Surfin’ USA

What’s going on?

No big news at the moment, I’m afraid. I’m a little sick with a sore throat, I hope it won’t get into a serious flu or cold — hence I’m consuming quite a considerable amount of fruits and hot tea at the moment.
I have decided to cut my vocab learning down, since I found it to be quite ineffective considering that I spent most of my time on it lately. After all I’m not a native speaker, so they can’t expect a perfect vocab score from me! Another reason is that this gives me more time to invest in my thesis work, which seems advisable as I’ve been progressing rather slowly over the last two weeks.
I just got my hands on a picture taken this weekend, when some friends and myself were waiting in line to enter a club downtown, so I’ll post it here:

Kitchenless

I might have mentioned it before, but one of my neighbours (he moved out recently) left some food open in his cupboard over the summer — this was obviously not the smartest move as the whole thing got quite messy, with flour beetles and flies (and a strong stench). Although we cleared the whole thing out when everyone got back after the summer, every now and then people would spot yet another one of those little bast*rds somewhere in the kitchen, emerging from some hidden recess. Thus we eventually decided to contact the dorm administration which quickly called the vermin exterminators, “Anticimex”.
Those came over last Friday to spray the cupboards and shelves and we had to move everything out the night before. Although officially we were told that we could use the kitchen again after only one hour, most of us decided to steer clear of the kitchen for some days…

Apart from that there was yet another good international party on Friday, and when I got home from that I found two of my Swedish neighbours partying with some friends in their rooms. They gladly invited me to join them and so the sun was almost rising when I finally made it to my bed. Unfortunately I don’t know of any photos from either party…

Last week I have also met the PhD whose dissertation results I will be partly working with for my thesis: It was an interesting discussion and I got some promising pointers for further research over the next few days. In particular he recommended two special software packages for Constraint Programming, the latter probably becoming one of the central issues within my work.

A ‘little’ weekend trip

Wow, what a day! On Saturday the parents of my former neighbour and good friend Christina (’Kicki’) invited Dain, Ian (another neighbour and friend, from Peru) and me to their place in Borås, which is east of Göteborg, 45 minutes by bus. We had some trouble getting on the bus (apparently half of Göteborg wanted to go to Borås in this very bus) but eventually we got there. Kicki and her father Åke surprised us by taking us to the local airfield (Åke is a member of the flight club) and invited us for a 1 1/2 hour flight from Borås over to Göteborg, up to the Norwegian border and back to Borås, passing the Vänern lake. The weather was just perfect, the blueest sky and no clouds at all! A great surprise indeed!

After that we drove to downtown Borås and strolled around the nice and small city before we went to Kicki’s parents’ house, a little outside of Borås; they have a very nice house just on a lakefront. Åke invited us to their Sauna after which we took a quick and very refreshing swim in the cold lake. We then sat together and chatted for a while and later had dinner — and what a dinner it was: Crayfish for starters (first time for me, quite an experience to take those little beasts apart ) and elk with baked potatoes and vegetables as the main dish, very good and tasty! After dinner we chatted some more with Kicki and her very likeable family before, around midnight, we went downtown again to experience the Borås nightlife in a local club — with a lot of beautiful girls by the way. At around 3.20 we took the night bus back to Göteborg and after walking home from the central station we eventuall got to bed at 5 am. What a day!
I’d once more like to express my deepest gratitude to Kicki’s family for their invititation and hospitality — this day was definitely very special and I will keep it in good memory.
I’ll conclude with a picture I took from the porch of the family’s house when the sun was setting over the lake. Just gorgeous…!

Idealistic Swedes

Today I went downtown for a little shopping. On the main road of Göteborg, the “avenyn”, I encountered a protest march of maybe 50 people. They were protesting against death penalty, demanding it to be abolished. The strange thing is, however, that Sweden does not have the death penalty at all.
Anyway, the whole road was blocked and trams and busses trailed behind the slowly moving group as the little march (which had, like all protest marchs here, a nice police escort) made its way up the avenyn to Göteplatsen, where they gathered for some sort of small rally.

3,600 words…

Last Friday I went down to the library and got a GRE preparation book. Among other things it has a nice list of 3,600 words (!!) which “one should know in order to take the GRE successfully”. I’ve just gone through some of them with my temporary roommate Dain (who is a native English speaker), and even he hadn’t seen most of them! Now, that will be some nice, busy weeks for me until November 23rd…
The weekend was rather calm, no birthdays or big parties this time; therefore I decided to take it easy, I caught up on a lot of sleep and relaxed most of the time (meaning I did basically nothing, again). Consequently I’ll have to work even harder next week, meaning I’ll want to get up early and all this unpleasant things — sounds really promising, doesn’t it…?

Little by little

After reading a lot (and procrastinating even more ) it finally seems like some things in my thesis research are beginning to make sense. I am more and more able to read stuff without looking up dozens of cross-references and keywords every other minute! Now I start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, although it’s just a tiny spot and still a long way ahead…
My linux-on-the-laptop project is also coming along quite well — after several days I eventually managed to get hardware 2D acceleration for the graphical user interfact up and running. Some other parts like the wireless network need some more attention though, so I’ll have something to toy around with when I find some free time in the evenings…
I am currently also spending some thought on what to do after finishing the Master’s programme here. Given that I just started my thesis one might consider that a little early, but as some dealines are already this December it’s advisable to look into this as soon as possible. Anyway, what I’d probably like best is getting into a PhD/Dr. programme. I will naturally investigate the options here at Chalmers and back in Aachen, buy I’ve also found some interesting opportunities elsewhere. Unfortunately some of those require some other standardised test besides the common TOEFL (which is for the Englich language), the GRE (which is more about academic requirements, although it’s in English), hence I have just signed up for that. Annoyingly you can’t take it in Sweden, so I’ll fly with Ryan Air to Frankfurt on Nov 22nd, take the test on the 23rd and fly back here on the 24th, a short and sweet trip… So now besides working on my thesis I’ll also have to study for that test as well, great.

Pictures

Well, it took me a little longer than I had initially thought, but I was pretty busy with a lot of things. This weekend there were some more birthdays: Aga, a Polish exchange student, and my former neighbour Mikael. Especially the Polish party on Saturday was nice, we got home at around 4am and slept most of Sunday. Needless to say that I didn’t get many other things done
The first picture was taken a week ago and shows Rodrigo receiving our birthday present. The second picture was taken this Saturday on Aga’s party.

Click the pictures for a bigger version.