well, this weekend i used the caltrain for the first time. caltrain is the fastest connection on the public transportation system, say, between my place and sf.

as somehow proud of the swiss public t. system i need to post a (unbiased) comparison here.
it starts with the looks of the wagons and the locomotives.  they have a silver appearence, like  aluminum cans. and they face looks pretty ugly compared to you well-formed  icn’s (ok, not domestic) and s-bahn and stadler rail trains.

the inside is about half as wide as in sbb-interregio trains and there are plastic seats and there are only very few seats where you can sit and face someone else. very bad if you travel with two other people, you can’t really talk.
on top of that, there is no such thing as overhead bins for baggage and the like. there wouldn’t even be enough space for grocery store bag for a 5-head family. now i’m realizing why americans like taking their cars so much. it really is much more comfortable!

btw. i now know where the gorgeous girls go in winter when the beaches are closes: to san jose to see the local ice hockey team! there was a bunch of them (accompanied by their boyfriends) heading to san jose – it was very pleasent looking around

last friday, a new big grocery store opened close to our place and it has nice features. first, it hosts a starbucks right next to the aisles, not just after the check-out points as, say, in kreuzlingen’s coop.
hence the problem arises how to shop with your latte etc. in one hand – they designed carts which have a coffee-cup holder! i call this laziness-induced innovation.

the coolest thing, however, is the self check out they have! u don’t need to talk to anyone anymore (unless the software crashes) to pay for your stuff. it went fine, the machine realizes when you put the scanned item into your bag (they call it ‘bagging’) and friendly asks you for you membership card. fun!

i think i would have made a good cashier

just aq quick one: yesterday, we went out to the french student association’s ‘wine and cheese’ event. it was a wine-only event since they ordered as much cheese as can be beaten in 5 minutes. bummer! *arg*

otherwise, there’s not too much happening at the moment, i keep u posted about 1-2 upcoming highlights before xmas, though!

have a good one,
max

yeah!

the trip was awesome – i’d like to do it again. for impressions, get the pictures here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/severin.obertuefer
http://picasaweb.google.com/maxhaeberlin
we did it! a 6-day-trip across the wild west to visit the notorious grand canyon, monument valley, havasupai indian reservation and *viiiva* las vegas. places that couldn’t be more different.

1. start saturday morning, at around 1am. 12-hour (!) drive to grand canyon. check the google map below and compare to the size of switzerland
2. set up camp on ‘mather campground’ on the south rim of grand canyon. strolling about the area and taking pictures of the stunning sunset and canyon in blue and red colors. buy food for the next day. check images
3. target rise-time 5 o’clock, we did get up at 7 something, packed our equipment and went off to ‘south kaibab trail’, one of grand canyon’s corridor trails. we initially targeted not to go all the way down to the level of colorado river, due to the big hazards tha expected us:

“Hazards hikers can encounter along the Kaibab Trail include dehydration, sudden rainstorms, flash flooding, loose footing, rockfall, encounters with wildlife, and extreme heat. At the Colorado River, additional hazards include hypothermia (due to the river’s consistently cold temperatures), trauma (due to collisions with boulders in rapids), and drowning.”

we eventually hiked all the way down and made our way back up on the “bright angel trail”.
according the a resident hiker, we were lucky to have an untipically warm day for the season. at the very bottom it was about 25 degrees centigrade which was perfect.

total walking distance: approx. 16 miles (25 km).
total elevation gain: almost 1 mile (1.6 km). (kinda tough!)

day three: target was havasupai, one of the most remote villages in the world. however, we first went to ‘monument valley’, that’s the one where many western movies have been filmed and the one which backgrounds every final cartoon in lucky luke (where he rides into the sunset check the pictures

day four: a looooong drive back to havasupai. under way we had to stay at a motel and could finally shower. however, we set out early in order to make it to havasu valley in time. it works like this: u drive to the top of the valley, get ur gear out and walk 3-4 hours down. it’s very western-like, again, and havasupai, the village itself, apparently is the most secluded of its kind in the us. the coolest thing is that mail to havasi residents is still delivered by the PONY EXPRESS! we saw the ponys, or mules or whatever they were on our way down. it was fun to see the boxes on the back that were labeled “US postal service”.
arrived at the very bottom and feeling quite exhausted after the many hiking miles, we went for a swim in havasu fall, just paradise-like! check the pictures (btw. it’s the falls that appear in the movie ‘next’, just fyi).

