Nothing New on the Southern Front

The last two days, I have been mostly working on the stream processing project. I have read some more papers and developed some ideas. Since the first meeting for the search project is only next week, I decided to push that reading back a while and concetrate on the other project first. I have also spent some hours improving the test coverage of the Storage API of Avon. I’m not completely there yet, but the remaining two classes look like a major testing project. I have, therefore, decided to do it on the weekend in Zurich, where I have a decent monitor!

Yes, I am returning to Switzerland tomorrow night because I will teach the course on Object-Oriented Databases on Friday morning. There are already over 20 students registered for the course which is a nice number and look forward to doing it. Of course, I also look forward to come back to ETH Zurich and meet my friends there! Nevertheless, I am a bit worried because I think it is quite cold in Zurich. Here it is still possible to walk around in shorts and t-shirt.

Yesterday, Mirjana and Eugenio took me to see Michele’s flat at Piazza Piola. According to Swiss standards it would be a 1.5 room appartment. There are two rooms, one is a mixture of living room while the other room is the bed room. All floors are either tiled or wooden. Generally, both rooms are very spacious and thus I would estimate the place to be about the same size as my old flat in Zurich. I was also assured by all colleagues here, that the price I was offered is a really good deal. So, in the end, I think I am leaning towards taking it.

And last but not least, Maristella introduced me to her husband today who works in the administration of Politecnico di Milano. He promised to help me with my Permesso di Soggiorno. So I am also making progress on the bureaucracy front. All in all, I consider myself very lucky because I think I have really met the right people here!

I’m back!

Sorry for the break! I wish I could say something like “Due to numerous requests, I have decided to write another entry”. But, in fact, nobody has complained so far… As it should be in the case of narcistic Blogs that are of little value to the greater good!

Nevertheless, let me recapitulate what happened here in the last few days. On Thursday, I have met with Maristella for the first time and we started to discuss possible collaborations. I’ve also met with Marco who is writing a project proposal and wanted to ask me if I would like to be involved. Apart from these meetings, I concentrated on Avon and fixed quite a few bugs in the In-Memory storage provider to make the jUnit tests of the OM Layer work. In the eveing, I wanted to write a detailed report on my day, but there was a problem with the Internet connection at the Residenza. That’s also why the picture below gets only posted today. Apparently, I am not the only one looking for a woman in this town. But I admire the optimism of the guys who stuck that Post-It to the windshield! (The flyer says “Cercasi ragazze” which means “Looking for girls” and the Post-It says “Anch’ io!” and ”Io pure!!” meaning “Also me!” and “Me too!!”.

Looking for Girls

On Friday, I started to read a paper about the semantics and complexity of SPARQL, the RDF query language. Then, however, I got distracted by a phone call from Michele who offered me his appartment at Piazza Piola which is about 400m from where I work and located directly at a Metro stop. So far, I haven’t seen the appartment myself. I hope to do so tomorrow. Nevertheless, I have been crunching numbers the whole Friday afternoon hoping to figure out whether I could afford the place. With the current Euro conversion rate, it would be cost about the same as my flat in Zurich did. But, of course, right now my “salary” is not as it used to be in Zurich. This being said, the price Michele offers is fair considering the area and to me there are also other factors apart from money that could influence my decision. The top two reasons currently being 1) having a my peace and quiet and 2) having the possibility of offering guests visiting me a place to sleep.

On Saturday, I slept long and then went to the main railway station to meet Stefania and Lukas who travelled through Milano on the way back from their holidays. As it had also rained the day before, the city was very grey and wet. It is amazing how little rain it takes to transform Milano into Venezia. About half an hour of intense rain and many streets are totally covered by water which can be 10-20cm deep! As soon as there is enough water and the clouds have vanished, the gondolas start appearing and one can hear the gondolieri sing their song. Together with Stefania and Lukas, I had lunch in a bar and it was good to see some familiar faces and speak some Swiss German on this dismal day. After lunch I accompanied the two back to “Centrale F.S.” where the took the train to “Schaffhause”. On my way back, I did some shopping in Corso Buenos Aires. Back at the Residenza I had a quiet evening and went to bed very early.

