If there’s one word that can summarize US Visa applications, it’s fees…

Today I already had the pleasure to pay three of them:

• SEVIS fee (= a database entry in the student exchange database), USD 100.-
• Visa appointment scheduling fee, USD 10.-
• Visa application fee, EUR 89.08 which is about USD 140.-

So before the application form is filed, you are already spending 250 Dollars in fees (not to mention the cost of driving to the embassy in Frankfurt). What eases the pain a little is the good euro-to-dollar exchange rate at the moment.

But of course unlike last time I don’t seem to be required to prove my proficiency in English so that saves me another few hundred dollars. Looks like it’s my lucky day.

Wow. I just unsubscribed from a Barnes and Noble promotion mailing list (that I didn’t even subscribe to in the first place…) and they literally ask for 10 business days to unsubscribe me from the list:

If they delivered their books as “fast” as they manage their mailing lists they’d probably have lost all their customers by now…

Awesome: Later this year, I will spend a few months doing research and writing my masters thesis as a grad student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It took a few months to get a handful of question marks out of the way, but now I am quite confident that it will work out just fine.

A lot of people may have heard the name Carnegie Mellon before, but for those who haven’t, CMU is a private university with a good computer science program. According to Wikipedia, the college is pretty decently ranked and was “named one of the “New Ivies” by the magazine Newsweek in 2006″.

Having been to the American East Coast only once before (on vacation to New York City), I am excited to see what the differences and similarities are between life there and what I experienced in Oregon and California. Oh, and if you happen to know Pittsburgh and around and would like to suggest something I certainly shouldn’t miss out on when I’m there, please drop me a line

Are you looking to hire a sysadmin?

An American friend of mine has just moved back to the U.S. after working in Germany for a while. He is currently looking for a job as a Sys/Network Admin or similar in Northern California (Sacramento or Bay Area).

If you are looking to hire somebody or know somebody who does, please check out his resume online and drop him a line, or leave a comment here and I’ll connect.

Thanks for your help!

A little video from the Animaniacs TV show featuring a song about the nations of the world.

Funny how they sing “Germany now in one piece” — of course some things are outdated too, such as “Czechoslovakia”. Needless to say that “Yugoslavia” is also a thing of the past. These facts, by the way, date the song somewhere between 1990 and 1993, if I am not mistaken.

“Another Difficulty for a Microsoft-Yahoo Marriage: Recruiting”

– an interesting NYT article about how big companies become an increasingly less popular workplace for young engineering talent, in favor of smaller companies, where they have more impact and some of which have the potential of making them rich if they take off.

(Thanks for the link, Paul)

I stumbled across Stanford on iTunes U today, which seems to be a great resource of fine academic materials and other gems worth listening to and watching, conveniently in the software you may use for your media collection anyway.

Then I found Steve Jobs’ commencement speech from 2005 that he held for the Stanford graduates of the year. It’s really inspirational and very worth watching, check it out: