The activities were not too exciting (especially the paint ball for which some people had signed up and then got to play for around 10 minutes), but I got to make one of my favorite Taiwanese desserts, 愛玉. Here are two pictures of me and another one where they were making mochi (麻糬):

By the way, Loïc was a little faster than I was, he's mentioning the event in his blog as well, including some funny pictures.

As part of the event we even got a gift voucher and today was the day where we could pick it up at the warehouse (that already made me suspicious). It turned out we had the choice between a really old webcam, a really old wired mouse, and a really old wired PS/2 keyboard. It wasn't so much a gift as a "please help us empty our warehouse, it's cheaper than ordering the trash company" object.

Anyway, free stuff is free stuff (haha, I'm cheap ;-), so I went for the keyboard. If nothing else I can use it to practice Bopomofo (the Taiwanese alphabet).

For the time being, though, I put it up in my office:

(I hate to explain jokes, but in case you can't read the Chinese, it says: "Antique keyboard exhibition. Please don't touch.")

So far, it's pretty interesting and I'm learning plenty of new stuff, although not necessarily in great detail. Some of the demos are really impressive but after seeing Vista fail miserably in my personal test I'm very suspicious of some of the things I see "work great".

Anyway, here are two photos I took in the conference center:

Who would have guessed Microsoft would display the products of their hardware division's biggest competitor ...

So, what are the reasons I'm staying in Taiwan instead of going back to California like it was planned? As always my reasons are manifold.

Let's start with the intelligent U.S. immigration politics. As you may have heard the run for this year's H-1B visas was generally a little underestimated, which prompted the USCIS to resort to a (more or less) random draw procedure that favored holders of U.S. MSc diplomas. I'm not going to dive into this topic cause others have done that plentiful, but I would be very interested in the opinion of a qualified economist. To me it looks like the U.S. government is passing on a lot of income taxes and pissing off their own companies, forcing them to move their workforce elsewhere. There may be more to it but I don't see it.

Then, the more I thought about the U.S. and my future in general, the less I saw myself living in the California. The poor health care and social system, the unhealthy and repetitive cuisine, the amount of driving and traffic, or paying for unjustifiable wars with my taxes are just a few things that bugged me more than I allowed myself to believe.

The longer I stayed in Taiwan, the more I felt that I would be happier here than in the U.S., especially since I can do the same great job here. It's pretty cool to work for a company that proves flexible enough to adapt so easily to the changing minds of their employees. :-)

I think I've said the same thing when I went to California last year: Feel free to come visit me at any time! At the time it didn't work very well; few people actually took the opportunity to do so, but I'm very happy about the ones that did! If you like a beautiful country with nice people and delicious, albeit slightly "unusual", food, this is your chance! (Today someone at Logitech offered to take me to a nightmarket to eat snake one of these days. I'll try to gather a few photos of dishes I've tried and come to like around here. I'll make sure the snake is on one of them! :-)

I finally (some claim I do it on a regular basis on windy roads in the Santa Cruz Mountains or between Chur and Peist) got a chance to practice and proof the skills earned while driving in the Swiss mountains. Either that or pure luck made me come in second out of fourteen leaving behind everyone but Patrick. Everybody had so much fun that I feel the chance of a rematch in 2008 coming up. ;-)

There are some pictures in my gallery. Sorry for the bad quality, indoor lighting and cell phone cameras are to blame. Nevertheless thanks to Richard and Loïc for taking them!

The actual news would probably be that I'm in the middle of (or should I say: at the very beginning of) learning Mandarin and preparing my three months' trip to Taiwan. I'll hope to post something about that very soon. It'll probably be in English, though. For some reason my blog doesn't support Chinese characters ... And that will remain the _only_ official reason. :-)

Either way, I thought the following picture taken last Friday at Logitech was pretty symbolic of the current situation:

The first item didn't actually cost me anything as it was a clear case for warranty. The Logitech Wireless Headphones for iPod that I had liked so much slowly started multiplying. (It's what I assume marketing people would call it when the headband snaps.) So, I got a pair of these instead:

Logitech FreePulse Wireless Headphones:

The first impression was not exactly good. The headband sat way too low in my neck, I felt like something was constantly strangling me and every time I moved my head it hurt my ears. So, after two days of not finding a way to adjust them and wanting to trade the new headphones in for the old broken ones and a tube of superglue, I finally came across a this review and continued trying until I found the solution: The rubber ear bands cannot be turned in place but they can be taken off and put back on very easily. New verdict: best wireless headphones I ever had. :-)

Of course, wireless headphones have their drawbacks. You can run out of battery and, due to their light design, they're not exactly great in a noisy environment. (If you've ever tried to listen to music in the BART you know what I'm talking about.) Again, Logitech to the rescue ...

Logitech Noise Cancelling Headphones:

To get a first impression of what noise cancelling technology can do I borrowed a pair of Sony ones and was heavily disappointed: the "negative noise" in a silent environment was about as loud as the noise that it tried to cancel. After reading a number of rather positive reviews of the Logitech ones I decided to go ahead and buy a pair. The ingenious part about them: once you put them on, most of the noise is already gone. The circumaural ear pads absorb already so well that the audio processing can easily remove the remaining (stationary) noise. Admitted, there is some ground noise introduced by the circuit but given the target environment--e.g. a plane or a train--that should be okay.

Having good music is all nice and great, but at the end of the day (and probably during the day, too) you still have to work. As some of you know, I've never been a big fan of mice. Nothing beats a keyboard shortcut or an editor like Vim where you can reduce any mouse user to a gasping spectator with the stroke of a few well chosen keys. So, for the few things where it's hard to avoid the mouse I'd like to be as efficient and precise as possible.

A great opportunity to test whether the new series of Revolution mice is revolutionary as promised. I decided to go for the VX notebook model and, indeed, it is very nice to handle. The movements are really precise and scrolling has never been that easy. I actually managed to scroll a 65,000 line Excel sheet from the bottom to the top with one swift motion of my index finger. Almost makes the Ctrl+Home shortcut obsolete. ;-)

Logitech VX Revolution:

In the past, the Logitech mouse drivers and applications have been infamous for their pathetic quality to the point where friends advised me not to tell people that I'm working on Logitech drivers--to avoid a spontaneous beating.

That must have been the reason why they came up with SetPoint, the successor to GrausWare (sorry, you need to know German for this one). Is it any better? Weeeelll ... At least it hasn't bluescreened my machine, which is already something. MouseWare took about one stand-by/resume cycle for that. But the software itself is still an exhibition of bugs (meaning they're so obvious, they can hardly be considered bugs) and it provides less functionality than some of the previous. Why, the hell, won't they let me assign the double click to the thumb button? I know it's lazy but I like it anyway! And browsing in the forums doesn't exactly do a lot to improve that impression.

It seems, though, that I'm not alone in my discontent. Somebody came up with an excellent hack called uberOptions that tweaks a bunch of configuration files and--voilà--more settings than you ever imagined. (Including the double click for the thumb button.) Integrate that piece of software into SetPoint, plan about a month of serious bug squishing and you have one of the greatest pointing devices available.

*PS:* We'll have the quality discussion again when the first product that I've worked on is shipping. ;-)

Maybe I should put up a webcam or a mouse trap, just to be sure that they're not actually of the same species ...

When I'm not eating I'm enjoying work at Logitech. Mainly reading up on driver development (Windows this time) and trying to get organized.

Two things positively surprised me about Logitech Switzerland, one of them has to do with Logitech and the other with Switzerland.

1. The cafeteria actually serves good food. You know, real menus with healthy vegetables instead of rare-cooked hamburgers that make you sick for the rest of the day. (Hello, Fremont cafeteria ...)

2. I know nobody's last name. Cause I don't have to. Just like in Fremont, people call each other by their first names. No "Monsieur" or "Madame". I was really expecting the typical uptight Swiss attitude there. I hope this spreads out to other European companies!

Not really surprising but nontheless positive is the fact that I have fancy keyboards and mice, e.g. one of these. (Yes, the diNovo Edge works fine even on Linux, it's recognized as two HID devices.) Working on consumer devices is just so much more fun to than sitting in the basement of a bank. ;-)

There were a few other things I wanted to mention but I seem to have forgotten. A clear sign to make three steps to the right and go to bed.

I will start out my new position as Video Software Engineer at Logitech in Romanel-sur-Morges until the end of December. Therefore, I will once again be living in Lausanne, albeit only for four weeks. At least that should give me time to get over the weather shock I suffered in sunny California. ;-)

Unfortunately, I missed by only a few days but a friend of mine took a few pictures and put them in his gallery. Have fun!

I want to take this opportunity to wager a few guesses on how different people feel about that. In alphabetic order.

* *Caroline:* Happy because she doesn't have to fly more than two hours to see me. (Or sad because she won't be able anymore to use the time difference as an excuse not to call me.)
* *Mike:* Sad because he has two (Loïc is leaving, too) interns less to pick on.
* *My parents:* Happy because I'll come back to Switzerland and will once again be able to fix their computer.
* *Naouel:* Happy because she'll get a few weeks' worth of brand new entertainment when I get back.
* *Patrick:* Happy because the Linux guy in the cube next to him finally leaves.
* *Peter:* Happy because he gets a reason to travel in the US.

(Sorry if you're not on the list. Just post a comment and I'll let you know how I think you feel. :-)

So how does Martin feel about the whole thing? I'll definitely miss my work and the people at Logitech. But at the moment I'm much more looking forward to the longest vacation I'll have before I die. (I figure by the time I hit retirement age, it will have surpassed the average life expectancy.)

Peter is either on a plane right now or trying to understand how tiny amounts of comestible substances can possibly endanger flight security and justify strip searching at airports. He'll be arriving here in SF tomorrow afternoon and I'll drag him to our little good-bye party. Updates and pictures coming up.

Today we hijacked one of the Logitech printers for a few hours, used a medium-sized Sequoia's worth of paper, and sent everything off to EPFL.

We also had our final presentations for the people at Logitech and I must say, it went surprisingly smoothly. The recipe: Prepare the slides about twenty hours in advance, skip any test runs, and sleep about five hours. It probably helps to have written and proof-read 98 pages on the topic shortly before.

So what's up for the remaining few days? Wrapping up, sleeping, cleaning out the apartment, more sleeping. And after next week it's traveling through California and a trip to the Big Apple. (Yes, I'm allergic to apples but this one is just big enough.) More details soon.

I'll try to post my thesis somewhere in the next days. For starters here's the title: _Building a Webcam Infrastructure for GNU/Linux._ Now, if you don't know what a webcam or Linux is, then I'm not sure, this is the right blog for you to read. ;-)

The first one was luckily not for breakfast but for lunch. As part of Logitech's 25 year anniversary a barbecue was organized for all employees. In a park right next to our HQ we were handed out picnic blankets, frisbees, and inflatable beach balls. There were sports and entertainment activities, among them a stand where a victim (among them several of our board of directors including our CEO) would sit on a chair with a menacing water balloon over their head. People could then try and hit a target in order to burst the balloon. Nobody got fired or their budget cut back as far as I know. :-) Try to find that in a European company where the board consists mostly of tie-wearing tight-ass managers ...

Just a few weeks ago after the quarterly employee meeting we were presented with a fancy glass cube.

Pretty shiny, huh? ;-) Okay, the cubes are a little on the tacky side but we appreciate the gesture. A couple of things went wrong though: For starters, some of the people didn't get one while the computers in our lab room did receive one. (I heard they were thrilled.) Moreover, some (according to a non-representative survey among a handful of my co-workers 'many' would be more appropriate a word) of the cubes had broken corners or lacked the stand. Let me assure you that this was in no way meant to represent the quality of our retail products and that they were neither designed nor manifactured by our engineers!

