hallo von deutschland

Smaller pictures this time in an effort to save some of my limited 1 GB of bandwidth provided by blau.de! They have no English customer service and couldn't aufladen my guthaben (recharge my credit) over the web, but that's a whole other post.

In case you didn't know, I'm in Berlin! One of my favorite cities. I lived here for 3 months in 2001, and it's been cool to come back and see how things have changed in eight years. I still wish it were warmer.

A delicious way to start the day. Schokolade Croissant and a Kaffee at Cafe Impala.

Our neighborhood is fantastic! we rented an apartment near Nollendorfplatz, in Schöneberg. It's gorgeous and I never want to leave.

A bit of the Berlin wall at Checkpoint Charlie. The history of Berlin is absolutely fascinating; one of the things I love about this city is the confluence of old and new:

The Jewish Museum. An amazing piece of architecture by Daniel Liebeskind, and a must if you're visiting. I have never seen architecture so aptly represent pain and darkness:

The main hall at Hamburger Bahnhof, a contemporary art museum. It had a seriously amazing exhibit titled "Murder of Crows", which was a soundscape. 98 speakers and 30 minutes. It was incredible. We all loved it and I listened to a lot of it multiple times.

Tschuß for now!

baking

More cooking I've been up to. I had some bananas that turned brown, but I vaguely remembered that's the best for banana bread! I found an amazing recipe that involved cinnamon, chocolate chips, and candied ginger. oh yes. i am going to devour the remaining candied ginger soon.

Doesn't it look delicious? Check out the chocolate!

Crap. I have to get rid of this before I eat all of it.

research dilemmas

I'm blocked.

Most of the people in my group are furiously trying to finish a paper for SOSP, and I'm off on my own thinking about web security.

It's not that I don't think this is an important problem -- I truly believe that the security model in today's browsers is a patchwork of brokenness, and could perhaps benefit from being rethought from the ground up. However every time I try to do that I end up meandering off into nothingness, or reading a blog. And it doesn't help that it seems like the problems are getting solved as I meander -- the Gazelle browser, from Microsoft, seems like a step in the right direction.

Also, I'm taking two classes this semester, Natural Language Processing and UI Design, which seem to be taking up increasing amounts of time. And of course there's my other job. It's so much easier to hack on Native Client than try to come up with a viable research project. By the way, we're having a security contest. If you're interested in security, or just interested in that sort of mechanism for validating your self-worth, go try to find some bugs!

I'm thinking of switching. To multicore, which the rest of PDOS seems to be working on, or something scalable-webapp related. I'm not sure how this research thing is supposed to work -- are you supposed to keep beating your head against a wall until something happens, or is it sometimes appropriate to give up and move on? How do you tell? Thoughts are appreciated.

learn to share, or, we all forgot kindergarten

I went to Pecha Kucha Boston last night, which is totally awesome. I highly recommend finding/starting one in your city. It's 20 slides X 20 seconds, so if something is boring, fear not, it will be over soon! Plus it's fun to watch the speaker get flustered cause their slides are blipping along. Yay emax for organizing!

Anyway, there was one talk that I haven't been able to get out of my head. Robin Chase from GoLoco gave a talk about sharing. What is totally awesome is that by just trying to find her name right now, I found out she was the former CEO of Zipcar! Her talk totally mentioned them and now I know she really knows what she's talking about.

Anyway, she believes that sharing is integral to sustainability. And I totally agree with her. I don't own a toolkit, so I usually borrow my roommate's hammer when I want to hang a photo. It's annoying to go find him every time I need his hammer, but it would be more annoying to buy one. What I realized is that we probably don't even need a hammer per house -- we could survive with a hammer per 4 houses or a hammer per block. How often are you using your hammer? Would it kill you to have to wait a couple of hours for one? How much stuff could you get rid of if you knew you could borrow it, no problem, from a neighbor?

Our culture has way too much stuff -- everything is all about getting your own, new things. That "new car smell". Old mattresses have bedbugs. I want a new computer so I know there's nothing wrong with it. Thrift stores are gross. Ew, eating food out of a dumpster is disgusting (sometimes, it's not!)

We don't need all this new stuff! There's so much out there to reuse. The problem is figuring out a way to share, and to distribute ownership responsibilities fairly. My car is sitting in SF right now, unused. Why should I ship it to Boston when there are already so many cars here, and I don't even need one all the time? I've been using Zipcar, but it's kind of pricey, and not good for regular, short trips. I would like to let other people use my car in SF, but dealing with the insurance is a hassle. And what happens if something breaks? How do we figure out who should pay for repairs? Similar problems pop up with me leveraging other people's cars in Boston. I get that slimey feeling asking to borrow someone's car.

The other day I was walking down 6th street in Cambridge, freezing, and I found myself wishing I could hitchhike a ride with one of the people driving down the street past me (warm and snug in their cars), to MIT. Maybe I could set up a regular arrangement -- they drop me off at MIT (3 minute drive, 18 minute cold freezing walk) and I could make them coffee. Or a bagel. I would totally bring someone a bagel every morning if they'd drive me to school (I make good coffee too).

Food for thought. I want to live in a community where we all have less stuff!

Too Many Mediums

I am having a problem with blogging vs. Twitter. I keep having all these little thoughts which I think to twitter, but then I realize I have too much to say, and I should do a blog post instead. Which I never do unless I am seriously procrastinating (as I am now). Also, I suspect way more people read my twitters than my blog.

I have decided the solution is to do more short blog posts, so I can capture more ideas and feel less pressure to write essays. Or maybe try Tumblr. I see the point of it now.

In other news, I woke up early this morning and set aside several hours to work on research in a coffee shop. So far I have successfully cleaned out my inbox, discovered Luis von Ahn's blog, email-debated to a granularity of 1 degree the appropriate setting for the heat in our apartment with my roommate, and read several New York Times articles.

I think I'm going to have to implement some advisor-moderated deadlines so I'm scared into doing work.