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

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.

This is my oldest relict… I started this post about 8 months ago and I am convinced that it is worth mentioning.

After reading the post from Mirko I thought why not read something different from time to time.
Besides some students at the CMU recommended this book on the Google Group for new entering students
Even though I did not completely finish the book, I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to improve his time management. I did not apply all the things the book mentions but I definitely could improve some work habits, which saved a lot of time.

Thanks to Mirko for lending me the book! Meanwhile I posses my own copy of this book

This is a new record on this blog. Obviously, this is not the kind of record you want to break!

Towards the end of the fall semesters in 2008, I was busy and was not motivated to write any posts. After that during the winter break, I was too lazy to write anything. (It is not holiday if you have to work…) Besides, I had better things to do than sitting in front of the computer like skiing and snowboarding in the Swiss Mountains

I started many posts but published none of them. I finally decided to do the write up and publish all of them. I will mark them as relict.