blog.zgraggen.name  All-day insanity or I have a blog too!

This weekend I attended the Electric Zoo Festival on Randall’s Island in NYC. Even though no one wanted to join me, I decided to go anyway. And I am glad I did. It was well worth it and I even met some friends from UBS there.

The Festival was bigger than I expected. There were several 1000 if not even over ten thousand people. But luckily the event was well organized and I didn’t even have to wait at the entrance.

The crowd at the party was really interesting. Especially, the dressings of some of them were hilarious. One would expect people wearing going out, beach, hippy clothes. Since it was an electronic dance festival I also expected all the neon and furry rave wear. But I didn’t expect people dressing up in action heroes costumes like superman, iron man, boba fett and some of them were totally weird by wearing a ski dress or a frog costume. Well… I enjoyed it

The one big negative part of this event was the dust. Since, it was really hot and dry. The dancing on the ground resulted in a lot of dust which was picked up. This is a picture of my foot after the event.

There were many people with scarf’s around there faces which seemed funny to me. But soon, I realized that it was not only style but even more so protection from the dust. A few hours later my through was itching and my nose felt funny… so I wished I had one myself

Yes, it was electronic music so I enjoyed myself. But I have to say that it seemed fairly monotonous with a heavy focus on Electro/House. I would have wished to have a little more diversity in the 4 music tents. The best set I listened to was from Sander van Doorn! “Thanks! You made my day”

All in all it was a wonderful event!
Note to myself:
“Maybe next time I shouldn’t run 14miles beforehand :-)”

I’m awake again… We just had a fire alarm in our building.
Luckily, I was still awake and not in bed yet. But still, it took me a moment to realize that it is an actual alarm and not a drill.
The first time since I’m here that I actually used the stairs to leave the building

The fire fighters arrived just a few seconds after I left the building. So that was pretty comforting to know that they are ready if something happens.
I look up on the building, but could not find any smoke or see anything, so I guessed that there was nothing big happening. After about 15min we were allowed to go back into the building. The interesting part about the whole alarm was that the fire fighter I asked didn’t know why the alarm went off…

Finally, I screwed in the last screw and hammer the last nail of my IKEA furniture.

Thanks to the MSE program, I am inclined to keep track of various data in my life. Therefore, I know exactly how much time I spent on each piece of furniture… Just in case I will have to buy new furniture
I guess all in all the 13 hours 27 min is not too bad for all the things I accomplished. I could even go further and analyze on what time of the day I did the most work, and at what time I was most productive… but that won’t be worth the effort

Special thanks goes to my girlfriend which helped me to choose, find (in the store), transport and haul all the furniture to my apartment!
Unfortunately, she couldn’t stay long enough to also support me during the assembling

Ps: List of all the items assembled…
1 bed, 2 dressers, 1 small dresser, 2 Book shells, 1 Bookcase, 1 office Chair, 2 small tables, 3 chars, 1 kitchen Table

While I was in Pittsburgh I learned the meaning of the “Pittsburgh Chair”. In Pittsburgh chairs are used to reserve a parking space for a car. This was heavily used in the last couple days when Pittsburgh was buried in almost 2 foot of snow. People, who dug out their car, most often reserved their spot while they were off to work or other things. The interesting part about that is that this reservation system is mostly respected by everyone and people still have their spot if they return in the evening. This tradition has even its own Wikipedia entry even though it is named parking chair.

Here is a report from a local news paper.

I uploaded some pictures with examples.

This weekend, Amy and I drove over a 1000 miles to go shopping… I’m slowly adapting to the American life style
Well, to be honest it was not only shopping:

Last week I flew to Pittsburgh to enjoy some days together with Amy and to pack up all my stuff. On Friday we drove from Pittsburgh to Stamford with a fully loaded car. It took us 7 hours to cover the 420 miles. We spend the weekend buying furniture for my apartment. The overall theme of my new apartment is once more: IKEA
Unfortunately, we had to drive twice to fit all the furniture in the car. This is especially inconvenient since it is a 40min drive each way. After two days of spending money on furniture it was time again to drive back to Pittsburgh.

I uploaded some pictures from the apartment after the shopping.

This Sunday I went for a run along the coast. Since we got about 10 inches of snow over the weekend everything was covered in white.
The thing which struck me was that in my mind model sand beaches have to be warm… warm water, good weather, and I can walk around in shorts.
What a weird feeling to run along a frozen beach which is covered in snow and ice.

