Tag: personal

berlin: we’re here

Today is our third day in Berlin. Things are still pretty insane, so I won’t yet write much. Not even any good pictures to post. The flights were fine; I was lucky and got some sleep on the transatlantic leg (leslie couldn’t get a wink). We arrived, got the key to our cute little flat (and I do mean little… but what would we do with more space, having only three suitcases to live out of?), and started to wander around Mitte (the central district in Berlin) looking for my institute. We eventually, through our first successful foray into German speaking, found it, and I met the very kind staff who installed me in my office and started me through the labyrinth of paperwork that is German bureaucracy. We managed to stay up until almost 8pm on our “new day.”

Yesterday we spent the morning finding a grocery store and allergy medicine (something here gets to both of us), then I went in to the lab, figured out how to buy a train ticket to Dresden for the weekend, then came back and we managed to get a bank account so we could pay for DSL in our flat (that will take two weeks to be installed, so don’t expect to hear to much for us until then), and even got a pair of “handies,” which is what they call cellphones here in a bit of using-english-words-that-english-speakers-don’t action (another example: a tuxedo here is called “ein smoking). We repaired to our home base where leslie cooked up a darn good seared chicken with onions and tomatoes (cooking at home here is basically unheard of, but the kitchen is well-appointed), then got through another 30 minutes of a movie before collapsing.

Today I’m trying to catch up on email and prepare for a talk I’m giving tomorrow afternoon at the institute. I’ll try to get some photos of some kind up soon.

deadline two, qual exam: check.

Another big sigh of relief: on Thursday I gave my qualifying exam talk–and passed. The qual at Berkeley is a bit different from most places; it’s basically a proposal of your thesis topic in the form of a two-hour talk given to a committee of four professors, who pepper you with questions throughout, ostensibly to test your knowledge of the area and to confirm that your thesis topic is “good enough.” I’ve spent most of the last two weeks making the slides and otherwise preparing for the talk. Although in theory you can fail your qual (and be kicked out of the Ph.D. program), I’ve never heard of it happening. This is because your advisor really shouldn’t let you take your qual until he knows you’re ready to pass. In reality, the hardest part of the qual is getting four professors to all agree to be in the same place for two hours on your behalf.

Anyway, it went fine, which means my thesis topic (TETS!) has the stamp of approval and I’m officially ABD (all but dissertation). I wish I could say that’s the last loose end for the semester, but I’m currently working on the take-home final for my graduate theory class and optimistically polishing up the SGP paper for it’s final “camera ready” version. We don’t yet know whether it will be accepted (and hence whether a camera ready version will even be necessary), but because the deadline for submitting the camera ready version is right in the middle of my honeymoon, I think I’d rather hedge and do the work now.

Oh yeah… we got an apartment in Germany. It’s smack in the middle of everything, about 15 minutes on foot from WIAS where I’ll be working, and 500 feet from a major transportation hub. Literally the ‘B’ in Berlin:

berlin apt map

deadline one, SGP paper: check!

Yesterday afternoon Jonathan and I submitted our paper for the Symposium on Geometry Processing, marking the first big sigh of relief for the spring. I promised pictures, so here’s one, for what it’s worth:

figure from tet paper

On the left is a tetrahedral mesh of… uh… a tire incinerator! Exciting. But it’s a sad tire incinerator because of all its bad, skinny, flat, tets shown in green, yellow, and red (increasing badness). But then I save the day by swooping in and lovingly molding all the sad tets in to plump round ones. And that has been my life for the last three weeks (and to a lesser extent, the last nine months). Oh yeah.

berkeley food #23: sea salt

2512 San Pablo Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94702

We arrived at Sea Salt early (about quarter to 6) to take advantage of the $1 oysters they offer from 4-6. The restaurant was well put together and felt new, though Les assured me that it has been around in Berkeley since before we arrived. We ordered a dozen oysters (chef’s choice, we ended up with “calm cove”), which were very tasty and came along with the usual horseradish/red sauce and also with a citrus and onion concoction that was quite tasty. We paired them with pints of Scrimshaw pilsner, which was crisp and light with the bready finish I like to see in good pilsners, and which was a great match for sea food. Things only got better from there.

