Drop

Today, I filled up Sandwich for the first time.

I'd need to have a closer look into it, but I strongly suspect it must have some humongous engine underneath its family-car hood. At the traffic lights, it easily leaves everybody behind. Which is really, really unexpected in a vehicle which all but mimics Smørebrød in many aspects (which definitely was not capable of leaving anybody behind in terms of acceleration).

Anyway, today it got treated to a full tank of gas. Premium gas, I might add. For something like US$2.95 per gallon - which comes down to around 80 US cents per liter. Regular would have been way below US$ 2.50. So I paid about 50 bucks. For a full tank of gas.


The country fought back, however, in its own sneaky way. For some reason, even with their huge trucks everybody is driving (ok, maybe just half or even less), the gas stations have very short hoses. For some reason (which is probably related to the reason why many things here are less-than-optimally designed), it is ok to simply attach a short hose to the gas dispenser. Not a spring-loaded rolled-up hose, not a spring-suspended arm holding a length of spare hose, no, just a simple hose. Dude, if two yards of hose ain't enough, drive around the block to turn your ride and come back, dude. What's the matter? Do they all know which direction to drive up to the gas station? Do US cars have their gas valves on both sides of the car? Am I weird?

Random Impressions

One of two cats. This is the non-neurotic one.


Public architecture, as seen in a public parking lot in downtown Baltimore.


The Inner Harbor area, surprisingly agreeable even at night.


Autumn has arrived full swing.

Contact

It's some five or six weeks I've been in the New World already. Granted, it doesn't always feel that new, but that's not the topic of this post.

The other week, my mom told me how everybody and their grandma have tried or wanted to try to reach me, but couldn't due to obsolete phone numbers, moving, and a general lack of up-to-date information. So, what follows is a list of contact possibilities; hopefully there is something for everybody in there. Unless I forgot about something, all other previous ways of reaching me (including German mobiles, German landlines, or in Bayreuth) won't work.



If now somebody still claims that I'm not reachable, I can't help it.




Still, there will be people who'll try to convince me that something is not working right. For these obnoxious fellows, here's the long story.

There were a few requirements that constrained the possible solutions regarding any phone contract when I came to the US. If it had to be a phone contract, its duration should preferably not be longer than twelve months. Once I had tasted the benefits of Google Maps mobile (including public transport routing and schedules), it was clear that any solution should cover mobile unlimited data as well. Calls to Germany should be as cheap as possible, and calls within the US should at least be possible. And finally, something I had not anticipated, the final solution should be available for me - a new resident without any credit history whatsoever.

In fact, this last issue proved to be lots of trouble; I've been denied contracts or service by several providers, which includes AT&T which happens to be the sole provider carrying iPhones in the US. More specifically, I wasn't technically rejected, but kept on hotlines for several days before finally being told that without a credit history, I'd have to pay a deposit in addition to the up-front price for the phone. How much this deposit were to be I wasn't informed of, however - this took me several more hours on the hotline (AT&T is infamous for their customer service). In the end the up-front costs added up to 800$, for which price I could get an iPhone on Ebay without contract obligations, so I respectfully declined their offer.

To make a long story a bit shorter, finally I settled on a "T-Mobile myFaves 300 with FlexPay" pay-as-you-go plan which, surprisingly, offers month-by-month coverage and includes unlimited data, even over 3G (although, as I found out later, "3G" encompasses at least two incompatible sub-standards, one for Europe and one for North America). Nevertheless, this plan includes lots of free airtime minutes and unlimited weeknights and weekends calling. As it happens, in the US you pay for outgoing and incoming mobile phone calls, unlike in (most of) the rest of the world. Furthermore, the "myFaves" are up to five numbers the subscriber can choose to his liking and which are free at all times. What this meant is I could combine my mobile phone with Skype...

... where I signed up for two other contracts: One monthly Skype subscription offering free German landline calls from Skype (also called "SkypeOut"), and one Skype-to-Go number in the US which connects me to my Skype account via the phone (and which I chose as one of my, uh, myFaves). Finally, the Skype subscription also includes a SkypeIn landline number in Germany, which redirects anybody's calls to that German number to my Skype account (which means, either to my computer when I'm online, or to my mobile phone when I'm absent). (Unfortunately, this whole intricate scheme has one drawback - T-Mobile has very good coverage within Baltimore, except for the house I'm living in and a 50m radius around it... But! Luckily my phone has WLAN, and runs a bastardized version of Skype called Fring - which means, even without cell phone coverage, I can still call and be called without using my computer! In fact, since this Fring also runs over the unlimited data connection I have with my mobile phone contract, it is online almost all the time, and calls to my German SkypeIn number therefore don't even cost any free airtime minutes when they reach the Fring on my phone while I'm on the go.)

