Thursday, July 31, 2014

Best. Roommate. Ever. Sofia!

Sofia is the best roommate I've ever had! When I came to CERN, I wanted to keep doing yoga in the morning and I was a little worried about whether she'll be ok with it. And you know what she did? She joined me :) We ended up turning on music in the morning so that it wakes us up and possibly makes us sing and dance. We love Moby, Morcheeba, Parov Stelar,... I'm so happy I can be crazy and Sofia is just fine with it :)

We always have these philosophical conversations about life, career, relationships, etc. Sofia is Russian and I love the way she comes up with new questions. She thinks so differently compared to me. She is definitely more feminine and I'm more childish. So we have things to talk about and share very different points of view.

Sofia made me wear a dress a few times. It was really fun, because here at CERN there are not so many women and very few of them wear a dress. So when Sofia and I dress up and go to work, it's so funny to watch the people starring at us when they drive or bike around :)

Oh, I wanted to tell you a few facts about her actually. So, Sofia studies IT in Moscow and does research in Neural Networks. She's 21 years old/young. I always feel so old when I realize this... I'm 24 in case you didn't know. Anti started calling me granny after I told him. Like five seconds ago...

Anyway, Sofia will study in Netherlands next year so I hope she'll enjoy her time there and will come to visit me in Prague. I'm sure we will keep in touch in the future.

Having lunch at Restaurant 2 (at CERN)

Visiting nuclear reactor in Grenoble

In CERN Control Center

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

(Monty) Python

I have a cold, the weather has been awful, it's been raining for two weeks or it feels like it... I was trying to work and ended up just deleting everything I coded today because it simply sucked. Such a beautiful day...


So I was thinking about something to boost my mood and ended up taking pictures of the doors in the data center where I work. For those of you who don't know it, I'm a huge fan of Monty Python so this really cheered me up when I walked by :) My favorite is the French taunting scene from the Holy Grail and basically whole Life of Brian.

Just to be clear, I didn't silly walk around CERN :) But I might try it one day when I feel like it :)


Tuesday, July 29, 2014

What a Girl Can Hear in a Single Day at CERN aka Lunch with My Friends :)

This is not going to be too serious :) The openlab guys and I had a lunch together. This is not such an exceptional thing but it was kind of special today. Just to make sure I want to make it clear that we had fun and we are friends etc. So let's get started.

We met at 12 in front of the data center. The first conversation with Robert went like this:

Robert: "Hey, Hana."
Me: "Hey Robert, how are you?"
R: "Your pants are disturbing."
H: "What?" (bewildered look)
R: "Your pants. They are disturbing."
H: "Oh, why?" :)
R: "My grandma used to have a carpet that looked like your pants."
H: "Ehm... Seriously? And you're telling me like that?"
R: "I'm not saying I didn't like the carpet. It just brings back some memories, you know."
H: "You just told me I'm looking like a carpet?"
R: "No, I'm not. Just your pants."

So then we go to the restaurant. We get our food and sit down together. I sit down next to Anti and Joao. Here I'm choosing just the highlights :) I must say I was smiling all the time, otherwise the conversation would not probably happen, but anyway...

Anti was staring at my pasta for a while and then he said: "You should eat less, you know?"
H: "What?"
A: "You know, you eat too much."
H: "I don't think so."
A: "Yes, you do. Look at you."
H: "Like 'look at me' so what?"
A: "You know, everybody is talking about it. You gained some pounds since you came here. Your butt looks awful."
H: "What?"
A: "Everybody says how much prettier you were when you came here but now when you gained so much weight."
H: "I'm fine!"
A: "No, you're not. Look at you. Look at you belly." Anti starts touching my belly as if I was super fat.
H: "Seriously? This is not possible! Is this really happening? Am I still sleeping?"

Now Joao starts helping Anti in trying to drive me crazy:

Joao: "You know, you should touch her belly and ask who is the lucky one."
H: "What? What possibly more insulting you could tell a girl?"
A: "What about asking who is the unlucky one?"

At this point we are just laughing and the guys actually eat their lunch. I am still kind of bewildered by the offensiveness of our lunch humor but I'm not taking it too seriously or personally. The rest of the story is rather boring compared to these lines :) I really like brutally honest and mean humor because I think it's a great way to tell people things you would never be able to tell while being serious. It makes you think new thoughts even though it is sometimes a little uncomfortable.

