Louise's thoughts

Back in Copenhagen

Being back in Copenhagen is okay. I have already seen almost all the important people, have gone the right places and eaten the good food. I moved into my newly acquired apartment yesterday and enjoy it tremendously. It is located down town and I secretly hope that it will improve my social life because here people can stop by for just half an hour if they are in the neighborhood. Of course I will not be home that much because I have teaching and a little PhD thesis to write. But it is a nice thought.

The 'back in Copenhagen' hit me hard already the first day. Everything is contrasting California, here I wait for the bus for 10 minutes every morning (can't wait to get a bicycle) I hold the door for people who don't even look me in the eyes, not to talk about thanking me (my mom says it's a city phenomenon, rather than culture) and the cars don't stop when I try to cross the street at a pedestrian walk (I am really scared that my California walking habits are going to get me run over one of these days). At my university, the Dean was the first one to welcome me back when I went to get coffee and my desk was filled with an office mate's papers. My PC didn't really work but already the second day I had lunch with two people that I had been excited about seeing again. So being back in Copenhagen is not that bad at all.

Airports

I hate airports. To me airports are sad, depressing and too big (I always end up walking too far with my carryon, wishing that I had brought less, but I usually don't have a choice because my laptop and camera needs to go in there and Vogue and Wired are heavy magazines but essential readings for plane rides). I hate airports because I always have to say goodbye to people that I like, places that I like and lifestyles that I got used to. But today, it wasn't bad at all due to me almost missing my flight, which distracted me and left me more stressed than sad. When I got to Seattle, my Copenhagen flight was about two hours delayed so I went to the bar and had a Bloody Mary and some nachos. And I didn't even get sad as I SMSed with an American friend of mine whom I will miss a lot. But as I was increasingly surrounded by male travelers, I got to think of a point that I had made to a travel friend about a month earlier in Washington Dulles airport: Why is it that mainly men travel? Look around in the security line, there are about 90 percent men and the only women are the ones traveling with babies (well, true, some men travel with babies too) or together with other people. Business travel is basically male dominated, so much that the security officers always look oddly at me when I pick out a laptop from my bag; they didn't expect me to be a professional traveler. My friend at the time responded sarcastically (he is great like that, one of the reasons I like him): well, women are supposed to be home taking care of the kids, didn't you know that Louise?. Well, I guess I didn't get that memo, I replied. I think I will never get that memo.

Last Night in Irvine

Last night was my last night in Irvine. Despite the place' (I won't even call it a city) oddity and lack of night life, I have had several occasions of real fun, because it is so much more fun to hate something together than hate something alone. And when you can't really do anything in Irvine, you either go somewhere else (snowboarding) or try to have fun anyway (road trip to LA). Or you just hang out with fellow grad students and watch movies.

As usual when it comes to my travel escapades, I meet some of the most interesting and nice people right before I have to leave. Or people realize that I am leaving and start thinking I am more interesting. The same thing happened last night, and I wondered if I should perhaps next time, plan on staying a little longer than 6 months. Next time I go somewhere, it will be for at least a year. That way I will hopefully make some friends that I don't have to hug goodbye and just assume that I will perhaps see sometime at a conference somewhere. I was trying not to cry as I drove home through the quiet Friday night in Irvine, but didn't really succeed. And I knew exactly what it was. It was the frustration over once more having to leave a place, with people I liked, habits of what to do, knowing where the good coffee shops are and just generally having a life. Although I knew that I had a life in Denmark, a very good one even, it was hard to look forward when leaving so much behind. At the end of the night, I thought about how I should remember to appreciate every place I go, no matter if when I have to leave again.

Star Trek

There I was, in my local Star Bucks, with my Chanel sunglasses in my hair, drinking a non-fat Valencia orange latte, typing away on my Vaio. Nothing was out of the ordinary this partly cloudy morning as two guys a few meters away from my table laughingly asked me if I watched Star Trek. I smiled and said sure. 'What race is Spock?' he continued and after two and a half seconds thinking, I replied 'Vulcan'. I knew my Star Trek facts, this was an easy one.

