seantime

• Found an apartment in Mountain View. It’s kind of expensive, but close to work, so hopefully it’s worth it. Plus it has air conditioning, which will be very useful if this weekend is any indication of the summer weather. On the plus side, maybe the rainy season is finally over.
• Moving means that I have to start throwing things away. Packing all this stuff up will take forever. It was probably a bad idea to buy backpacking gear that I won’t even use on the Europe trip right before moving.
• I think I might throw out this stockpile of old hard drives. I started the erasing of them, but it seems like it’ll take quite some time to do these secure erasing passes. Considering one pass takes hours, maybe I should’ve chosen a slightly less aggressive wipe.
• Day by day the end of school draws near. This time around, I don’t really feel like graduating.
• This importance sampling project for computational biology is driving me crazy. I just can’t seem to focus long enough to make any real progress on it.
• Can’t tell if I’m in love or not, especially because the “with whom” part is elusive. I hope life sorts itself out for me at some point, hopefully soon.

Finally found an oldies radio station: AM 1550. It’s a bit staticky, but works, except under bridges.

Song of the moment: “Sweet Little Sixteen” – Chuck Berry

• Saw the swingtime show and the tap th@t show. Swing and tap look kind of fun. Sometimes I wonder about ballet a little. Seeing tp girl there was nice.
• Also saw Sofiane Sylve teach a master class at Stanford. She has a ridiculous (as in, ridiculously awesome) accent: it’s like some strange fusion of French, British, and American. It’s also kind of crazy how fast the girls in the advanced class can pick up choreography. I suppose anything becomes easy after 10+ years of practice, but it’s still amazing to see just how many people can specialize in something as specific as ballet; these aren’t professional dancers, either.
• A google girl sighting this morning, which has become a rather rare event of late.
• Motivation to finish up this quarter is waning rapidly. Just a few more weeks, then a tearful second goodbye.

As excited as I am to finally go to these parts of Europe, I’m definitely not excited on the planning of the trip. It probably doesn’t help that somehow I have to figure out when to move as well. The next 2 months are going to be action packed.

Rough itinerary:

Paris – 4 nights

Brussels and the rest of Belgium – 2 nights

Amsterdam, windmills, tulips – 3 nights

Copenhagen and that crazy Doug character – 3 nights

Stockholm – 2 nights

Oslo, Bergen, fjords – 4 nights or so

Back to CPH and then back to the US

Somehow I don’t think it’s possible to make it to Svalbard or Tromso in under a week. It’d be pretty awesome to be able to visit the Arctic… maybe some other time. This might have to constitute a preliminary trip to an actual Scandinavia trip in the future. I am pretty excited about a lot of these cities, though.

Any suggestions of places to visit, places to stay, things to do, food to eat, beer to drink, etc. in any of the places above?