Surfin’ USA

Party weekend and new laptop

Now that was a busy weekend: On Friday there was yet another party at a student dorm nearby, again I met a lot of new people, but slowly more and more faces seem familiar to me. On Saturday it was my Mexican friend Rodrigo’s birthday (he’s now again one year older than I am, happy birthday, old man ) so we first celebrated at his place. Around midnight we proceeded to an international party on campus, where we partied until 3am (why do most parties in Sweden end so early?). And since I also played basketball and soccer on Sat./Sun. I didn’t get many other things done…

On Saturday my buddy Dain returned from the US (good to have him back :)). As he had to move out of his room when he left in June, he doesn’t have a place of his own yet. Until he has found something he is staying with me; we just moved his bed into the empty corner of my room. Now everything is a little cramped but we don’t spend that much time in the room anyway.
Dain also brought my new IBM Laptop with him (I had ordered in the US and had it shipped to his place). It’s really a nice device/toy with a lot of good things. I’m currently in the process of installing Linux on it (but keeping Windows as a backup), In just two days I have so far managed to screw up the partition table twice, so that Windows would not boot anymore. Luckily I had produced the recovery CDs in the very beginning, so I ‘only’ had to repartition, reformat and reinitialise the whole harddrive each time…
At the moment I am sitting in the library, using the university’s wireless LAN. When I’m back home later tonight (still some reading ahead) or tomorrow I might get around to uploading some of the weekend’s pictures here, so stay tuned.

Tedious research

Having covered the basics of Linear Programming I am, as part of my thesis research, now moving on to more advanced aspects like Column Generation approaches. I am also starting to look into Integer Linear Programming (which is, for people who know what that means, an NP-complete problem). Believe me, at times all this can be rather boring and unmotivating…
Fortunately in my free time I can make up for it by doing sports (I play soccer and basketball several times a week) and meeting friends. The community on our corridor also develops quite nicely, there are already plans to go out together some time.
Yesterday night I met my former neighbour Christina (she had to move to another student dorm nearby), we went downtown with some of her friends and had a fun time at some club. Before that I also met some of Christina’s new neighbours, one of them being a Swedish girl that has lived in Austria for around two years, so she speaks fluent German but with a thick Austrian accent — quite amusing.

Viva México !

At the afterwork yesterday I met some friends who told me about a Mexican party later that day and that I could just come along — so that’s what I did. Apparently the 16th of September is the Mexican Independence Day (from Spain, declared in 1810) so there was big party with a number of Mexican families, Mexican students, other folks from Latin America, their friends and several exchange students that had somehow caught word. It was quite nice, with Mexican music, rather low priced Mexican food and (Mexican?) dancing. Eventually, though, as we heard there was another party nearby, we left for that other place.
Indeed there was a party in a student dorm with mostly exchange students and I had some interesting conversations and met some more new people, e.g. from Canada and Greece. Around midnight some friends and I then decided to take the last regular tram home, as most of us were quite tired already. I ended up watching a movie at my place before I went to bed.
Today, after getting up late, I cleaned my room and read some more for my thesis, now I’ll try to get the plans for tonight sorted out…

Back to the (mathematical) roots

I spent most of today in the quiet reading at the library (I get distracted too easily at home), going through some introductory texts about Linear Programming. It turned out it’s all Linear Algebra: matrices, nullspaces, and so on. It’s been quite a while since I learnt all this back in Aachen, and there are several more advanced concepts like polyhedrons, polytopes and their vertices that I’m not familiar with — all in all not exactly what I was expecting. But, on the other hand, I was not really expecting anything in particular…
Now I’m about to leave for the famous afterwork, my first one since my return two weeks ago! There are no plans for the weekend yet, but probably something will come up on short notice. Or maybe I’ll take it easy and just watch a movie / read a (non-scientific) book, after all I’ve already been to some downtown club this Wednesday…

Comments language

I could have pointed that out earlier, but just to stress it I’ll post it separately: Of course, as they used to do on my old, German site, my friends from Germany can post their comments in German as well as in English — or even in other languages, if they prefer

Getting started (again)

Well, I’m back in Sweden now for more than a week, after 3 months of internship in Germany and some nice days in sunny Stockholm (beautiful city by the way!). I have to say that I do feel a little bit like being back home.
I have already had the first meetings with Devdatt, my thesis supervisor, and we came up with a considerable list of literature: I now have a huge pile of books sitting on my desk and an equally high stack of research papers waiting for me. What is still missing is my motivation to actually start reading, guess I’ll eventually just have to force myself to it.
Today also the defense of a PhD thesis took place on which my thesis will mostly be based, i.e. I will try to extend it in some areas. I have also had a short chat with the new PhD and we will meet sometime next week (as he is naturally quite busy right now) — it would probably be a good idea to have gained some first insight until then.

Apart from school there has already been quite some partying since my arrival since almost all of my friends from last year have meanwhile returned as well (of course only those that were actually planning to return, as some were only here for a year and are now back home, unfortunately).
Also there has been quite some moving out/in going on at our corridor, we have at least 6 new people (and more to come) — I will soon even be the senior, i.e. living here the longest! The new neighbours I’ve met so far seem quite nice and, after the disastrous shape the kitchen must have been in over the summer, we have so far managed to keep everything nice and (relatively) clean.

Välkommen !

After having some sort of online diary (in German) for the first year of my stay in Sweden I have decided to “move it to the next level”. My main motivation was to switch to English so my non-German mates from around the world can follow what’s going on over here as well. Moreover, by employing this complete open-source system, managing entries, comments, pictures, etc. is simplified a lot! I’m still experimenting with the layout and design (there’s a whole lot of options), hence things might still change in the future…

Anyway, I’d like to say a hearty welcome to everyone, stay tuned for updates.