wasnt boring at all. For example, I was explained that variance in gene pool within the race is bigger than the variance between races, which implies that there is no biological excuse for racism. Then I asked Steven and Milena, until when are they going to stay in Munchen, and the answer was shocking, not unexpectable though. "Until the first Nature paper". Wow, thats the spirit!!! Most of people that I know wouldnt be so determined to publicly express their goals. Everyone without a Nature paper believes that "One Nature paper changes everything". Similar pattern exist inside virtually everyone who aims to achieve "something" in his area of activity: arts, music, sports, banking... However, I realized that attitude one-big-thing-oriented is one of the main sources of depression, and I am trying not to practice it myself. Many-small-things-oriented life stile seems more suitable for ordinary people like me.

Then I discovered the new technology that made pilling of potatoes a piece of cake. I liked it. New technologies made many things, that just until recently required extraordinary skills, to be performed by ordinary people like me. Making videos for youtube, or creating radio-dramas (like one at http://www.podcastkrimi.de/). However, I would like to share with you the stunning experience of what new technology can do... in somewhat different area, though. Namely, on christmas eve we met a nice girl who was once an ordinary next-door girl. Then she did a boobjob and become a super-extra-hot chick. Affordable new technologies are changing the way people enjoy the world. Instead of waiting for a good movie, you can make one... instead of waiting for someone else to pill your potatoes, you can do it yourself... instead of dreaming about super-hot girlfriend/boyfriend in your bed you can make one for yourself. The change brought by new technologies and their impact on the present world is very nicely discussed in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail.

Finally, it was Tuesday and I was ready to return to my sweet-cubical-home when I realized that I will not be able to enter the LAX airport without the passport that I forgot in my office in San Jose!? That meant that I had to search for alternative path for San jose. http://www.greyhound.com/home/ provides a solution for outcast people without ID. It took them 7 hours to drive to san jose confirming what i learned few days before that california is long. Finally, the joy of the little girl sitting in front of me with her mother reminded me that life of us, ordinary people, can be nice even without first-author Nature papers. Although a potato-piller and a girlfriend with a boobjob would be nice to have;-)

http://picasaweb.google.com/rrrade/SFLA

Neighborhood

I went around and made a few shots with my 7-megapixel-100-euro camera.

At this photo you can spot a few things. First, an orange tree in front of my house, hills that surround the silicon value, long shadow of me. You can also notice how wide my street is, I havnt seen a street in san jose narrower than mine!?



The next one is shows the flavor of my neighbors. Many houses around have crosses on the windows and virtually all of them are asian-looking (thus not italian nor irish area).


The crossroad of my street with some tropical trees



My train stop


If I get home with huge-fat belly it will be because of me falling under american consuming culture : (one .69, three 1.00!?)



Finally you can see my face with big bloody pimple on my forehead, my dry lips, freckles and mona-lisa smile. This photo is there for two reasons: (1) to capture some human on those photos (2) to help you not to forget how I look like ;-)

Good old times

I am one of those guys who is nostalgic, perhaps more than a man should be. When I think about events that happened to me in the past they look somehow good independently on how bad or good I felt about them at the time they were happening.

Yesterday, Saturday, I woke up around 9. That means I didnt go partying anywhere on friday night. Fuck, I didnt go out anywhere for-the-previous-2-and-a-half-weeks or since-that-drunk-night-at-the-roost. That goingoutfree time gave me a lot of spare time to think about my life and about important/unimportant things (I also used that spare time for exploring new web architectures for porn content distribution, and i was amazed; the last time I had an internet connection at home (2004) the content distribution was so primitive. viva la youporn)

So lets get back to the institution of Friday Night. In the last few decades the Friday Night has become very important event in the life of a contemporary man/woman. It has replaced medieval object called Sunday Mass. Both Friday Night and Sunday Mass are times for socializing, place where you meet people, where you talk about everyday stuff, show your new clothes and so on. So why am I talking about Friday Nights? In reality, most of Friday Nights are boring, with bunch of people going out at some loud place, hoping to score, but usually going home either drunk or depressed* (this might be why guinness, smirnoff and others are doing so well).

When I objectively think about my Friday Nights, most of them were just small talking, pussy talking, drunk talking, and at very loud places no talking at all. But from a time-distance my mind filters out those crappy feelings and I feel nostalgic about those fridays**. Weird, isn't it?

Moral of this post is.... Do it! You will feel good about it when you get to my age ;-)

* - I discovered a very efficient way to heal any bad feeling after Friday Night: A juicy Smokey bacon burger, pljeskavica or similar make you ready to go to bad without any negative collateral effect.

** - This filtering is close to the phenomenon known as ryanair-effect, discovered by steven strachan.

First week in SJ: new house, cisco people and crapy food

Well, the first week is over. And some things were happening over here. Just to keep me busy. Last weekend I told u I was afraid that i will not be able to find a house. However, my worries were gone on sunday when I found a room 5-train-stops away from my office. My landlord is funny mid-fifties guy, called Piter (his real name is vinh cao, or something like that) has been living in san jose for 30 years and talks mainly about how great america is and how bad vietnam is. Anyway, his daughters remind me of bich... with no french accent, though ;-)

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After I got the room I needed to spend my time, and as every proper american I did shopping in a huge mall. I spend lot of money on chip low class products. Among those are 100E camera and great 25E 1GB mp3 player with nice color display, probably able to do all things that nano can do but cost 5 times less (the difference goes to guys like florian who own apple stocks and advertise the apple products all the time; of course for the sake of making profit ;-).