What all this comes down to is - from Germany, I'm easily reachable via the SkypeIn number which even happens to have an Idar-Oberstein prefix (this costs me at most 2ct/min for the Skype-to-cell redirection). From the US, I can call any German landline phone for free, and worldwide for next to nothing.
The only times I am not reachable are when I am not online on my computer, not online on my phone, and have no cell phone coverage.
It might be of interest to calling parties that I don't use and will not make use of answering machines or voice mailboxes.

Phew.
I hope this made everything clear to everybody. Good luck!

Sandwiched even more in JHMI

Always look on the bright side, and cherish what you have.
A very neat administrative aide just peeked in, and informed me that for the next six weeks, a new "resident" (short for what? resident MD? resident evil?) will be lodged into this lab. Which then, by definition, probably becomes a mixed lab-office space. Although "space" is not really the proper description.



Luckily this is not to be my regular workplace. The above really shows most (maybe 75%) of the lab.

Sandwich in JHMI

Finally, the car search has terminated.
After making a full circle, I have come back to my landlords' car. They wanted to sell it, I needed a car, and with all the regulatory hoops one has to jump through to get a car registered and on the street here, it was much simpler to simply borrow an existing, registered one.
Let's call this one Sandwich. It's an sufficiently Anglosaxon name, and it is a sandwich solution between me having been in Germany and me going somewhere else later.





Today, I have packed up the 3DOF robot stage and moved it from the JHU Homewood campus to the Johns Hopkins Hospital lab. Actually, "lab" is a euphemism. Emad himself told me so. He's trying to convince himself that the small, windowless basement room he was assigned is a lab.



Along the hallway walls outside the lab's door, there are little windowless holes in the walls. In each one, there is one researcher (or more) huddled over a keyboard, busy researching.

Ongoing (More Of The Same)

Well, the story of the car is still going on, but now there's a silver lining on the horizon. If tomorrow's Maryland safety inspection goes well, maybe this one could be it.



Maybe I can then drive around and experience some of this beautiful landscape (which is surprisingly reminiscent of Canada) without being afraid of the current palaeolithic borrowed car of mine breaking down.



What else? The following is my workplace as of now... in center of the botlab (which is called the Robotics Bay here).



It is not necessary to start salivating now (looking in my UBT colleagues' direction); the machine I am working with looks very humble. It is very humble. The robot controller of this thing is programmed with something even worse than V+.



The office is somewhat more bland than the UBT personal spaces, and is shared with around eight colleagues (the center desk with the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard iMac is mine, sure):



Since everything is lined with huge glass windows, we can bend over some desks and peek down into the Bay:



That's it for today. More news in their own time.

First Signs of Exhaustion

Remembering to fill the blog with new impressions is really not easy.

Of course a lot of stuff is happening. But as a matter of fact it is exhausting to think of documenting or even just remembering the interesting parts. Life here itself is exhausting, and this holds the more so for the secondary, "meta"-task of mentally sifting through it to filter out the gems.

Yes, in all my earlier trips I kept lugging my camera with me, at every time of day, to every corner of the place, at noon under Mexican pyramids or at midnight in the Forum Romanum. Now and here, my life is less of a travel, where you know that after two weeks you'll return to your home where everything is under control, and more of a tiresome odyssey to get everything working. It is not impossible to deal with things, sure, as most people speak a comparatively clear English. Still, the culture is different enough to force you to be attentive all the time.


The new office building, named Computing Science and Engineering Building or CSEB.


One of the many yards, or quadrangles or "quads" of JHU.

The last two-and-a-half weekends since I have come here I spent looking for housing and a car. Luckily I found a very nice place to stay on the very first attempt.





However, the right car has eluded me so far. Never having bought a (used) car before, and never having dealt with all the difficulties you face when coming to a new place where very few of your assumptions about how things really work really hold, I am wary of scammers, thieves, and simple car dealers. I am also exhausted with looking for a car. While I have believed it might be possible to live without one, after the first two days my initial positive attitude to public transport has broken down (as reported here before). My preference with regard to cars during my search has run the full gamut from European makes, to known American ones, to unknown American 60s classic cars, back to European ones, with a short detour through Japanese ones.

















Then, of course, there are also things really, truly, honest-to-goodness American. Like highschool football.

Impressions

Morning walk downhill, along houses on large lots, with huge amounts of squirrels:




Something for Techno, in particular:


As long as stuff like this can be manufactured, packaged, and sent for less than five dollars, oil is still too cheap: