Chris at Big Blue in SJ

the last 2 weeks

2006-07-30T20:09:00.000-07:00

hey,

for some reason the picture which shows my office has not been uploaded. so i take care of that right now:

Two weeks ago we went to Monterey, which is located 40 miles south of San Jose on the Monterey Bay. Monterey is a nice coast town. We went to the Bay Aquarium there. This is a exhibition of animals from the ocean.

picture of a shark in a big aquarium

many small fishes in the big aquarium.

some jellyfish.

and yesterday there was a farewell party for some new zealander guys who have finished their internship and go back in their home country.
the guy to my right is kyle. he is one of the guys that are leaving. on the very right side is jacques, my former manager who did all the paperwork before i got here.

begin of september we will go to LA and watch the NASCAR race series. we will be there a whole weekend. that'll be fun.

today it rained for like 5 minutes. the first rain since may. very interesting. now it won't rain again until end of september or october. the last weekend it was especially hot, around 40 degree celsius. the air was not refreshing, more like the air that comes out of a hot oven. i never was in a place that hot before.

so i am tired, all party this weekend... so

see ya around.

2006-07-02T12:02:00.000-07:00

hello everybody,

it has been a long time since my last entry (at least 2 to 3 weeks). and in that time some

some weeks ago i bought myself a digital camera to make photos on my own.
and my first picture i took was my office desk. i share my office with a guy from new zealand and his part looks more tidy than mine does ;)

since end of june the work site has a beach volleyball field. every week now i play on this field. there is a so called sand volleyball league in our company and we play in teams of four.

but i still play 2 on 2 with stefan, another coop from germany. he is the guy with the black shirt on the right.
due to the very stable weather conditions one can play every day for hours. there was no rain since beginning of may.

apart from the sports we also have recurring events like a dinner party. somebody would cook for the others and then we would sit together and play games. especially tabu is very funny. and difficult at the same time. it is not so easy to describe words in another language when vital words for description are taken away. the next people to stage a dinner party are sebastian and me. i think we will cook something chinese or so...really!

last week we went to sixflags waterworld (http://www.sixflags.com/parks/waterworldconcord/index.asp) in concord, about an hour drive from san jose. that was a lot of fun even though a lot of the rides were closed. the best ones were the halfpipe and the tornado ride. unfortunately, lots of people had the same idea and it took more than half an hour of waiting for each ride. so we got on four rides in about 3 hours. the park also had some disadvantages. there were no real areas where on e could lay down and rest. those areas were mostly in between the rides. the second worst thing was the concrete. it was burning hot. you could barely walk. and you were not supposed to get on the rides with shoes. however the next water park we go to will be raging waters (http://www.rwsplash.com/) in san jose, even if the rides are not that spectacular.

and finally, last week there was a human foosball (or human kicker) tournament at work. i hope everybody knows how a foosball (german: kicker) table looks like. but this time the players were humans on a rope rather than a steel bar. that was a lot of fun.

and by the way, the guy in the middle of the picture witht the grey shirt and jeans is my manager, my direct superior.

so have a lot of fun! we have the july 3rd and july4th off. at least a long weekend!
see you!

World Cup 2006

2006-06-11T14:55:00.000-07:00

jippiii, germany won its first game. a good start. we watched it at work. it was highly official. the only very unfortunate thing is the time. when it's 15 o'clock in germany here it is 6 o'clock in the morning. yesterday friends of me started this early in the day to watch the england - paraguay game. i did't get up that early but today i did because a friend of us came to watch the next game. so i watched almost all games except one.
the games are all shown in american tv. i think it's for the first time ever. however they always talk about their team and really think that they might win the world cup. let's see how they fare tomorrow against the czech republic. the us games are also shown at work.

in the last weeks since the yosemite visit nothing noteworthy happened. the other guys went to sequoia national park (this with the huge trees) . i didn't go there because i didn't feel well. i guess i will go there at some point. i don't know when, though.

i wish luck to everybody and the favorite team wins at the world cup. i certainly hope that germany makes it but...well let's see.

have fun!

