Surfin’ USA

Back home!

Well, after a delayed flight to Germany, a short night at the youth hostel, a rather positive GRE test (at least the results I know so far), and a lot of walking around Frankfurt, I eventually made it to my parents’ place. I’ve taken the day off today (by sleeping through most of it ) and I will do some other things tomorrow; but Saturday at the latest it will be high time to really get going with my thesis and start finalizing my PhD applications.
A word about the GRE: Rather as expected, I scored quite high on the fairly easy math part (as almost all people from computer science do, i.e. the ones I will compete with for admission). In the dreaded verbal part (which contains those evil words I’ve been pushing into my head) I managed to get a little more than the computer scientists’ average score — which I, as a nonnative speaker, am quite content with. The two essays I composed during the test will be graded soon and the results will be mailed to me in 2-3 weeks.
In the end it’s nice to have this done with, one less thing to take care of…

Off we go…

My bags are packed, the fridge is empty and and my room prepared: I’m ready to go! My flight is scheduled for 17.35 today, the shuttle bus to the airfield leaves central station at 15.15.
I am a little nervous with respect to the test tomorrow but at the same time quite excited to see how it will go. Most importantly, however, I want to be done with this dang thing.
I am also looking forward to spending some days in my hometown, at my parents’ place — although I’m not going on vacation but will have work to do (making some headway with my thesis and writing my PhD application letters).

Final spurt

Four days from now I’ll be probably sitting at Frankfurt central station, waiting for my train to my German hometown — with the GRE test behind me.
Preparations are going quite well, although for these kind of test you can never really study enough. I’ve finished most of the flashcards I wanted to prepare, the remaing few I’ll hopefully get done tonight. Some neighbours have already practised some flashcards with me, but we will continue tomorrow and on Monday. On Tuesday around noon I’ll get on my way to the local airfield, hopefully arriving at the youth hostel in Frankfurt around 11pm. My test is then on Wednesday at 1pm and should take about 4-5 hours. So keep your fingers crossed…

Which way to go?

My cold is more or less gone now and I’ve already been to the sports center yesterday, playing Basketball. But unfortunately my membership expires today — and if I extend it now I will pay for the whole christmas break without being able to make use of it. Hence I’ll probaly postpone the extension to next year…
As I’ve mentioned before I’m taking the GRE on Nov. 23rd in Frankfurt. In this context an idea emerged recently which I find quite appealing: As of now I am actually planning to spend some days in Rheinberg after the test, at my parents’ place, before going back to Sweden until Christmas. I will of course have to take the material for my thesis with me and keep on working (esp. with no more learning for the GRE to spend time on), yet I’m confident that I will be able to meet some of my friends from back home.

Regarding the thesis, I’m a little stuck right now; I’ve looked at a number of packages for Constraint Programming, none of those seems to really suit my needs, though. More specifically, I will need to customize the actual search engine or implement my own one; but most environments assume that the user will employ the included engines and thus the options for that are limited… Just today, however, I have been pointed to a new project in this field that looks quite promising — judged by the feature list at least. I guess I will have to look into that, although not much documentation is available yet (since the project is still in beta phase).

Förkylning

That’s the Swedish word for a cold and also what I’m plagued by at the moment. Thanks to my fruit comsumption, however, it’s not that bad and already getting better quickly.
Today I finally got around to picking up the keys for the piano room at the student union; so from now on, every once in a while, I can go and play. I already did that today and it was very refreshing, after not actively making music for several long weeks.
Tomorrow is also my last day with Dain as my roommate — he is moving in to a place of his own, which he rents second hand. Although we had a good time, it is just too small a room for two people to live in over an extended period of time, thus it will probably be nice to have this place to my own again… Dain’s new place is right in the centre of the city, so it will be a nice place to meet and hang out before heading for the clubs and bars.