Torsten Hoefler’s blog

Well, I’ve been to Washington more than once, but I finally found the time to actually check out the city (the flight arrived Sunday noon and the first thing on the agenda was Sunday evening ). It’s a very nice city. It’s very nice for walking around and well connected by subway. I did [...]

When I was travelling to Washington today, I had a fun experience at the Indianapolis airport. Well, the first real fun thing is that this stupid CLEAR thing is dead (this was where you could buy yourself into a priority lane at the security checkpoint). Well, the second nice thing was that preferred (status) customers [...]

Those who know me know that I’m usually careful about nutrition. I visited some friends in Indiana last week and my host (Nick) invited me to home-grown squashes, turnip greens and zucchinis. Man, I’m jealous … it inspired me to finally begin my herb garden project. And here it is, my first american herb garden:

Ok, [...]

The second strange thing since I moved here two months ago. Well, I was working as usual … and suddenly heard a really loud bang. My reaction was to check the weather (online) if there was a thunderstorm. Nope … ok, more working. Then I heard several Police sirens, and they stopped nearby. Of course, [...]

Wow, the weirdest April 1st ever. I was just biking to UIUC and saw somebody jumping from one of the tallest buildings in Urbana-Champaign. Around 9:10am, he decided to jump from Burnham 310 (an 18-story apartment building) right when I was biking by (like every morning). I didn’t really see which floor he came from [...]

A month flew by (literally, it’s hard to believe that it’s already more than a month) since I started my new position at UIUC/NCSA. I really like it. We found a good apartment, Urbana-Champaign is much better than I imagined (the campus is really beautiful, especially at night), and the best is the really really [...]

Well, I had another crazy trip last week. I attended two meetings, one in Washington and another one in Poughkeepsie (yeah, I bet you don’t know where that is, it’s an IBM research lab close to Fishkill and about 1:30hrs north of New York City). So I flew to Washington and attended the first meeting [...]

Didn’t you have that point in your life where you wanted to move to a city that sounds like a bottle full of alcohol? Yeah, that’s what we did. As mentioned before, we found a beautiful apartment near downtown Champaign and now we had to haul all our stuff there. My first plan was to [...]

Yes, now it’s official, I’m moving to Urbana-Champaign to work at the University of Illinois (UI). It’s somewhat a funny change not only because of the IU to UI thing but also with regards to many other things. I’ll be working as a Research Associate at NCSA, or better in the Blue Waters’ Directorate. I’ll [...]

It took me quite a while to mention my new office. The main reason is that I wanted a picture and it too until today to get one . I was moved to a really beautiful office (out of the student lab)! This alone offset the hassle to graduate! People who know me know [...]