I guess this happened because so far I only saw sand beaches when I went on vacation to warmer regions.
Is it only me or did other people have a similar experience. Maybe it is particular the case for Swiss people, because we are not bordering a sea so we travel to it in the summer.

Jihaa, I already moved into my apartment!
After looking at apartments for three days everything went quick. I prepared a reverse prioritized list of all the apartments I wanted to look at. On Thursday morning I had a tour on the last apartment on the list and decided that I want to lease this apartment. I signed the lease on the same day. Finding an apartment was much easier than expected. And it was even easier to start the electricity and internet service. In Pittsburgh I had difficulties as a foreigner without an SSN, here in Stamford the electricity company didn’t care about that. Getting internet service for the apartment was also much easier than I thought. In Pittsburgh it took me 7 weeks to get internet (read here) in Stamford only 1 day. The service I got from Cablevision so far is amazing. Cablecom could learn a lot from them! I called them yesterday and today (on Saturday) a guy came to my apartment and configured the modem. So, one day after I called them, I have internet in my apartment! That’s a service!

Tonight, I will spend my first night in my new apartment. Temporary I organized an air mattress as a bed and some boxes substitute a desk.

Here are some more pictures of my apartment.

After a long and nice time in Switzerland, I’m back in the USA.
The trip from Zürich to my hotel in Stamford, CT was smooth and without problems. The only thing which was a little disappointing when I arrived on Monday was that there was no snow at all. After all the news from Washington DC and Pittsburgh I was expecting that New York area would have some snow too. Well by now we have snow and I am amazed how much snow can fall in such a short time. It started in the morning and a few hours later we had about 15cm of snow. Everything looks really nice now
Soon, I’ll be moving on to visit Pittsburgh. Supposedly they have about 50cm of snow in the city

I already looked at several apartments and I am slowly getting used to the thought to live here in Stamford. I’ll keep you posted with news and maybe even some pictures, once I find a place to live.

One thing which is worth mentioning is the “warm welcome” I got on Monday evening. When I was walking around and taking some picture of the area. A security guy run up to me and told me that, I am not allowed to take pictures in this area. My questions why and where it is not allowed to take pictures the answer was simple: “You are not allowed to take pictures in this area!”.Therefore, there is nothing I could show you guys right now…

It’s almost a tradition that I clean up my blog at the beginning of the year and publish all the posts which I never finished during the past year. This time I will focus on all the things I did during my last semester at CMU. Passing all my classes with an acceptable grade and finding a job kept me quite busy… But I did a few fun things!

Family Road Trip

Before the last semester started my parents came to visit me in Pittsburgh. After two days in Pittsburgh we started a road trip to see the Niagara Fall, NYC, Amish People, and Washington DC. Besides all the typical tourist stuff which can be seen on all those locations we also saw something special.

A waitress at the Niagara Falls told us that it is possible to operate the lights for the Niagara Falls at night. We followed her directions and knocked on a particular door which was then opened by an elderly nice guy. He told us stories of the old days and how everything used to be and also technical details about today’s lighting system. And finally we were allowed to play around with the light system. I thought this was funny since 100 of people were standing on the edge of the water fall taking pictures of all the random combination my family experimented with

A more detailed description of our road trip can be found on my brother’s blog. (in German)

Oopsla 2009 in Orlando, Florida

I and a friend from school went to the Oopsla 2009 convention as student volunteers. Special about this Oopsla is that it was held in the Disney World Convention center which was in the middle of Disney World Orlando. What a great location. The conference itself was really interesting and it would have been even better if our professor would have relieved us from our homework assignments

But I have to say one negative thing about Disney World Orlando, all the water you can drink from the fountains taste horrible after sulfur. Maybe that is because of the fireworks they light every night.
Before we left Orlando, my friend and I had to visit the Universal Studios and go swimming at the beach, which felt like a mid-semester break

Philly Marathon and Rocky stairs

Amy, I and two of our friends drove together to Philadelphia to run there a half marathon which ends in front of the famous “Rocky Stairs”. It is a nice and almost flat course. The special thing to do after you finished the half marathon is to run up the stairs like Rocky Balboa did in his movie.

There would be many more detail I could tell about each specific thing, but I finally want to publish this post. Besides for most of my readers this is supposed to be a short update on what I have been up to.

What an awesome coincidence. Today, at my Birthday, they opened a Dunkin’ Donuts in my neighborhood. They must have known how much I love sweet stuff. The logical consequence was that I went there this morning and got a dozen donuts.

Sugar high! Jihaa