jetlagged me

.

2008-03-09T06:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-22T23:23:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-14T21:00:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-09T00:48:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-05T19:47:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-27T20:25:00.000-08:00

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.

Lemoncello and giant trees

2008-01-15T20:32:00.000-08:00

I dont remember if I told you how I opened my bank account? (I repeated the same procedure two times, the first time I wasnt eligible; the second time everything was ok and I got my account opened). Although I have account open, my paychecks are still not deposited directly to the account, so I have to bring them to the bank myself. So, since last weekend was raining like in hell, and I dont really have time to go out on weekdays, I decided to go to the bank on saturday and get that money deposited. I woke up, shaved myself, and erased that scary look from my face. In the train to downtown I got the call from some american number. The guy calling me wasnt any of very few people that could call me from america. It was KURT!!!! He was passing by, and he said that we could meet in San Francisco for a pint!? I thought he is joking with me, but then why would he do it?

So I took the train and was in SF in less than two hours. We ended up in some italian place with one irish waitress who was flirting with Kurt all the time. We spend more than a hundred$ and I dont regret any cent of it (cmon, its only 70eur ;-). Kurt introduced me to limonchelo and i remember it as a lovely drinkable beverage. Well, after I wrote this paragraph, I realized that I had a bullet 68. in my "2007 list": "Kurt travels the globe and when he doesnt he gives me the lessons in drinking". It seems that now he gives the tutorials on his trips as well ;-)

After we had our nice dinner, I decided to go to visit my high school friends, across the bay in Berkeley. Berkeley is a lovely place to live in. But my memories are mixed up. They dont really have public toilets, which can be uncomfortable, sometimes. The indian place had a very dry fish. And the chip downtown hotel, was probably the dirtiest hotel I have ever slept in, and remember I am coming from eastern europe and I have been staying in many chip ho(s)tels out there. However, seeing Matic and Vukmirovic was a memorable event. I know them since 1994, and it seems we didnt change at all since high school. Same stories, same jokes, probably the same pairs of shoes. Everything was the same, except we were 10 years older.

We decided to go to Muir Woods for the sequoia trip and then try to go the pacific to check out the whales migrating to the south. We were just few minutes too late to get the chance to see the whales but the trip through those gigantic woods was amazing. We look so tiny compared to those 1000 years old guys.

I was asked 5+ times over the weekend about the origins. When I was walking to city center in SF, one guy, asked me a question and I just said "no" . He replied: "you must be eastern european, right?"!!!??? So what makes it so obvious? My hair? Clothes? Nose? The way I walk? I dunno.

The work is going ok. I am trying to code some efficient algorithm in C and after I started to play with hundreds of pointers pointing in each direction I felt quite frustrated. It took me a couple of days to revive those good old days, when me and pointers were friends. However, like most good old days, those ones were better in memories than in reality.

Moneytalks

2008-01-08T21:40:00.000-08:00

Nothing special happened last couple of days/weeks... Last weekend we had a serious weather condition as we got 20cm of rain in two days. Thats a lot of rain, but hopefully it will be the last burst of rain of this magnitude until december :-) Before that, last wednsday I had a meeting with a guy with a wikipedia article. It was ok, but I couldnt really explain why my boss sent me to talk to him. So none of us wanted to be in that meeting and it was initially very uncomfortable. Then it got better, but generally it was a waste of time, his time (loss of my time is a few orders of magnitude less important so it can be neglected;-).

Then on friday my boss asked me whether I can/want to stay another few months. I quickly found an excuse, saying "I want but my irish boss dont let me".(I thought I would never be grateful to bob for not allowing me to stay in cisco for more than 3 months.). His relpy was something like "Why not? We can pay you and you can do research for him..." Anyway, I dont think I would be able to live there longer than three months. But, again, maybe I am wrong. Money can change the way people feel

Insomnia, I had insomnia most of nights since I came here. I dont know why. I am healthy, dont have any emotional problem, my body functions well, but when it comes to sleeping it doesnt work. I have been falling asleep for last 27 years, every night (almost every night) so I guess I should know how to do it quickly. But it doesnt work. I had the same problem few years ago but then I started to watch movies every night and it helped. Now even movies dont help. Can anyone tell me how to deal with this issue?

