Adventures in Switzerland

I woke up today thinking that it was 7:11AM, and very happy that I had only slept 2 hours and still felt somewhat rested. Though I was surprised that the sun was in the same place in the morning as it usually is when setting.

About 45 minutes later, it turned out that it was actually 7:55PM, that I had slept 14 hours, and that my planned day to move out had been all but slept through.

Suck.

Straight 48 hours with crappy sleep, one 11 hour flight, one broke-down bus, one broke-down friend's car, I'm back.

Some changes I want to make with my life: don't just dream, do it. Keep in better touch with friends and esp. family. Stop using Internet as means of escape from very difficult problems.

E.g., I have to move today, and that sucks. But sitting here isn't going to help me do it, so I'd better go. :-)

Hope everyone is well, I can't wait to catch up. I will finish the trip entries as time permits, and the pictures are oh-so-definitely coming.

K and I parted ways until ~Sept 23rd in Tokyo. I miss her like hell.

Apologies first off for not replying to the comments re: the GPS logger. I really appreciated them. :-)

Pro: I ordered a sick combination GPS logger / navigator and had it express shipped from California in only two days -- this was cheaper than having it sent from Germany!
Con: DHL had someone named "WONG" sign for it this morning at 11:20AM. It later turns out they actually still have the package, which confuses me, and also, there is no one named "WONG" living within 2,500 of me. (Anyway, tomorrow I'm staying home until they come.)

Pro: We had a ton of awesome adventures this summer.
Con: Our train passes expired last week. It was sad.

Pro: I figured out how to use our sick new / old phones as GPRS modems, so now we'll be able to download our e-mail our get on the Web pretty much anywhere!
Con: ... with glacial speed.

Pro: We finally hiked the mountain ridge by us yesterday! It was gorgeous!
Con: We each got six-seven mosquito bites. It's really a minor con, though.

Pro: This coffee is fantastic.
Con: It's not fantastic enough to make work interesting ATM.

I'd like to show you some more photos, but I have ZARROH time!

I want one.

Has anyone ever had a contact with one of these mythical, wonderful devices? They record your waypoints for later retrieval.

I want to use one for geotagging our photos from our upcoming South-East Asia trip.

I would prefer one that could also act as true GPS, that is, output real-time GPS sentences, as well as optionally log them. Such a device would be very useful to me.

I would get fairly giddy over such a device. About as giddy as really good trance, and if you've ever had the pleasure of seeing me giddy, you know what that means.

:-)

Also, half of CERN (the responsible half) is away on meetings all day, so the other half (we) have not been terribly productive today. :-)

Male Summer Project Coordinator: I used to have MSN Messenger, which I actually really liked, I mean, it had a nice interface...
Bored Female Grad Student: Uh-huh,

Even I bow my head in shame. This is the sad state of conversation here most of the time. :-(

I managed to catch some kind of a sickness last week while traveling, so
I finally decided to just take some time off and sleep in a cozy warm
bed.

Life is going through one of its strange and difficult transition phases
again. Being with K is inspiring me to actively make decisions about my
life and my happiness, but now the problem is that I don't really know how. For the bulk of my life I've never been a really active participant in it, and I'm doing a lot of thinking and reflecting to explore this space. I'm sure there are limits to how much about my life I can change and all that, but it's still a genuinely exciting and novel idea to be able to change the things that I think are bad for me.

Now, up until this point, this is a fairly generic pronouncements; it
sounds like something you might see on Oprah. There are a lot of
details, though.

For example, I realize that I am still wasting a lot of time at my
job when I don't like to do it. I check my email constantly, my RSS
feeds, blah, blah, blah. I do this because were I to do something I am
genuinely interested in -- like planning a bike trip through Europe -- I
would feel bad for doing something I liked, so instead I do something
that I don't really care about, but still not my onerous task at the
moment.

Of course there are deeper issues. Why am I at this job? Why aren't I
out at the parties meeting more people like I'd like to? It's because
I'm still afraid of meeting new people -- I still remember my middle
school trauma. It's hard to shake.

Instead of freaking out about my current job and it's current piece of
drama, why am I not planning my transition from physics to whatever
combination of statistics, data mining, computation, high-performance
computation, physics, modeling and programming that I'd like to do for
my Ph.D.?

And why haven't I bit the bullet and sat down with my advisor and told
him that unless he miraculously both secures funding and becomes active
again, there is no way I'll do my graduate work with him? It's because
I'm afraid to make waves, afraid to rock the boat, afraid to upset
relationships and people.

Ironically, sometimes I think I've got it all backwards when I worry
more about what my advisor thinks than my girlfriend. I do this because
in the face of uncertainty, I just don't know what the mechanics of the
relationship are, and so I tend to stall making decisions.

Why do I stall making decisions? Because often times, I don't know what
I want. I had a handful of critical decisions about my life made for me
when I was younger with some crushing consequences, and coupled with the
flood of school and what else, over the years I think I just forgot
about myself. After a while, the idea of making a decision filled me
with enough dread that I just didn't want to do it, nevermind the
consequences.