They both laughed and it turned out that he was teasing the other one because of his spiky ears and I jokingly agreed that he looked a bit like a vulcan. Although this is totally speculatory, I assumed that they had just picked me because I was there (there were only about 5 other people in the shop) and seemed approachable, NOT because I looked geeky with my laptop and surely would know about Star Trek. I actually know embarrassingly much about Star Trek; although the Next Generation is my favorite series and Voyager and Enterprise share a second, I have even picked up a lot from the Old Series through just chatting with other Trekkies. So of course I know who Spock is. And although I will have to give up my Star Trek and Sushi Wednesdays when I go back to Denmark, I will keep on liking the Star Trek world just as much as I always have.

Water

After about a couple of weeks of drinking American water I usually stop tasting the chlorine that is added and start liking the water just as well as the hard Danish water. I am usually only reminded of the great difference when I have visitors from Denmark and when we have to get bottled water because they don't want to drink it, even thought I reassure them it will taste just fine after a while. Fact that after a year and a half I cannot taste the chlorine at all and I know that I have to get use to the Danish water when I get home; it tastes metallic for a while.

I always wondered why there was such a difference in taste and why the American water had to have so much chlorine added that you can actually taste it. This week, on my road trip I finally got an answer. At least for the State of California's water. Here water is transported through huge aquaducts and because only little parts of Northern California have a natural water source, it has to travel far, both to the Bay Area and the LA area. It is transported openly and to keep bacteria and micro organisms from building up, a mix between chlorine and ammoniac, chloramines are added as one of the last parts of the disinfection process. In Denmark on the other hand, the ground is mostly calcium based and because we have plenty of water, it is pretty much pumped up and lead directly (and most importantly enclosed) to our taps. That diminishes the need for adding chemicals.

All this I was informed of in this wonderful exhibition area ('visitor center') at Pyramid Lake, where I stopped on my way back from Oakland. It was very informative and very empty, perhaps due to the fact that they didn't serve food but only water. And I guess I just have to get used to the Danish non-chemical water taste when I return.

Road Trip

The last few days I have been on the road, driven more than 800 miles back and forth between LA and Oakland, to visit my aunt and uncle one last time before I leave for Denmark. It was wonderful to see them, short but nice. My aunt is 81 but we spent time looking at yarn and shopping nail polish and lipstick. She is one of the most cheerful people I know and even though we have only known each other personally for about 4 years, she is incredible hospitable every time I go visit them or need a place to stay for a few days in the Bay Area. I usually go to San Francisco when I am there (it is my 3rd favorite city in the whole world), but this time I was so exhausted from paper writing, celebration and well, driving up there, that I just hung out with my aunt and uncle all day. I had a great time, because sometimes older people are just so blunt and honest, telling stories of back when it was okay to call a shovel a shovel (admitted, that is a Danish expression, which sounds weird in English, but I believe a bit of mixing is in order since my aunt is half Danish). My aunt was a flight attendant in the forties and fifties, back when they were actually nurses and mainly there for safety reasons. She vividly tells about when they went over the mountains and they had to serve the passengers oxygen; this was before pressure cabins. My uncle was a sea captain for the US Marine and served during several wars before going into the juke box business! I have to admit that Betty and Fred are like the grandparents I never had.

Driving up I5 all alone is quite boring and I was glad that Prince, Kylie, Pink and Britney kept me company. After getting out of LA's packed traffic on the 405, the freeway decrease to only two lanes, which immediately gave me flashbacks to the motorways in Denmark. The good part was that Americans are far friendlier drivers than Danes and I only once had one of those '3 feet behind you' maniacs drive up and trying to push me. Fact was that I was already driving 85, which I find quite fast, and there were several other cars right in front of me, so that was just the speed of traffic. After him aggressively passing all of us on the inside (when he finally had room), he continued out towards the horizon, only to be hitting heavy traffic on the 580 about half an hour later where I caught up with him. So much for speeding and annoying the rest of us. But as I mentioned, there are few of these drivers here, most American drivers are patient and considerate and I find that it is contagious. I always let people in and I always keep a good distance to the next car, not only to keep him in a comfortable mood but also because the chance of hitting a car is negatively correlated to the distance you keep to it.

