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Under the sun

This is long overdue. As you probably guessed, I have been fairly busy in the past weeks. Things are finally settling down a bit and I have a bit more free time now. So why not use that free time to tell you a bit more about what has been going on?

So I moved to California. That's basically what has been going on. The amount of administrative bullshit before I could actually leave France was mind-boggling. It was no better after my arrival here. In these situations, there is only so much you can do in advance. And the very little that could be done beforehand, I didn't need because of my previous visits to the United States. Thankfully, my installation here was mostly uneventful, and things unfolded rather smoothly.

My first task was to find a place to live. I already crashed at Louis & Céline's apartment for a full month back in spring, I didn't want to abuse of their hospitality once again by staying too long. I quickly found a place not far from downtown Sunnyvale in an apartment residence. It's not as fancy as it could have been, but the 700-sqft one-bedroom unit is more than enough for me. The apartment is on the ground floor, and I have a nice, partly covered patio, which is always nice to hang out with the laptop outside while it's still warm. I need to put a couple of plants or small in-pot trees in it too.

I'm still in the process of buying my furniture. The living room is now almost done, with the exception of some more decorative material – the walls are still empty. The dining area is still very much empty to the exception of a bookshelf and all the cardboard boxes from the new IKEA furniture that I need to throw away. I have the basic kitchen stuff for preparing (and eating) my own meals, although I still miss a few things like a microwave and all the basic food! The bedroom is still completely empty for now, I still haven't decided what type of bed I'll put in there. I'll probably go hunting for a nice bed next month, for now the sofa-bed is fine.

The second most important thing to do after my arrival was to find a car. You literally and figuratively don't get very far without a car in the South Bay. It took me a while to go through the dealerships and Craigslist ads, but I ended up finding an incredibly good deal. I'm now the lucky owner of a second-hand 2002 Audi A4 3.0L V6 quattro, 99k miles, in the well known Audi's Denim Blue Pearl color.

As soon as I arrived in California, I was back to work from the office. I didn't had much to do as first as the experiment as was working on before leaving had produced the expected results. But soon after my arrival, we moved forward with the project and things are ramping up nicely. If you look close enough, you might even see my stupid self jabbering in front of a camera for all the intertubes to see! My shipment from France also finally arrived about ten days ago, and I could rebuild my workstation which is making my work a lot easier, and more confortable too. I could also start filling-up my bookshelves with my books and my stuff from France. Feels much more like home!

Other miscellaneous paperwork included getting a voice+text+data plan for my phone (I kept the same number, +1-408-310-0595), broadband internet at the apartment, dealing with the US employee paperwork and benefits enrollment, applying for a California drivers license, etc. Hopefully most of that is behind me now, I'm starting to get fed up of filling in my first name, last name, address, social security number, passport number and what not!

Life is basically finding its pace here in sunny sunny California, although the past two weekends didn't have very good weather. Why does it have to rain only in the weekends? Anyway, I met everyone back, and more, which means that when I'm not working, sleeping or building IKEA furniture, I'm hanging out with friends. I started working out again too, going running once or twice a week. I need to go back to the climbing gym as well.

Alright folks, that's all for today!

Phoenix

At this point, you guys must be wondering what the heck I've been up to in the last two months. Although I didn't talk about it here, you probably know that I spent a full month in the US starting March 22nd. No need to say this was a total blast, and I can only thank all my friends there for making this trip so eventful.

Being back in California also meant reviving our afterwork tradition, made even more easier here now that Louis and Céline (who kindly hosted me during my stay) live just across the street from the Faultline brewery. From a quick beer to let some steam off after a day at work to a full evening spent there, it's always very fun times. So guess what we did on the evening I arrived?

One other perk of being in the United States is that you don't have to wait six months or more for a movie to be shown in theaters. In the first week alone, we went twice to the movies: She's out of my league (54% RT), which was nice, funny, but altogether very much forgettable, and How to train your dragon (98% RT), probably one of the funniest and cutest animation movie I saw since Ratatouille — without beating it though. Early April, we also went see Green Zone (54% RT), by the director of the Bourne trilogy and with Jason Bourne. No need to say the fruit never falls far from the tree in this "Matt Damon against a government's conspiracy"-type of story. I didn't like how it was filmed, but it's still a good political thriller and action movie. As long as you stay far enough from the screen. Yes, even further than when you went see the Bourne Ultimatum! Finally, we saw Kick-Ass (76% RT), a "violent comic tale of wannabe superheroes". Generally a very graphic and violent movie, funny or touchy at times, that really lives up to its title. Oh, and it's not because Nicolas Cage plays in it that the whole movie is bad. Just his part ;-)

This year's weather in California was apparently messed up by a particularly strong El-Niño, so we had lots of rain. Lots and lots of rain. Well, by Californian standards at least, so I guess it wasn't that bad. We were particularly lucky most of the time, and my first week-end there was no exception so we gathered our French expats' group around our first barbecue of the season. We didn't take any group pictures, so I'm just shamelessly stealing Céline's montage of Julien's portraits of some of us. We then spent Sunday afternoon at the Japanese Tea Garden of San Francisco, where most of the trees and flowers had bloom, ending the day by a nice drive down from the city by 280 which had even more spectacular scenery than usual since all the hills were still green, thanks to the extra rain during the winter.

