While Christina has been at work, and doing various other things, I have been working on a couple iPhone/iPad apps, and doing a bit of wandering on my own.

The first weekend I was here, we took a trip up to Kanazawa, and Osaka, which was pretty interesting even though it was really hot. The following weekend we cleaned up the apartment, and went to see the Tobata Gion, which is a local festival where the men from each of the four parts of Tobata build floats and carry them around saying, “YOI-to-SA!” They also bang on drums. On Saturday evening, they built a pyramid of laterns on the floats, and they all parade around together banging on the drums, and so forth, which was very impressive.

On the Friday following the festival, there were fireworks nearby, just at the other side of the train station over the straight between Tobata and Wakamatsu. Japanese fireworks are pretty great. I’m looking forward to seeing more in Tokyo the weekend after next. This past Sunday after the fireworks, we took the Shinkansen down to Fukuoka to do some shopping. Christina bought a new bento for lunches, and I found some more oatmeal to eat for breakfast.

Since then, I have been doing some more coding and a little more wandering. This weekend I think we are going to try to go visit Mojiko and Shiminoseki. I don’t have my usual photo-editing software along with me, so I won’t be posting more pictures until I get back to California, or more likely, after I manage to move myself to Zurich.

Lucky for him, Zach is coming to visit in about a week! Hopefully he won’t melt!

In other news, I’ve started taking lessons in ikebana lately. It’s interesting to learn, and the teacher provides me with free dinner, but the last hundred meters or so of the bike ride there are worse than the climbs I had in Pittsburgh! I give up and just push my bike, but even so I am completely worn out by the time I get there. I’m not so good at taking pictures yet, though. I don’t have a particularly good backdrop or anything for pictures.

April was also an exciting month. I visited MSR in Seattle, gave my dissertation talk, and went adventuring with Christina. In mid-April I made a visit up to MSR, and did my song and dance for the fine people there. I had a good time, and had lots of good conversations with people about research-y things. I think it would be a good place to work someday. In the end, though, by the end of April I had received and accepted an offer for a post-doc from the folks in Zürich =)

A few days after returning from MSR, I gave my dissertation talk. In a surprising stroke of luck, I managed to get my whole committee to attend. Unfortunately, I only managed to do that by scheduling the talk at 8am, so the only other person who showed up was the indefatigable Leon, who was up that early anyway to teach a recitation section at 9.

The following Monday, Christina showed up in America and we traveled together from San Francisco to Pittsburgh, and had a good time there for a week or so. After that, during the first week of May, we traveled back to San Francisco, met up with Christina’s parents, and drove down to Paso Robles, and then back up Highway 1 stopping in Big Sur for a couple days, and passing through Carmel and Monterrey before spending some time in San Francisco. It was a really fun vacation!

Immediately after returning from vacation, I spent a couple of days running around campus trying to get signatures and last-minute feedback from my dissertation committee. By late Tuesday afternoon everything was finished, and my dissertation was successfully filed, and by Wednesday morning, I had discovered the first missed-typo =) Wednesday was also the first day of the yearly OSQ retreat in Santa Cruz. The weather there was beautiful, and I had a good time.

By the time I got back from the retreat that Friday, my family (my mom and dad, Andrew and Christy, and my aunt and uncle, and cousin Ben) had already arrived in Berkeley for my graduation. On Saturday we drove up to Napa and visited a few wineries, Sterling and a couple others. On Sunday I got up early and graduated. In the afternoon we all went to a barbecue at Ben and Juliet’s place in Lafayette.

On Monday morning we got up early and drove to Yosemite. We rented a 4-bedroom cabin in Wawona, which was pretty nice. Unfortunately, I managed to catch a cold, and was stuck in the cabin for part of the trip, but my family had never been there before and enjoyed it a lot. After Yosemite, we drove down to LA for Ben’s graduation from Pepperdine, and spent the weekend at the mansion of his Great Uncle Steve. I flew back to Berkeley on Sunday afternoon.

By this point, I was pretty exhausted from lots of travel and adventure and excitement, and still recovering from my Yosemite cold, and so I skipped the ParLab retreat (also to Santa Cruz), which took place starting the day after I got back from LA. Since then, I have been working on some research things, hanging out with Ben and Juliet and other folks who have not wandered off yet, and starting to pack up my apartment to get ready to sell things/ship things home/ship things to myself when I have someplace to ship things in Switzerland.

I have also made plans to visit Christina in July, which I am very excited about. I’ll be there for about a month, and we will be going on some new Japan adventures =)

I took a trip to the US a couple weeks ago, and met up with Zach and my parents for a trip along US 1 from about Paso Robles to San Francisco. We stopped off in Big Sur, Carmel, and Monterey, and also took a trip up to Muir Woods. I had a good time, although I was still suffering from some jet lag, which slowed me down some.

Now I am back at work in Japan. And it is hot and sticky.

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.

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. ]]> http://megatiny.com/?feed=rss2&p=311 0 http://megatiny.com/?p=306 http://megatiny.com/?p=306#comments Thu, 25 Feb 2010 01:55:16 +0000 christina http://megatiny.com/?p=306

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!

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.

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!

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!