Is it time to leave? Again? Yup. The final days of my stay in Pittsburgh have come: My master’s thesis is more or less complete (by the way, it has the nice name “Transaction Management Challenges for Cross-Organizational, Workflow-Based SOA Applications” and spans 104 pages total), so it is time for me to take it back to Germany and finally wrap up that “Diplom” of mine.

It was a fun time in the “Steel City”, I’ve learned a lot both professionally as well as personally and I have met great people who I will really miss. Thanks for making my time in Pittsburgh great, you know who you are!

But I am not quite flying home yet: Before diving back into the “frozen tundra” of Germany, I shall visit warmer parts of this country. I promise I’ll feel a little bad for you, snowed-in readers, while I sit by the pool sipping margaritas!

(Pittsburgh skyline photo CC by-sa licensed by Ronald C. Yochum, Jr. on Wikimedia Commons.)

The Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Baltimore Ravens tomorrow — and apparently they have quite an interesting rivalry going on. But don’t we all want to see the Steelers play in the Superbowl?

In preparation for the game, my grocery store at the corner sold Steelers stuff today. Incidentally, soon I’ll move back home from Pittsburgh, so what better time to buy a little souvenir than now. I wanted to buy a Terrible Towel ever since I first saw it in one of the bars in Oakland. So I got one — Here it is!

They also had Steelers-themed food on sale, such as this cake:

I know, I know, this is a very, very hideous cake. I took a photo though because I got a kick out of it saying “Stillers (sic) Fever”. The local Pittsburgh accent has indeed a tendency to take long “i”s short. Examples? Well: Steelers/Stillers, of course, but also Bloomfield/Bloomfill’d, feel/fill and others. The first time I stumbled across this was when I watched TV and they mentioned the “Still City”. That’s not a nice nickname, I thought?… It took me a while to realize they were actually talking about the “Steel City”: Pittsburgh.

Here’s an “award” the city of Pittsburgh would probably prefer not to have “won”. According to the 2008 American Lung Association’s State of the Air report, Pittsburgh is the number one U.S. city most polluted by short-term particle pollution.

1. Pittsburgh, Pa.
2. Los Angeles/Long Beach/Riverside, Calif.
3. Fresno/Madera, Calif.
4. Bakersfield, Calif.
5. Birmingham, Ala.
6. Logan, Utah
7. Salt Lake City, Utah
8. Sacramento, Calif.
9. Detroit, Mich.
10. Baltimore, Md./Washington, D.C./Northern Virginia.

The US Environmental Protection Agency’s flyer “Particle Pollution and your Health” says about short-term pollution:

Short-term exposures to particles (hours or days) can aggravate lung disease, causing asthma attacks and acute bronchitis, and may also increase susceptibility to respiratory infections. In people with heart disease, short-term exposures have been linked to heart attacks and arrhythmias. Healthy children and adults have not been reported to suffer serious effects from short-term exposures, although they may experience temporary minor irritation when particle levels are elevated.

On the year-round pollution scale, the city ranks almost equally as bad: Trading spots with the “short term” number 2, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh was the second most polluted city in the country, year-round.

1. Los Angeles/Long Beach/Riverside, Calif.
2. Pittsburgh, Pa.
3. Bakersfield, Calif.
4. Birmingham, Ala.
5. Visalia/Porterville, Calif.
6. Atlanta, Ga.
7. Cincinnati, Ohio
8. Fresno/Madera, Calif.
9. Hanford/Corcoran, Calif.
10. Detroit, Mich.

Only in the third discipline, Ozone pollution, Pittsburgh doesn’t rank among the top 10.

Link to the condensed lists, or look at the stateoftheair website for nice Google Maps overlays, and to find out how your city is doing.

(Thanks, Tara, for the link!) — (Photo “Pollution”, CC by-nc-sa licensed by Gilbert R. on flickr)

This week, I went to the exhibition “life on mars” in the Carnegie International Gallery. All in all a fun collection, and one of the most curious exhibits was this:

David Shrigley, 2007: “I’m dead”. The gallery guide writes about this:

With a deliberately naïve style and an intellectually dark sense of humor verging on the absurd, David Shrigley makes drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that collectively illustrate a scathing commentary on the various artistic, social, and political states of humanity. Almost without exception, his works are hilarious, cynical, and sharply intelligent, covering topics that range from music, art, politics, and health care to religion, sexuality, and life and death. Beneath the flamboyant irony and self-deprecating humor lies an undercurrent of vulnerability that lends many of Shrigley’s illustrations and objects a bracing poignancy and reveals intimate notions of individual and collective identities. (…) In I’m Dead (2007) a taxidermied kitten stands sentry with a wooden sign indicating his deceased status—an absurdly ironic yet tender work bordering on the grotesque.

I can tell you, I laughed out loud. Quite literally, even, not in the laughing-quietly-on-the-inside-LOL-instant-message sense. Who would’ve thought museum visits can be so much fun?

(“Cat: I’m dead” photo CC attribution licensed by daveynin on flickr)

Surfing around on kayak.com for affordable destinations for my planned, hopefully then-deserved post-master’s-thesis vacation, I browsed through the list of travel destinations, glancing over Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela, ….

Wait a minute. Cuba?

Sure enough I was curious, so I clicked it and got the following message.

Ah. Everything’s still in order, the trade embargo hasn’t been lifted without my knowledge, Pennsylvania liquor stores are still safe from the invasion of evil Cuban rum, cigar stores can still sell Dominican cigars with the slogan “taste almost like Cubans” with only mildly ridiculing themselves, and kayak.com saved itself from committing treason at the last minute. Phew, time to dry the sweat off my face.

That went quite quick: I looked at two places and the second one was good enough so I took it. It’s a little room in Squirrel Hill, furnished and with air condition (believe me, that is important here). I even have an own bathroom. (And, as I mentioned earlier, I have decent cable TV that allows me to watch Euro 2008 soccer — yay for the landlady!)

At the moment however I live in a different room of the house because the current person to live in my room-to-be will only move out on July 15.

Either way, I am happy to have found a place to stay.

Murray Avenue, Squirrel Hill’s main street (picture off Wikipedia)

By the way, the neighborhood is really nice, there are a lot of families living there, it’s very close to amenities (grocery store, restaurants, post office, even a liquor store) and it’s a really short walk to the bus stop too.

Looks like I’m all set — Now I only need to write my master’s thesis. Peanuts!

There’s no question about it: This is the street I need to move to.

Or at the very least I need to go there and take a photo

Sadly, the Pittsburgh Penguins lost their game against the Detroit Red Wings last night. Watching the game downtown was fun nonetheless. Plus, while during the course of the game it became quite apparent that the Red Wings are the stronger team, at the very end the Pens put a tremendous effort into tying the game to get into overtime and they almost made it! In the last second of the game, the puck was literally *on* the Red Wings’ goal line.

I also got myself a t-shirt with the Pens’ captain’s name on it (Sidney Crosby) — I mean, when in Rome…

Here are three pictures I took with my crappy cellphone cam (click on them to see the larger version):