Yosemite National Park

2006-05-22T20:44:00.000-07:00

on saturday we went to yosemite national park. this park consists of a beautiful valley. the vally is about 200 to 250 miles away from san jose. driving time was about 4 to 5 hours (for one direction). therefore we rented a car. on the left picture you can see the rental car, a toyota camry.

the five of us that went to yosemite taking a break.

finally arriving at yosemite. we had to wait 20 to 30 minutes to get in the park. there were two lanes and everybody had to pay a fee. fortunately sebastian already had a pass.

at the height of about 2000m we entered the valley. in the back one can see a waterfall, but this is not the largest one.

it's really beautifull there.

huge rocks and steep walls characterise the valley.

in the back one can see the 800m high waterfall. in the summer this waterfall disappears because of the lack of water. at the position this picture was taken there were millions of mosquitos. i was already biten five times.

at the park itself we went on one of the trails hiking. we wanted to go to the mirror lake and take some pictures. what we didn't know was that the trail was partly flooded. in this picture we had no idea what lay before us.

this is one end of the mirror lake.

this is one example how the trail looked like. everything was flooded. so we climbed over rocks and through the underbrush to the side of the trail to reach the other side.

an example how this looked like.

we went by the mirror lake. though we didn't know it we had already passed it. so we went the full round trail through a small valley of this river.

this is the half dome. i think it is the highest mountain there. there were even some rock climbers on the steep wall!

finally we reached the other side of mirror lake and there we found the information for the tourists we were looking all day long.

at the end of our trip we visited the large waterfall. one can go directly to the place the waterfall comes down.

directly below the waterfall.

of course these were not all pictures we took. we got lots of them at gallery.trashgroup.com and on http://www.flickr.com/photos/vitorrodrigues/sets/72057594140724423/

the landscape there is really nice! always worth a visit even though its 4 to 5 hours away.

tennis and barbacue

2006-05-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

hi folks,

usually i write the posts on sunday evening but this time it comes a little bit later. i just couldn't write it in the middle of the night because i didn't feel like it. that has to do with the cold i have caught. that troubled me the whole weekend and will continue to do so for some more days, i think. now you are probably wondering...how do you get a cold with temperatures of 20 - 30 degree celsius and no rain? i am simply not used to air conditioning. we have an air condidtioning system at work. and i believe that it is set to be pretty cold. but thats not good when you get outside and there are some 30 degrees. then somehow you can catch a cold easily.
does anybody know how to prevent against this? but i can't turn off the air conditioning and i can't lower the temperatures outside. the differences will even be greater in the summer. speaking of temperatures. in the last few days they have risen to almost 30 degree celsius with sunshine all day long. even in the nights 15 - 20 degrees. no rain.
nonetheless i played some tennis with some friends. over here there are public tennis courts and one can use them for free! even in the night one can play because the courts are equipped with lights.
yesterday evening we had a barbacue at a friends house and watched the icehockey game the san jose sharks agains the edmonton oilers. there are the playoffs right now and the sharks started very good. but yesterday they lost again against edmonton. it is some semifinal and they play best out of seven games. that mean whoever wins four games advances to the next round. the other one is out. unfortunately edmonton leads with 3 to 2 games. so they just need to win the next game. too bad, because the sharks won the first two games.
icehockey is pretty big over here. in san jose there is an arena...the hp arena where they can play but for the playoffs you won't get any ticket. they are sold in an instance.
in june there is supposed to be a car race in san jose downtown, like the formula one in monaco. but i don't know which kind of cars will drive there.
so thats it for now...i have to go to work.

have a nice week!!

seventh entry

2006-05-07T23:27:00.000-07:00

so this is the seventh entry. that means that almost as much weeks have gone by since i arrived. time is moving fast. but probably you all know that.
last week was kind of normal again. the only exceptional event that happened was a health checkup at our cafeteria. everybody could go there and let their blood test on cholesterol and glucose values. other things measured were the body fat and the bloodpressure. additionally everybody could get a massage for maybe 5-10 mins there. i'm not going to disclose any values here...everybody that needs to know knows already :)

so half of the work day was spend on this event. in other words, i didn't work that day too much ;)
today some of the volleyball team i'm playing on wednesdays went to santa cruz again. it took us one and a half hour to get there. the distance is about 25 miles. the road was jammed by traffic. it seemed that whole san jose wanted to go on the boardwalk and to the beach. finally we made it and had some fun on the beach playing beach volleyball. i don't think there are any pictures. the sand there was so hot that i eventually got a blister on the left foot. i never had this before so i can barely walk now. i hope it goes away as fast as it appeared. but i didn't get any sunburn unlike some other people that were pretty red in their faces.

so what is going to happen next week?
on friday we ordered cable tv. and tomorrow the cable guy is supposed to show up. that mean we have to work half a day from home. so at last we will have cable tv at our apartment. the tv itself we already bought some days ago.

maybe i will step up the rate of posting blog entries. but i can't promise anything.

sun and car

2006-04-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

this week nothing special happened. except for some party at work :) we had some fun talking to other people at work. the weather was nice and i got a small sunburn around the neck. here it was about 25 degree celsius in the shadow. no clouds at all. the last few days were this warm.

finally i am assigned to some "productive" project. doing testcases is also important but i like to have a challenge. and my new project this certainly is. after some weeks this will be evaluated and assessed by my manager.

today i have made two pictures of the car a lot of people were waiting for.
one can clearly see the effect of the sun onto the finish and paint of the car. but it drives good and that is all that matters. i don't care about looks.

today (sunday) we went to los gatos. unfortunately sebastian forgot the camera. los gatos is actually looking almost european. lots of buildings build of stone. most buildings here are normally build with wood so that they withstand an earthquake. there was a main street with lots of small business. quite unlike san jose, no high buildings just real nice. next time we go there there will be definately pictures.

thats about it. see you around!

the san andreas fault

2006-04-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

what is that?

now probably you are thinking, what does he want to tell me?

just that impossible things might happen.

hello my fellow readers of this blog!

the picture above was taken at our work place. yes, this is a real bat!
it happened to be there. we didn't know how it came into the office. probably the same way the mice come in...

so this little guy was just flying around in the office. of course we had nothing else to do but shoot some pictures :-)

finally, it tried to hide so we set up a box and wanted to catch the bat.

here you can see the box and the little guy who is very afraid of it. he hand on to the papers but finally we managed to get it into the box and brought it outside on the lawn.

finally in freedom again it choose not to fly immediately. instead, it checked the weather and probably couldn't believe to be free again. but after a few minutes the little guy took off...and headed for the next building.

and today we were visiting san andreas ... net the city san andreas in a well known video game but the san andreas fault. probably the most scary thing in the area. the fault is a line in which two continental plates touch each other. in 1906, where san francisco was virtually destroyed, one could actually see how and where the plates moved. a place where one can see and stand on both plates is point reyes. but the problem is...the san andreas fault is not alone...there exists another fault, the hayward fault, that goes right through berkeley and oakland. but today, sunday april 23rd, we visited point reyes though not completely. point reyes lies some miles north of san francisco. it is an island that is on the pacific plate.

here one can see the san andreas fault and its way through north california.

for some more information on point reyes and the san andreas fault, you may look here:
http://www.emporia.edu/earthsci/student/gunther1/point_reyes.html

or here:
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1127/

there are more pictures and a better description of the area. just look for san andreas fault in google ;-)

but first we had to get there. so went to san francisco and took the 101 north over the golden gate bridge again.

this picture is in case anybody wanted to see an original san francisco police department car. when you look at the cars type then it says "police interceptor". what a nice name...

after the golden gate we decided to drive along the pacific coast. so we turned on highway 1. the landscape is really beautiful.

on highway 1 to the pacific coast.

it kind of reminded me of the french provence. steep treeless hills and winding roads.

a look back into the interior.

looks almost like painted.

i can tell you, it was real windy up there. the hill lead directly into the water below. no beach or anything like it.

i told you that this year more rain had fallen than any known year before. this lead to land slides in some areas. in san jose we didn't notice anything but the highway 1 is in a bad shape. have a look at the pictures and the road we were driving:

now you know why they got so much SUVs in the area. when you look left or right on a highway then you're going to look in somebodys wheel house.