On my way back two days later, I stopped at one of the larger travel centers (they are actually called that!) that featured a Star Bucks, nice sunshine and a gorgeous view of the mountains. I was sitting enjoying my ice-mocha, checking my email on my cell phone and this nice man casually chatted with me on his way out to the car. It made me in such a good mood and I realized that this is what I will miss the most about the US. The fact that people just talk to you, and that they are sincere about it. This guy was clearly on a road trip from A to B as well and just needed to make sure his voice still worked. And in the process I found out that mine was still there despite hours of screaming together with Robbie Williams.

Girlfriends

I was at the gym the other morning, working out before going to work because then it is over and done with and I can stay working in my office as long as I want to. I go to the gym 2-3 times a week to keep the pain in my hands and arms away, it is the only way my Carpal Tunnel syndrome won't bother me too much. This also means that whenever I go traveling somewhere, getting a hotel with a gym is an essential thing and half my suitcase contains gym clothes and sneakers. The rest of the suitcase will of course be books and high heels, some of my books have been all over with me, which is starting to show (not good when it is other people's books).

My gym is one of LA's fancy places because I like the clean and roomy atmosphere and because they have towel service, the best invention since the treadmill. But it also means that all of Orange County's finest ladies are there, brushing their hair, making up their faces every morning. This is the only gym I know that has more hairdryers than showers and they are always in use.

I was drying my hair and putting on mascara when I overheard 3-4 women chit-chatting about their common problems. They talked about laundry and how they had to do at least two loads twice a week and how they hated when their maid went into the hamper, but it was okay if she took care of the dry-cleaning. I was quite fascinated by their talk, but not only because I do laundry something like once every second week and really don't have much clothes that needs to be either dry-cleaned or ironed (the fact that I have never owned an iron myself, might have something to do with this). I never had a maid either but that was really not what made me gloomy eyed. No, it was the fact that I realized I have no American girlfriends. I have numerous American guy friends, ex-flings/future-flings and professional acquaintances (some even belong to more than one category), who are all great and incredibly nice but no American girlfriends. And that was why I was so fascinated by their chat, because it made me think that I was totally missing out on something here. I had never really talked makeup, boys, TV or even cooking with another American girl on a regular basis. Being in computer science, definitely had something to do with it but I also realized that girlfriends are hard to get. Real girlfriends are something that takes years to find and you have to nourish such relationship. I have a lot of Danish friends, but of real girlfriends, the ones you can call up late at night because of a broken heart, the ones who you can just be in the same room with without having to talk, the ones you can confess your secret crushes to, I have only few. I could count four on the top of my head, but I knew that are were all exactly what I just described; girlfriends I can call up just to talk to even from California, totally ignoring my phone bill, girlfriends who will not email me for a month, but who I know thinks about me and look forward to seeing me. The ones who I sometimes cry over getting emails from because I just miss their company so much that I feel so alone even though I am surrounded by nice people. But I am not surrounded by my girlfriends here. They are all in Denmark. And I guess besides my two brothers, those are the ones I look forward to seeing the most, the minute I get to Copenhagen.

My favorite place

Right now this is my favorite place in the whole world. This is where I sit and write at night with candles and coffee. This is where I write my papers, my diary and my blog. This is the place that I will miss the most when I go back to Denmark in 10 days.

Writing papers

As you probably know I am writing papers right now. I have to admit that the 's' is what makes this more crazy than usual. Somehow they decided to place the paper deadline for my core-conference and my newly adopted 3rd favorite conference within a week of each other. And since I am this ambitious, hardworking, mad woman, I plan to submit to both of them. Where the two first describing characteristics are my own, the latter is actually a term that I have been called twice this week by the same person. I secretly wish, at least one of the times, he would have used one of the two first characteristics, but considering who he is, I take both as a compliment. So I am writing two papers at the same time. Actually three, but that is a different story.

After a week of franticly writing, erasing, re-capturing data and writing some more and then restructure the whole thing, I am now not only the happy owner of an almost finished paper submission, I also learned how paper styles differ vastly among researchers, even within the same field. When I was at Berkeley I learned one style of paper writing, which definitely paid off, because I got two good publications out of it, but this week taught me that there is never one way of doing things. To sum up the types of papers one can write for a conference, there are roughly two styles: The 'look what we did, see what we found, so we can conclude this' and the 'this is what we should consider so we did that, this is what we found and these are the consequences for the field that these findings have'. Instead of mentioning names I will call the first approach the Berkeley paper and the second one the Irvine paper.

