We slept in the new flat for the first time last night. As usual, at least in Germany, it’s going to take a few weeks to get DSL connected. In our case, DSL gets connected on the 30th. This used to be the time when I’d fall into a deep depression due to withdrawal issues. However, this time is different.

For the time being I’m using the awesome new feature in Android 2.2 for sharing a mobile internet connection. Impressed with how easy it is to set up. It’s as easy as turning the feature on and setting the access point name and passphrase. Once that’s done up to 8 computers can connect as they would to any wireless access point.

Unfortunately, my mobile data plan only allows up to 200MB at 3G speed after which it gets throttled down to GPRS speeds. But it’s better than nothing and once DSL is finally connected we’ll be rewarded with 50Mbits down and 10Mbits up. That’s about 8-9 faster than what we had in San Diego for only a little more money.

Annika and I just got back from Conan O’Brien‘s stop in San Diego at the San Diego Civic Theatre. It was heaps of fun. Would have been even more fun if we hadn’t been in the nosebleed seats – last row of the Balcony. I’ve never been in a theater that was so vertically oriented. It felt like being in a basketball arena – extremely steep. Nevertheless, we could still make out what the small characters on stage were doing.

Conan was always my favorite late night talk show host when I used to actually watch TV. I think his show will be better on cable where he can go even further with his brand of humor.

Since I’ve already told family, friends and finally work, I guess I’ll now tell the world. Annika, Vada and myself will be moving back to Berlin on May 27th. We came to San Diego with the intention of moving back once I was done with school, but after living here and befriending so many great people it was a little hard to finally carry through. Annika grew to love the weather that she thought she’d find monotonous and we really like the South and North park areas of San Diego. But, alas, we’ve got tickets and only a few days after I receive my degree we’ll be gone.

I’ve also put in my notice at work. I wasn’t able to work that many hours anyway due to my school schedule. Dropping the few hours I was working will hopefully make the last two months here less stressful. I learned a lot in my 2.5 years at Geodetics. I’ll miss my co-workers but I can firmly state that I won’t miss programming with MFC.

There is lots to do before we are able to leave. Next week is Spring Break and in addition to wrapping up things at work, I’ll be busy putting things on Craigslist and Ebay. Eventually, we’ll need to get rid of the car and do something with my Vespa. I don’t want to sell my scooter but I definitely can’t afford to send it over; at least not now.

I feel like this move may be our last. Ever since watching the fall of The Wall on TV in 7th grade, I’ve been intrigued by Berlin. After having lived there I fell in love with it and I feel it’s where our small family will be staying for some time.

Now that I’ll be a little less busy I hope to start blogging again. Once I’m in Berlin I’ll have lots to blog about. More on that later.

Well, it’s been forever since my last post. School, life and laziness have combined to cause me to completely neglect my blog. No apologies, though. I’m plowing through school and hope to be finished in the next 2 or so years.

Well, the biggest change is that Annika and I are having a baby in 4 weeks. We don’t care to know if it’s a boy or a girl but so far things are going wonderfully and we are looking forward to starting our family.

In preparation for our new family, I’ve changed my name. I’m now Christopher Wilson Kuehl. So I took Annika’s last name as it’s easy to pronounce in both German and English whereas Wilson can give Germans difficulty. Also, I like to buck patriarchal traditions. And who would pass up the chance to be Chris Kuehl (pronounced “cool” slightly wrongly by English speakers).

Also, I got accepted to San Diego State University where I’ll be working towards a degree in Computer Engineering starting next Fall. I’ve really enjoyed the time at San Diego City College. Most of the professors are great and I’ve had the chance and will continue to work with a lot of great people on the AUV project.

Ok, time to stop procrastinating and get studying for my Circuit Analysis exam in the morning.

It appears that digg has been blocked by the San Diego City College District for the last couple weeks. I’ve tried accessing it from City College and Mesa College with the same result. After a minute or so I get the “The connection has timed out” page. I’ve not tried it from Miramar.

Other sites that are a lot less informative are still accessible: Youtube, MySpace, Facebook, etc.

Of course, getting around the block is trivial. Just find a free proxy site and read digg all you want. Unfortunately, digging doesn’t seem to work.

Update: digg it!

Tonight I went to see the Padres play the D-backs. They were down 8 to 0 but almost came back. The game ended 8-7. Now they are only 1 game out of first place. I went with Annika and Matthias, a friend from Berlin. It was his first baseball game but he quickly caught on. By the end of the game he had all the basics down. He goes back to Berlin on Saturday.

Even though they lost ,it was the most exciting one I’ve seen this year. We were seated behind the left-field wall.

I’ve completed 10 days of the Master Cleanse and am now going for 14 days. 21 days will be the maximum regardless of how well it’s going. I’ve been wanting to try this since working at Deep Roots in 1997. So I’ve finally done it. Yeah.

The whole process has been extremely painless. After a couple days you don’t feel hungry and because of the lemon juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper drink I haven’t felt fatigued. I’ve only done the salt water flush a few times because I go to school in the mornings but that was also painless.

My body has been responding positively. I’ve lost about 15lbs so far. I’ve also stopped having pain in my knee that I’ve had for a while now. My eczema has mostly cleared up, as well. Maybe it’s all in the mind.

I’ll post to the blog when I’m off the cleanse.

The Lying Game from Balls of Steel

So my first semester back at school ended a week ago. I’m going to San Diego City College right now with the intention of transferring to San Diego State or UC San Diego for the last ~2 years. My intended major is Computer Engineering.

I took 21 units (12 is considered full time) so I was kept rather busy. While 21 units seems like a lot it doesn’t really give the whole picture. I had a German III class that was 5 units which didn’t really require effort. My other classes were Precalculus, Scientific Programming (Java) w/ Lab, C/C++ Programming and Honors Sociology: Social Problems From a Feminist Perspective. We don’t get our grades for a few days yet but I think I got an A in everything.

I really liked Precalc and Sci Programming. The instructors for those were really nice and helpful. I’m ready for Calculus now!

The Sociology class was LOTS of work. I probably wrote about 1000 pages for that class. The feminist aspect of the class was really interesting. Too bad the term makes so many people cringe.

The C/C++ class was absolutely horrid. It was done by the laziest professor of all time. The Sci. Programming class and the C/C++ class were both online but that’s were the similarities stop. While the Sci. Programming professor was always giving feed back and prompting participation, the C/C++ professor only showed up to post the assignments and quizzes. Once you submitted your assignment there was NEVER any feedback. Nothing is ever graded except the test which is all automated. The tests consistently had errors and when notified of the errors he wouldn’t take the effort to change the grade (at least for students to see). When another student and I went to confront him about these issues he made these excuses that it’s not realistic that he give feedback on everything. Fine, unfortunately it wasn’t realistic for him to give feedback on anything. Oh, and for the programmers out there, we didn’t even cover pointers, structs or classes!

Apart from that one bad class I’m really impressed with the level of education at City College. Many more students follow the 2-year-then-transfer path in California than in NC. The student are more serious and also a bit older than in NC. I’m meeting a lot of really cool people that are in a similar situation as myself; a mature student going back to school after experiencing a bit of life. There is also a tuition waiver program for po’ folk that I qualify for. That is saving my $400+ a semester.

Besides the classes, I also started a Computing Club on campus. We’ve got about 10 members and will probably increase that quite a bit when we participate in our first club rush in the Spring. I’m President of the club and have given a few presentations on Firefox, Linux, and Web Development. We’ve also had people give presentations on Maple/Mathematica, The GIMP and the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Project, of which I’m also a part. It’s purpose is to be a place were we each can learn from the other.

The AUV Project is apart really interesting for me. Basically, the goal is to build a robot that can navigate an obstacle course. Last year the City College team got 17th out of 21 participating schools which is pretty good for a first year. We are the only 2-year school involved. There is also a High School participating. The other schools are 4-year engineering schools: MIT, Georgia Tech, Univ. of Florida, Cornell, Duke etc. Basically, we don’t satnd much of a chance to win but it’s all about learning. I’m currently building a GUI to display the readings of the bot. I’ll talk more about that in the 3rd part of this recap.

In November I finally got a job. I’m tutoring a blind student in German 10 hours a week. It’s quite a challenge. It’s made even more challenging by the fact that my student is newly blind and therefore doesn’t know braille or how to properly use a computer. I’ll be continuing tutoring him in the next semester. With that money I barely get by. I wasn’t exactly planning to get rich by being a student, though.

I’m looking forward to next semester.Actually, I also have an intersession class that starts in 2 days and is 4 weeks long. That’s just a Speech class requirement, however, so I ain’t really looking forward to that. Next semester I’ll be taking Calculus and Analytical Geometry I w/ Lab, Digital Systems, English 205 (ugh) and possibly Machine and Assembly Language w/ Lab.

In short, I’m lovin’ being back in school. Only 7 more semesters to go!

This is part one of a three part recap of what I’ve been doing these last few months.

So Annika arrived into Charlotte (as I mentioned in the last posting), visited my family in NC and finally flew out to her new home, San Diego, where Waid and I picked her up from the Airport. I had saved up all my absentee days at school in order to be able to spend more time with Annika since this almost two weeks is the only chance we will be able to see each other till March. We didn’t really do too many things; just enjoyed each other’s company.

