Monthly Archives: January 2003

Thursday, 23 January 2003

Staircase Problems

They did deliver David's new mattress on Sunday. Only problem was that the boxspring wouldn't fit through the quite narrow staircase. They couldn't get it through no matter how hard they tried. Makes you wonder how they managed to get the old boxspring into the apartment. Anyway, they'll deliver a boxspring in two parts tonight. I hope they'll somehow manage to get the old one out...

On Monday we went shopping with Brina and Pooh. We got a wireless access point plus router for David (which now enables us to be online with more than one computer at the same time). Then we went to Target which is Brina's and Pooh's nemesis because they always spend more money there than they plan to :) It was fun though and I also finally found black & white film for my SLR camera and we found some CDs for cheap. The rest of the day was spent installing the wireless access point and playing games. Wireless internet is great. When I have the money I want to have this for my notebook as well.

On Tuesday Michi and I took the bus out to Market street to go shopping for a jacket for Michi. He had only brought his winter jacket which is too warm for the temperatures here but going out without jacket is a little too cold on some days. We found a very nice reduced price snowboard jacket for him in a store Pooh had recommended. We also browsed the Rand McNally store on Market which has a very nice collection of travel literature and of course maps and travel guides. I bought a Lonely Planet San Francisco guide, a couple of maps and a book by Bill Bryson I've been wanting to read. Later we met up with Brina and David and took the bus home together.

Yesterday Brina didn't go to work so we went to a nice cafe nearby to play games. Later we walked through Golden Gate Park for a bit to feed ducks and watch the buffalo. The ducks were pretty cool. They'd even take the breadcrumbs from my hand. The squirrels unfortunately didn't seem to like our bread.

Okay, gotta run and take a shower now. We want to walk to the Palace of the Legion of Honor today to look at some paintings and maybe hike around the surrounding park for a bit if there's no rain.

  Posted by Edda at 21:10 CET  |    0 comments

Monday, 20 January 2003

Fun

Just a short update:
On Friday Michi and I took a walk through Golden Gate Park to the Ocean and back. The weather was great, sunny, sweatshirt temperature, very springy. We don't have weather like this in Berlin until May. In the evening we met up with our friends Brina, David and Pooh to have very good Thai food and then play games.

Saturday we first walked to Land's End and through the park there. The park and the view on the Golden Gate Bridge from there is beautiful. Then we took the bus to Fillmore Street and spent some time there. Did some shopping later and then met with Jesse and Linnea for dinner and then games. That was a very fun evening and it was very good to finally meet Jesse who I had previously only talked to online.

Today we went to the San Francisco zoo to see the nutty penguins and other animals. It's a very nice zoo. Very nice landscaping. I do pitty some of the animals in zoos though. This afternoon we'll hang around and play more games while waiting for David's new mattress to get delivered (they even deliver on a Sunday here. Cool!).

Just realized that this entry shows up in Central European Time and not in Pacific Standard Time. But I'm too lazy to change that now. I'll probably do it later.

  Posted by Edda at 01:39 CET  |    4 comments

Friday, 17 January 2003

Made it!

My first day in San Francisco! Woohoo! The weather is great! The sun is shining and it’s really warm outside (compared with the temperatures we’re used to at this time of year). So I won’t talk for long and go out with Michi to show him the Golden Gate Bridge and the Ocean. Wheee! It’s so great being here.

The flight was pretty uneventful except that I got the only seat in the whole plane where the video screen was broken. Actually the whole seat was kinda broken, the table had a heavy slant to the right and the right arm rest didn’t line up with the one next to it either. But fortunately the seat next to mine was empty (the whole plane was pretty empty fortunately) so I just switched seats. In Philadelphia we missed our connecting flight because we left Frankfurt an hour late because of strikes and in Philadelphia we were first held up at immigration, then at the baggage claim and then at the security thingy (we waited for over 30 minutes because they had to handle the people from three international flights at once). We got rebooked on the next flight to SF 2 hours later though, so that was not such a big problem. In SF our friends David and Brina already waited for us and everything went smoothly. Even our luggage arrived with us :)

On the weekend we’re thinking about going to the zoo watch the nutty penguins:

<< Brainwashed by six newcomers from Ohio, 46 penguins at the San Francisco Zoo have abandoned their burrows and embarked on a great migration —

except their pool is not exactly the coast of South America and there’s really nowhere for them to go.

“We’ve lost complete control,” said Jane Tollini, their mystified keeper. “It’s a free-for-all in here. After 18 years of doing this job, these birds are making mincemeat of me.”

They’ve all been swimming since Christmas Eve, whirling around the pool like tuxedos in a washing machine. No one knows why they started or when they’ll stop. All they know is that the zoo’s Penguin Island has turned into a very chaotic place.

“Round and round they go,” Tollini said. “They almost make me dizzy.” >>
From SFGate.com

Song for today: California - by Phantom Planet :)

  Posted by Edda at 19:56 CET  |    1 comments

Thursday, 16 January 2003

Gone

It's 6 in the morning and I'll leave for the airport now. They said in the news yesterday that travelers should expect delays today because of strikes. Damn them. Why do they have to strike today? Anyway, I hope we'll somehow manage to get our connecting flight in Philadelphia or at least *some* flight to San Francisco. I'll post again when I'm there...

  Posted by Edda at 06:01 CET  |    1 comments

Tuesday, 14 January 2003

Lego Star Destroyer

Saturday night Michi and I finally assembled my Lego Star Destroyer. It took us close to 10 hours (we started around midnight). We let my webcam take a picture every five seconds and made a stop motion video out of the pictures (over 7000 of them). The video turned out really cool. It's a little over 4 minutes long and you can download it here. There's two different qualities available:

Please also use the mirrors for downloading to reduce some of the load to my server. Thanks!

Medium / Mirror 1 / Mirror 2 / Mirror 3 / TORRENT - 12MB: Okay quality

Huge / Mirror 1 / Mirror 2 / Mirror 3 / TORRENT - 32 MB: Original webcam resolution in very decent quality

Milo did a version with sound.

Sean put up a mirror for all three videos.

Please use the torrents if possible. Thank you!

The videos are encoded in divx5 which you can download here if you don't have it already. I hope everybody will enjoy this as much as we did.

Mirrors kindly provided by the good people of CyborgCow - Cows of a different color and Geekfury and Rianjs.net and 01792.org.

  Posted by Edda at 04:10 CET  |    118 comments

Monday, 13 January 2003

Night? Day?

My daily schedule is currently totally fucked up. I'm already living on California time and sleep by day and am awake at night. I'm such a night owl. I hope I'll get back to a more normal schedule when I'm in San Francisco.

Now I'll have a farewell dinner with my roommates. This is going to be yummy. Be back later with a neat surprise for all you Lego and/or Star Wars fans out there.

  Posted by Edda at 20:07 CET  |    2 comments

Thursday, 9 January 2003

Game List

Michi and I just compiled a list of all the games we own on boardgamegeek. That’s quite a bunch of games (exactly 100 at the moment). And I’m sure we forgot a couple of games. It’s strange that when you want to decide which game to play it always seems you don’t have enough games and if you actually count them you realize it’s not that few…

  Posted by Edda at 06:16 CET  |    1 comments

In the freezer

Quote from the weather guy on TV: "Today it's warmer in your freezer than outside". How nice. And he's right. It really is cold outside. But there's snow so I won't complain :)

  Posted by Edda at 04:38 CET  |    0 comments

Monday, 6 January 2003

Kill Bill

Just watched the Kill Bill trailer. It's the new Quentin Tarantino movie and features two of my favorite actresses, Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu. This gotta be good. The trailer makes me bounce up and down.

  Posted by Edda at 07:23 CET  |    4 comments

There and back again

I'm finally back in Berlin. We drove through the snow (yes it finally snows in Germany), the car totally stuffed with just enough space left for three people to sit and one of us had to hold a box in his lap for the whole trip. It's all because Michi and I had to bring the suitcases to Berlin that we'll need for our trip to San Francisco. We'll fly to SF in mid-January and stay for three months. I will have internet access for most of the time so I guess I'll transform this into a travel blog to keep everybody up to date. Until we leave there's still so much to do though. I don't even know if I'll manage to build my Star Destroyer before I leave....

  Posted by Edda at 03:58 CET  |    1 comments

Thursday, 2 January 2003

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I hope everybody made it safely to the new year and there were no cases of severe alcohol poisoning ;) I had lots of fun with some of my good old friends here in Karlsruhe. We of course started the evening with "Dinner for One", kind of like a German New Year's Eve tradition. Then we proceeded to make sushi which turned out to be pretty tasty and even looked pretty good :) I had lots of fun and it was really good seeing those people again. Yesterday was mostly spent with hanging around, watching part of the LotR I making of and dozens of "Malcom in the Middle" episodes and playing games. Fun!

  Posted by Edda at 15:44 CET  |    3 comments