The Train to Schaffhause

I had planned to go to the FoxTown outlet stores in Mendrisio (CH) on Sunday. For the bus ride there and back again, I had already bought a ticket for 15 Euro. However, when I told Eugenio that I would go there, he offered to take me by car. As a coincidence, Matteo a colleague of Eugenio also wanted to go there because he, too, had never been there. We decided to meet at 2pm at the “Molino Dorino” underground stop. “Molino Dorino” is as far as you can go with the urban ticket… On my way there, I noticed the following sign high above one of the seats.

Reserved Seat for Mutilated and Handicapped People

The sign caught my attention because I found the term “mutilati” (“mutilated”) quite crass. Also these reserved seats are as far away from the Metro doors as possible… We managed to get to Mendrisio in half an hour and in another half an hour we also managed to find a parking spot there. Because of the bad weather and the day being Sunday, there were crowds of people shopping at FoxTown. I bought two pairs of jeans and three shirts hoping to fit in better with the Italian style in the future. Back in Milano, Eugenio and I went to a Japanese restaurant in the centre of the city for dinner.

Today, I finished reading the paper I started on Friday and, apart from one proposition, I think I’ve got the message. In the afternoon, I read Stefano’s project proposal for another project that he just got accepted and that would be another opportunity for me to do some work in his group. This second project deals with a new way of searching for information on the Web and it, too, sounds very interesting!

It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Continuing in the tradition of using song titles and commenting on today’s experiment at CERN, I am still waiting for the black hole. Okay, ther would have been other alternatives such as Supermassive Black Hole by Muse or Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. All of which, however, has, amazingly nothing to do with what I have been doing today!

Instead of worrying about the end of the world, I have invested in my future at the Politecnico and completed another stage of bureaucracy! This time the goal was to get access to a printer and an E-Mail account. With the much appreciated help of Davide, I accomplished both tasks in half a day! Must be a new World, ehm Italian Record. Apart from that I have worked some more on the survey paper, now being able to print the latest version to read it in paper. Then, I also read through a report by the guys that work on stream processing and I will annoy them tomorrow with some questions and feedback!

This is, indeed, all very interesting, but the real question that was on my mind today was, when is a cover of a song a good cover? After doing some lunch-time research on YouTube, I have come to a personal hypothesis. A good cover of a song is a performance that stands on its own and give the existing material a new spin. It can make you aware of something that has always been there, but you never noticed. Furthermore, a band covering a song should also make it “theirs” in the sense that the song should sound and fell as if it were written by the band originally. Actually, it pretty much the same criteria I would have for a good theatre or opera production. Well not entirely, but still… A very good example that I think illustrates what I am trying to say here is the following. (I admit it, I didn’t know that they had covered this song… Shame on me!)

Now, I am off to watch the Switzerland vs. Luxemburg football match! Hopp Schwiiz!

Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday

Today was a very long day. I got up at 7am in order to make sure that it would be at the workshop Stefano invited me to attend on time. The workshop was part of the 20th World Computer Congress that is currently taking place here in Milano. I had no trouble getting up since I did not get much sleep anyway as Lorenzo my Italo-Insomniac flat mate was rearranging the furniture in his room all night. Okay, I am exagerating and probably it is only natural that he couldn’t sleep well during his first night in a strange new place. But what is with all the noise? Yeahyeah! I am getting old…

To get to the workshop, I had to take the metro from “Lambrate F.S.” to “Loreto” (seems to become the standard opening of all my travel) and then change to the other line to get to “Fiera Milano City”. I had brought a map to find the venue which proved to be a superfluous precaution as I could simply follow a crowd of WCC 2008 backpackers! The workshop was about Alta Scuola Politecnica (ASP), a joint venture between Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino to offer an alternative MSc track for excellent students. First, the general concept was introduced by the President and the Vice-President (Stefano) and then a series of projects were presented that have been done by interdisciplinary teams of student in the past four years that ASP exists.

After the workshop I returned to the office only to find that everybody else had already gone to lunch. So I simply had a banana that was lying around in the office and started to prepare for the colossal Avon commit that Alex, Michael and myself (no I don’t have multiple personality disorder) planned for today. After I found out my office phone number, I had chats with Alex, Michael as well as Moira and in between these chats I sent out some mails inviting people from around here to the next DBTA Workshop in Lugano.

