This post will fulfill the blog’s original purpose: to have a single source of information and to prevent the same questions again and again.
My plannings for the rest of September 2009 are:
While playing around with my new Samsung NC 10 I just realized that the Synaptics touchpad can detect the pinch multitouch gesture. It is expressed to the OS as CTRL +mouse wheel up/down (Firefox works this way). The gesture is however quite hard to perform on the tiny pad – at least with my fatstrong fingers.
While tracking my GF’s flight back home, Delta Airlines seemed to have some trouble with their data: lulz
PS: welcome home! :*
I wanted to write this entry almost from the day I moved in to The Woods, but I just had no time…
The Woods is an apartment complex in San Jose that consists of 5 “Villages”. You enter it via one of two lines that are equipped with bar code scanners that scan a sticker attached to your window and then open the gates for you. The leftmost of the right lanes is for visitors that don’t have the magic sticker attached to their cars.
The main entrance to The Woods Apartements
The exit. If you like tire damage, also the entrance.
One of the first things to come across is the leasing office, a place we went just too many times – most of them just to hear that some paperwork “will be done first thing next day”. As revenge we ate as many of the offered cookies and drank as much coffee during our visits as possible. Right in front of the office there is an overview map that shows the scale of the complex. I don’t even want to estimate how many rent they collect each month. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but since The Woods does not accept wire transfer, for each appartment a lessee has to walk (or drive, or use his Segway or whatever) to the office and pay by check or money order or by credit card (for an extra 25$ omg). To scatter the incoming money the different villages have distinct rent due dates.
The office. We liek this place!
The Woods overview. We live in the top green village. NB: North is in the top left corner. Aligning maps is for noobs!
(I think) the villages differ in the pricing and therefore in quality. Cedarwood is one of the cheaper districts with wooden houses where you can hear any movement in the upper levels. If you jump on the patio one has to fear that it breaks down because everything is shaking. The same is true if the nearby train is passing by. I don’t say that it’s extremely bad, but I like houses made of stone rather than some wooden planks.
Our home for the last 3 months. I won't miss it.
The vegetation is in a good condition, one place where the rent goes. There are gardeners working almost every day to keep everything neat. The grass is one of the greenest and lushest (another word in my vocabulary, thx leo) I’ve seen so far. Until last night I thought that they irrigate once per night (approx 15 mins at midnight), but last night I brought my girlfriend to the airport to her plane back to Germany at 3 am, and they were irrigating again. That nice scent of chlorine was refreshing! I want to know how many GALLONS (that’s it, I’m assimilated) of water they waste every day just to keep the fucking grass fucking green just as much as I want to know the monthly income of The Woods.
Summing it all up (da wird ein Vogelherz hoeher schlagen :D) I can say that The Woods is OK to live in for a quarter of a year, but under no circumstances I’d live here without a fixed move out date. You have little privacy, can’t hear loud music/watch movies, all the noisy kids, the trouble with the management. The pools and the fitness room can’t compensate for that.
PS: I don’t want to start a new post, so I just use this one to tell you that I’ve submitted my report to my mentor for rating and there are 4 working days left to finish everything up – tomorrow is Labor Day, a national holiday. Since the report is finished I can focus on the work and hopefully get everything done. Germany, I’ll be back soon!
I just returned from the second visit to the local Black Angus steakhouse. This time i went there with my girlfriend to celebrate the completion of my report about the internship. I handed it to my mentor for evaluation and rating this afternoon, so I can focus on the real work again (it’s going quite well and I think I can finish it by next Friday).
At Black Angus we had another Campfire Feast for Two for only 38$ + tax + tip. I chose the New York steak again, and this time it was medium. Better than last time, thx Guido 😉 The sidekicks were delicious as well: steamed broccoli (yes, again) and green beans. Miri had a 8oz top sirloin steak (well done) with a Ceasar’s salad and french fries. And finally the Big Mountain Chocolate Fudge Cake could not be missed! It was however too much, we were unable to finish it off. I just wrote them an email asking about the nutritional information 😀
Regarding my new toy I can say that the 8 hours battery life are realistic. If you turn down the brightness of the screen and just surf the web (and write blog entries, for example). The keyboard is also really nice to write even longer texts, but I’m still not using all fingers for writing. The fan also hardly ever runs, so the netbook is almost quiet. At least nothing that could disturb you. Things left to try: quality of the audio output (both speakers and headphone jack) and VGA output.
11 days to go.
Just used IE6 to download Namoroka, now that old browser can rest again on my new Netbook’s harddisk.
I got me a Samsung anyNet NC-10, which is very nice, especially for the low price. The usual Netbook hardware is included: intel Atom N270, 160G SATA HDD, 1GB RAM. One of the reasons to get this model is the non-glare screen with a resolution of 1024×600 (a little too small…). Another benefit is the battery lifetime of 8 hrs – at least according to the Internet, I’ll see if this is true. While writing this I also realize that the keyboard is nice. Only a little smaller than a full size keyboard and with nice feedback. The touch pad could be a little bit bigger, there’s space left to grow. The screen can be adjusted between way too bright and comfortably dark for long battery life. The whole construction feels quite sturdy. Now I’ll have to set everything up, uninstall unnecessary software (after booting the first time, “only” 44 processes were running) and get comfortable with the little screen.
