Blog entries for category "USA":

I had spent 12 weeks in Redmond and I got to like the Seattle area. I also got to like working at Microsoft a lot more than I originally thought I would. But it was never meant to be for longer than three months. It was time to leave.

Once again, my life was reduced to a suitcase. I was going back Down Under, but I was looking forward to have a 5 day layover in Los Angeles first. As a city, L.A. doesn’t really exist. Well, to be precise, there is an actual place called Los Angeles, but all it is, is a bunch of grim roads with bleak giant parking spaces, a few unimpressive sky scrapers and a small train station build in Spanish colonial architectural style. There is nothing there to see. I didn't believe it, so I went to check, and that was right. Nothing to see. But what Los Angeles really stands for is a giant suburban area stretching for over 100km each way. L.A. is Hollywood, L.A. is Santa Monica, L.A. is Long Beach, Beverly Hills and a lot more. There was something to see after all.

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They say she is the European city in the United States. I do not know about that, but I sure had some fun. San Francisco was one of the places I went to from Redmond; this time we went for a three day weekend with my friend and flatmate Bartek. It was the Halloween weekend.

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Well, during the three months in Redmond I tried to not loose any time. When I was not working I was either sleeping or exploring what western state Washington and its habitants have to offer a traveller and/or a longer term resident. In fact, the "exploration" was the activity I invested most energy in. Having had no time to blog while in Redmond, I'd like to give a few very brief impressions here for the benefit of friends and family.

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Or Chicago - London

I was excited and full of happy and eager anticipation to get to London once again. But first, it turned out, I was to have some unpleasant adventures.

Before I get to the main story about how American Airlines treat their customers like shit, here is a warning for all travellers from the metric world who want to go to the US and back:

First of all I must say - I really liked Chicago. This was the first place I've seen in the US, about which I thought that I understood why people would want to live there. Like in some European cities like London, I in a real metropolis, with imposing buildings, and busy ado everywhere. Sitting on the train and looking at other passengers I realised that they did not appear any different than in any other of the world's metropolises. I could have been in Moscow, in Paris or in London, and the people would not look much different. I liked it. But first, I had to leave Knoxville...

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The reason I came to Knoxville was to visit Sergey's Gavrilets lab for theoretical evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee. Sergey is one of the leaders in the field and it was a very interesting visit.

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The trip from Atlanta to Knoxville was nice, northern Georgia and eastern Tennessee offer some beautiful nature.

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The actual reason for my trip to Atlanta was attending GECCO - the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2008. I have published some work there and thus presented that work in form of 2 posters and a paper presentation at the Graduate Student Workshop. One paper was on protein pattern classifier learning [Paperin, 2008a], the other - a conceptual investigation into using my computational model of Gavrilets' Holey Fitnes Landscapes for preventing premature convergence in evolutionary optimisation algorithms [Paperin, 2008b].

The conference was a brilliant one, everyone I met there liked it a lot.

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I went to Atlanta to take part in GECCO'08, but staying on for 2 days after the end of the conference I had a chance to explore the city. I did not like it. It made the impression of a third world county. Dirty, hot, loud, and so full of beggars that you cannot cross the street without being harassed for money. I have not seen so many homeless people in my life.

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The last few weeks before the departure for my world round rip were quite crazy. As it happens, I tried to do too much in a far too short time. All the idealistic plans about being ready for departure a week before the flight in order to take things easy turned out to be fatuous. Well, I should have expected that. At the end, I barely managed to finish most of this website and to release a new beta version of LiveGraph. The grandiose plans of writing a numerical analysis paper on holey fitness landscapes and starting the Dual Phase Evolution review paper fell sacrifice to the harsh reality and my inability to make realistic time estimates.