The next barbecue was organized by Michael who invited us for his last night in the Bay Area. (Okay, not technically his last night but it was his last day at work and he and his girlfriend are going away traveling for a few weeks.) Foodwise I went a little easy on the meat and language-wise I finally got to practice my German, which I don't get to do a lot. (Caroline, if you're reading this--which is very unlikely--this is your fault!)

This night I finally got my well-deserved sleep back. At least some of it. Because after about 8h of sleep I just couldn't stay in bed anymore and had to get up.

Oh yeah, as of today I have a guitar! ;-)

Ok, the noise argument first: If the difference between a laptop running and in standby mode were actually audible, I wouldn't have forgotten to switch it off at the office, right? And protecting the hard drive? If that were in fact necessary then how come I'm blogging from the very same computer that I carried home--running--while riding my bike for about half an hour over California's bumpy roads?

You can see this as an interesting experiment whose outcome humanity has been waiting for or as a sign that I should not be working till 11pm.

What was the reason I stayed so long, then? Automake. If you don't know what automake is, you can safely skip this paragraph. Let's just say that some combinations of convenience libraries, static libraries, and shared libraries are pretty hard to link together to a plugin (itself a shared library). Not getting it? Well, there you go ...

Lunch was fun today, we had a new hire lunch with Guerrino De Luca, the CEO of Logitech. It's not like we had filet mignon--it was pizza--but I guess they had spent all the money on a few hundred mysterious plastic cubes about which I shall blog later this week. ;-) Anyway, I love pizza, so I'm not complaining, and some of the discussions that were going on were pretty interesting.

As you can imagine I'm way to tired to end this post on a witty punch line, so here we go instead:

---p-u-n-c-h-l-i-n-e---

The soccer world cup has come to an end and so has a time feared like no other by managers all around the world. Or so I would imagine. While the office calmed down as people were watching the soccer matches of the Swiss team (in case you don't remember, the Logitech video department is largely in the hands of the Swiss :-), I came to think about the economic influence that such a sports event has on companies around the world.

The USA are certainly not the best place to study such effects given that most people here aren't particularly interested in sports that don't revolve around egg-shaped balls, wooden bats, or cheerleaders (the last of which I can almost understand). There are no people wearing soccer outfits for weeks at a time, there are no soliloquizing mascots for sale at every corner, and, most important of all, no big-time annoying soccer fans that feel the urge to block the streets with their honking cars after their team made the qualification round while poor students are trying to prepare their exams and get some rest. (If you've ever lived in Lausanne, you know what I'm talking about ...)

Back to the economic aspect: It would be interesting to know if the enthusiasm piling up during a soccer game transforms into flashes of productivity after the match or if the whole thing is just time lost on the companies and the entire economy. Does the turnover volume generated by the soccer world cup level it all out or is it the tar icing on the concrete cake of today's economy?

I have no clear answer to those questions but I'm inclined towards the pessimistic side on this one. Partly because of stories from certain companies in Belgium where employees in times of soccer world cups start work at 11am and leave at 3pm so that they have enough time to prepare the game (you know ... buying beer, making popcorn, aligning the TV set).

I myself am proud to have boycotted the world cup almost entirely (the occasional asking others for the score doesn't hurt too much). That doesn't mean that I have been working as efficiently as could be throughout the entire time (damn those instant messengers and funny Canadians! ;-), but at least I can safely say that I haven't wasted too much time when the deadline for my Master's thesis draws up. And it also doesn't mean that I won't be doing the very thing I'm complaining about right now during the next Summer Olympics myself. :-)

As you may have seen, I've used a good part of my little spare time to get the gallery running but there wasn't too much time to sort out, upload, and comment the pictures. So what do we need? More power! ... Umm, sorry, that was a different story. We need a good reason for me to put up more photos--like a trip!