Btw, I signed up for netflix. 14$ a month and you can keep 2 dvds at all time. As soon as you finish watching a dvd you return it and in two days you get the new one from your wishlist. Amazing service. I wish something like this exist in ireland.

Finally, to illustrate my Gastarbiterism I will tell you a short story. I get roughly 3.08 hours of holydays every week, which is roughly 5 days for 13 weeks. So I was planning to use those days and go to visit friends nyc/boston for couple of days. Then last week they told me at work that all unused holiday are paid on the end of the internship, so I decided that having fun is not as important as geting a grand, so i will probably stay closed in my fucking San Jose .

Dump: short term memory

2008-01-01T19:02:00.000-08:00

I dont know about other people, but i tend to have a short memory. In other words, if you ask me to list you things that happened to me over last week, last month, last year or so, the answers would be equally long. Thats the reason I tried to list things that I could find in my short-term memory as of today and hopefully google will keep it on some safe place so that i can replace it with some new stuff.

1. Losing drink-virginity: Me and Miske with 8 dunjas each.
2. First time in the US. Big cars and no people on the strets.
3. Dzhuna showed me Cambridge, MIT and Harvard square. Nesha showed me the rest of Boston.
4. First time in France: strike of french train-drivers and me losing flight from Barcelona to Helsinki (and spending extra 250E). People say, typical.
5. First time in Finland: sauna-lake-sauna-lake-sauna-lake....
6. Drunk girl in Leinster's Arms kissing 20+ guys and going home alone!?
7. Me, Jelena and bunch of erasmus in Clifden, Connemara where the rain flows horizontally.
8. A random couple in the toilet of a Hostel.
9. No rejected papers this year
10. Boar in Nish (my hometown), city center

11. Dunnes at 5
12. Rade is polish: cześć
13. Steve Davis and Ken Doherty in Maynooth!!!
14. Football on tuesdays&thursdays, noon. Basketball on fridays, at 5.
15. My foot is fucked. Spend 150E on phisio but it didnt help.
16. Ben and Dirk and the polish summer... And of course waitresses ;-)
17. Chile:Germany - 2:0... Since Stuttgart ;-)
18. Novak is stable in Top3; Jelena i Ana are stable in Top5.
19. Dirk showed me the world of Absinthe
20. Very bad movie, Deathproof. Quote: "Is this a tasty beverage or is this a tasty beverage". This link is not from that movie, but the message is similar...

21. Success, Dule and Audi Q7.
22. Success, Jonatan:Erasmus - 2:0
23. Useless success: Milan offered 100K+ job that he rejected.
24. Failure, Rade tried to install linux.
25. Moving to the postdoc salary. Now I have no problem buying Smokey-bacon meal in Supermacs after roost
26. My parents in Ireland. Fancy rooms on south campus are great.
27. Steven graduated, got a fancy suit and the same day Scotland won France.
28. Serbia didnt win any decent team in years.
29. Steffen had several cool shirts, russian/kozak style. I bought one for myslef, but it doesnt look cool on me.
30. Jacket, made in Serbia, 575$!?!?!?

30. Many boys in love with Ingrid(fr) and Ingrid (ch).
31. Memet is gone.
32. Gerd thinks... He also thinks linux is great...
33. Hard drive on my laptop: replaced.
34. Feta cheese from Aldi: greasy.
35. Lea and her lifestyle
36. Yann Tiersen in Dublin. I heard about it one day too late ;-(
37. Matthieu still breaks parties with his drums.
38. Florian's flickr, wikipedia, trivia, etc.
39. Summer in Maynooth: Italian/Spanish kids (Pericols non entrare) everywhere. No Jewish families this year.
40. Little miss sunshine... "Can I give you some advice?"

