Last weekend I have been snowboarding in Sunday River, Maine. The Ski Trip was organized by the graduate student council of MIT. Sunday River ia one of the best ski resorts on the east coast, and the conditions were quite good.

On friday it was extremely cold (-20 C), I nearly had my ears freezing off. Saturday and sunday were much warmer and less windy.

Unfortunately I lost my camera while snowboarding, so I can't share any photos this time.

Last Saturday I went to New York City with the Chinatown Bus. You can go by bus in about 4 hours from Boston to Manhattan for $15 (http://www.fungwahbus.com). This worked reasonably well, the bus was on time and did not seem like it would explode the next minute.

We started in Boston South station at 6:30 am and went back with the 7 pm bus. We spent the day doing usual tourist stuff like visiting Ground Zero, Wall Street, Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building

We waited about 1 1/2 hours to get to the top of the Empire State building and ended up paying $30 dollars (16 plus 14 extra to get all the way to the 102nd floor)

I took lots of pictures, find some of them here.

Here are some pictures from recent activities of the Nelson Group here at MIT. We did a small hiking trip at the Blue Hill Reservation south of Boston and we had a nice little party celebrating the new arrivals and the recent birthdays in our group.

Monday was Columbus Day, so we had a long weekend here in the US.

I spent most of the time exploring the countrydide. On Saturday I went on a hiking Trip in New Hampshire to Mount Moosilauke with some people of the Euroclub at MIT. I forgot to take along my camera but Roman (who is also at the Euroclub) is an excellent photographer and allowed me to upload some pictures here.

On Monday I went along with some friends of my roommate to Stirling, Massachusetts. We went to a farm and bought some Pumpkins and then drove up to Mount Wachusett.

Now it's back to work, hunting some THz pulses.

Today we had beautiful and warm weather here in Boston. So I decided to take a boat tour and do some whale watching.

Thanks to the continuous shooting function of my trusty Canon camera, I took about 400 pictures. Most of them show water and maybe s little bit of whale...

I uploaded some of the pictures here, have a look!

I finally have to look for a permanent place to stay here in Boston

During the last days I looked at a lot of places ranging from affordable to really expensive but I could not decide yet.

Meanwhile, I did a little bit exploring in downtown Boston, and I have uploaded some more pictures here.

After the slightly rocky start in Boston (see article below) I've now settled in a little.

I live in Somerville right now, about 4 km from the MIT. The public transportation system here is rather good, at least for american standards. The weather has been rather pleasent the last couple of days, so I spent some time walking around in Cambridge and Somerville

The MIT itself is really a cool place, you can do everything there without ever leaving the campus. The last couple of days I had to do lots of administrative things but I'll get that all sorted out soon.

On the weekend I will do a little more sight-seeing and I'll probably update this site with more pretty pictures

So I finally made it to Boston.

The flight with British Airways was even more entertainig that I originally feared - more details below...

Today is Labour day in the US so I took a short trip to see the MIT. The weather was fine so I made took some snapshots of the MIT main building and the Boston skyline which you can view here.

I also got myself a new mobile phone number in the US (ironically with the german company T-mobile).

Tomorrow will be my first day at MIT, I'll keep you updated.

I'm just back from the Freak Guitar Camp 2006 in Gothenburg sweden

I had a terrific time with Mattias Eklundh, Christian Alsing and 29 other brave freak guitar campers. It felt great to see all those people again.

This year we had two guest stars, Partick Rondat from France and Andreas Öberg a gypsy guitar player from Sweden.

Check out some photos from the camp here.

My PhD thesis is now online

It took me some time go get rid of some minor typos, but now I uploaded it on my webspace

You can download it in PDF format here

The same version will also be available at the Freidok document server of the University of Freiburg.