The Berkeley paper follows a strict line of presenting the system/case study/architecture/algorithm that was developed or conducted. First we say what we will be saying, then we say the things we need to say and then we will say what we just said. This paper also have a strict order of sections such as introduction, related work, method, results, discussion, summary and/or conclusion, future work and acknowledgments. In the beginning of each section the purpose of the section is stated ('we say this in this section because of this and this') and in the end of each section, a summery of how far we are in the argument is stated ('this is what we have seen so far, this is what this section was about'). The Berkeley paper is therefore really easy to read and it is good for presenting systems that you have built or case studies with a limited array of findings.

The Irvine paper on the other hand tries to tell a story. We don't want to give away the punch line before the end and it builds up an argument before concluding on eminent points. The paper does not need any predetermined sections other than introduction and conclusion. The introduction is an appetizer to what we will be saying and what we have done. If it fits the purpose a review of some relevant literature is a section of its own, if not, the related literature is intertwined with the real material. No matter what, the material is continuously related to other literature. If a study has been conducted or a system developed this is presented, not unlike the Berkeley model, but where raw findings are essential for the Berkeley paper, the material can be more spread out here and colored with analytical insight. Again, we want to tell a story. Finally, it is essential to have a good conclusion which is not just a summery of what we found, but actual extra insight and concluding remarks in relation to the issues dealt with in the paper and the overall consequences for the field.

Needless to say I like the Irvine paper much better than the Berkeley model. This is what I always hoped that research could be about. Don't get me wrong, the Berkeley paper has its advantages, especially when it comes to reading speed and being merely a presentation of some new technology. But as I usually say when people ask me why I am in this soft and boring (their words) area of computer science, HCI: I think humans are much more interesting than computers. And likewise, I find stories so much more interesting than presentations.

Panic button

I was stuffing my gym bag in the trunk of my car early this morning, when suddenly an ear-piercing sound blasted from the car. It was really loud and scared the hell out of me, but I quickly realized that I had accidentally squeezed the key chain too hard and hit the back side panic button. I had actually looked at the key chain when I got the car a couple of days ago, and wondered what exactly that red button did. Now I knew. I pressed the unlock button, because that seemed to be the most reasonable button which, if I was lucky, would make the horrible alarm go away. A woman passed by me as this happened but she just smiled and said 'You didn't expect that to happen, did you?'. Apparently she was more used to panic buttons going off unintended than I was.

I have always wondered why it is so important to have a button that would constantly go off at the wrong times (I was just trying to manage my bag of gym clothes, car keys and a bottle of water that was not going into the trunk, not something out of the ordinary) when it was in fact needed so few times if not never. And when I finally face my attacker in a deep and dark parking structure, one late night, what are the odds that someone will in fact come to my rescue because of just another car alarm? But in this country, panic is important. It is important to think about panic all the time and panic is all around us. So when my car automatically locks the doors after 2 minutes of driving, I am reminded that it does this for my safety. Car doors are supposed to be locked so when I am at a stoplight, no mugger can just open the door and steal my purse or worse, pull me out and steal my car. I have been advised to always lock my doors when driving around by several people who cares about my well being, but it stands in dire contrast to what I learned by my father as a little kid: don't lock the doors, because if you get knocked unconscious in an accident, people should be able to get you out. This has been a constant motive for me to actually never lock my car door; to be honest, I rather want my purse stolen than burn up in an accident. I know very well that this is not so simple in reality, because we take risks all through the day, by walking out the front door and going around doing our business. There is nothing safe about driving in a car, walking on the street and taking a plane. But one thing I realized lately with all the panic around me is that no matter what, that is not the way I want to live my life. I want to be able to go out at night by myself, I want to drive around in my car not having to think about if I will get mugged or if I will get in an accident. I want to open my front door without the chain on and I want to talk to strangers on the street if they ask for directions to the liqueur store. So if it wasn't because my car is a rental that I need to return next Tuesday, I would go and have the car dealer disable the panic button. Because I don't need to panic.