here, part of the road was simply gone.

yes, we 've already noticed that...

there were many other singn. at least they put away the earth from the slides.

but finally we were compensated by this beautiful view. we arrived at stinson beach.

the look from the other side.

the atm automat is a automat where you can withdraw money from your bank account.

guess where that is....

alps.

wrong!

stineson beach. alps and the northsea together. a sight that is very odd to me.

finally we arrived at olema, a town on highway 1.

and we arrived at the famous earthquake trail. in this area one could actually see how the earth was ripped apart from the earthquake in 1906 (see the links above for older pictures)

before 1906 sebastian and myself would have been standing togehter side by side on the picture. the earthquake ripped the fence apart. iam standing on the pacific plate and sebastian on the american plate. the rupture occured in direct line from the camera to the blue pole in the background of the picture.

of course, the fence is not the original one but it gives an impression on how far the earth moved at the earthquake. both fence parts are about 5m away.

this is the picture in the other direction.

so having seen the san andreas fault although you can not see it directly we decides to drive along the eastern part of the bay. that means we drove through berkeley and oakland. we crossed the bay over the richmond - san rafael bridge. this is a double layerd bridge. one direction above the othre direction. in our direction we were under the cars that drove into the western direction.

the richmond - san rafael bridge.

we took lots of pictures. all other pictures of this trip that you might want to see are can be found under
http://gallery.trashgroup.com/sa/

see you around.

p.s. yes i will post a picture of my new car....when i got one.

beer and contact lenses

2006-04-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

hi everybody,

this week is almost over and some funny things happened. in germany one would say this is unbelievable.
at firs i searched for a store that sells contact lenses. until then i had not known that in order to buy contact lenses one needs a prescription from a doctor. this subscription has to be renewed every year. but at firs i searched google "contact lenses san jose". the almost first link was:
Contact Lens Center
3590 Moorpark Avenue, San Jose, CA 95117.
we decided to drive by and have a look. and then we were suprised by that:

notice the car

i am not joking this is the address of the "contact lens center". the lenses must be some weapon or something.

does that look like contact lenses are sold there? NO of course, not! so we dropped that one.
at some mall we went into a store that sold glasses and there we were told everything about the subscription and so on.

the next days we were working again and earning some money. we had some hope that finally we would get some money by the weekend.

but first we applied for our californian drivers license in san jose. the application itself cost $26. so really cheap compared to germany because after we completed the application we took the written test. it was a good timing because we had the book from the californian department of motor vehicles (dmv) with all the driving rules in it. we both passed the test with one fault. and because i have an old drivers license from new jersey thats expired i don't have to do the driving test. so next week my license should be in the mail.

so you were probably wondering why "beer" is one of the title words. i tell you. one day, i believe it was friday we went into a supermarket called "safeway". there we got a sixpack of budweiser. and at the checkout i waqs asked for my identification (id). normally one would give his californian drivers license or his id with a birth date to the guy at the checkout. i gave him my new jersian drivers license. we bought beer before in a place called "albertsons" and there we had no problems. but at safeway the guy suddenly says "i have to check that because it's laminated, you could have faked that". okay, here we are two 26 year old guys suspected of faking an id. i bet the guy had not seen a drivers license from new jersey for his whole life. he went off and shortly thereafter sebastian wanted to show him his german dl or his german id. but probably they guy would not have taken that too since german ids are laminated too and he probably has no book how they look. finally the guy came back and was excusing himself...all part of the job blabla.
while we were standing and waiting for the guy to come back one of the female employees asked us where we were from. our answer should be clear. she actually wanted to visit germany and see the city of amsterdam. what city? amsterdam? yes, amsterdam and she believed that is in germany. at this time we were in a bad mood and we were laughing at her and told her that amsterdam is a city in the netherlands. she was very embarassed. sebastian almost told her to get ready for the coffee shops....

finally on saturday we got our first paychecks. that is really good because now we can look for a car to buy. this will probably the story in the next entry.

i want to conclude this week with some pictures we took right after sunset from the mountains of the valley.

looking to the west of san jose.

looking almost straight to the north.

