Deutschland, ich komme!

I have made the decision to return to the place of my upbringing after I graduate from Oregon State University.  Approximately one month from now I will be walking at my commencement ceremony and two short days later I will be boarding an airplane to embrace my new home in Munich, Germany.

This is going to be a rather interesting adventure for me.  Although I grew up in the Munich area, I left there when I was only 12 years old and in the past 11 years that I have spent in the US, I have, for all intents and purposes, become very americanized.  I have visited Munich many times since moving to the US, but it has only been as a tourist.  I have spent the last 5 years or so brushing up my German skills and will be receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in German (language and culture/history/literature) this June.  I won’t be going through the culture shock experienced by most expatriates, however this is indeed going to be a major change in my life.

I have done a lot of soul-searching throughout my time in College.  If nothing else, I have learned a lot about myself.  In studying German, I have learned a great deal about the English language.  In studying German culture I have learned a great deal about the American culture.  It’s funny how that happens.  In drinking American beer, I have learned to really appreciate German beer.

When looking back over the last 6 years since graduating high school, my first thought is that I didn’t really learn anything at University.  It is just a huge bureaucratic mess that tries to shuffle as many students through it as possible so they can take our money.  I definitely didn’t end up where I started out.  I have changed my major more times than some people change their clothes in a week.  I have changed my views on life many times and my interests have changed significantly from when I first started.  So looking back and realizing that I spent an enormous amount of money on a degree that probably won’t relate much to my chosen career path at first is a little disheartening.  But taking a step back from this initial thought, I realize that I wouldn’t go back to change any part of it, given the chance.  I have learned a great deal about Business, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Liberal Arts.  But mainly, I have learned about myself.  I now know what I don’t want to do with my life.  I’m still not sure what I do want to do, but I know where I want to start out.  That is the first big step.  It took me 6 years to figure that out, but along the way I have met some amazing people.  In the last few years I have made friendships that will probably last a lifetime.  I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

So in the last month that I am here, I have really taken some time to think about life in America.  The things I will miss, the things I won’t.  Of course people say the grass is always greener on the other side.  I look forward to moving to Germany and somewhere deep down I think that everything will be perfect and I won’t ever look back.  Well these were my thoughts 11 years ago, when I decided to move to America with my mother in the first place.  At first everything was great and fun.  A new culture to get used to, new people, new school.  But I started missing things about Germany.  Things that were more important than Root Beer or Dr. Pepper (hope I can find that stuff in Germany).  At this point in my life, my friends hear me raving about the great food/beer/cities in Germany, but really that stuff isn’t worth moving to another country for.  And I would hate to try to convince someone that they should move to Germany because they have better beer.  Everyone has to do what is going to make them happy.  As a third-culture kid, I can only say that home is where the heart is.  I find myself disgruntled with American laws and politics frequently (will devote a separate blog post for that), but I think at this point in my life, my main reasons for leaving are family, friends, and career opportunity.  Food, Beer and Fun are a close second.  I think this will be a great opportunity for me to really reconnect with my father, see my brother frequently and hopefully be a part of my little sister’s life.  She is 7 now and I have only spent very little time with her in her short life.  Some of my best friends that I have made in college have somehow found their way over to Europe.  In fact, all my friends are leaving Corvallis this summer, so I won’t be missing anything here (other than my mom, of course).  So I’ll be leaving all that is familiar behind here, but I think my heart is in Munich right now.  I will be closer to some of my family, I will be closer to most of my friends, I will be enjoying a brand new life German-style.  I have re-established contact to some of my friends from grade school in Munich.  It will be interesting to see what these people are like now, if we still have anything in common.  Yes, it will be a great adventure indeed.

So for now I am trying to make the most of my final month in Corvallis.  I will be spending a lot of time with some close friends here, and my mother, and I will be taking a small trip to visit my grandmother before I go.  Aside from that, most of my time will be spent preparing for a move across the ocean.  I can only take the bare minimum with me, so selling stuff and giving stuff away and asking my mom to store some stuff for me has been a little sad.  But I am excited for what might await me in the new city.  I am mostly bummed that my toaster oven won’t be coming along with me.

That is all for now.  Goodbye, Corvallis!  Germany, here I come!

Movies in 3D

My girlfriend and I went to go see “Meet the Robinsons” today. The cool thing about it, was that we got to pay an additional $2 each to purchase a pair of 3D glasses because the film features neat 3D effects. At first I was a little skeptical, because I had envisioned those old one-green-eye and one-red-eye paper things that you put in front of your eyes to get a quasi-3-dimensional effect when looking at pictures that have been enhanced with red and green colors around the edges of objects. However, I was very pleasantly surprised to get a pair of cheap plastic glasses, that just look like sunglasses, and were very comfortable and unobtrusive and even fit over my regular prescription glasses without any discomfort. I was very amazed at the quality of the 3D effects and the whole experience blew my mind. The movie itself was pretty cute and it had its moments. I was really excited because before the movie started, there were a few previews of other 3D movies that looked really cool with the 3D glasses on. I am really looking forward to seeing a recorded U2 concert in 3 dimensions this fall. The best of all was that after the previews and before the feature presentation, they showed a Donald Duck/Chip and Dale cartoon from 1953 (one of my favorites, where Chip and Dale are trying to steal peanuts from the elephant at the zoo). The cartoon was completely done in 3 dimensions to fully take advantage of the 3D glasses!

So overall I was very impressed with how far the technology has come and I hope to see more movies in the future done with the 3D effects. One thing to note, however, is that this whole thing is playing visual tricks on your eyes and I think if the movie were longer I would start to develop a headache, similar to the type of headache you get when your monitor’s refresh rate is set too low. This is probably something that varies from person to person, but something to be careful with nonetheless. Also I would definitely not recommend using the 3D glasses as sunglasses, even though they look and feel like sunglasses, I’m pretty sure it will mess with your vision after prolonged use.