Louis and Céline's residence has a gym and a swimming-pool. So on the next week, I started working out, running and swimming again, which felt really great. It's amazing how much energy you get from exercising! It also helps sleep better, something I really needed at the time. This got me in shape for another amazing week-end: on my second week-end in the US, I drove up to Santa Rosa to Ben (colleague/friend) and Kristy's house for a wine tasting tour in Sonoma County. It was a really nice week-end, we were very lucky again with the weather and I had an amazing time with Ben and Kristy. Something tells me I'll be back up there more often than not to visit, hike, or simply replenish my soon-to-be mini wine cellar!

The next week showed a bit more routine, but I sticked with my sports schedule. I even went rock climbing, something I haven't done in years! All this got me in shape for the week-end, where Louis and I went snowboarding at Alpine Meadows thanks to the Bay Area Ski Bus! I don't think I ever went to a ski resort that late in the season, but thanks again to this strange winter in the US, the mountains got lots of snow until the beginning of April, so we had fairly good snow conditions. Louis also just bought a ContourHD camera, so we brought it along and got some nice footage throughout the day. I now need to go through all of it and make a montage.

The week after that was just plain crazy. I didn't get so little sleep, for so long, in quite a while. It started on Sunday night with diner in San Francisco with Louis, Thomas and his boss, Michael and ended with my departure from the US ten days later. The beginning of the week was occupied by the Embedded Linux Conference in Japantown, San Francisco, which unfortunately required to wake up way, way earlier than I generally like. Thankfully, it was all very much worth it: the conference was excellent as always. I got to attend a lot of interesting talks, and meet (or meet again) members of the Embedded Linux and kernel communities. The conference ended Wednesday night with Chris DiBona's (Google) keynote, giving away Nexus One to all attendees. I sure didn't expect to walk out of ELC with the best Android phone currently on the market, unlocked, in my pocket. Unika (which was also attending ELC) and I then drove to Oakland after the conference to meet Louis, Céline, Catherine, Julien and Stephen at the Oracle Arena for the Muse concert! Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome this day was :) I never saw Muse live before, and they really did rock our socks off. I'll let you be judge with Céline's pictures of the show:

On Thursday morning, I attended a first-aid and CPR class at MontaVista, which meant I couldn't sleep in even with the Muse concert the night before. But I'm really glad I took this class: it was really informative and now I know what to do if first-aid is required. We also covered various topics like allergic reactions, strokes, diabetes, being careful with blood and AED training — which can be, quite literally, life saving. Then on Thursday night, we went clubbing, with David Guetta mixing a set at the crowded Ruby Skye in downtown San Francisco, from which Catherine and I only got back at first dawn.

The week-end after that was again very sunny and warm. Originally, we wanted to go zip-lining in San Francisco on Saturday morning. But upon arriving at the Embarcadero around 8am, the line was already formed, and all tickets given away — even though the event opens only at 10am! So we decided to visit the farmer's market at the Ferry Building nearby instead and enjoy a succulent organic pancakes breakfast with great Californian weather:

On Sunday, most of the "group" gathered again for our annual Angel Island day. Angel Island is an island (duh!) in the SF Bay, located just in front of Tiburon, north of the city. The entire island is part of the Angel Island State Park, and is a great hiking spot for easy half-day or day hikes. It also features a small mountain (really a hill): Mount Caroline Livermore, at 240m elevation, which offers stunning, all-around views at the Bay, including the three bridges. We drove up to Tiburon, took the ferry to the island and spent the day there, hiking, joking, having fun and craving for some shade... as you can see from the pictures below, clouds weren't exactly invited to the party!

After all these adventures, the last remaining thing for me was to get back home. And this unpronounceable Icelandic volcano certainly didn't make it easy! I got home one day late, which all things considered is not that bad compared to the trouble my brother went through to get back to France after ELC!

Et pendant ce temps, à Vera Cruz...

Pendant ce temps, il fait sûrement beau, à Vera Cruz. Ce qui est pas vraiment le cas de Belfort, où la neige à a peine le temps de fondre qu'il en retombe un quinzaine de centimètres. Pour le plus grand plaisir des yeux, mais pour notre plus grand malheur dès qu'il s'agit de mettre le nez dehors.

Toute cette neige m'a donné envie de descendre quelques pistes, et c'est ce que nous avons fait il y a une dizaine de jours avec Al_Hop et Fossa à la Bresse, une petite station des Vosges pas loin au nord de Belfort. Ça fait du bien de remettre les pieds sur une planche de snowboard, s'éclater (figurativement, et malheureusement aussi parfois littéralement) dans la poudreuse, et être grisé par la vitesse. Seul bémol de la journée : le brouillard. Il avait beau donner un côté particulièrement mystique et flippant aux trajets en téléskis et télésièges, ne pas voir la piste devant soi et sous ses pieds ne rend pas toujours les choses faciles !

Du coup, on y retourne dans 10 jours pour remettre ça (avec Al_Hop, Mee, A6, et peut-être d'autres!), en espérant qu'il fera beau cette fois pour profiter des beaux paysages vosgiens :)

À part ces aventures neigeuses, j'avais la semaine dernière mes derniers examens pour mon M2R AII à l'UHA. La semaine a été un peu éprouvante avec tous ces aller-retours à Mulhouse, surtout pour les examens à 8h ! A part un examen de réseau sur l'IGMP que je ne connaissais pas (du coup, je me suis renseigné), tout le reste c'est a priori très bien passé. J'attends les résultats avec impatience !

Pour finir, je serai ce week-end au FOSDEM. C'est la première fois que je peux y aller, j'ai hâte de découvrir cet évènement et d'y retrouver la communauté du libre. Si vous y passez aussi, n'hésitez pas à me le faire savoir, qu'on puisse se croiser !