Anyway, this lunch break was a really unexpected experience. The good thing is I realized I am not fat and I don't care about what somebody else says, which is great :) And I do like my pants even though they look like somebody's carpet. By the way they are super comfortable. So thank you guys!

My beautiful comfortable pants



My Oatmeal Mornings

One of the basic questions when you move somewhere else is what to eat. And the most important meal is breakfast. At least for me. When I don't eat properly in the morning, it doesn't matter how much I eat during the day, I end up hungry at night. 

So what do I eat here? I make my oatmeal. What started as a low-cost American college breakfast with Chun and Vashku evolved in a masterpiece. It consists of oats (What a surprise!), sugar (preferably brown) or honey, some nuts such as almonds, hazel nuts, pieces of coconuts or something, and some dried fruits. I prefer raisins, dried apricots, cranberries... Or I use fresh fruits like bananas, apples, peaches,... When I get bored, there is always the possibility of putting some chocolate in there :)

I love this, because it's quick, healthy, and filling. You just pour boiling water on it and you can eat it in 3 minutes. It's warm so it wakes up your body in the morning. It's rather healthy, not much processed stuff. It's easy to make since I can buy the ingredients in every supermarket. And it also makes me proud of myself for taking care of my body :) Which is a good feeling to start the day with. I just think it's great :)

Other essential parts of the morning routine are: turning on some energizing music and dance and possibly sing with Sofia, do some super short yoga (Sun Salutation) and there is no way this wouldn't wake me up. Also the neighbors appreciate our singing :) Luca said so a few days ago so I hope he really doesn't mind :)

Sunday, July 27, 2014

Chill Out in the Library and My French Skills

I finally did some work on my research project form home university. I'm proud of myself. Joao and Anti took me to the library where you can actually work outside. It was so peaceful and calm. I think I will go there more often to get some work done.

The highlight of today was when I understood how much I had to pay at the cashier in the restaurant. The funny thing is that even the numbers are different in Swiss French compared to French French :) So for example "soixante dix" means seventy in France but it's called "septante" here. Makes sense, right? I just found out there actually is an article about it on Wikipedia (in French) with a brief history background of the story.

Anyway, my French is not really getting anywhere except the fact that I started to understand French commercials on Spotify :) And this is just because I heard them already one hundred times or so. I'm afraid my French skills will stay dormant for a few more years...

I also started moving my old blog about my time at Union College to blogspot. It will take some time since I need to write a script to get the posts from the awful messy and nonfunctional xml format to something more user friendly. It will need some editing in hand anyway...

It feels like traveling back to the past when I look at the posts, it brings back so many memories... I hope it will help somebody to decide whether or not to go to Union or abroad. And to be clear about this, I had a blast at Union so just go for it if you can!


Saturday, July 26, 2014

Visit to ILL and ESRF in Grenoble

The openlab Summer Students went to visit the Institut Laue-Langevin and  the European Synchrotron on Friday. It was a very interesting visit especially after we knew already something about how CERN works. Both research centers are smaller than CERN and work on a little different basis. There are many more experiments and scientists from different fields come here to carry out experiments.

We got to see the data center at ILL, which was relatively small compared to the one at CERN but the data are not stored forever as at CERN. Then we visited the nuclear reactor at ESRF. It looked like in a movie or something :) I guess you usually don't have a chance to see something like that.

Anyway, the visit was great but I feel like I really want to work on my project at CERN. I had so little time to work that I'm actually really excited about finally having a week without traveling :) You can look forward to some more serious posts about the science we do here.

Me and a lot of dosimeters




My Work Project

So I'm cheating a little today and I'm sharing only my original job description. It is really vague so if you don't get much it doesn't mean you're stupid but the text is just not very specific. Don't worry, I will describe what I do in more detail later.

Partner/group CERN IT DSS (Data Storage Services)
Title         EOS monitoring and analytics tools

Description
The IT-DSS group at CERN runs and evaluates innovative cloud storage technologies for their application to big data problems in high-energy physics research. One of the main storage systems is EOS, a multi-Petabyte disk storage built from commodity hardware heavily used by LHC and non-LHC experiments, primarily for physics data.

In the scope of a common monitoring framework for our cloud storage services and in order to improve the analytics, the manageability and the user interface, the candidate will
* implement a probing system to check storage health and main KPI
* implement features for the web visualization of storage KPIs 
* investigate  the integration of other monitoring within the framework
* compare different solution of storage monitoring and analytic tools

The successful candidate will have knowledge of scripting languages (e.g. python/perl/bash) as well as java, experience with Linux and web services, and will enjoy working in a multinational team.

The student will gain working experience with a large-scale data storage system and exposure to several other user+support-facing IT services; contributions will be running in production - project will include roll-out procedures/cycles and user feedback.

Supervisor Luca Mascetti
Candidate(s) Miss WURZELOVA, Hana (Czech Republic) 

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Memories from Zurich

After a few days I decided to post some pictures from the trip to Zurich last week. I really liked the city, the atmosphere, the old city center, free drinking water in 1200 fountains around the city, the great guide we had etc.

We went out to have a beer and ended up going to the river and chilling out standing in the water, drinking our beers... I wish there were more peaceful nights like this one.

The crazy Greeks crew :)

Our cool guide in an old monastery in the city center

Looks like a dream retirement activity to me :)

The view of Zurich from Lindenhof Hill

Playground/party area at ETH Zurich


Wednesday, July 23, 2014

CERN: So What Do We Actually Do Here?

We had a great tour around CERN today. I finally got the big picture of what happens here. It is rather difficult to sum it up since everybody you talk to usually knows only the experiment they work on and don't know much about the other activities.

I'm full of everything and super tired so I actually skipped a Czech barbecue tonight which I'm not happy about... Anyway I'm sharing pictures from today and including some links for further reading and procrastinating for those of you who are interested. I really had a blast and learned so much today. So I hope you enjoy it as well :)

Well kids, this is where the antimatter is made. Seriously. It is called Antiproton Decelerator

This is me being excited in the data center :)

The tape storage is accessed by several robots.
It serves as back up for all experimental data at CERN. 
 
Ties looking at a high-resolution picture of the CMS detector. 

Sofia and I as cool scientists wearing helmets :)

So this is Compact Muon Solenoid
It is 22 metres long, 15 metres in diameter,
and weighs about 12,500 tonnes. 

Big Brother watching us and vice versa in CMS Control Center.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Saturday Trip to Annecy

Petr told me his crew for Saturday trip to Annecy, a medieval town in France. We went with two guys from Ecuador, Bryan ("I sprained my ankle but will go anyway.") and David ("I'm the best figure skater of Ecuador."), and Stathis ("I will freeze to death in this water.") the sane Greek. For some reason, we left at 8 am but we were possibly the first tourists in the town.


The old downtown is really beautiful. I loved these old tiny houses built just next to each other, tied together by the stream. It looked a little like Venice.


Then we walked up to the castle, where we met another group of CERN Summer Students. As there were a few experimental physicists, we ended up measuring the depth of the well by repeatedly throwing coins in it and measuring the time of the fall of the coins. I think the well was 15 meters deep if I remember it correctly :)


Then we took a tour through the castle since it was raining anyway. We learned a lot about lakes, fishing, birds... The best part was probably Pixar short movies about animals :) It was rather boring otherwise. But for example these mermaids' skeletons were really cool. Especially after Petr called them "sea virgins" as we do in Czech. Everybody liked that :)


Then we went to see Gorges du Fier, but the pictures from this part are not as good as it was raining and cloudy. We chilled by the lake, drank some wine and enjoyed Annecy in the evening. Overall, I had a great time!

PS: Some of you are probably curious about what I actually work on here. I wanted to wait a little before I elaborate on it and there have been many trips lately so I haven't written anything yet. You can look forward to some more scientific stuff later this week.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Morcheeba Concert at Montreux Jazz Festival

Epic! I loved Montreux! The place is insanely beautiful. We took a car with Lada, Czech Technical Student. We were three Summer Students, Eva, Aman, and I, and went to Morcheeba concert together.


First, we walked around the place. It was really crowded but the walk along the lake was nice in the evening sun. The Geneva Lake is so pretty with those mountains all around...



The concert was great. I need to do that more often. Morcheeba sounds even better live. I wish I had a voice like that... Eva and I were surprised to be basically the youngest guys in the audience. Not a big deal, just interesting :) We had a great time.



Montreux got even more crowded after the concert so we just left and were back to get some reasonable rest before the rest of the weekend. Thank you everybody for the great night in Montreux!






Sunday, July 20, 2014

Google = Free Food + Disneyland = Heaven on Earth?

I apologize for a little break. I've been busy living this week :) This is the first time since Tuesday I have some time to stop and write. There are many things I want to share with you so please be patient with me. I'll take it step by step. There's too much going on :)

Trip
As a part of the openlab Summer Student program, there are several visits to companies and research institutes in Switzerland and France. I didn't know that in advance and I was so happy to find out we will go to Zurich to visit several places including Google.