We started with slices of monkfish liver topped with sea urchin (a.k.a. uni) and sturgeon caviar, resting in a pool of cucumber puree with cilantro sprouts. We spent about 20 minutes savoring two slices; it was absurdly good. It pushed all of my “this is awesome sushi” buttons without being corralled into the usual settings you would see these ingredients in at a Japanese place. In our opinion, the combination was transcendent.

We followed this up with a pair of crabcakes coated in a layer of cioppino and another of a rich rouille. The cioppino probably wouldn’t have stood on its own, but that was alright because these crab cakes were definitely in my top-five-ever category. Heavy on the crab, light on filler, perfectly put together (not too dense) and lightly fried, we teased out every bite. The acid in the cioppino was right there to cut the richness when it threatened to be too much.

For the main course we had a vietnamese-style barbecue eel sandwich and grilled walu. We knew we would like the eel, and were pleasantly suprised to be assured when we asked that it was cooked on-site (often it’s just reheated from frozen). The sandwich was filled with onion cilantro, shredded carrots, and slices of jalepeno pepper. It made a great combination, except for the jalepeno. It was raw and quite spicy, and Leslie and I both thought there was too much of it. Leslie got a bite with a huge slice and spent the next five minutes just trying to cool things down enough to appreciate the walu.

We’ve had walu before, but only raw. Another name for it in the sushi world is “butterfish,” which I think gives you the right idea of its essential properties. I was skeptical about subjecting such a great raw fish to the flame, but we were astounded by the characteristics it took on when (absolutely perfectly) grilled. It had a nice metallic meatiness of a carnivorous fish, a perfect amount of char, and was flaky and moist throughout. I dream of someday having the timing and equipment to cook fish so appropriately. Surrounding the walu were some large slabs of “sunchokes,” which I would describe as a mix between an artichoke heart and a potato, and baby leeks, all resting on a puddle of “sauce americaine.” I wouldn’t have thought much of this sauce looking at it or reading it’s name, but it turns out that it’s basically a reduction of lobster, butter, and a bit of flour, and it just kept giving and giving. It helped out the veggies and the fish equally. It was the third example (after the liver and the crab cakes) of the right sauce in the right place to perfect the dish.

Overall, the dinner was outstanding. It definitely outshone the experience I had at its mother restaurant, Lalime’s. Not cheap, but so great that I’m sure we’ll come again on our own dime.

wii keyed; big basin in spring

It was only a matter of time. The newest addition to my console collection, the Wii, was mercilessly chipped this week, allowing me to boot “back-up” games on it as I can with the PS2 and the Xbox. The device that enabled it is called the “wiikey,” and we were able to install it in about 15 minutes with no headaches at all. I’ve been messing around with the new SSX and Trauma Center games, but I’m really looking forward to the new Mario game coming out in a week or so.

This weekend I rounded-out spring break with an overnight trip to Big Basin state park, a bit south of San Jose. I went with Jacob and some of his friends. I was told we would mostly be relaxing, but after we got there and set up camp, we promptly embarked on a 12-mile hike. Hiking is not my favorite activity but I was resigned to give it a shot with the group. It turned out to be tolerable, and there was even a nice waterfall toward the end of it:

berry creek falls

Click on the picture to see a few more shots including a lizard and a huge banana slug. We rounded out the night with a fire and some sausages, and drove home early today.

Things will be pretty crazy this month as I work on a paper submission (due the 25th), and then they will just stay crazy until I wake up in Berlin in mid-June, married and probably moved out of Berkeley.

berlin bound

At last, finally, and after months of searching and much hand-wringing, we have a plan for the summer. Thanks to an introduction from James, I have an invitation to visit Marc Alexa‘s group at the Technical University, Berlin. Yay! I’ll be there, getting to know people, doing some of my work, hopefully collaborating some with people there. The position should offer plenty of flexibility about when I’m in the office, which should be great for all of our plans to explore Germany and the rest of The Continent as much as our budgets will allow.

