Zurich!

By zach | Published March 6, 2010

I have had a good visit to Zurich. I feel that my interview with the ETH folks went really well, and I will hopefully be getting an offer from them within the next couple of weeks. I have only been able to get a close look at the center of the city, and the area around ETH, but even from that limited information, in addition to conversations with people here, I think I can safely conclude that Zurich is a really nice place. Restaurants and housing are even more expensive than in the Bay Area, but the public transportation is amazing (Apparently, visitors to ETH from MSR Cambridge have called it, "Tram City," which is perfectly apt), and otherwise I feel like one would get a lot of value out of the expense of living here.

Today, I had free since I'm not returning to California until tomorrow, and I did a little sightseeing. I was thwarted at first since it snowed a few inches between about 7:30 and 12:30. Luckily, snowplows came around and cleared the sidewalks(!!), and I was able to walk to the nearest tram stop without my feet getting wet. I took Tram 9 from my hotel down to where the river runs out of the lake, which is where the famous Sterne Grill is. There, I got myself a delicious servalat. I backtracked a tram stop and decided to spend the snowy afternoon at the Zurich Kunsthaus. It was a pretty nice museum. They had a big-ish collection of the impressionist stuff that I like, and a medium sized collection of the standard, jesus-y, European, renaissance stuff, which I quickly browsed through. They also had some paintings by a Swiss dude named Felix Vallotton that I rather liked.

By the time I finished at the museum it was already late in the afternoon. I took the tram another two stops to Paradeplatz, and  tried to get some hot chocolate at Sprungli, which was recommended to me by the ETH folks. But at roughly the same time it started snowing really hard again, and everyone else in Switzerland apparently had the same idea, and the place was utterly packed. Therefore, I hopped back on the tram, and went about halfway up Bahnhofstrasse. I still had a bit of hankering for hot chocolate, but couldn't find a cafe I was happy with, and eventually wandered into Merkur (a chocolate shop.) In the back was a dude making truffles. He gave me one to try for free, and I ended up buying a box to take back to folks in Berkeley.

Anyhow to make a long story short, the snow kept me from going up to Uetliberg, but I had a good afternoon running around Zurich.

Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment

Kyoto, and now to Zurich

By zach | Published February 27, 2010

A few weeks ago, I was in Japan with Christina, and we visited Kyoto for the weekend. I am finally getting around to posting my pictures. It was snowy and cold on Saturday, but the weather cleared up on Sunday, and we had a good time, aside from a misadventure or two. (I am now the proud owner of two Nikon camera battery chargers.)

Now, I am preparing for my trip to Zurich next week. Mostly, this involves working on the presentation about my dissertation research that I'll give there on Thursday. Yesterday, I had to do some painful cutting to get it down to 45 slides, but that is probably still too many. I will have to do a few practice runs this weekend to see how long it is. I am nervous and excited about the trip. I want it to go well, and for ETH and Zurich to be as awesome as they sounded over the phone.

Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment

Nagasaki Lantern Festival

By christina | Published February 24, 2010

This past weekend I went to visit Nagasaki for the lantern festival. The weather was really nice and I had a good time overall, but the lantern festival was extremely crowded, and so I didn’t get to see as much as I would have liked. I could have tried to squish in more, but I am not a fan of huge crushing crowds, and so I decided that it wasn’t worth the extra squashing. I also went to visit the Dejima reconstruction, which was neat. I like the sorts of places which try to show you how people used to live with furniture and food and such. I particularly liked the wallpaper, but it certainly looked like it was a pain to put up.I had some delicious Nagasaki Champon, as well. It’s a type of Chinese-style chicken soup with various shellfish and fish and cabbage and things in, and the bowl I got was nice and peppery and tasty.

The weather has been nice for most of this week, but I hear it’s getting worse starting today, and we may well have a big storm tonight. Hopefully the weather isn’t too bad for my lesson tomorrow!