The visits to Open Systems and ETH Zurich were also interesting and I enjoyed them both a lot. However, everybody keeps asking about Google and I have not enough time to go into detail about everything. If you're really interested in something else, please email me or something.

Free Food
How was the day we spent at Google then? Epic! Of course it was great. One of the highlights was having breakfast and lunch there. The food was actually pretty healthy. And there was so much of it! It feels good to be taken care of like this.

I loved the fruits and didn't have enough time to have ice cream, because we wanted to try sliding down the slide from the floor above into the cafeteria :) It felt like a playground combined with a candy store or something.

Disneyland
I actually found some pictures from the office. The description of the workplace as "surreal" is pretty fitting in my opinion. There is food every 30 meters so that you can have a snack any time you want to. There are chill out areas, sofas, massage chairs, little gardens, play rooms, gyms, game rooms,... I cannot even remember all of it. Just follow the link above to check it out. It's really impressive.

We had a great guide, one of Google summer interns, Elizabeth from California. Thank you so much for the great tour! She handled us (a bunch of crazy Greeks and other international guys) pretty well :)


Heaven on Earth?
I got asked multiple times. Do I want to work there? I mean Google is just an amazing place to work at. No doubt. However, to really enjoy working there, you had better be passionate about what you do. I think this is true in general, about anything you do. The point here is you won't get to work at Google unless you are really excited about your work anyway.

So if you are the right kind of geek who spends their free time solving programming puzzles, just go for it and I think you will have a blast working here. On the other hand, even all the slides in the world won't help you if you don't do what you love.

So for now, I don't want to work at Google. I want to travel and do as little programming as possible. I am super excited about working as an intern at McKinsey Prague next spring. This is another dream of mine that came true in the last few months... Dreams are coming true so fast I can hardly keep up. Let's see what happens next :)



Friday, July 18, 2014

Google = Free Food + Disneyland

So I spent last two days in Zurich, visiting Open Systems, ETH Zurich and Google :) I can tell you it was like Disneyland with unlimited free food. Basically a paradise :) But I'm really tired now, so I will give more details tomorrow. 

Good night. 


Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Morning

Originally, I wanted to take a selfie of myself in the morning to prove I got up so early. But I just don't have the courage to put such a picture on the web...

Leaving for the visit. See you later everybody.


Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Firework at a Castle

We went out with the girls with openlab last night. There was a firework at a castle nearby. I liked it and I think I liked the music even more. We ended up dancing with other Summer Students and took the last bus back to CERN. The local band really rocked and it was for free :) 


I am super tired now but I am also super excited about my near future, because we are going to Zurich tomorrow. And we're going to visit Google! No pictures allowed inside the place though... And then there will be the Montreux Jazz Festival and Morcheeba on Friday! :) Is this really happening?

Monday, July 14, 2014

I Went Running!

Well, I already went running a few times with Markus and it was great. The surroundings of CERN are just beautiful. I keep being so positive... Maybe I should write a more depressed post once in a while... But not today! 

I went through the back gate behind Pump Hall and ran towards a stream in a narrow forested area 15 minutes away from CERN, where we actually went with Markus before. You run along vineyards and sunflowers. Like a dream :) This time the weather was just ridiculously great and I had some time so I ended up continuing to explore a forest a little further and came back after almost an hour. 

Since it was raining a lot last week, the forests are pretty soaked now and it was rather difficult to run in the mud. But it felt so good to run in the shade completely lost in a forest I've never been before :) Next time I'll take shoes for orienteering and keep exploring. 


Sunday, July 13, 2014

Geneva Lake Parade

Petr and I went to Lake Parade yesterday. We left later to be able to stay for the party at night, but we came just on time to get soaked by the rain. Fortunately, we met with Tana from Slovakia, who had an umbrella and some food :) 


After the rain, we followed the parade to the Parc La Grange, where the evening event was held. Since we had some time, we took a break from the noise and went to see the park. I really liked it. The trees were huge and old and it was a nice walk. We also met some random girls from Slovakia at the restrooms :)


Then we went back to the lake to have some beer and watch an epic sunset over the lake and the Jura Mountains. As you can see, it was amazing. After a few hours of walking, it felt great.


We had a funny view of a bathroom place. It ruined the romantic atmosphere though... :) At one point, there were ten guys queuing to go to the bathroom. I was wondering how many thousand people could watch them from the bank :) 

Anyway, after the sun set, we went dancing and had a great time which I'm not going to describe in more detail here. I've never been to anything like that before and I liked it a lot. Maybe I could go dancing more often. 