Missing California

There are several things I will miss about California. Besides the obvious 2 really good friends I have here and my favorite advisor, whose insight I will miss terribly, there are certain other things that I really like about America and I guess, specifically California. Boba tea, for example, is one of my favorite drinks, because of its chewy pearls and sweet taste. You cannot get boba tea in Denmark, so I will have to live without that until I come back. I will miss the nice, comfortable way that Americans always chat with you in the grocery store and in the coffee shops. The way the cashier casually says 'Oh, I love that salad too, I had the last one yesterday, it was SO good'. I once ended up in a long conversation about how much candy I had bought, because I started commenting it myself. The nice guy kept saying that it was okay, because it was good chocolate I had bought and that he sometimes did that too. I was just realizing that perhaps I shouldn't have gone hungry into Trader Joes a Thursday night just so I could get some chocolate ice cream for Friends night. But I think that in the end the guy had me convinced that some chocolate was good once in a while.

Americans are so talkative that you can't help getting in a good mood. Just today, an older man stumbled by me at Diedricks coffee house, saying: 'Oh I was told that this is the place all the young students go to study'. I just laughed and agreed. Study. That is such a nice comfortable word. I like that. I like to think that I was just studying and not frantically writing up my research results so I can finish my paper submission for next Friday in order to get another academic publication on my CV. No, I was just studying.

And of course I will miss the weather and the palm trees. Fact is that I am writing this entry by the pool, right outside my apartment. It is 80 degrees (that would be 25 in Celcius) and I have to sit in the shade not to get sunburned. The palm trees are swaying lightly and the sky is clear blue. I will miss the way the weather can affect not only your mood but also increase the possibilities for work space. I will miss the no need to think about wearing a jacket or having to check the weather to see if I should bring an umbrella.

Having said all this, I have to admit that there are just as many things I miss about Denmark when I am in California. Needless to say I miss my family and friends, but I also miss the ease of public transportation and I thought I would never say this: a bicycle. I miss the freedom of just hoping on my bike and go wherever I want. A car doesn't have the same ease to it and you don't get any physical activity out of it. I miss biking through the rain, getting home and take all my clothes off, before packing myself under a blanket with a cup of hot tea. I miss biking home, late night, kind of tipsy, from having partied with friends somewhere in Copenhagen. I also miss not having to chat friendly with store clerks the rare days where I am in a really bad mood, because overly friendly chatting people just make your mood worse and make me feel that I am generally bitchy.

I also miss weather were noisy, drying-out air-condition is not necessary and believe it or not, I actually miss the short winter days almost as much as I miss the long (never ending) summer days. Here the sun rises and sets pretty much the same time year round, making it sort of dull.

Well, I have chewed my last boba and should get back to my paper. No matter where I am I always have papers, studies and work. That I guess, I can never miss.

Junior 1 bedroom

Leaving Irvine is very difficult for me. Not only because there are people here that I like and care about and because I love being in America just because it is America, but also because breaking a lease can be very expensive. In fact I found an envelope stuck to my front door the other day with a dry 3087 $ move-out bill in it. Besides my last month rent, I had to pay 1700 $ in lease breaking fee. That almost equaled my two last months rent, which meant that I could just as well stay in the apartment and tell my university that 'sorry, I can't afford to come back to Denmark'. But somehow, I wasn't sure they would look favorably at that option. I went online again and changed my ad on Craigslist to include words like 'desperate', 'rent negotiable' and 'this is a good deal'. I realized that if I didn't find someone to take over the last two months, I would have to live with my parents through the summer. Don't get me wrong, I love my parents to death and really started to get along with them after I left the country for several cconsecutive longer periods of time. But my value on the single market would seriously decrease because attempting to have a casual relationship where him picking you up for the first date means meeting the parents, tends to turn off certain guys. On the other hand the thought of having at least one of my brothers around was not bad at all.

So you might ask why in the world I had signed a lease for 7 months when I knew that I was very unlikely to actually stay this long. And this question brings me to the real point here, which I hope will put practicalities of life in perspective. There are three ways you can get a place to live in Irvine: You can stay at a hotel and pay day by day. No further elaboration needed. You can get corporate housing where you pay month-to-month. This option is really good if you have money (which everybody seems to have in Irvine except me and my friends); the cheapest place I have seen was 2000 dollars per month, it was a nice little dark ground floor studio with all the American furniture and all the appliances you can wish for. The girl who showed it to me eagerly proclaimed that it came not only with a dishwasher (who needs a dishwasher when you are just one person?) and washer and dryer in the unit, but it also came with an iron, a huge coffee maker (sorry, I prefer to go to Diedrich's in the morning), 10 towels and tons of pillows for the couch (what do Americans use all these pillows for? Pillow fights before bedtime?). The third way you can get a place to live in Irvine is to sign a lease, which comes in 7, 9 or 12 months.

I have to admit that I secretly hoped that my university would let me stay all 7 months. That, and the fact that I found an adorable junior 1-bedroom apartment in walking distance to my office and the essential coffee shop made me decide on signing a 7 month lease. 'Junior' basically means that there is no door between the living room and bedroom and who needs a door when you would never close it anyway? But now I had to deal with the cold facts that I either had to pay my lease break fee or find someone to take over the place. I was settled on going for the best offer; even if I got 500 dollars a month for the place I would come out even. And I would hate if the Irvine Company (the company that owns all apartment complexes in Irvine) made more money out of me than they already had, they knew as well as I that they could rent out my place the minute I had left. The very next morning I got a phone call from a woman who was very interested in the apartment, she offered 850 dollars already over the phone. As it turned out it was not for her but for a visiting physics professor from UC Berkeley who was joining a 2 month project at UC Irvine. After a bit of negotiation and practicalities I agreed to give it to the professor for 950 a month. I had already received two other phone calls by interested people (the new ad had apparently paid off) and knew that if I kept receiving offers, I was very likely to get better ones. But having been in a situation like the professor's and realizing that this was a good opportunity to help out another person without the hassle of dealing with multiple people and multiple offers, I accepted her deposit check on the spot. I was in a good mood the rest of the day, not only because my apartment trouble was (almost) solved and fairly painless, but also because I had done something good for somebody. It made me feel really good to decide on this rather than be gready. I know very well that I wouldn't last a week on The Apprentice; last week I watched one girl getting fired because she became 'emotional' in a critical situation (I still can't believe that they used it against her because otherwise she did a good job). But I believe that when you think of other people in the business process you have a much better chance of being a happy person than if you think of only money. Not that money cannot buy lots of happy moments (I for example have a lot of happy moments with my new Chanel sunglasses), but in the end it cannot buy a good conscience. And by the end of the day, I slept better than I had done for weeks, due to the good deed I had done.

Welcome to Louise's Blog

A lot of people have not only asked me if I have a blog, but have actually requested me to keep one. On popular demand, I therefore introduce you to my new time consuming side kick: Louise's Blog. You probably think 'why in the world didn't she name it something exciting or at least fun', but after several minute-long considerations, I thought that in the end it is the content that counts, the rest is just wrapping and much less important than what is inside. Just like me.

Before I start writing thoughts and interesting concepts down here, I have to set up a couple of rules though. I have a serious website which tells a bit about my research and my professional career, so this blog is purely personal. It is created with three things in mind: Me, me and me. That also means that I don't really care if anyone reads it because if I did, I would constantly sensor what I write. Fact is that I am just as stupid as all the other personal bloggers out there, thinking 'why do people want to read about me?' And then get really surprised when they realize that their mom read about their latest sexscapade, which they published one late confession night. I have therefore set up 5 rules that I will uphold, they are listed in nonspecific order.

1. I write this blog because I like to write. That means that if I don't feel like writing, I do not write.

2. I will not be nice. I am a very nice person in real life and I do not need to reconfirm my nice-ness in this blog.

3. I will not necessarily try and write clever little academic or technical insights just to impress fellow researchers or students.

4. I will try to write every week at least

5. I will not give this blog link to my parents

Finally, for the readers who don't know me personally (in the rare case that some random person have wandered in here) I can tell you three things:

I am a cs research student
I am a very social person
I love chocolate and redwine