Deciding what you want and what you like is hard, I think. I guess you
just have to try many different things, but you also just need some
certain amount of life experience. And some people are just more
complicated than others.

For now, for myself, I have a growing idea of what I like and what I
want do be doing for the next few years. Still haven't really connected
it to a job I could be doing for the next 10-20 years, and don't even
know how I could, but it would be nice to have that worked out too.

It's also important to realize that when there are no defined mechanics
in a relationship, whoever goes first gets to make the rules. Sure,
there can be a discussion and compromise, but how much of that happens
all depends on how much volition the other person has.

I feel like that's enough for now.

Yeah, I still have to write about my last crazy weekend, where we went
to Avignon, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Frankfurt/O and back to Geneva.

We also saw the Pont d'Avignon, got bad directions there (and so almost
missed my Grandmother's 83rd birthday), rode a TGV from Avignon to Paris
for 2.5 hours (170mph) saw the MAD Train to Paris arrive as we pulled out
of Paris Nord, hung out in Berlin for the day and chilled out at a gorgeous,
abandoned lake late into a summer evening. The next day we had more
ridiculously good coffee and cake than you can shake a stick at and took
the night train from Berlin back to Geneva.

I often seem to have this problem where I write people well thought-out emails and get nonsense replies:

From: "M" <m@cern.ch>
To: "R" <R@cern.ch>
Subject: CERN FW installation path
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; 
	boundary="----=_Part_13755_27524533.1215710636957"

Hi R,

In the configuration file sent out by the DCS PVSS project server, there is
a "proj_path=..." for the CERN FW Installation tool, but it references the
DFS file system which is of course nominally unavailable on Linux.

Is there any update on the availability of your Linux software repository?
It would be great if we could just reference that.

If necessary, I think some tricks can be played with SAMBA under Linux to
access the DFS shares, but I would rather not go there unless necessary.

Thanks!


M

To which I receive,

Subject: RE: CERN FW installation path
From: R <R@cern.ch>
To: M <m@cern.ch>

this will change soon.

Due to an improbable set of circumstanes, I have probably the best seat
on this train right now. We're on a double-decker TGV Express from
Avignon to Paris, and I have the only seat in this compartment that has
a power plug. When the train banks over a bridge, you can't see anything
directly to the side and it looks like you are in mid take-off.

Earlier today we set off from Geneva to Avignon to go see the famous
Pont d'Avignon, which K had known about since she was a little girl.
Predictably, the TGV's were all booked, and so we had to get up at
4:45AM and take the Regional Express trains. It was a gorgeous ride,
though. Clear skies, much sun, and just a really nice time sitting next
to K, talking, looking at the French countryside. Mornings like this
make me wish there were more hours in the day to fill.

Avignon is a very nice little city, full of historical bits but also
really good, cheap sandwiches, live music, and more plays than I
have ever seen. We must've seen fifteen or twenty plays being
advertised.

Unfortunately, it seems that like everywhere else, the closer to the
equator you get, the worse customer service gets. I had printed an
itinerary for us follow from Avignon to Basel (Basel because we are
actually en route to my grandmother's 83rd birthday in Germany,) but the
train station service rep gave us misinformation about which train
station we needed. We even ran back to the station but missed our train,
necessitating a complete re-route.

Well, this re-route rockets us from nearly the bottom of France at
Avignon to Paris at the north center, and aside from having to pay for
another set of reservations, things could really be much, much worse. :-)

And by "much worse", I mean that K and I would both recommend this
ride to anyone. It's four hours of dedicated high-speed track through
the gorgeous French countryside.

Work at CERN is tumultuous as usual. I've been assigned to another
project which finally looks like it's going somewhere, and is even
possible to finish. It's not terribly exciting, but it does fulfill the
dual roles of making my de-facto boss' life easier as well as giving me
something I can present to the DOE when the summer is over. (It turns
out I won't be at home when the DOE is coming, but my advisor may still
have to present something to them.)

Personally, this whole mess of trying to find a project to work on while
out at CERN has cemented one thing in my mind: I have to change
advisors before long. I practically love my current advisor, and he's
done a lot for me, but from everything I've heard about him, it's clear
that he's just way too far out of the loop to be able to help me.

Doing a Ph.D. is really difficult enough even with an advisor who knows
what's going on, but my advisor is actually disinterested, it
seems, in the physics that is now going on, and has been for about ten
years. I won't speculate on his core motivations for not retiring, but I
can tell you that many people hold the same theory.

A third, really good reason for him to just get out is basically a
last-chance effort at mending things with his children. I'm quite sure
that intimidates him more than going in front of the DOE.

Well, we've now arrived in Paris (quite earlier than I expected!), so
I'm checking out now. More pictures coming soon!

Summary of some research I did for how to get a phone and use it anywhere in the world: http://chatsdumonde.org/wiki/index.php/Mobile_Phones.

It's quite good. :-) Hopefully it will be of some use to people.