Saturday, July 12, 2014

Why Do All the Coins Look the Same?

I'm super lazy today so this is going to be a very short post about Swiss coins. As you can see at the picture, the francs just look the same. This is really inconvenient when you are trying to find the right amount of money at a cashier. Moreover, I usually already feel embarrassed by the fact that I can't understand the basic numbers in French even after studying it for 6 years. My life is difficult, I know:)

When you look closely, you can see the 50 cents coin is actually 1/2 franc. Who came up with this idea? I don'w know. Wikipedia says the coins are actually very old: "The oldest coins are still valid today; the 10 Rappen coins dating back to 1879. They are therefore among the world oldest coins still valid today." This is cool, I agree. But the daily use is complicated :)


Friday, July 11, 2014

Getting an Account in a Swiss Bank

So I finally got my "credit" card today, which means I can withdraw some cash and start spending my Swiss money :) It's a quite interesting story.

I'm not sure I can call the thing they gave me a credit card. It is a card. You can withdraw money from your bank account. However, there is no internet banking and you can't even pay with the card in a store. Another funny thing is that this account costs I think 7 CHF (160 CZK, 8 USD, 6 EUR) a month. What for? I don't really know.

I was also pretty amused to sign a thick pile of papers to get this account :) The bank doesn't really like providing accounts to students from different countries. I heard that the Summer Students were paid in cash last year. So I guess we are lucky this year :)


This also bring back memories from the time I studied at Union College in Schenectady, NY. The US bank was super user-friendly. For example, we were given temporary debit cards before they made the proper ones and the staff set up internet banking with us. They actually took a picture of you and put it on the card. The funny part was the use of cheques, which always reminds me of the nineteenth century :) Or when I ended up having three different cards (with the same number) to one account :) They want you to spend money and use the service. Oh, and I nearly forgot, it was free.

Here, I pay money and sign a thousand papers for using a super simple product. The approach is very different... Maybe it has something to do with the stability of American and Swiss banking systems :) However, the American way is definitely more user-friendly.

In the Czech Republic, you can get an account online and receive the card by post in a few days. It's easy, fast, and I like it  like that. As it's probably different for non-citizens, it would be unfair to compare. Anyway, it's fun to see the different ways of thinking :)


Thursday, July 10, 2014

Czech(oslovak) Party at CERN

When Karel came up with the idea of having a Czech lunch, I thought it would be nice to see other Czech guys who work here. I ended up throwing up a little party at R1 and I expected five to ten people would come.

After a little confusing search for other lost groups of Czech guys sitting around the whole building, we finally found a place to sit down and have some Czech beer and French wine :) When we ran out of this and the restaurant stopped providing at least local beer, we switched to some suspicious Slovak liquors... I really hope we won't drink it again. Surprisingly, more than twenty people showed up, a few guys were from Slovakia. I had no idea there were so many people from the Czech Republic.

Even though we didn't really know each other in the beginning, we had a really great time and ended up leaving way too late/early. I hope we will meet again after this unexpected success :) See you soon, guys!


Wednesday, July 9, 2014

I'm Famous Now

I'm famous! :) I mean I have a profile on the openlab website :) It always takes ages for me to write something as short as this in a coherent way. Thank you for editing, Stephen! So this is how my short bio looks like.


Hana is currently pursuing her Masters in Applied Software Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. Before coming to CERN, she worked as an IT architect in banking and as a Researcher in Statistics and Big Data.

As an openlab Summer Student, Hana has been working at CERN IT Data & Storage Services with Luca Mascetti. She has been improving and consolidating the analytics, the manageability and the user interface of a monitoring framework for EOS, a multi-Petabyte disk storage used by both LHC and non-LHC experiments.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

I Thought They Were Guinea Pigs or Something...

I have a very short post for today. I don't think there is much to say about it. This is what I see several times a day when I go to my office :) The first time I went through there I thought that there were some guinea pigs in there, but they didn't really move or anything, which was weird...

Click on the picture to make it big enough to see the truth :)


Monday, July 7, 2014

The Coolest View from Office Ever

So I didn't do any crazy stuff today. Actually I went to dancing (swing) class but I don't know if that counts. Fortunately, there is plenty of crazy stuff around to write about, such as the place where my office is.