Annika did, however, have an interview with the German immersion school around the corner. The result is that she has a job as a kindergarten (auf Deutsch: Vorschule) teacher starting in April. She won’t be a “real” teacher until she gets her credentials. She should be able to do most of the course work for that over the summer and be working as a credentialed teacher in the Fall.

The stuff worth writing about actually happened when Annika wanted to fly to China. We bought a one-way ticket from the Air China’s US website for about $500 and shortly thereafter received, via email, the confirmation stating, “E-Ticket purchase has been confirmed by the airline. No tickets will be mailed.” Great! So, on Wednesday, November 15th, Annika got the train to LA for $29. Josh was nice enough to pick her up from the train station, let her sleep at his place and even take her to the airport just before 7am.

When Annika arrives at the airport she goes to the counter with booking number ready expecting to be given her boarding pass and go through security. Instead, she is told that she has a paper ticket and without that she will not be allowed to board. Being that the airline doing the processing is United and the flight is also a United flight, they cannot do anything with tickets purchased through Air China. She’s told that she’ll have to speak to an Air China representative. So Annika hurriedly goes to the Air China desk only to find that the don’t open till shortly before her flight leaves. After a few more desperate attempts to get on her plane, she realizes that she has no chance and waits for the Air China desk to open in hopes of getting on a plane that day.

When she finally gets to talk to Air China people they tell her she’ll have to talk to the agent she bought the tickets from. She tells them she bought it directly from the Air China US site. They tell her that she actually bought it from Expedia. It turns out that, although there is no mention of this, whenever you buy a ticket from the Air China US site you are buying it through an outside agent. So Annika get in the phone with Expedia and they confirm that the ticket was booked through them. They also confirm that she ordered a paper ticket (although it clearly states “E-ticket” in her confirmation). In fact, the ticket had been delivered by UPS on the 8th! Annika calls and asks me to go home and check that we have the tickets at home. The ticket was lying inside a UPS envelope inside our screened-in porch.

The reason we hadn’t noticed the envelope was that it was lying right where we would normally put the paper to be recycled. I remember seeing the envelope but not paying it any mind because of where it was lying and the fact that we were not expecting anything. Initially, we thought that UPS delivery person had put it where it where we found it but I have my doubts now. I talked to our delivery guy an as I had though, he mentioned that he would never go inside the gate because he new we had a dog.

So, I eventually call Annika and tell her that the ticket is there. She is first told to have it faxed. I get on my scooter and while approaching 30th and University the back tire goes flat. What great timing! So I called Waid to have him pick me up, which he was nice enough to do. Luckily there was a place with a fax machine around the corner. Once Waid had picked me up, we went to the scooter shop so that I could also print out and fax the “E-ticket” confirmation. Keep in mind this is around 6:30pm. Annika arrived at the airport around 7am.

Annika had her meeting with an Air China supervisor at 8pm. In the meantime, while wondering around LAX, Annika ran into Thomas Gottschalk of all people. He is host of “Wetten, Das?,” a German TV show and one of the most famous people in Germany. She got his autograph and told him her situation, of course.

Well, back in the real world Annika went to her meeting with the Air China people at 8am. They had received the fax but insisted she have the real tickets in hand. It would not be a problem to give her another flight to Shanghai but the original tickets had to be shown. This meant that I’d have to deliver them. Annika told them she would have the ticket and booked a flight for the next day.

At 11:30 I went to Thrifty to pick-up the Economy car I had reserved only to find there was only Mini-vans left. Ugh! So I take that and drive through the extremely dense fog. I buy a couple Monsters to keep me awake and arrive in LA at 2:50am. Josh’s place was easy to find and and I was sleeping by 3:10am. At 6:40am we awoke and quickly made our way to the airport. The traffic was surprisingly a non-issue.

So there we were, at the terminal where Annika had just spent 15 hour the previous day. We get to the counter, show the ticket and are told not surprisingly that the ticket is for the day before. Annika explains and is told that this is not “their” (United’s) ticket and they can change it. At this point we both kinda make funny noises in despair/disbelief. Annika is a used to this by now and firmly explains the situation. Someone who dealt with Annika the previous morning comes over and confirms. After the supervisor calls the “international supervisor” Annika is FINALLY cleared to leave.

I stay till Annika is safely through the security check and make my way home. Annika spent over $20 on phone calls that day and I ended spending $75 for the rental and gas. As you can see Annika’s departure was quite eventful. I hope she’s able to leave China without all this hassle.