This week, I handed in my master's thesis (German: Diplomarbeit) with the title "Transaction Management Challenges For Federated, Workflow-Based SOA Applications":

Meine Diplomarbeit

Need I say more? :)

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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.

Pittsburgh Skyline

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.)

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So, I arrived in Pittsburgh yesterday and so far it seems to be pretty nice. I am slowly exploring the university and its surroundings and I am quite impressed with how many food places there are around campus and how many people there are. (Even though it's the summer so this really only is a fraction of the people I will see in August).

I am currently busy setting up my accounts and ID cards and such, and I haven't found a room yet but I am working on it. With a little luck, I'll soon have a place I can move into, so that I can start focusing on my master's thesis.

By the way: The Pittsburgh Penguins (hockey!) are currently playing the Detroit Red Wings in the Stanley Cup Finals, so the locals are all going mildly crazy and even the buses show "Let's go, Pens!" on their displays. Tonight is apparently the (probably) final and most important game in the series, and my friends and I may go see it on a public screen downtown. Time to get into hockey, I guess!

As far as soccer is concerned, I am still pondering options on watching Germany play on Sunday. It'll be 8:30am here so besides getting up early, I'll also need to find a place with an enthusiastic enough owner to set up a TV set in their cafe first thing in the morning. I'll let you know if I succeed.

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Just to give you a piece of unwanted knowledge, I just passed my last exam ever! It was about parallel programming, by the way.

Now it's really only my masters thesis that stands between me and graduation. Yay!

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