41. My first St Patrick in Dublin. Waste of time...
42. Stevens traditional St. Patrick party made me miss Kurt's birthday....
43. Feb/March, Jelena in Maynooth. Best month of the year. You know what I mean ;-)
44. Jelena in the house: healthy food (broccoli and little carrots, mmmm), tidy place, and 9-to-5 work.
45. Nice day in Bray, and a long, unintentional walk to Greystones (thats not set of geay stones)
46. Florian proud of his thickness and complains that most girls are too tight for his majesty. Steffi not too happy about it
47. I met an undefendable basketball player: Ignacio.
48. Summer in Montenegro. Me, Jelena and 20 other people in the house.
49. Got new Passport (5th in last 10 years). However, I must replace it in 2008!?
50. Becky:

51. Microsoft? no thanks.
52. People still compare me with Borat!? Maybe because of Mattias's blog?
53. Jussi is married!?
54. German girls are #.... Or its just me?
55. Chip cigarettes.
56. Alexia is daughter of Marc Farry!?
57. Slovenac had a crush on Candice ;-) Sweeeeet
58. My brother became an ex-brother.
59. I postponed my fucking military service until the end of 2008. I guess I should be happy about it.
60. Tipsarevic

61. Decent movies: Efter brylluppet, Derailed, Stranger.Than.Fiction.
62. Polish-mexican sisters working in Macdonalds around the world.
63. Failure, Elsa:Renaud - 0:0.
64. If Atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby, Renaud's facebook quote.
65. Nesha is uncle; Nidzha is daddy
66. Ingrid and Sara... always in the roost
67. Simone&Simon didn want to go public.
68. Kurt travels the globe and when he doesnt he gives me the lessons in drinking
69. One written paper this year... still not rejected ;-)
70. Dave's son Caoimhin learn how to walk this year. Ken calls it controlled falling ;-)

71. Germans in Hamilton: extended holidays in ireland ;-)
72. Andrea's sister in Maynooth. Wow.
73. In Andrea's house pissing while standing is not allowed! Even if you are a guy!
74. Ben bought a skype mobile phone. He is now available 24/7, for 10E a month.
75. I am still in love. Skype know it well, and I am sure they are happy for it
76. This summer Steve told me Bich is going to stay in Maynooth. Then I asked him: "How are you going to brake up with her?". He said "I dont want to brake up with her". I felt really embarrassed afterwards.
77. Bich and her S&M boots.
78. Black paint, great story. Or what to do when you feel a desire towards a person while in commitment... Thanks Slovenac.
79. Got several emails from a chinese student interested in my work. He actually read the papers!?
80. Peter Cook - One leg too few:

81. San jose: the city of engineers. In other words the major boring city of the world.
82. NUIM webmail system is replaced and I lost 600+ emails I sent using their webmail service. Moving to google forever.
83. An Inconvenient Truth . US government doesnt seem to care too much.
84. Modern ways of communication: email, IM, sms, facebook, myspace, twitter, wiki, blogs, rss, pub/sub, pstn/cell/phone/voip/skype, pdas, pagers, and PVRs,
85. Florian promoting iPhone, and other overpriced apple devices. Me, opposing it.
86. Strongman
87. I am not really into big boobs, but boobjob can be useful.
88. Trick question: Who is a girl's best friend?
89. The toilet graffiti: "If it is not for the toilet, when would a man think".
90. In a manner of speaking: Nouvelle vague cover.

91. Many new kids in the Hamilton.
92. I lost both of my life-goals: neither 5-kids nor 100-kilo goals are alive.
93. Cisco sales vs Cisco engineering. Who is better?
94. I have problem with sleeping. Lack of sex or something....
95. Finished school. Still no gray hair. Still dont need glasses.
96. However, developed carpel tunnel syndrome on the left hand as well.
97. Maynooth is my home now.... for another two years or so
98. Jelena might move in with me some day next year. We will see...

Ordinary people

2007-12-26T19:26:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-16T14:04:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-16T11:57:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-09T17:42:00.000-08:00

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 ;-)

<
View Larger Map

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...

2007-12-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

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?

2007-12-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

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...