Accommodation finally

It's finally done, I found a shared flat! I will move in next Saturday. My flatmates are a Frenchwoman from Paris who studies law and a German who studied psychology and is now looking for a job. More to come...

England

So I am back from the SOSP conference which took place in Brighton, UK. Weather and food were really British ;)

I met well-know people from Cambridge which was a very nice reunion. Furthermore some new "friends" from CMU, Cornell and especially MIT. I appreciated the conference a lot (and wine, beer and company).

Oh, yes, by the way, there were also some interesting talks (although not so many networking stuff).

Now I am just back in Saarbruecken, Germany and still have no accommodation for the next month. This will be a pain in the ass for the next days and week.

Annoying things that turned out to be nice

The institute's secretary is giving me a hard time. In the first place she promissed to handle that conference stuff (going to the SOSP conference next week), but suddenly she made me registering by myself. But even worse, today it turned out that she did not book a flight for me and assumed I would do that by myself. Bottom line is also, that she is not here today.

Fortunatelly, the second secretary supported me really nice, booking the flight for me (as it is just too late the flight to London Heathrow is no business class!).

This week is full of trouble and I need a lot of strength to handle it.

Fitness?

To cycle in Karlsruhe is pretty nice, no hills, everything is flat. That's different in Saarbruecken. The university is approximately 5km away from the city and there are several hills on the way (while the way back to the university is worse than the other way).

Today I cylced twice (!!!) to the city to visit two shared flats. Each way in less than 20mins, not bad, not bad. Both flats were nice, I hope to get one of them...

Saarbruecken, finally

I finally landed in Saarbruecken. I have a nice, big and bright room in the MPI guesthouse. Work starts tomorrow and I am excited about it.

We have great weather here. A nice autumn, much sun but already cold. I took my bike today to learn more about the surrounding areas (the guesthouse is on the University's campus which is 3km away from central Saarbruecken). The landscape is pretty, good for nice walks.

Programming lessons

After I hacked approximately 4500 lines of C code lately and cursing the compiler for not warning me when I again write to memory I have not allocated before etc, here is the point where I am happy that gcc will warn me at least if I do really big crap with my pointers.

This does not help in finding the weird causes for some segfaults, but nowadays I am happy with so little...