Later, I was interrupted by Martin and we started to work on the ICWE 2009 Programme Committee using a Google spreadsheet. I have to say it is a bit awkward working on such documents in the browser and the thought of having everything stored at Google is downright scary. But after I messed up a few time and Martin had to revert the document, everything worked out fine. At least that is what I am assuming…

When I finished working on the PC, Alex and Michael were ready for the big commit in Zurich. So, in a phone-slash-MSN-conference we commited module per module and now there are but a few things to sort out before we have a compiling (and hopfully running) version again. With Avon committed, Alex went off to his holiday in Northern Spain. I have to say I am a bit envious of him and I blame myself that I missed a chance for some time off between two jobs yet again! Why do opportunities often present themselves at the wrong point in time?

And finally, to give some meaning to the title of this post apart from the fact that today is Tuesday and I am in the mood for sad songs…

Monday, Bloody Monday…

Back to work after an eventful weekend. Today, I finished reading through the survey paper and started editing and rearranging it. I was interupted by Stefano, who was looking for the “Ragazzo Svizzero”. However, since both he and I needed to sort out some other stuff first, we decided to meet in the afternoon, but he already invited me to come to a workshop where he is giving a talk tomorrow. At noon, I had lunch together with Christina in the mensa. The mensa has a very bad reputation around here, but is really not all that horrible compared to “Chez Thérèse”. I find it funny that they also stick to there model of having Primo, Secondo etc. in the mensa. I had a dish of pasta and a piece of meat for about 6 Euro. So, it is slightly different and Moira would like it a lot because they don’t seem to distinguish between students, employees and external guests.

At 4pm, I met with Stefano and he invited me to sit into a meeting he had with Emanuele and Davide who are working on stream reasoning in the context of the larKC E.U. project. Stefano encouraged me to attend a lot of different project meetings that taking place in the next few weeks to help me decide what projects I want to involve myself. However, if I decide to do reasoning over RDF data stream, I think I have a lot of reading and getting up to speed ahead of me! Nevertheless, it looks interesting and would clearly fit into my plan of broadening my CV.

Today, when I got home, there were two surprises. One, the appartment had been cleaned and two, I finally have a real room mate! His name is Lorenzo and he is from Bologna.

Festa della Piazza Röntgen

On Sunday, I slept even longer than on Saturday and because I was feeling exhausted even when I finally got up, I decided to have a siff-day. So I stayed in bed mostly, watched some movies and read a bit. In the early afternoon, I got an E-Mail from Eugenio asking me if I would like to join him and some of his friends for dinner. Of course, I accepted and we met again at “Duomo”, this time at 5pm. Eugenio introduced me to some more things that are good to know about Milano and then at 8pm we drove with his Mercedes A Class (!) to the Fiera at the fringe of the city. There, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party, i.e. not Silvio Berlusconi) organised some festivities in order of who knows what. Eugenio pointed out several times that we would go there for the food and not for the politics. If that is the attitude of most Italians (and it probably is), I’m cannot be surprised by anything anymore! Anyway, the food (and the wine) was excellent and while sitting and eating, I decided that this Festa is probably the aequivalent of “Röntgenplatzfest” in Zurich. See for yourselves!

Piazza Röntgen

Israel-Svizzera 2:2

After sleeping until 11am, I had breakfast in my appartment at the Residenza. During breakfast I relayed the finding of the previous evening to Moira. Later in the afternoon, I decided to explore to the city centre. I took the metro from “Lambrate F.S.” to “Loreto” as I had done the previous evening. However, instead of changing to the Linea 1 there, I decided to walk from Piazza Loreto down to the Duomo on Corso Argentina. If you do so, you first get to Piazza Argentina and then to Piazza Lima before you enter the Centro Storico (Historic Centre) at Porta Venezia. What takes the Metro 5 minutes to me almost 45 minutes. But, on the bright side I saw something (mostly shops) of the city! After entering the city centre, I turned right into Via della Spiga (a.k.a “Lümpemeile” in some circles). Together with Via Monte Napoleone, Via della Spiga is the street where all well-known designers have their stores. An impressive line-up, but also quite outside my current budget.

