Surfin’ USA

Fire

For those of you that have heard about the huge forest fires in Southern California: That’s about a hundred miles northeast of us here, so I’m alright, don’t worry.
The weekend was good and I intend to put some pics up, but at the moment I have other priorities such as homework, so I’ll have to ask you to hang in there for now.

Quick update and some pics

I’m quite busy with school and other things, hence I don’t quite find the time to post things here. But rest assured that everything is going well. My courses here are a getting more and more challenging with homework, assignments and general studying, but I try (and usually succeed) to have some free time besides that as well. Also I might finally get a bike soon; then I can go to the beach more frequently, the weather still being great around here.

As you might be aware, Halloween is approaching on Oct. 31st and this is a big thing here in the US. In preparation for it I therefore joined some friends for traditional pumpkin carving (ironically the majority of us were not American, but who cares ). It was fun and I think the results turned out quite well, but see for yourself. By the way, since Halloween will be on a Tuesday this year, it seems the majority of parties will be happening this weekend already — so I’d better figure out some kind of costume soon…

Los Angeles

Yesterday I joined a tour to LA for international students. Our funny, Mexican driver and guide, Jose, drove us around some parts of the city before we made a stop at Hollywood Boulevard, also known as the “Walk of Fame”, where we met some famous heroes (see right). We also saw the well-known Kodak Theatre, where the Oscars are awarded each year. Afterwards we proceeded through Beverly Hills to a farmer’s market for lunch before we headed back home. It was a rather short trip but it was still nice — and once I have a car I’ll return to LA to check out more sights…

Settling in

So slowly I’m making myself at home over here: Since this past week I finally have a phone set up, landline as well as a mobile one. I’ve also bought a nice little adapter box which enables me to use my German VoIP number independent of my computer. So you can now call a german landline number and the phone here in my room rings — and best of all, you just pay the normal German phone rates. If you want to know the number(s), just contact me.

Moreover I’ve finally been able to get a proper bed, after sleeping on an air mattress for the last couple of weeks. I bought it at IKEA (yes, it’s a small world ) and spent all afternoon yesterday assembling it. As I’ll probably use it for some years I went something decent and chose queen size, so the thing is rather huge (150×205 cm) — no matter which way you roll or stretch, there’s always more bed there. To give you an idea of the vast space available, check the following (click for bigger version):

As you can imagine, my first night in it was quite nice and pleasant. Together with a small bookshelf and my desk, I now consider my room more or less furnished. The next item on my agenda will probably be to acquire a used car somewhere, preferably decent but still inexpensive.

Apart from all that the quarter has already begun here at the university and at least in the beginning I still have to take some courses. Therefore I’m already busy with homework and projects for my two courses “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning”, which is also what I should probably get back to now…

Conference report

Since late Saturday evening I’m back in California, after another day on the road (literally 24 hours). All in all the conference was nice and I feel it was worth going there, also Nantes is a nice city — still it was a very exhausting week, physically and intellectually, so I’ll first have to recover from that (not to mention my destroyed sleeping schedule). At the same time I’ll have to catch up on the things I missed in class last week, but I’ll try to take it easy at least today…

Anyway, as promised here are some pics from the conference, enjoy: