Orbitz idiots vs. United Airlines

I booked my flight to the states through Orbitz.com because is was cheap at this point. But yes, cheap … and nothing more. I tried to change the flight back to Germany yesterday. It took me 45 minutes on the phone, talking to many different people and half of them couldn’t even speak a proper English. It was amazingly bad. Anyway, it seemed fine at the end and the fees were 100 EUR to change the flight and $30 service fees for orbitz (I am wondering which service!!!). They told me that I shall call back when it does not change in the online system in 24 hours.

It did not change … of course not. I called them back, again, people who could not communicate properly (I suspect an Indian call center). The only thing they could do was to undo yesterday’s transaction and tell me to call United Airways (after another 45 minutes on the phone!!!!).

So I called United, expecting that I will just loose my ticket. And they have been surprisingly competent. It was awesome! They changed everything in 10 minutes, sent me confirmation emails and charged only 100 EUR. I’m deeply impressed by their service (actually this should be normality, but I was used to Orbitz).

I’m not going to use their “service” again!

Meeting Albuquerque

I came back from the Open MPI collective meeting in Albuquerque. It was amazingly fruitful and we had many new ideas for non-blocking collectives. Many of the are actually new problems but it’s good to discuss them before I am challenged with those questions at conferences without preparation. The meeting was hosted by the university of New Mexico

To be precise, the Center for High Performance Computing at the UNM:

We ran through the discussions pretty quickly (actually too quickly for my taste, because we “dropped” (i.e., decided not to implement) most of the nice collv2 things we designed last year) so that we finished early. We had the last late afternoon (5pm) off and I decided to go with a guy from Sun Microsystems to do some sightseeing. We went to the Petroglyph National Monument to see some drawings of native americans.

We had to wak through the hot desert to see them

and they were really disappointing!!!! :-(.

Anyhow, we went on and wanted to see the “Vulcanoes”.

The first one was pretty lame …

but we had a nice view over Albuquerque and the Sandia Mountains

And of course the *real* volcano!

That we finally climbed! *yeah*

So that’s pretty much it! The afternoon was over and we flew back the next day. A very productive meeting!

McCormicks Creek

We’ve been to another State Park this Sunday. It was great, we hiked the whole day and got totally lost in the wilderness (there were deer paths that looked like human paths :)). The waterfall is really ridiculous (see picture), but the wolf cave is really cool.

It’s a small (very small) tunnel-like cave where one can go (crawl) through. It’s not really advertised on the webpage (I guess they are afraid that some people just get stuck in the middle – this nearly happened to me as I realized that my shoulders are to wide for several passages in there :)).

Lake Monroe & Some more links

Yeah, we biked to Lake Monroe on Saturday :). The bike ride was great even if we lost our way due to my misinterpretation of “Moores Pike”. I know I know … American cities are organized in grids and one can not get lost. But somebody decided to rename streets in the middle of town!!!!! Anyway, we finally made it :). The beach was nice but the swimming area was ridiculously small. And the worst thing is that the Indiana Department o Natural Resources (DNR) seems to be *really* stupid. So their goal is to protect nature (sort of I guess). Ok, here’s the deal: if you come by car or van or truck or minibus or whatever vehicle, you pay $4 gate fee per vehicle. Fine, but if you come by bike, it’s $2 per bike!!!!! So, calculate how many people fit into a minivan (I’ve seen a van loaded with at least 10!). And we paid $4 for two bikes! That’s such a rip off. And I must say it really encourages me to take my car next time and get 3 people to join me – it’s half the price. Seriously, they must be completely retarded. And we’ve been pretty much the only two cyclists who came from “the outside” (there were more, but they seemed to come from the campground which was 100 meters away). Oh my gosh! I have to file a complaint! I don’t know where yet, but I’ll do!

To the links:

The boys project .. pretty interesting. Boys are “extremer” than girls in many regards ;).

A funny airline complaint – awesome ;-). Don’t choose this seat!

Did you know that yoga and sex are related? Let’s test it ;-)!

Spending my birthday in the airplane

Yeah, it happened that I missed my flight from LA to Indy. I arrived 8hrs late, don’t ask why ;). Anyway, they explained me that I would have to purchase a new ticket *argh* – I thought that I would never ever fly with Northwest. I discussed for 45 minutes with the clerk and she was pretty much under pressure (the queue behind me got longer and longer and people started complaining). Finally, she gave me a place on the waiting list to a flight to Detroit for free. And I made it into the airplane (again, don’t ask how :)). I had only a half seat (there was an incredibly fat (later sweaty and even later smelly) guy next to me that occupied the other half of my seat. It was probably the worst flight I ever had (4.5 hrs on that “half” seat with *full* body contact), but I was very happy to be in that plane! The plane arrived late (a connection flight to Indy was already waiting), and I did the same thing there. I discussed with them until they assigned me tha last free seat for free (hey, what’s the point to fly with a free seat if you could make a potential customer happy :)). But yeah, I forgot about my luggage … it was only checked to Detroit (I realized that later *g*). Again, discussions at the baggage reclaim office :). They did at least agree to transfer it to Indy that I could pick it up the next day (there was no way to convince them to send it home to me for free :)). But I got a car and gas is nearly for free here … so I picked it up. Generally, it was a very interesting experience, how you can fly for free if you are determined enough (I did not make it into the direct flight from LA to Indy, the guy at the desk (Larry) was very very well trained and impressed me a lot, but I had a nice conversation with him, and the next flight worked out).