By now, you have probably heard that there are the Alps all around Geneva. Basically anywhere you look, you can see some mountains. By the way did I mention I love this place? So where I work, we do have a window. It's actually pretty big. However, we can see the CERN data center main room instead of the Alps :) Both are impressive. The center is actually really interesting so I might write a separate post about it later...


You also might know that the World Wide Web was born at CERN 25 years ago. This is not the only super cool Internet-related thing about working here.

There is also one of the main Internet exchange points. My advisor told me if this buildings falls down, half of Europe goes off-line. I really wanted to find a website to support this statement but I've been unsuccessful so far. I'll try to update this with a link later or maybe someone will send me a link :) Anyway, this important thing is what I can see from my office. It's right under the huge red pipes. What does it mean? That there is one more good reason why you should visit me! :)


Sunday, July 6, 2014

Trip to Geneva Vol. 2

And this is why I should write what happened the day it happened. I had so much to tell last night and I've forgotten it all by now... Anyway, we went to Geneva today as well. The point is that it was 30 degrees and sunny despite all weather forecasts :) It was probably one of the nicest days of the summer. 

We went to the lake and chilled out at a lighthouse at Pâquis Area with an amazing view of the city center and the fountain. I cannot even remember when I felt as relaxed as today. Thank you guys for the great day!

Surprisingly, even though there were about five Greeks and some guys from Spain and Portugal, I was the most tanned person in the company. I think it's a pretty funny statistical fluctuation :)

As you can see, this picture was photobombed by one of my Greek friends Alex. I think it gives a better idea of today than the ones without him :)  


First Time in Geneva

I went to Geneva for the first time. We went together with a pretty big group of Summer Students, we were randomly meeting and getting lost in Geneva, walking in circles around the main train station and having fun :) We eventually went to a guided tour at United Nations Office and I was pretty surprised how much I liked it. 


Some of the highlights were cheap kebab and Turkish beer, riding a flying superconductor at Science Night and buying my monthly transport pass in French. So happy, excited, and proud of myself right now. 

Anyway, I'm really exhausted so I'm just including a picture of the ridiculously beautiful Jet d'Eau, the famous local fountain in Lake Geneva, with a small rainbow. More details tomorrow. Good night. 


Friday, July 4, 2014

Summer Student Lectures - Obscure Particle Physics

Today was probably the last day I went to the Summer Student Lectures. That's the other Summer Student Program. I will describe the differences in a separate post later. The guys have lectures every morning in July and August. Most of the lectures are about particle physics or some other rather obscure and mysterious topics. Even though the lecturers are great, it doesn't help much with my basically nonexistent physics background...

Fortunately, there were lectures on Statistics in High Energy Physics, so I was able to follow and understand most of the time since I know at least the statistics part.


Btw, it's been exactly two years since the discovery of Higgs boson was announced in exactly the same auditorium where the lectures take place. I think it's pretty cool :) And we actually had a slide on this during the first lecture today. The Independence Day has become The Higgs Boson Day at CERN :) If I were American I'd be like "This is soooo cuteeeee".


Thursday, July 3, 2014

The View of Mont Blanc

I actually wanted to show you my office today, but I changed my mind when the weather improved in the afternoon and I could see Mont Blanc for the first time. I won't artificially make today's post longer than necessary. Here I'm sharing a picture made by Libor.


I really love this place. I find the view of the mountains amazing, there's no busy traffic so it's rather calm and quiet, and the air smells like summer and holiday :) We had a dinner outside tonight with this beautiful view. It feels more like a spa sometimes... :) I don't mind at all.

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

How I Got My CERN Card

After I arrived, I was a little nervous about my work because I didn't really know what I was supposed to do. I thought I would start working like crazy from the first minute on site, but it was not the case.
First of all, I needed to get my CERN ID. I was a little sick and my picture captures my mood at the moment, but it's fortunately rather small and dark :) Maybe I'm just ridiculously tanned again… I don’t know. The point is I have a CERN card now! :)

To make a long story short, I managed to find somebody who at least vaguely knew what I could work on before Luca (my advisor) arrives to CERN. His colleague Jan from Germany found a PC for me, uninstalled the evil Windows and got me some Linux :) I will talk about my office and this kind of stuff in more detail later.

I guess I was expected to get to know the local labyrinth of buildings better as soon as possible. On the first day, I went across the whole place about four times in total, but in the end I got the key from my office. I was thinking about all those poor American kids not getting enough walking because they need to drive everywhere. They would die here…

Now I’m ready for anything :)