From the Duomo, I walked down Corso Italia where I found something that reminded me of home. And it has to be said, that the Hotel Zurigo is much nicer than the Hotel Berlino which I saw later that weekend. So 1:0 for Switzerland!

Home Away From Home

At the end of Corso Italia, I turned right twice and came back to the Duomo on Corso Porta Ticinese and Via Torino. In this area, there are a lot of young people with styles ranging from Skater over Punk to Emo. Of course, the stores (including a Carhartt store) in that neighbourhood are targeted to this particular clientele. Back at Duomo I was very exhausted and a bit overwhelmed by the number of people in town. Most of them, I guess are tourists as the speak German, English and even Russian. Therefore, I decided to go back to the Residenza. On the way there, I stopped at “Esselunga” (The Long S) to shop for some food and found something I haven’t seen in Switzerland for a while: ready-to-eat roasted chicken. I bought half a chicken (nothing Alex would enjoy ) and ate it on the balcony while watching the Swiss Nati play against Israel. I won’t comment on the game, but here is an impression how it looks around here.

Calcio on the Balcony

Friday, September 5th 2008

My first work week at Politecnico di Milano comes to an end. The office is slowly populating. After I met Donato on Thursday, I have met Christina today. Christina did her PhD in Stefano Ceri’s group and is now a post-doc in Bergamo. Nevertheless, she will be around in Milano as she also teaches a lecture here. Later in the afternoon I was surprised by two visits from old friends. First, Fede showed up at our office and invited me to come to visit him in Innsbruck. Then, Florian also dropped in for a chat!

In the evening, I met with Eugenio who wants to do a PhD in Moira’s group in Zurich. We met outside the metro station “Duomo” and then went for drinks. Actually, we went for “Happy Hour” a.k.a Apero which is this great deal where you buy slightly overpriced drinks but can eat as much as you want from a buffet. And, of course, my guide had picked a bar where the food was first rate! After drinks, Eugenio showed me around the centre of the city and I just caught one of the last metros to get me home.

Aaaaah… Ants!

Apart from the fact that I met an office mate of mine, Donatello, it was an uneventful day at the office. First, with the help of Alex, I finished some administrative business for Zurich hoping to make some students happy. Then I had a go at the survey paper that Stefania, Moira and myself are writing. When I came home tonight, I was surprised by a couple of new flat mates here at the Residenza. Unfortunately, they are more interested in stealing my food than in keeping me entertained. See for yourselves!

New Flat Mates

 Now I am counting on the weekly cleaning service to revert things back to normal!

“I want to lie, shipwrecked and comatose…”

What I saw this morning on my cooker/stove made me think back to the outstanding British Sitcom Red Dwarf that I liked to watch during my time at ETH Zurich. Cheers, Moira!

A Tribute to Dave Lister

Considering the possible (though denied) provenance of the made-up swear word “smeg”, it is something I would rather not put on any kitchen appliances or anywhere near where food is prepared! Nevertheless, it made me remember that I still have an unwatched final season of Red Dwarf on DVD in my storage room in Oerlikon! I have to get it at the next possible opportunity…

Apart from that, I am settling in here in Milano. The few people that are here, are very helpful and do their best to set me up with everything I need! They also make sure that I don’t starve all alone in my office. So far, we have done the Italian classics: pizza yesterday and pasta today! Both times, delightful meals at a far more reasonable price than anything you can get at Güttinger’s back in Zurich!

Today after lunch, we all went get the forms for my Permesso di Soggiorno (the document I need to stay more than three months because Switzerland is so slow with bilateral treaties, thank you, SVP!). You would think, there is a Kreisbüro or something where you get those forms. But instead you go to the next post office, show your I.D. card and get them there! Most inexplicably, you get them for free… I feel so far away from Switzerland, sometimes.

(If you wonder, why the entry stops here… It is because I fell into a state of deep paralysis when I opened the folder they gave me and looked at the forms. A Swiss tax declaration form is a piece of cake! Smeggin’ hell, that reminds me of something else I still need to do…)