Posted in christina, travel | Leave a comment

Japan Adventure

By zach | Published February 10, 2010

I have been having a good time in Japan with Christina. I got into Fukuoka late last Friday night, and the next day we wandered around Dazaifu. There, we saw the stone garden at Kōmyōzen-ji, a Zen temple, and Dazaifu Tenman-gu, a Shinto shrine. Then we headed back to Kitakyushu after eating some delicious ramen. On Sunday, I was very jet-lagged, and we mostly sat around at home. During the following week, I found out that my PLDI paper was rejected in spite of the good reviews. On the other hand, I also found out that I’ll be visiting ETH Zurich for an interview during the first week of March, which should be exciting. I am sad about the PLDI paper not getting in, but I’ll be able to make some big improvements and rerun the experiments on a bigger machine at the Intel lab, and resubmit to OOPSLA at the end of March. Anyhow, what I’ve been doing while Christina has been at work is working on said improvements.

This past Saturday we ventured up to Kyoto on the shinkansen. I will make another post about that because now it is time to make French toast.

Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment

Kyoto in the snow

By christina | Published February 9, 2010

Zach and I went to Kyoto! We had a good time, although the weather could have been better and there were some camera battery mishaps. We ate some tasty miso ramen, and I finally figured out why my sister wanted Subway so much when I went to Kyoto with her. Sandwiches without mayonnaise are a true rarity in Japan. Good cold cuts are hard enough to find. We were very lucky to fit on the bus on the way back to Kyoto station–if we had waited at the next stop we wouldn’t have been able to get on, and then we would have missed our train!

 

Posted in christina, thoughts | Leave a comment

Dazaifu Again

By christina | Published February 1, 2010

Zach showed up on Friday night, so on Saturday morning we went down to Dazaifu, which he had never been to. Winter is not the nicest season, sadly, but it was still a good way to pass the first jetlaggy day. We wandered over to the national museum, but Zach was getting a little bit bleary at that point, so we didn’t actually go through the exhibits. Then we had ramen and got me some new shelves and went home for a nap.

Next weekend we go to Kyoto!

Posted in christina, thoughts | Leave a comment

Bad at Posting

By zach | Published January 25, 2010

It has been a long time since I wrote anything here. To correct my previous post, I did end up going home for Thanksgiving thanks to finding a cheap(er) ticket on the Sunday beforehand.

So, what’s new? After submitting my paper to PLDI, I took some time off, and then focused my full attention on writing my dissertation. Except for a wonderful trip to Disney World with Christina and her parents, and then to Pittsburgh for Christmas, I worked on it non-stop until this past Tuesday when I sent off a complete draft to my adviser.

The trip to Florida and Disney World was really great. I very much enjoyed seeing the Hall of Presidents with the new animatronic Obama, and finally getting to ride the Tower of Terror. There was also lots of delicious food! The picture above is from the Osborne  spectacle of Dancing Lights. It has a lot of lights =)

The reviews for the PLDI paper came back the week before last, and they were largely positive. I am expecting the paper to get in based on the scores it got, but I won’t find out for sure until Friday or Saturday after the program committee meeting is over.

The most exciting news, though, is that I am headed to Japan this Thursday to visit Christina! I am going for about two weeks, and we are going to take the superfast shinkansen up to Kyoto for one of the weekends. It will be exciting fun. Now is a great time to make  the trip since I won’t have much work to do until I get comments on the dissertation back from my adviser. Also, I just sent off a few job applications, and I don’t expect to be hearing back for a couple more weeks due to reference-letter-writers needing at least a couple weeks to write reference letters. While Christina is at work, I will likely start working on my “Job Talk,” which is an hour long presentation I’ll have to give about my dissertation work when interviewing for research positions. I will probably also do a little coding, as fighting with powerpoint for any more than a couple days in a row tends to drive me a little crazy.

