My silicon valley experience

Yesterdays conference at Xeequa made me curious about writing a facebook app. Apparently there is more than enough information about that and a huge bandwidth of different APIs is being offered. Since I am right now learning Ruby on Rails I wanted to combine these two and decided to use the rfacebook library for RoR. I also found a little guide which should help me setting up a simple test application quickly.

Installing the needed gem was a piece of cake but the also supposedly simple installation of the rfacebook plugin turned out to be a problem on my desktop PC. It magically worked on my Laptop. But I wanted it to run everywhere. As I found out this afternoon the problem was that no SVN client was installed on my PC. Took me a while to figure out that this one is being called in the background.

This being done I quickly had the controller created and copied the needed code. Then application really was able to open facebooks application logon screen which already was a success. Sadly enough this success was followed by a little bummer since apparently showing a image brought up the following error:

super: no superclass method `path_to_image'

Deleting the line in question killed the error but of course now the picture is not being shown. Apparently the function is somehow wrong. I found some information on the internet what to change in the rfacebook files to make it work anyway but it didn’t work for me. If somebody knows this error please let me know!

So it looks like writing applications for facebook is not as complicated as I expected it to be. I also like the huge amount of information available about it. But the rfacebook library appeared to me pretty buggy and underlying too much change. Since it’s only version 0.9 I should spare them from complains about that. Overall I feel confident about being able to achieve with this technology what I want to. What this exactly will be should be revealed in the next few days/weeks when the first version of my app will be available.

On the last days I attended the universities orientation events for international student and new graduate students. I meat some nice people and got some valuable information. Although it was pretty boring most of the time it was worth it.

It’s pretty amazing what the university offers in comparison to a German university. The university has it’s own little clinic on the campus where students can see different doctors for free. We also can see a psychologist for free and get tutoring for writing, mathematics or whatever for free. For me it also was astonishing that the university has it’s own police station.

Getting to San Jose turned out to be less complicated and faster then I expected. It takes me between 50 and 90 minutes to get there using public transportation and my new 37$ bicycle which I got at target. I have no idea how it can be that they sell bicycles with 15 gears and aluminum frame for this price but so far I have no complains about it and am happy I got it.

Cause we forgot the cameras cable and my laptops incapability to read CF-cards I still can’t post any photos. Sorry. But I will work on this.

Meanwhile I want to complain about the ridiculously high cell phone prices in the US. Yesterday went to check some offers because I don’t have a contract in the US and Ana needs a new phone. The prices were that high that I only this morning understood that these prices are not for the year but per month! Apparently the lowest amount of shared free minutes you can get at Verizon (I just picked this one randomly I could have picked some competitor as well) is 700. First of all that’s WAY too much for me. I have no idea how people are supposed to ever use that up. But they want 69$/month. And that’s the smallest partner contract you can get. But even with this contract an additional minute costs you 0.45$. The biggest partner contract comes with 6000 minutes and costs 299$. And still you have to pay 0.2$ for every additional minute. Readers from the US might perceive this as normal but I did a quick comparison with O2 in Germany. There have apparently a contract where you don’t pay a basic fee but only the minutes you use. So I would expect a pretty high price for each minute. But it’s only 0.19 Euro per minute. That’s still comparable with the cheapest additional minutes at Verizon. And of course we have contract for 10-20Euro/month in Germany and these are not unusually cheap or tiny. So I am completely astonished and can’t believe that people in the US apparently are willing to pay prices like these.

Yesterday in the early morning we drove up to Palo Alto in our jam packed car. We planned to meet our land lady at 12pm and wow what should I tell you? Although it’s a 5hr drive we got out of the car exactly at 12:00pm! I now know why my girlfriend is a successful manager!

But then it started. A few things in our otherwise great, bright and large apartment absolutely weren’t like we wanted them. So a window didn’t lock properly and the hardware in the guest bath room is kinda icky and some other details like dirt a lot of it. After we brought those complains to our very nice land lady we went o to IKEA and needed too much time too buy too many things too big for our car. Worst thing is the mattress was too big and we needed one for the next night. Delivery via IKEA on the same day wasn’t possible anymore and we couldn’t manage to rent a truck somewhere. Although AVIS told us on the phone they had something. But after a 30min drive to SJ international airport we found out that there vehicles were either too small or you couldn’t remove the seats. Thanks AVIS you stole one hour of our time! So we bought another, smaller mattress to fit in the car and we slept on this last night and it was good. The other stuff will be delivered on Monday. Another advantage of this is that the bed we bought looks way cooler with a spring box. But IKEA wants 250$ for that which isn’t an option. So now we can use the additional mattress instead. So that worked out well.

So today we have more shopping to do but decided to approach it less stressed and more relaxed than yesterday. So we are now sitting in a great cafe in downtown Palo Alto enjoying great coffee, pastry and wifi.

So more things will probably follow on Tuesday since then our ISP will send someone over to activate our Internet connection and the Router/Modem should arrive. By then I should also have some photos at hand.

So today I finally came back to the US after I was in Germany now for about 4 weeks due to Visa reasons. The flight was long and boring like always but I am only decently jet lagged.

I was really nervous about getting here because I had to drive my girlfriends car from LAX to our current home about 1.5 hrs away. I had never driven a car in a US city before and am not used to automatic shifting. But it all turned out perfectly. Although there was heavy rain driving was no problem at all and it’s just great to be back. Actually I wasn’t looking forward to being back (nor was I upset about it) but once I was out of LAX and smelled LA’s typical mixture of smog and ocean air again I was so happy to be back. Everything in this country is just so much bigger and wider and somehow makes you feel you can achieve everything you want. A lot stuff here looks really shitty and in bad condition. Everyone knowing how a Californian freeway looks compared to a German Autobahn probably knows what I mean. But driving home passing the Getty and the vast areas of generic shopping areas on a road with 4 lanes made me see these things first time differently. It might all look not as perfect and authentic as things in Germany but that does not matter. In the US things are not made for eternity and they don’t mean to be. Everything here is issue to constant change, progressing with only little respect for how things used to be. I think or better ‘feel’ that this approach and mindset makes the US so strong in modern fields of economy. Some days ago some one told me during an interesting conversation that US venture capitalist are willing to invest into markets not existing yet for which it’s much harder to find investors in Europe. I think that is right with that and this mindset can be seen just by having a look at US or at least Californian cities. Altogether I have been here for more than 3 month now and I realized it just now so it’s probably not that obvious but my todays trip through Woodlands Hills and seeing all the area from the airplane convinced me of this.

So now I absolutely have to watch all the episodes of House recorded on tivo!

I am a computer scientist originating from Germany and now moving to Palo Alto in the heart of the Silicon Valley. I am finishing my Masters degree at San Jose State University. I will use this blog to tell about the experiences I make moving to this country and I also want to tell about my interests. These include web development (esp. Ruby on Rails which I am currently learning), cooking, the Chinese language Mandarin and probably more things to come.

I also have some projects going about which I will talk at the appropriate time.