On November, I, Riku Itäpuro from TAMK's Computing Centre, made a trip to California, USA on a combined conference and staff exchange program.

There was at first USENIX LISA Conference in San Diego, which collects together yearly some 1000 (mainly unix) sysadmins around the globe for a week. My second week I spend in San Francisco where I had opportunity to visit colleagues from three different Universities and Colleges: California College of the Arts (CCA), Stanford University and University of California Berkeley.

CCA reminds me a lot of TTVO at here TAMK. CCA has two campuses, one in San Francisco City and the one I visited in Oakland. The distance between those two is 20 minutes with BART-train. They also have dedicated campusbus for students that makes door-to-door trips between campuses. Academic programs have both undergraduate(20) and graduate(7) degrees and include animation, architecture, photography and design only to mention few. CCA has 1660 students, 400 faculty, exchange program and summer studies for international students.

I was happy to meet shortly Peter Hendricks, director of international students programs on international luncheon. The least I could do was shake hands, talk a bit about our exchange programs and exchange visit cards in hope to touch base later regarding relationships between TAMK and CCA. If somebody wants to study Art in California, maybe that could be possible after few years.

My interest in CCA was more exchanging knowledge with people who keep IT (Information Technology, not the pronoun) running. It was very nice to talk about issues that keep us busy, whether we work on San Francisco or Tampere. These issues are universal and there exists different ways to handle them, some ways sound better than we use to do. For good thing I also noticed, that we are not hopeless behind common colleges and universities regarding centralization of services and identity management where I think we are now ahead of our american cousins. Or terrible late, because centralization-decentralization cycle tends to be some 15 years and we might as well be one lap behind.

I leave techie details from this art blog entry away, but if you are interested hearing them you are welcome to join my yearly travel presentation later this year at Computing Centre. Just mail me beforehand so I can reserve enough tea and coffee mugs.

Here are some photos from CCA's Oakland Campus, where I was hosted by John "Rowan" Littell, who also was conducting workshops on LISA week earlier. Other persons on pics are me, Mik Gaspay and Patrick Lee


Links:
http://www.cca.edu/academics/
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa08/