Then on monday I went to the office where I met my team: 8 cool, asian-american guys. They are extra friendly and very likable. I did some of the administrative crap and i still have a lot of things to do, whatever. Well, what am I suppose to do? I still dont know. I am quite confused... They (cisco) are giving me loads of money and it seems to me that they dont really know why. For example, at some point, my manager asked me: "So Rade, how did you ended up here, with us?". It seems that some high-level person allocated me to this group, and right now both me and my manager dont know exactly what to do, but hopefully during next couple of days we will manage to find something mutually-interesting. Btw, on thursday I was at a company meeting with CEO and simultaneously with 7 other cisco groups around the world (dalas, toronto, israel, india, belgium, etc.). It was an interesting experience, those guys, CEO, CFO, CDO are amazing with slide shows...


My food habits in maynooth were bad, I know.... I ate mainly food with low nutritional value. However, it was probably an order of magnitude better compared to what I eat here. Most of my meals are in some macdonald's-like places and although they initially tasted good now i started to feel depressed. It is quite cheep to eat in those places compared to irish prices, which was probably one of the main reasons why i like going there. The other would be that I have no other choices ;-) This is how those places look like


Anyway, eating tasty&crap food was my main source of socializing: "Number 4 please", "Which drink?", "coke please". Sometimes I dream about being an alien in maynooth... however being a complete foreigner is not that great in place as big and empty as san jose. On top of having no friends around, last week I didnt have internet, which just amplified my loneliness. Having facebook account turned out to be a nice place to develop virtual life, but i am still new to that. we will see.




To conclude, the house is ok, the food is tasty&crap&chip, the cisco-people are cool, and my life is boring.

Polish, mexican, chinese, brothers&sisters...

As you probably know, I hit the road to the US. My flight was at 9am on friday so I decided not to sleep that night before. So we went to the roost on thursday, and for some reason I started with shots and by midnight I was jumping all over the place. Many people celebrated my departure and I am glad for them ;-9 Me, stive, bich, dorotea and kurt had great greasy food at supermacs and then I lost them on the way to simons place. I stayed at simons until 5, then called taxi and went to the airport.

When I arrived at the airport it felt I was in krakow or wroclaw. You can say how rich a country is based on who works in the Macdonald's: if they are different than customers then the country is rich. Anyway, after I was served by a guy called lubos, I took a seat next to a bunch of ryanair crew members, wearing their blue/yellow clothes and fixing their hair (steve should know what the picture is). Although I am one of them I still find funny to see a bunch of polish people ( as you know polish is a synonim for any eastern-european) communicating in english, but thats just me.

I skipped 50-meter-long queue at dublin us-immigration and did us-passport check in san francisco. The flight was pleasant as i slept most of it; thats why it was a good idea to go out the night before and get wasted (I want to thank kurt for taking care of me that night). Most of the people on the plane were irish-americans visiting their uncles in galway and donegal. As contrast to chip-slim-ryanair crew, the aerlingus air cabin crew was mainly irish except for a shaved-head-120kg polish guy who was quite scary so that no terrorist would mess with him.

The arrival in california was quite an experience. Most of the people are either mexican (synonym for latino), chinese (synonim for the asians) or brothers&sisters. Quite wide genetic pool can bring many good things to this place. Yesterday I had a walk (1 hour or so) in the neighborhood and during that time i met 4 girls singing on the street and one homeless guy. Noone else! Here everyone drives. For a countryboy like me it was shocking. Then I bought a phone (if you feel like texting me feel free : +1 408 466 7226) and they ripped me off but it seems that I couldnt get a better deal without social security number and credit history. Those things are a must in america, or at least it seems like they are ;-)

Today I am going to search for place to live. My hotel is nice, but it costs 60$ a night and i will need to find something chipper soon. Hopefully I will not need a credit history for it. I will keep inform you on whats going on with it.

There was italan party yesterday, right? I hope some of erasmus people will post some photos and spread some gossip.

Enjoy the saturday night and c u soon

Rade, why blog?

This is an interesting question. I was always wondering why people blog, but i didnt care too much about it. Spending time typing some text never sounded very attractive to me, esspecially when there are so many wikipedia articles and youtube videos waiting to be seen. So why did I decided to write? Maybe because I wanted to improve my English writing skills, maybe... I know that if I dont write it down, I will forget many things i shouldnt forget, so maybe I write to prevent forgetting, maybe.... Maybe I just want to stay in touch with you, maybe.... Those are all legitimate reasons for blogging, but I could use those reasons to start blogging earlier, but I didnt. So there must be something else. The key reason is probably the fact that I have nothing else to do, and blog sounds as a good place to waste my spare time at this point. So when you see that i am not writing that probably means that something is going on in my life which should be a good news.

Until then...