Posted in thoughts | Leave a comment

Kites

By christina | Published January 25, 2010

I got to fly a kite on Sunday! The weather was sunny and relatively nice, so I decided to head outside for a little while and get some new books and things. While I was wandering around, I ran into a kite-flying event. Little kids got to make their own kites, but the adults had brought some more impressive ones by. The biggest ones looked to be at least 10 feet tall! However, the wind wasn’t the best, and although the little kites did okay, the bigger heavier kites had a harder time staying in the air. I was talking with one of the people who was in the group running the event, and they let me fly one of their kites for a little while. I did okay, but once or twice the wind dropped enough that I couldn’t keep it afloat. I had a good time!

Posted in christina, thoughts | Leave a comment

Christmas Lights!

By christina | Published December 1, 2009
Santa's House

Japan has really caught on to the most sparkly aspects of holidays. Most major areas seem to end up with some sort of light displays, twinkling away in a non-denominational Santa-if-anything-centered way. I have to agree that there’s something very alluring about the cheer and friendliness of Christmas. (Apart from the Black Friday sales, that is.) They even get into the music, although in true Japanese style, most of what you hear is sanitized elevator music versions of everything. And everywhere has ads for Christmas Cake and Christmas Fried Chicken. Both of which Japanese are completely unaware are actually entirely Japanese customs.

Tree decorations at the Riverwalk

My favorite decorations I’ve seen so far are these little white abstract tree light things. The color comes from the light reflecting off of the bottom of the rings, which have been cleverly colored by children with markers. I’d like one as a way to make my room feel a little bit more festive, but sadly they were only available to decorate if you were willing to give them to the general decor of the shopping center.

Hopefully I’ll get to go to a few other places and take pictures of the decorations before I head back to the US. Fukuoka will have some nice ones around Canal City and Tenjin, I bet. And then hopefully I’ll be able to take a pile of pictures of Disney Christmas decorations. We don’t really take pictures of Disney much anymore, in my family. It was our usual vacation place when I was a kid (not so hard when it’s less than an hour and a half away), and so we’ve all gotten so accustomed to it we don’t even think to take pictures. But I feel that I may as well try this time around. I don’t go nearly as often as I used to. This is definitely one of the bigger downsides of no longer being in Tampa.

Posted in christina, thoughts | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Deadlines Approach!

By zach | Published November 16, 2009

Some are externally imposed, and others are self-imposed. This Friday is the PLDI deadline. In addition to my own paper, over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending more and more time at the lab working with the people there on a second paper. All of the implementation work and experiments have been done by someone else, but I’ve been contributing ideas, and now I am revising the paper, since mine is in pretty good shape.

I suppose that is the only externally imposed deadline. The self-imposed ones are as follows. 1.) This coming weekend after the papers are finished, I want to finish working on the pictures from my brother’s wedding. I have most of them posted to Flickr already, but there are still a number left to do. 2.) By this Monday, I need to send email to the Professor in the Systems group at ETH Zurich who wants to host me for a post-doc, or whatnot. Mostly to introduce myself, but also to figure out what the process is for applying and getting myself over there, and so forth.

There was a third thing, too… Oh, yah! That whole dissertation thing. I can say that it is coming along well because my PLDI paper is more-or-less the last real content I have to develop for it (whether or not the paper is accepted). I am waiting until early next semester to file, but I want to finish all of the actual work on it between the PLDI deadline and winter break. It’ll be a bit of a slog, but I’ll have vacation in Florida with Christina and her family to look forward to, so I think I’ll be able to make it =)

Other than that, things have been pretty slow. The weather is getting colder. The Steelers aren’t doing so well, but the Penguins are still awesome. I’ll be sticking around here in Berkeley for Thanksgiving since plane tickets got to be too expensive, which I am a bit sad about, but hopefully there will be some potluck sort of deal to go to.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make more interesting posts after all this work is finished!

Posted in work | Leave a comment