the village is fun. since the fastest connection to the outside world is a 4-5 hour hike up the valley and no cars can commute between the top and the bottom, there’s a helicopter shuttle service it flies residents out of the valley for 25 bucks, tourists for 85 bucks and u can even give them your backpack so that u don’t have to carry it all the way up. nice
they have a school, 2 churches (i guess catholic and mormon), restaurants and organize a ‘miss havasupai’ competition every summer

day five: walk 5 hours back up the valley, treat our sore muscles and blistered feet. get back into our nice minivan and off we went to las vegas! it was an extremely long drive, i think it was about 9 hours (oder, sevi?). we passed ‘hoover dam’ and soon after, the city appeard out of nowhere in midst of the nevadan desert! just crazy, this 1.5 million-souls-city.
we stayed in MGM grand hotel, went out to the nine fine irishmen and went dancing at a studio 54 club. the former rocked, the latter sucked.

and ask me personally about details to the different spots we visited.

hugh!

today, just one fact: it was so warm that i could go to campus in my tshirt even before 9 o’clock!

hey folks!

last week’s been very busy. wednesdey night, there was the deadline for abstract submission for THE international conference on mri in medicine. my entire group was trying to get their individual projects done to submit them. and so was i

i had never spent that much time in the lab in stanford so far, but worked all monday and tuesday until midnight or later on my abstract. writing the introduction was easy , but u gotta have some results…and sell them well! it was good, though, and i learned a lot.
now everyone is waiting for their submissions to be peer-reviewed and accepted. i’ll let u know!
the ultimate goal is the participation at the ISMRM conference in may ’08, which will take place in toronto!

btw, the title of mine is “matrix formulation and tikhonov regularization of hypr reconstruction”. i know it says absolutely nothing to you, but doesn’t it sound neat? *lool*

have a good day!
max

this one is on my most american-like day since i’ve come here.

this saturday, the day started off with an easy run around atherton where people were probably still recovering from halloween two days before. by my return, my homies had prepared breakfast, i.e. pancakes! soaked in original canadian maple syrup! yummyyummy
shortly after noon fabian and his two travelmates came back from shopping at wal-mart (they arrived in sfo on friday and stayed overnight at our place) and we set out for my first-ever american college football game! that included ‘tailgating’, of course!
people gather in the parking lots around the stdium, unload their stuff and bbq for 2-3 hours until the game starts. so did we and it was fun. it was very cultivated
(i’m disregarding the fact that we struggled with the wal-mart grill and hardly got the meat done by the kick off. however, this made the day even more memorable

the game itself, let’s say, sucked. severin and i were in the stanford students’ section and tried hard at cheering our boys up!
there was the whole show we know from college and high school movies back home: 19-year-old cheerleaders, the official bands of the teams (they’re so funny – it’s basically the same as a guggenmusik back home) and the mascot.

the day ended in a 9-27 loss of our team which did not really upset me b/c it wasn’t big game! so who cares (big game is the game against stanford’s biggest rival, uc berkeley). stanford students have purpose-made shirts with “beat cal” or “cal sucks” on it.

i gotta get one too!
max

just as a matter of fact: this saturday morning, i’d have come back from my first wk
hahaha!

by the way, san francisco and the bay area experiencd the strongest earthquake since the famous devastating one in 1989 (see picture 1).
and i didn’t even notice it! primarily, though, b/c i was down in monterey, but menlo park was not affected too much somehow. thad, one of my roomies, was home and saw our closets shaking. but no broken glass or the like.
severin, of course, did not notice anything since he was busy chasing balls on the tennis court

i have added some pics to illustrate the difference between the 1989-rattle and the one of tuesday. enjoy

left: the epi center was quite close to san jose and menlo park. in the current earthquake, our living room remained unaltered. in 1989, however, the result was somehow different

hello again,

we spent sunday until wednesday afternoon in monterey, which is 2 hours south of stanford. our faculty was giving letures on mri (“current concepts in mri” to mainly practicing radiologists, technicians and physicians. we, as the physicists, were invited too and thus went there for a couple of days. it was basically lectures all day that took place in the monterey plaza hotel just at the ocean.
the view was good, the weather changed from hot-sunny to chilly-cloudy and the seals under the pier would make penetrating noise.

now i’m back and it’s halloween! we’re thinking of going to a campus halloween party and check out what it is like.

and last but not least: last weekend we went to a benefit concert in mountain view. it was at the amphitheater, right next to the google complex. it was awesome! people sat on gras that was tilted, like in good ol’ greece! it was fun. we saw neil young, jerry lee lewis
and metallica! awesome lineup, it was worth the 50 bucks

hope you’re doing great!
max