What better moment for a trip than a long weekend? This is such a one. Tuesday is Independence Day, so we get a day off. And since Logitech is such a nice company, and because we all work very hard, they give us Monday off, too. Or maybe they just want to stop their phone system from breaking down if everybody were to call in sick. Who knows, who cares? Bottom line: the ideal weekend to go away.

Together with Thomas and Michael we're heading North to visit Lassen Volcanic National Park, Shasta Lake, and whatever else we'll feel like visiting up there.

Judging from past experience, I will have to sift through some 400 pictures next week picking those that are worth going into the gallery. We'll see.

Ironically, the long weekend starts with a very short night. We're trying to leave Fremont at 6.30 am to avoid the traffic. Right now it's 0.30 am and I still have a few things to do on my list.

Unless we get mauled by bears, attacked by rattlesnakes, or bitten by bird-flu carrying mosquitos, this blog is going to continue on Tuesday.

Tonight, Logitech invited employees and guests to the movie _Click_ in the Metreon in San Francisco. The movie is part of a cross promotion for Logitech's Harmony remote controls. Nobody has to ask me (or any of the other interns, for that matter :-) twice to go to a free movie, so Thomas and I joined a few dozen Logitech people and went to the premiere.

Despite my initially low expectations towards the latest Adam Sandler movie, I was positively surprised. There are many hilarious scenes that, luckily, leave bigger impressions than the ones that strive to give the movie a shade of seriousness. (Dramatic running in the rain? Been there, seen that, and way to often ...) Christopher Walken makes for a surprise when he turns up in a comedy and you don't have to guess long to figure out what kind of roles Jennifer Coolidge (American Pie, Joey) and Rachel Dratch (Saturday Night Live) play.

While the movie doesn't quite reach the highest of intelectual levels, it does give some food for thought: How many of us would just fast-forward through the better part of their lives if they could? What would be left? Something to keep in mind, I find.

I'm either very gullible or masochistic cause I keep making the same mistake about once a month. I still remember the words at introduction:

"The cafeteria is really good! It's run by this nice Asian couple and they make really good food!"

But then again, that came from the same person that sent our internship papers to Logitech Switzerland instead of EPFL. So close but yet so far.

I'm pretty sure that this time cured me and next time I _really_ don't feel like going out for lunch because I've had a bad day, I will just enjoy a couple of crackers with a bag of tuna. (I know, it sounds aweful but that tuna is actually really good and it's ready to eat unlike the canned one.)

Zero Gault Millau points for Logitech's cafeteria. That's about one point less than Switzerland usually gets for their songs at the Eurovision Song Contest. (Yeah, I know that's history's thinnest comparison but I'm delirious and bored here! ;-)

The answer to all these problems is not 42 but the Logitech Wireless Headphones for iPod:

Easy access and lower prices for their cool products is just one of the perks of working at Logitech ...

I think I have to go get dressed. It's 1pm and I'm in my pyjamas, still tired from yesterday. After the many miles I walked in the city yesterday and the 3+ hours of standing at the concert (they made us wait quite a bit in between the opening act and the actual concert), it's probably going to take a while until I can use my legs again. But then again, who needs legs if you have a rocking chair, wireless music, and a laptop. ;-)

In this case, the developers of a library that shouldn't need to be doing JPEG decoding decided to implement their own JPEG decoder instead of relying on libraries proven to be correct. They forgot a single line--easy enough to write but very time-consuming to track down--because they never tested the library with a particular type of JPEG images. I really wish I could use my time here at Logitech doing more interesting and productive stuff, it's not like there isn't enough of it.

Time to go home. Without the computer, it's Tuesday.

[Image]

I guess that Carl is one of the bigger people working at Logitech:

[Image]

(In case you can't decipher the bottom line of the second picture, it reads: "PS: will be eaten by Carl in facilities dpt!")