Last year when K and I went traveling, we got separated in Switzerland by accident and it took us about 24 hours to find each other again. Nevermind the incredible agony and stress this cost, but also about $50 because we both had to rent separate rooms for that night. We decided, then, that we would have a pair of phones with us to use wherever we traveled.

Now, you might think that this is easy, but oh-my-god, let me tell you, the situation is horrendously complicated.

To start with, most of the world uses GSM, so if you have a CDMA phone from Verizon here in the US, forget about it. (I got reception in Beijing on that phone, but that was the only place, anywhere. Not that it matters, since I've never heard of CDMA providers allowing foreign phones on their network.)

So, you need a GSM phone.

But, you can't just use a GSM phone from anywhere, because there are four frequency bands in use (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) all over the world, and most places only use two at a time. Europe uses 900/1800, and the US now uses 850/1900.

You will agree that there are no sensible patterns to be found anywhere in this topic, and that the whole thing evolved all organically and crazy.

It is currently possible to buy, relatively cheap quad-band GSM phones which will work anywhere in the world where there is GSM service, and this is good. It would make it possible to talk to each other anywhere that we went.

Except in Japan, where there is no GSM service. At all. Ever. Like, there never was. And never will be. Because the Japanese used something completely different from anyone else in the world. This, you will agree, is a  bit of a problem for us since we are spending more time in Japan than anywhere else.

Now the Japanese have developed this tech called UMTS and most of the rest of the world is using it now, or moving to it.

UMTS is like GSM in that it's a standard for how phones communicate, only it's much, much faster. (Like, 100x faster is not an exaggeration.)

OK, so why don't we just get a pair of UMTS-capable phones and call it a day?

Because UMTS has six (six!) frequency bands in use (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 / 1700 / 2100), and not only do different countries use different frequencies, but different providers in the same country are even operating on different frequencies! For example, if you had a GSM phone in the US that operated on 850 / 1900, you had no problems, because you could take your Cingular phone and replace the SIM card with one from T-Mobile, and you were ready to go. Now, if you buy a Cingular UMTS phone (850 / 1900) you can't use it on T-Mobile's network because they use 1700 / 2100.

In other words, we have, again, achieved vendor lock-in. Only, when you bought a "Verizon" phone with "Verizon" service, you knew it. Now it takes you about a week and a lot of Wikipedia to realize that your choices as a consumer have again dwindled to about 0.

OK, so we know that we need different GSM frequencies to get around the world. Why don't we get a pair of phones that also support multiple UMTS frequencies?

Well, aside from the complete ridiculousness of having a phone that can converse in two different protocols over six or seven different frequencies, the problem really is cost. A good quality, used, quad-band GSM phone will set you back $25. A good quality, used, quad-band GSM and UMTS850/1900 phone will cost you ~$60. But, a good quality, used, tri-band UMTS phone is impossible to find, and a new one will set you back roughly $400 or so.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have hit the leading edge of the technology curve. That is, prices have skyrocketed.

OK, so we can't have everything. What about a phone that will work in the US and Europe, but also include high-speed service? Not available, my amigo. All the Europeans carriers I see use UMTS2100, whereas the US uses UMTS850/1900, so, they are not compatible.

The new iPhone is apparently tri-band UMTS, but Jesus, do I look like I'm made of money?

The sad conclusion is that unless you're hard-core into UMTS/HSDPA in the US or Europe (but not both! and not Japan!), there is no point in purchasing a world phone right now that has UMTS capability, since you will not be able to take it with you. Certain places do support GPRS/EDGE, so that is a little speed increase there, but it's nothing to write home about (~180kbps, according to Wikipedia.)

For now, then, all we really need is a pair of unlocked quad-band phones; EDGE will do fine for us, no big deal. I guess we'll just hold hands in Japan.

Then again, why not wait a year and just get a decent pair of used phones that will also work in Japan? After all, we don't really win anything by getting a pair of phones now.

Sheesh, and that's how almots a week of intense research comes to an end, heh.

I can haz gone pro!

Our first foray into the Jura is up. Hopefully pictures from Prague will not take much longer to get up! (Although there are over 230 of them...)

We are in the office, late at night, so we are playing some YouTube to relax.

On come the classics: K. puts on "Hit Me Baby One More Time". Three-quarters of the way through, as I queue up "Backstreet's Back", K. saunters over,

K: "Awww, this reminds me of my fantasy of making out with you when I first heard this song,"
M: "What, in '98?"
K: "Yeah, I was..., like 11. You had a year to go, right?"
M: "Oh god, I could've picked you up from the elementary school outside of my house."

:: shakes head :: :-)

sarcasm/

Me: "We're thinking of going down to Berettyoujfalu for the weekend."
Dad: "No problem, but space is limited and there will be other people there."
Me: "As long as we can get some blankets, I think we'll be OK."
Mom: "There are tons of blankets. If you go there with no expectations, you should be OK."

Please, I am the Zen State of no expectations.

/sarcasm

The bathroom on my floor smells like cigarette smoke.