Santa Cruz and San Francisco again

2006-04-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

hello folks,

you've probably waiting the whole week for a new post and here it is. actually nothing really interesting happened until friday. on friday we had a potluck lunch with some peoples from our company. the potluck is meeting where everybody brings some food and then everybody shares and eats the brought food. of course, a picture was taken, too. but that i'll show later. in all the whole week we went for work and did some testing there. it's going to be a very long blog entry. we have lots of photos. so take your time.

but lets start with the end of last week.
last sunday we went to santa cruz and i forgot about that the whole week. no wonder because the weather is real bad. it's raining every day. there were no two days in a row where it was not raining. sometimes the rain came heavily down as it was the case when we were in santa cruz. santa cruz is located some 20 miles south-west of san jose and is a city directly on the pacific ocean.
finally the pacific ocean...seen for the first time. well, really doesn't look different from other oceans...

some beach volleyball fields. probably build for better weather ;)

the beach is obviously not enough. there was a whole amusement park with roller coasters and others.

at santa cruz there was a boardwalk which went into the water and underneath the wooden construction sea lions were lying all over the place.

read carefully!

and there were right about it!

soon the real bad weather started. it was beginning to rain heavily shortly after this picture was taken. when i got to the car i was soaking wet. sebastian was better off since he had a jacket with a hood.

as we got to the car we decided to drive a differnt way back to san jose over the mountains.
so we came by this landscape. no question that with good weather it would have been awesome. hills as high as 800 m going directly up into the sky. almost as the alms in the alps.

suddenly one thought this is a rain forest. all green and wet.

that was our trip to santa cruz. and now two fun pictures follow:

what's odd in this picture?

this car is like 10m long. a hummer converted into a stretch limo. not the only one we saw.

today (sunday April 9th) we had to switch our rental car. give back our good old chevi and get a new one. this time we got a car that was smaller. last time we got a larger one because the had no smaller ones left.

therefore we went to san francisco international and we thought: good then lets visit the golden gate bridge. and so we did.

to avoid san francisco downtown which is more on the east side we drove right through the city.

one side of the hills. this was still south of the city of san francisco.

in the streets od san francisco. notice all the wires there.

this some kind to house type we didn't know that it existed. this is in the suburbs of san francisco.

at least somebody made his house look like it was built with stones.

to give you some impression what sf looks like outside of downtown.

by the way that is our new rental car. it is a crysler, so almost a german one ;)
you were probably waiting for a picture since i told you about the new car, weren't you?

this is what san francisco looks like in the inner but out of downtown.
the following pictures will illustrate this further.

some yellow street train going by. san francisco has not just it's famous cable cars.

finally the san francisco bay came into sight.

looks nice and very steep. and it is steep. we drove all the way down.

this is the entry to the golden gate bridge. the northbound entry is free but when one goes south it costs 5 dollars.

and here we go....

we took several pictures on the bridge itself. we went to almost half of the bridge on feet.
as we were on the bridge the weather had mercy and it cleared and the sun came out. but not for long. as we went back home rain came pouring down again. we are now used to that....
but just see and enjoy.

these are the small steel cables that extend from the pavement up to the big and thick cable that crosses the bridge.
those cables were about 20-30 cm in diameter and there were always four of them in one location.

then we went to the hills north of the bridge itself. there we made these photos.

i want to finish this blog entry with the following picture:

but before you leave see the picture of the potluck. some employees after lunch:
(hopefully they don't mind being on this page)

for all other pictures (especially san francisco and the golden gate) that haven't made it into the blog entry you may visit sebastians gallery at
http://gallery.trashgroup.com/

apartments and san francisco

2006-04-02T11:23:00.000-07:00

after you've read a lot about the first days i am now going to tell you how the new apartment we've got looks like.

the first picture shows sebastians room:

the second picture my room:

hello my sweetheart, you're going to be living here when you come and visit me *kiss*

you'll see that we almost have no equipment and furniture in our rooms yet. the matrasses and that stuff we bought at ikea in palo alto.
fortunately the kitchen hardware we don't have to buy as well as the cleaner and dryer.