And I did still have some time to celebrate my birthday.

Swimming in the Pacific

I just had to go for a swim. The conference ended at 5:30 today, so I had some time to go down to the beach (10 mins walking). It was really nice, and I was nearly alone. I did even manage to swim in the Pacific (the water was *freaking* cold) – for 2 minutes :). I guess it was less than 10 degrees Celsius.

Running at the long beach :)

Yeah, after eating all the fat-cakes and muffins and bagels and more unhealthy stuff, I had to go for a run. I used the break between the sessions and the banquet to go for a beach run. It was great! I beat the beach *yeah*. I ran from the beginning (3rd street) all the way down to the end of the beach (okok, let’s say the end of this segment) at 54th street. It’s about 8km (5 miles) one way on google maps. It was really cool – 1hr running at a paradise-like beach with perfect temperature (chilly wind). And I was even the fastest runner out there (I passed everybody and nobody passed me). It was getting very very hard at the end though. Anyway, I can barely walk now but it was totally worth it!

Long Beach, CA

Some first impressions from my trip to the west coast.
My ride to the airport (yeah, the driver carries my bag – he literally pulled it out of my hand *g*).

the inside (huh):

The weather in Long Beach was pretty cold (about 16 Celsius, Bloomington was about 27 Celsius *argh*). Anyway, it was a sunny and nice day, and my rental car (Pontiac) is neat (I’m now proud member of the Emerald club – thanks to IU):

Ok, I should have printed a map :-(. They did *not* have a map of Long Beach at the Los Angeles Airport :-(. So I tried to find the hotel on my own. That was a clear desaster, but I think I found the place where several scenes for Terminator I were shot:

It looks extremely similar, I nearly went down to test the race track :).

Anyway, I found the hotel finally. It’s pretty far away from the conference, but it’s really nice (incl. free wireless) and the hotel + rental car is *much* cheaper than the conference hotel!

My first talk on Monday went *really* nice and the room was completely packed and we had interesting questions/discussions :). I’m looking forward to my second talk on Friday!

ABINIT Workshop in Liege, Belgium

Yes, I finally made it. The drive from Bruyeres (Paris) to Liege was hell because I decided to avoid the freeway and take the national roads. But I did not know that the French and Belgium signs only indicate the next very small village, and my map had a very very low resolution. So I was mostly doing “hot potato” routing – but it kind of worked. Ok, it took me 5.5 hrs ;). Anyway, the Belgium specialities are amazing, I tried all kinds of beer yesterday and lots of cheese. And I found the way back to the hotel :). So Belgium is also nice – I was very surprised by the large variety of cheese they had.

The university looks similar to other Belgium universities that I saw. It looks like an old WW II bunker complex (just the cannons are missing). Pretty interesting, and it’s like a labyrinth inside.

Salut de Liege

Soiree, Soiree, courir at travail

Yes, pretty long time since my last post :). That does not mean that nothing happened, it means that I did not have time to write anything down. So I’ll just wrap it up.

The last two weekends have been great, I discovered several great places in Paris. The Glaz’art is a rather spooky, but nice techno place, the LaFleche d’Or is really nice. I enqueued 30 minutes in front of it, but it was worth it! The night was tres bien. Last weekend was Erasmus-party weekend. I went to the La Loco on Friday, this was amazing. It’s unfortunately directly next to the Moulin Rouge, so that I searches 40 Minutes for a parking lot *argh*. After enqueuing another 40 minutes (where I met many people and learned about the secret trick to get in free – just bring a printout of the flyer with you – the belgium guy had one spare for me which saved me 10 EUR!), I was inside. And it was amazing, the place is rather huge and not too packed (I don’t understand why we had to wait so long?). But the music was awesome, the best DJ I heard since a long long time. Saturday was another Erasmus party at another place in Paris. So Paris is a great place to club, if you know where. I found the following two sites very helpful: cityvox and tribudenuit ah, and not to forget google.

Besides that I’ve been working at the CEA, which is a clearly amazing place to work -  (randomly ordered) great people, great food, great technology, great boss, great sports.  Yes, great sports. The facility offers different sports for their employees. As I wrote earlier, I went running every second day, for slightly more than an hour with nice company. They did not speak English or German and it was much fun :).

Yes, that’s it mostly. I’ll depart to Belgium on Sunday – I will miss France and the CEA.