As you may know, I was in the USA previous week. Unfortunately, it wasn't sightseeing trip. In fact, I attended
NSDI 12 networking conference which was held in San Jose. The conference was splendid -- there were many high-quality papers and presentations. The ones I enjoyed most were
Jellyfish,
ultra-low latency for datacenters and
multipath tcp. And of course our paper about
testing openflow applications (here I extremely enjoyed the fact that I was not the presenter).
In total, it was a good stay. Unfortunately, there were not many occasions to do the sightseeing. In fact, I had just one afternoon to do it. After a brief visit to Google where we met my advisor's former advisor, I was left with a couple of hours to spend. However, after making a quick poll, I realized that there is really nothing in San Jose. Edit -- really
big nothing -- not only there is nothing to see but it is spread in traditional Californian way all over the place. So I decided to visit San Francisco instead. To go there, I took a train with which I was not very impressed. Even for express trains, it takes ages to go the 80 kilometers. And by ages I mean more than hour and half. Plus the american trains are roughly two decades late -- when was the last time you saw a diesel locomotive? If I skip trains from Banska Bystrica to Zilina which are not electrified probably due to more than twenty tunnels on that route, I do not remember when I last saw such train.
Anyway, San Francisco is interesting city. Skyscrapers, old trams, chinatown and a hill in the middle of the city which does not affect the perfect square layout of roads. The only thing I do not understand is how can they drive these very steep streets. If you are interested in some pictures, you can find them at
usual place.