The fact that I'm still just embedding simple pictures in my blog probably gives you a hint on how far I'm along with my gallery module ... Well, I'm making progress, the integral parts of the engine are alive and I see a few hours clearing up in the next days.

In the meantime, you can still enjoy my temporary gallery, which I hope to enrich with some more pictures of San Francisco this weekend. I'm planning on meeting an old friend from EPFL, David Hürlimann, who's doing an internship at the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory over in Palo Alto. He moved to France a while back to do his Master at the Eurecom. I must remember to ask him about the student demonstrations and whether anything's left of the institute. :-)

No, I'm not obsessed with Starbucks, I've never even really been to one. Why would I? I don't drink coffee and even if I did I wouldn't want to pay five bucks (wild guess; if I ever come across the real price, I'll post it here) for a cup of caffee. Soft drinks are in the same price range as far as I remember and don't even get me started on the prices of tea in every single bar/restaurant around the whole world. Anyway, we also have tea in our kitchen, and that tea just happens to be the same one you can buy at Starbucks; that's all.

What's much more interesting though, are the names of the different kinds. Among many others there is _Earl Grey_ (we all expected this one), _Passion_ (at Logitech, everyone is passionate about their job, therefore this fits), _Awake_ (people do work a lot, so this one's hot), and--my favorite--_Zen_. (I have been told that not everyone knows what Zen is, so if you're one of them, take a look at Wikipedia.)

Now, guess which ones we're constantly running out of. That's right, _Awake_ and _Zen_. So if you've ever wondered whether Logitech is a cool place to work at; people are constantly working, wide awake at all times and still Zen throughout the day. Need I say more?

I'm not going to break the promise I made about a week ago, but let's just say that one of my work buddies was nice enough to give me a lift this morning so I didn't have to swim.

In the office I discovered that our Starbucks coffee machines not only produce excellent coffee (so I've heard), but equally good hot chocolate. I was told that it's even better if you manage to quickly pull away your cup before the machine waters it down. I'll try that tomorrow.

Work itself is getting more exciting by the day. The mass of new information is overwhelming, but it gives you the nice feeling (that is, of course, if you don't have to go back to university :-) that you learn more during one week in a company than during many entire EPFL courses. On the other hand, I could also apply the knowledge I had acquired during one of my favorite courses last semester (_Storage and display peripherals_)--an experience you can't and don't have often enough.

We had excellent lunch in _My Thai_ (34265 Fremont Blvd, Fremont, CA 94555), about five minutes from where I work. Not only do they serve excellent food, they also have a very special way of challenging their customers. The menus come in different levels of spiciness: mild, medium, hot, and _fire_! If you manage to finish a "fiery" menu, they take your picture and put it on a wall of fame, therefore allowing anyone to see what a person looks like seconds before they go to the emergency room. I chose to live and ordered a mild meal. I was not disappointed.

Not being a coffee drinker myself, I couldn't quite share the excitement about the Starbucks coffee machines, but I do like the water coolers that, next to hot and freezing water, serve water at room temperature. :-)

For lunch, everybody was assigned a lunch buddy, i.e. somebody who would take you to lunch and introduce you to your new workplace later on. The cafeteria served a cordon bleu sandwich creation, which bore a strong resemblance to a hamburger but was nevertheless good.

I got to meet a lot of new, cool people and sit through my first two meetings, complete with video conference to the Logitech branch in Taiwan.

Oh, and did I mention we got a MediaPlay Cordless Mouse as an introduction gift? It is still up for a serious evaluation, but it did manage to seriously confuse my roommate's X server/USB stack. We'll see how it's going to work for me.

If I want to be able to get some productive work done in the next six months I may have to put an end to these after 1am bedtime blog sessions and find a different window in my busy day.

All in all a very exciting day that made me look forward to my internship even more. I'll keep you posted on what happens next!

PS: For those who don't know yet (and do care): I'm going to be programming Linux drivers for the latest Logitech webcams.