TU is nicely situated at the west end of Tiergarten, a huge park in the middle of Berlin. We’ll probably live in Mitte (“midtown”), which seems to be the cultural heart of the city. Here’s a cheesy little map I stole from Lonely Planet to give you an idea:

berlin map

I very excited that we ended up with a big city. Hopefully, this will give us a taste of what life in Germany could be like for a longer stay, and also serve as just a cool adventure. Coincidentally, we also just finished the final lesson (90 total) of our German tapes. Hopefully by the end of the summer we’ll be making some real progress on that front, too.

synchronize itunes libraries with unison

A few months ago I wrote a python script based on unison for synchronizing the iTunes libraries between my computer and Leslie’s. Although you can’t actually merge changes from both libraries, you can push or pull updates, which works well when one computer is a “master” where changes are made and the other is a “slave” where music is usually just played, but the library isn’t added to. You are able to manually push updates from the slave to the master if you like.

Anyway, I finally got around to commenting it a bit and I present it here for download in case others might find it useful: itunes_sync_0.1.tar.gz

I run it from a cron script hourly right now, which is maybe a bit excessive, but it’s all on the local network, so who cares? A better way of doing things would be to only sync when changes have been made, but I haven’t had time to fancy things up like that yet. I run the script only on OS X boxes, but I’m sure if you’re enterprising enough to get unison running on a windows machine it would work fine there too.

overt update and gallery comments

Today Ali and I completed what has become the biennial server upgrade. We added a pair of 500GB drives that should slake the endless thirst of our users for ever more space to put their photos and email. This was stressful for me, but even more of a pain for Ali who has to drive a couple of hours out to where the server is stuck in a data center. I imagine the thing had gotten pretty lonely sitting there in its little cage for the last two years, and appreciated the visit and TLC. Anyway, things seem to be mostly back to normal now. Let me know if you see any problems.

On a somewhat related note, I fixed gallery up so that you can post comments again. I’m glad I got this taken care of because I get about 20 emails a day from irate gallery browsers who want to chip in their two cents. Ok, not really.

fat dawg is my kind of hippie

One of my new year’s resolutions was to practice my guitar more, and thanks to our spreadsheet that tracks resolution-keeping performance, I’ve actually managed to stick with it. So my guitar has been getting much more of a workout than usual, and so developed an annoying buzz when playing certain notes. These notes come up a lot, so I eventually I decided that it had to be fixed one way or another. I dread this, because most places charge quite a bit for fixing up your guitar (I paid a place in Palo Alto $80 to fix the action on it after I bought it).

So I did some research, and found places offering to fix the setup for $120, and I’d just need to leave it there for 2-3 weeks, etc. I found one sketchy looking webpage that advertised repairs in the $20 range, and so decided to give them a call. Thinking the place must have gone out of business and the webpage was some 1996 remnant, I tried calling with little hope, but a friendly voice answered and told me to bring my guitar by. I did, and after they checked to make sure I’d parked somewhere that my car would be safe from ticketing, they pulled out my guitar, diagnosed and fixed the buzz, and handed it back to me in the space of about 2 minutes. When I asked how much I owed them, they waved me off.

The place itself was amazing… I little house on the corner in residential Berkeley, filled with hundreds and hundreds of guitars. While I talked with one guy about my guitar’s merits, another played some amazing licks on an electric in the corner while the third (who I presume was fat dawg himself) scheduled a jam session/”chance to smoke some fat dubes” with someone who called. Classic Berkeley.

When I got home I did some digging and found the home page for the place, Subway Guitars. It seems these guys made some huge scores of overstock guitar parts in the 60’s and have been building guitars out of the parts for dirt cheap ever since. They call them “proletarian” guitars, and I love the concept. Here’s an excerpt from Fat Do(aw)g’s philosophy of custom guitar construction:

You must ask yourself honestly: Will you be satisfied with what is adequate and functional? Or do you prefer to spend a lot more for super-polished and shiny appointments? If yes, there are many builders who will charge you thousands of dollars for it.

Madison Avenue and Hollywood have sold some of us a value system where our self-esteem is coupled to a superficial, shiny product. You must be honest and ask yourself: is this me?

I certainly am not in the market for a guitar at the moment, but if I ever am I think I know where I’m going to go for something adequate and functional. Guitars for the people, man!