And maybe finish off my report for university.
Edit: the screen dims after a minute or so of inactivity. I needs me a hack to reduce it all the time! (major wtf: there’s a Fn key that TURNS OFF the backlight completely. I still have to find a use for that…)
This is about to become my first review evar, so don’t expect too much quality.
I just came back from my first visit to an American cinema, Dirk and me watched Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds” (which was referred to this morning on the radio as “Inglorious B-Words, and they even spell the B-word wrong”). We arrived at the place just in time, the movie was scheduled at 0925 pm, we were there at 0925pm. The cinemas here don’t have numbered seats, you can sit wherever you want to if you are early enough. This sucks however if you want to reserve places for a group in advance… We took (had to take) two seats in the fifth row or so, the outmost ones.
There were no ads before the movie, just trailers, which I appreciated a lot. Some of the trailers even looked quite promising, but I’ve forgotten any title already.
The movie is split up into 5 Chapters and SPOILER ALERT at the end nearly everyone dies. It was quite interesting to watch the original version of the movie, since the Nazis speak German, but not all dialogues are subtitled. One British spy is even disguised because of his accent, and I wonder if Americans would have noticed this. The movie isn’t too violent except from some scenes where skulls are smashed by a baseball bat and scalps are taken off the Nazi heads in closeup shots. There were also a lot of funny moments, many of them due to Brad Pitt’s remarkably accent and cliche after cliche – I have seen better Hitlers, though (spoiler: he dies). Overall rating of the movie: 7 out of 10 J-Points. -1 for the end, was a little weird; -1 for unnecessary violence; -1 for predictability.
As I told you, you’d better not have expected too much of this “review”. I liked the movie, 10$ were completely OK for a Friday night, and I’m really looking forward to see the German adaption of the film, the translators will have to face some hard problems.
I just finished my first cake here in the USA. I asked mom via email for the recipe for my favorite chocolate cake (not as good as the one I had at the Black Angus, but very tasty anyhow). Here it comes:
I was shopping for butter, eggs and cocoa. First surprise: standard American butter is salted. They had different brands at Safeway, but there were two kinds of each brand: Butter and Unsalted Butter. Very tricky… The butter was packed in a paper box that contained 4 blocks which were wrapped individually. This allowed me to guess the 375g quite accurately. I had to guess, since we don’t have a kitchen scale. The flour and the sugar were measured highly inaccurate with cups and the help of some conversion tables from the Internet. Another tool that I missed was a mixer, but the egg beater (LOL!) worked quite well. Another valuable information from the Internet was of course the conversion from C to F, and with this information I set the temperature and the timer of the oven to bake the cake. While it was baking, we had a very nice lasagna that we made in a reused form of a deep frozen lasagna that we had a week ago.
I am quite satisfied with the final result, especially since I had no scale. I’m looking for one I could buy back in Germany, since I don’t have one in Stuttgart. Amazing what amazon sells… Is there anything they don’t offer?
Update: pics, since it did happen:
The leftovers, already a little old and ... crunchy 😉
Last week another IBMer and his girlfriend used our place as a home base to explore California. They went to LA as well, and returned yesterday. Before they had to fly back to New York, where his internship will start on Monday, we decided to go to a nearby restaurant and then drive them to San Francisco International.
The restaurant of our choice was the Black Angus in San Jose. We had to wait a couple of minutes to be seated by a waitress who showed us the way and advised us of steps while we followed her to our table. Maybe that was due to the average age of customers, to prevent getting sued for femoral neck fractures 🙂
I had the fear that the prices might be too high, which they were at first sight. I shared the “Campfire Feast for Two” with Thomas. This menu comprised an appetizer (filled potatoes), a steak (I had a New York Steak, 12 oz) with two sidekicks and a desert. Even though we had to share the appetizer and the desert, the main course was enough to get full. And it was friggin delishus!!!11one I had my steak “well done”, accompanied by steamed broccoli and a wedge salad with blue cheese. The broccoli was even al dente, which I did not expect to get anywhere in the US… For desert we had a chocolate fudge cake with vanilla ice and chocolate sauce. I think you can’t get any more decadent than that… but it was one of the best deserts I had in a very long time.
Considering the price of only 50$, this was totally worth it. The drinks were offered with free refill for 2.25$ (4 Mountain Dews prevented me from sleeping until 0230 am…).
After returning we even found a coupon in the spam to get the whole meal for just 37$, I think we’ll come back!
That’s the maximal value of items I’m allowed by the German customs to bring “for my personal use or consumption”. I don’t think that I will even get close to this number, so if anyone needs something that is much cheaper over here or not available in Germany, drop me a message. Depending on your need for privacy, leave a comment, write an email (optionally gpg-encrypted). I will then use a sophisticated decision engine decide by guess and by gosh (thx leo 🙂 ), but being fast definitely will help!
US and A - my experiences and WTFs 