I had Kentucky Fried Chicken tonight, a Frappuccino at Starbucks this afternoon and tacos from Taco Bell yesterday… I know it’s a bad trend. Where did my healthy Mediterranean diet go? Actually I tried to keep eating simple and healthy stuff and to cook at home, but the fast foods are so many and so cheap that it’s difficult to resist. You can have a dinner for 5 dollars or less, including the drink (obviously a super-sweet beverage) practically everywhere.  By the way, I will keep an eye on my diet (but probably close the other!)… it’s only two months at the end and trying the fast foods is part of discovering the American culture, isn’t it?

I had some good news last week. I presented a paper to the PhDay, a workshop for the PhD students at Politecnico di Milano and I won the best paper award! It was quite a surprise, since I did both the presentation and the poster session remotely (via Skype) so I thought not to have many chances… but it seems the reviewers appreciated the work, or maybe the pictures of San José I put at the end of the presentation I had a couple of paper accepted either, and this is good news. The bad news is that I spent most of the weekend preparing the camera-ready for the conferences. But I hope to have more spare time the next week-end. By the way, I went out on Friday to a very interesting place with Matteo and Davide, two (ex) PhD students from my same Department in Milano that are working in HPLabs (so cool to find them in California!). We went to a Japanese restaurant to eat shabu-shabu. They give you vegetables and meat and there’s a pan with boiling water in front of you where you actually cook the food. And we went to a nice rock place in San Francisco after, where I listen to a couple of bands… one of them was deliriously funny.