As mentioned in my last posting we weren’t yet sure what to go for next, however it would have been quite silly to go for San Diego without enjoying it a bit. So we’ve looked at the Zoo while BJ stayed at the hotel to give his body a day off to get rid of his cold (which turned out to be the absolutely right decision). We on our part, enjoyed the stay at the Zoo and the change from the last activities. Some animal pictures can be found here.

Afterwards we dropped back to the hotel and picked up BJ to start our trip to Vegas. After an about 6 hour ride we finally arrived there and checked in to our hotel. Most of the other stuff happened in Vegas is filed under our non-disclosure agreement based on “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”. I can however tell that it was one hell of a trip. We needed all of our time for “different” activities and so weren’t able to go for Grand Canyon or Hooverdam either.

Our back flight was just the extension of our one-hell-of-a-trip, which we however didn’t want it to be. All started out right at the Vegas airport when we figured out that there are quite a lot of people trying to depart on mondays. To make things even easier we figured out our flight was put over 30 minutes earlier for departure. Later on turned out we missed a mail of our travel agency trying to tell us exactly this. Well, however we made it to the gate exactly when they pushed-back the plane for departure. Only thing we could do was to wave after it. After the persons at the gate absolutely pissed me (us) off by stating via the loudspeakers that they are no information or whatever and are going to close now, we had no other possibility then going back to the Check-in desk to rebook that stuff. The lady at the check-in desk later stated that she was so sorry for that, as they would have needed to do this up at the gate. Anyhow she did a really great job by finding an alternative flight for us going via Denver and Frankfurt which only caused us about 7 hours later arrival. The rest of the trip was quite smooth as we catched all the connections and also today arrived our luggage.

I myself enjoyed the trip and now try to work things out, that came up in the meantime.

As we used our last day in SFC to see Golden Gate bridge we took the chance to visit the museum of computer history in Mountain View which i can really recommend. We had a very nice tour there and have seen a lot including the first Google production server. As we already were in Mountain View we surely had to catch up at the Google HQ.

Afterwards we drove to Santa Cruz, as our plan (if you can call it one) was to use California #1 to go south. In Santa Cruz we had dinner and went for some bowling. We also enjoyed the Boardwalk named gaming lot – where we left some bucks playing air hockey.

As we wanted to use our travelling time as much as possible we used to make some more kilometers before catching a motel. So it came that we ended up in somewhere of nowhere and couldn’t get a motel for about 1 and a half car hours. The drive along the pacific coast on California #1 however was awesome. We had no full moon but growing moon i guess and so you could see a lot of the moon light flickering in the ocean. Finally we dropped at a motel in San Simeon at the other end of nowhere. It was a nice but short stay as we catched up in the morning and took our trip down to LA. In LA we stayed at a hotel i’ve already been once earlier this year. In the evening we grabbed our dinner and had some nice beers near Hollywood Blvd in LA.

Next day our choice fell on Disneyland in Anaheim, as we didn’t get up early in the morning we came there at about 4pm and so only had 4 hours left to enjoy the stay. I can recommend the space mountain ride. Most of the other stuff is probably only funny if you get there with children. After we had our dinner at IHOP (International house of pancakes) we stayed at a motel near Newport Beach (yes, as in O.C. California) which was – well, cheap.

Today we had a trip to newport beach and afterwards dropped by at San Diego. Here we’re staying at the Sheraton which i’ve also been earlier this year (at this time named Radisson). We weren’t able to get our trip to San Diego Zoo as BJ catched a cold (which i had earlier last week), so we took the rest of this day off and i enjoyed my stay at the jacuzzi.

Our plans for the rest of the trip are not quite sure, maybe we drop to San Diego Zoo tomorrow or we go directly to Las Vegas. We’ll see. As i had some time today i finally made it, to upload the photos.

I’ll catch some sleep now – still a bit jet laggy.

You can find my pictures of the trip here.

Flight to San Diego & Excursion in La Jolla
DatCat Workshop in San Diego
Extraworkshop Activities
San Diego – Vacation Time
San Diego to NC

After we’ve reached the other side of the campus we thought about heading to the beach. We crossed down a street to some kind of gliderpoint. The first thing which came in my mind when i saw it was the old pc game named summer games. The view from up the cliff was great and sun was giving us about 25 degree celsius. There was a small path leading down to the beach which we surely followed to find out that this is a nudist beach. So we headed down the beach for a while and found out that the water will still take some time to get appropriate temperature. At least felt temperature on right teeth was cold.

When coming back from the beach somewhere at La Jolla farms we wanted to head right over to downtown La Jolla. We’ve not fully lost our orientation but we didn’t exactly know how far it would be. So we just started walking … and walking … and walking … after about 2 hours we were pissed of the long distance. So we considered taking a taxi, but wait – where is our sidewalk? Hmm strange we thought – till we found out we’re on some kind of freeway. Dude! Good for us, there was a traffic jam on it and an empty taxi stuck in it. So we just jumped on it to find out that both was illegal – walking on a street without sidewalk and jumping on a taxi while it’s not inside a parking lot. He dropped us at downtown La Jolla at a restaurant which he considered to have good meals. So we headed there and took our first meal in the states. Meal was not that good but also not too bad i guess. Nearby the restaurant there were some kind of cliffs inside a cove. On this cliffs there were hundrets of pelicans and they all used it as a toilet. Therefor the rocks had a little white color touch and well the smell was disgusting. I choose to take a little break and lie down in a nearby park while Teemu choose to head down the cove a bit.

As Teemu had no shorts with him (weather report?) we had to look for some clothing stores and so we went up to Prospect which is the main street in downtown La Jolla. There we grabbed sunglasses (well, ok – i grabbed two of them) and found some khakis and sneakers for Teemu.

Shopping makes thirsty and so we headed for an irish pub named Bull and Bear straight on Prospect which offered us a fine range of cold beer.

In the evening we went to Pacific Beach which is a part of San Diego like La Jolla as the girl in the sunglass shop gave us the tip. I personally didn’t like that college party town that much. So we finished our first night at about 1am and headed back to our hotel.

We’re currently sitting in the boarding area waiting to get on our plane to Paris. I’ve had a party with some friends yesterday and made the night through. Therefore i have already my 3rd mocca inside. I hope to catch at least some hours of sleep on our way to LA. *tired*

The currently planned flight schedule is as follows:

Vienna VIE (10.03.2007 10:10 ) – Paris CDG (10.03.2007 12:15)
Paris CDG (10.03.2007 13:15) – Los Angeles LAX (10.03.2007 15:50)
Los Angeles LAX (10.03.2007 17:55) – San Diego SAN (10.03.2007 18:43)

Los Angeles (17.03.2007 16:30) – Paris CDG (18.03.2007 11:05)
Paris CDG (18.03.2007 12:40) – Vienna VIE (18.03.2007 14:40)

We’ve choosen to take this chance to do a little holiday down in california and therefore will stay the days after the workshop in Los Angeles.

In January 2007 CAIDA was one of the institutes behind the Day in the life of the internet. This project was one of the first steps in trying to gather more research data for the future development of internet technologies. I as an operator of ORSN node B have provided them with PCAP data of this node.

Now CAIDA came up with the idea to make a workshop for future contribution of data. They have already invested a lot of time in the DatCat database therefore. The focus of this workshop is to get data providers and researchers together to find a way to provide enough metadata to make the data useful for researchers while still keeping it that simple so data providers will use it. Workshop attendees are also being introduced in DatCat and it’s background.

I’m looking forward to join this workshop in March …

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