the kitchen:

and at last our dining and living room. I spare you the sight of our bathrooms ;)

and finally we went to san francisco by train. here at san jose the is a small train called lightrail. in germany one qould say its a "strassenbahn". additionally there is the caltrain. this train run from gilroy (a town south of san jose) to san francisco.

by the first look we thought it was a cattle waggon. the upper level is real limited in space. one larger person would get stuck in the stairs.

without words

one of the stopping points of the caltrain

this is a national guard depot the train drove by. on the left side there is sign probably designed to win new recruits...

a few seconds later....

finally arriving at downtown san francisco. this picture shows just the east of downtown.

when we arrived there and walked into downtown everything was full of cars and the streets were congested.

as you see on the next pictures san francisco is build on hills and the streets are really steep. when you walk on one of these streets then you'll get easily out of breath.

we went all the way from caltrain station south of market street to pier 39 through chinatown.
this shows a picture of chinatown where lots of flea markets and jewelers.

and at pier 39 we took a picture of the californian sea lions. for some reason there were just lying there and doing nothing.

the next two pictures show sebastian and myself. in the background there ist the golden gate bridge.

and, alcatraz, every good tourist should have seen ;)

the "bad" guy and the "good" guy :)

the first days

2006-03-30T22:56:00.000-08:00

everthing starts with the company and the people that works behind these walls....

a friend, sebastian, and myself are becoming interns at the big blue company in the united states. originally we are from germany. we arrived in san francisco at march 27th. at san francisco we rented a car (seen right, ours is NOT the white one ;) ).

our car

in SJ driving around

finally we arrived at san jose, california three days ago. fortunately we could stay at another friends home.
the next day we tried to get a home on ourselfs and soon the words credibility and deposit became our nightmares. since we are germans we needed to get adjusted to this.
but soon this was getting ridiculus. i have a contract for a mobile with a big magenta-colored company and here they refused a contract because i am not credibile. now obviously i am credible in germany but in here you aren't. they wanted a deposit over 500 bucks. either you have tons of money or you are a us citizen. otherwise you can't do anything.
Either way i have heard that establishing a good credability takes almost the whole life. but when you have credit or credit nobody tells you. the checkup on the credibility is some remote program that the firms run and then the output is some number or something. this is all real mysterious.
anyway we found, after two days of search, an apartment and hopefully everything (like the telephone and dsl) will get set up nicely.

another thing that struck at us is that at some malls people were just hanging out and doing nothing. there were just standing there and most of those people seemed to be mexican. that reminded us of the game "gta: san andreas" where the gang members were also hanging out and doing nothing. so we were giving them the name homies. in some forum somebody said they were waiting for work but for what work? i think nobody would come up to the group of those people and give them something to do. its real weird. the homies

the next thing that had our attention was the pure size of some cars and how they looked. we guessed that probably half of them wouldn't stand a inspection by the german tüv. huge cars, tons of foils on the windows of the cars.

the huge cars

really surprising was the fact that in one moment you are in some kind of, well not too good, neighborhood and in the next you are downtown with skyscrapers, all in 100 meters.

downtown

and neighborhood

when renting an apartment you will need a deposit and since we are not credible we have to pay a fulls month's rent as deposit. normally that would be between $600 and $800 for a two bedroom apartment. this desposit has to be some kind of special check, for example a cashiers check. fortunately we were able to set up a checkin bank account (now whatever that means, the name doesn't say anything but our earned money we be administered there or is supposed to be.). while this we got taken pictures from us for the atm card (thats in germany an ec card). but sebastian's picture wouldn't come out right somehow. the camera was defect. then we wanted the special check and there the printer for the check didn't work right from the terminal the bank employee was working on. what does that mean?

however the biggest disappointsment was the weather. we expected sun and we got rain as you may see on the pictures. everybody expects sun and high temperatures but its raining all day at least once since we are here....

we hope that changes real quick and probably when the sun is finally coming out we will have to work and sit in the building. as usual.

tomorrow we finally move into our own apartment and we won't have internet access from there right now. so hopefully everything works out as planned.