So if you get a chance, check out one of the 3D movies that are starting to be released. It is unlike anything I’ve seen before!

I don’t care for most things…

… but at the top of this list are MySpace, Microsoft, and Albany, OR. What do you think the world would be better off without? I’m just curious about what gets other people really riled up. Leave me a comment with your pet peeve.

Movie Quotes

Here is a list of some of my favorite quotes from some of my favorite movies:

1. “That one goes there, THAT one goes there!”

2. “You talking to me? Well I’m the only one here.”

3. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I break your concentration?”

4. “Someday – and that day may never come – I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this justice as gift on my daughter’s wedding day.”

5. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

6. “Medium-dry Vodka Martini… Shaken, not stirred.”

7. “Say ‘hello’ to my little friend!”

8. “Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.”

9. “You’ll shoot your eye out!”

10. “There’s, another example. See, here I’m now by myself, uh, er, talking to myself. That’s, that’s chaos theory.”

Can anyone guess which movies they come from? One hint: No two quotes are from the same movie.

Wet Wookiee

Some friends of mine and I were discussing some interesting questions the other day over a game of water basketball.  What does a wet Wookiee look like?  For that matter, how does a Wookiee dry itself?  Does it use a hair dryer, a large towel, or does it shake itself dry like a dog?  Or maybe a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, they had some special technology that allowed for super-efficient Wookiee-drying?  Maybe George Lucas should have included some more info on this topic in the newer movies, instead of adding that Jar Jar Binks thing to the mix.  And the dreaded question is, what would a wet Wookiee smell like?  Can you even imagine?

License Plate

Pretty cool.

Christmas

Well, Christmas is over.  I, for one, had a good Christmas.  I spent Christmas Eve Day at my Mom’s house, mostly baking in the kitchen, eating, and consuming Christmasy drinks, such as Glühwein, Winter Ales, and of course Absinth.  We had a good time, with barbequed steaks for lunch, and Fondue for dinner.  We exchanged presents in the evening and all was jolly.  Christmas morning I got up and went home to recover from the family for a while before I went over to Karen’s family’s house for Christmas Day Dinner.  I also had a wonderful time there with excellent food and losing three games of the 1981 edition of Trivial Pursuit in a row.  After dinner we drove around town to look at the different Christmas light displays.  All in all a very successful weekend.  I even got that KitchenAid knife set I’ve been wanting.  Now I can cut things in style!

It’s back to the mines for a few days of work while looking forward to New Year’s.  I hope you all had a merry Christmas and were able to spend it with loved ones as I did.

I hate you, Microsoft!

There is a specific chain of events, which happened to me recently, that couldn’t have been more unfortunate. I was the owner of one of those Samsung smartphones that was running Windows Mobile 2003. The phone was pretty cool, but it had its share of bugs. I could live with most of them, but overall the thing was great as a PDA and terrible as a phone. At best I could get a day out of the battery if I didn’t make any phone calls or use the Wi-Fi or anything like that. This made it a very expensive tool to see what time it was. On top of that, it wasn’t really intuitive to use the phone function. It just seemed like the phone part and the PDA part didn’t really know each other existed. Well I got used to it anyway and just carried around a huge bulky phone that I ended hating after several months. So I went down to the store and found a pretty good deal on one of those new Motorola KRZR phones. This ended up being worse than the Samsung, since all the neat features of the phone had been disabled by my service carrier, and the remaining ones were extremely broken beyond any kind of usability. Failing to find any kind of decent software hack to get the back to its original Motorola functionality, I decided to return the phone to the retailer before my trial period expired. The retailer was happy to exchange the phone for a similarly priced way more functional LG enV. However, they didn’t have a way to copy my contacts from the KRZR to the LG. Not a problem, since all my contacts were still backed up on that stupid Samsung running Windows. Somehow, in the time it took for me to return the KRZR, leave the store with my new LG, and get home to the Samsung (which was working fine before I left that day), the Samsung completely crashed all by itself and did a handy little factory reset on itself, completely annihilating all my personal data including 8 years worth of collected phone numbers!!!

This is strange, since that phone never gave me any trouble like that in the 8 months that I had it. It’s almost like it knew that as soon as I actually really needed it to not destroy my data it did everything in its power to anger me. There was nothing I could do. Now I have a nice new LG phone with the 7 phone numbers in it that I could remember off the top of my head. I am livid!

The only thing that makes me feel better about the situation, is that deep down I am telling myself that Microsoft uses their own software to run their entire network infrastructure, including their backups. That is punishment enough, if you ask me. I severely hope that they lose 8 years worth of code or something.

Well enough ranting for now. If you are reading this and wondering why I haven’t called you in a while, it is because I no longer have your number. Please send me an e-mail with it, so I can stay in touch.

Free Country

While down in Mountain View, CA this last weekend, I couldn’t help but notice the following group of signs:

Let me translate this: “You are not allowed to smoke. You are not allowed to ride your bike. You are not allowed to use your skateboard. And yes, we are indeed watching you right now!”

But that’s okay, because we live in a “Free Country”.

Mountain View

Today, I am writing from the beautiful city of Mountain View, California, home of Google and Mozilla.  I drove down last night to visit my very good Foreign American friend, Fred.  It was a long trip, but totally worth it.  Today will be spent catching up on things with Fred, whom I haven’t seen since September.  Tonight will be spent catching up on some liquid bread.  Tomorrow we’ll probably see if we can’t find something to do in San Francisco.  Right now, while Fred is diligently coding away at work, I’m shamelessly raiding his kitchen and watching HBO on digital cable.  It sure is great to get away for a while!