Since San Francisco is a cold city, we decided to go to Santa Cruz a city supposed to have a typical Californian beach and have some farenheit extra degrees.

We left at 12 because the night before was my roommates’s birthday party, the trip was supposed to be easy and last about 2 hours.

but of course, as always, we got lost. We still don’t know why but I suggest that it is because of the bad quality of my copilots’ advices. We spent something like 2 hours before reaching what looked like the t.d.c. of California. and two more hours to get to Santa Cruz. Anyway it was fun.

There we wen to the beach which was not impressive at all and walked to find what was up there, finally we did’nt find anything. Only hundreds of latin american people enjoying the sun and the wind. The water was almost frozen.

Then we spent some time downtown eating an ice cream cone and enjoying the cabrio.

• The trip

There, the proportion of girls was extremely high and the bar was full of MTV’s dismissed kind of drunked girls. Bad music, TV screnns diffusing baseball and huge blond american style guys. I didn’t like the place too much but it was good to try.

So when I was at Dinu’s, I found a post on craigslist (which is the most amazing place to sell or buy things. The guy was selling his car because he was going back to Switzerland!!!!

I called him immediately and this guy happened to come from Yverdon and after a 6 month internship he was going back home. The car was ok the guy was great so the deal is done

Yes I found a room, this is not very impressive now but two weeks ago after having walked all around SF looking for a room at that moment it was.

I live in a very typical victorian house 5 blocks away from the place where the hippie movement started back in the sixties (haight & ashbury). I share the house with a guy (Alexis) who is 26 too. The place is great, calm enough but close to the Golden Gate Park and the restaurants area. What is very cool is that here there is no problem to find a parking place!!!… pictures will follow.

Huge buildings with real dinosaurs inside is a small example of the life sciences faculty. Everything is huge and beautiful, lots of people around, the Berkeley

university of California seems very dynamic. What else could be with something

like 30.000 students. The city around the campus seems to have been designed for the students life, lots of restaurants, bars and stores around the BART (c’est le métro local) station and nice small houses full of

students or university members. Nightlife here is something I must try!

well after a painful 15 hours trip, I finally am in SF, more precisely in Emeryville which is one bridge away SF (not the golden). This is the land of many start-ups and big companies like Pixar, Kodak or (guess what) Novartis have offices here.

Everything is clean, nice (I even don’t miss MY switzerland) and on the streets there you can only see cars.

Since i can stay at the hotel (which is great by the way) only until sunday I started a very active phase of rooms hunting.

SF is a great city big buildings, nice coffees and restaurants, strange people everywhere. After my first day I have probably walked more than the last six months but it was a nice way to discover the city and visit some apartments.

The principal guests are Jessee James Garret (adaptive path), Jeffrey Huang (I&C, EPFL) and Alexander Ntoko (Chief e-Strategies, ITU, Geneva).

They will talk about the different decisional changes the Web 2.0 brought to companies and about the future of management.

Special prices for motivated students are available.

The workshops about Dojo and RubyOnRails will take place from April 23th to 27th.

• More details: www.natiw.ch

Banks, high technology, universities, big international companies and organisations, location in central Europe and people’s motivation makes this place very special and well fitted for developping web-based ideas.

Different events will take place in the very next weeks:

• The Swiss Web 2.0 in Geneva (March 20th) organized by Sandrine Szabo (check her blog) which was an informal meeting of active people in the french swiss part. You can find a video with everybody’s presentation.

• The NATIW (for Nomades Advanced Technologies of Information Workshops) seminars will start on April 20th :Ateliers Nomades organize this event for managers and web professionals. The goal is to discuss about strategic changes taking place in the management and the relation with the Web: How to take advantage of new Web technologies and people’s habits to improve management decisions. People from ITU, EPFL, CERN and many other will participate and animate this seminar. (check NATIW description )

• Finally, the Pionner’s Club 3rd event: “Web: a key of success” is a sharing experience meeting where people with a HighTech background (Phds with business ideas) meet people with a consolidated experience in entrepreneurship. This event will take place on May 1st at Hotel Movenpick at Lausanne and is a very good opportunity to meet future CEOs.

Orb is a startup based in Emeryville, CA they launched a product called MyCast which basically allows sharing media from your personal pc to any communication device connected throug the internet (phone, laptop, wii, playstation,…) honestly it is quite cool. You can see how it works here.

My job is not yet very well defined but what I am sure is that I’ll work as hell.

will be the beginning of all my sentences for the next 2 months.