Michael in Pittsburgh

During the last week, I attended the Interspeech Conference, which is an international conference on speech recognition. It was a noteworthy experience.



Close to 1000 participants presented about six hundred something papers; and used up almost an entire hotel for four days.

Preview:On the weekend, I went to a camping trip. I'm going to upload the pictures and tell about the trip ASAP. Stay tuned!

Two days ago there was a great party at Patrick's and Nora's place! For those readers who don't know them: They live in a superb (albeit quite expensive) apartment in the neighborhood of Shadyside, they made a cool party during orientation, and now they - did it again!

We had a lot of fun, and as I promised, these are some of the photos. Please send an e-mail to mwand att gmx dott de if you'd like to get more pictures!

In the recent days, I took advantage of good weather and free time and explored Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood where I live. It's actually very interesting because it's got a very significant Jewish population, and there are several synagogues and Jewish community centers. These are two photos of Squirrel Hill, I'll add more later on.





Squirrel Hill has got a lot of fairly sizeable houses with gardens, and is located between two large parks: Schenley Park and Frick Park. Schenley Park is between here and CMU, and Frick Park is on the other side of Squirrel Hill, so I made a long walk there. For those of you who like it, these are two photos from Frick Park and nearby:

On Monday, I tried skydiving for the first time! This is one regular activity of the Explorer's Club of the CMU, and it was just awesome!



We went to a company called Canton Air Sports, where I eventually made a tandem jump from a height of approximately 10.000 feet. The experience is unbelievable! From this altitude, you'll have about 30 seconds of freefall, even though the ground is so far away that it hardly seems like falling... Then, the parachute deploys, and things get a bit more quiet. It feels a bit like an extra-high chairlift, although you can steer the parachute, of course.



Your sense of height gets somewhat confused at this altitude, or at least mine did. As I said, it's hard to describe. The hardest moment is the actual jumping, when you realize what you are doing...

The landing was rather soft, though.



All in all, it was a great day! I wish I had the time and money to pursue this further, but even so, it was worth it... We were a nice group, too, here you see Andrea and Karen, Lauren and Michael (the Skydiving Chair of the Club) and I are missing.