Surfin’ USA

European pictures

Here are some selected pictures from my vacation in Europe, part of which I got to spend with Teiko. The pics are mostly from our trip to Sweden, but I also include some from my cousin/friend Robert and Tina’s wedding (where I had the honor of being the best man), and some from my parents’s place.

Update: Robert’s homepage has some more pictures from the wedding.

Back from vacation

Yesterday I returned from my almost 5-week long vacation trip to Germany. It was a blast, even though the weather didn’t live up to the summer season.
For the last week or so, I was joined by Teiko, who managed to take some days off at work. Yay! Among other things we made a short trip to Sweden, which we both enjoyed very much. Teiko also got to meet my family and a lot of my friends. Both of us had a wonderful time!

I have some pictures, mostly of the trip to Sweden. As soon as I get my things organized I’ll look into posting some of them here. As usual, stay tuned!

Busy days

Time is flying and all of a sudden my first month back in Germany is almost over already. But no wonder, I’m quite busy with a lot of things:
For one there’s my internship, where I work 40 hours a week (excl. lunch breaks and commuting to work). Hence I’m out of my place most of the day. The project I work on is pretty cool, though, I’m looking into extending the algorithmic core of one of the company’s optimization systems — also fits my Master’s thesis pretty well.
In the few hours that remain I’m also trying to finish off my Master’s thesis, at the moment only the introduction remains. Apart from that I’m trying to catch up with a lot of old friends, both from Aachen and my hometown Rheinberg. All in all, as you can see, I’m quite busy.

On another note I’m missing Sweden — a lot! It’s not that I’m not having a good time here in Germany, but I really spent great one and a half years up north and met a lot of fabulous people - a shout out to all of you!
Well, I guess all good things come to an end sooner or later, there’s nothing I can do about it…

Anyway, for now I’m facing one more week of work, after which I’ll be leaving for a nice little vacation in the vicinity of Malaga, Spain!

A lot to catch up on (pictures galore!)

It’s been while and a lot has happened since my last entry. I was very busy with several things, so I haven’t gotten to actually writing something here before. So let’s get started:

First of all there was my thesis and especially the conference submission I was working on. The deadline for that was the 23rd of April, hence the week before that was quite bad… Anyway, eventually I managed (with the help of my supervisor Devdatt and the former PhD student Mattias) to finish and submit a nice paper — at least we think it’s nice

That same weekend, after submitting the paper, my two good German friends Lars (”Uschi”) and Simon came for a visit (after not managing to do so for 1 1/2 years ). Anyway, together with my friends from Gothenburg we had a great time with lots of partying, but see for yourself:

The following week I spent taking care of formalities and saying goodbye to all my friends in Gothenburg, which again involved a lot of partying. Here are some more pictures:

Then, on Friday, my father drove his empty car all the way up to Sweden (roughly 1,000 km), we spent Saturday packing and drove back down on Sunday, with an overfull car. Quite surprisingly everything I wanted to take back to Germany fitted in the car.

I spent Monday home at my parents’ before going back to Aachen on Tuesday, where I’m now living in the same dorm I lived in almost two years ago. Tomorrow (Thursday) I will start an internship / summer job with a local company. I will try to write more about that in a couple of days. I will also post some reflections on my time in Sweden, so stay tuned…

Easter greetings

Happy easter or “glad påsk” to everyone! I hope you have a few nice and relaxing days, wherever you are. Here in Gothenburg the weather has just turned rather nice, sunny and little clouds, perfect for a public holiday.

By the way, my presentation on Wednesday went fine I think. Now I just need to finish my report (i.e. the conference submission) until Friday. Although I’ve completed quite some part of it there’s still a lot to do, thus I will remain busy for the next days…

April weather at its best

Currently the weather situation changes rapidly: Yesterday we had sunshine, rain and snow, all more or less within one hour! Crazy… and really annyoing But I have to spend most of my time indoors anyway, working on my presentation and thesis paper. Also I’ve heard the weather is not really that much better in Germany…
As for the thesis, I’m making good progress. But as usual there are always a lot of things that one can still do and improve, so I’d better get back to it.

Short but sweet

I just returned from a very short trip to Stockholm: I left early Friday and returned today around noon.
My friend Dain had been travelling Europe with two friends visiting from America for the last week, and their final stop was Stockholm. So I decided, on rather short notice, to join them on their last day (and night) and got myself a last minute train ticket.
Having arrived in Stockholm I met up with the guys, we did some sightseeing and had a beer in a bar, after which Dain and I went to check out the Stockholm nightlife — his friends were too tired from their travels, so they skipped this part. Anyway, Dain and I ended up in an Irish pub with live music, where we had a fun time until early next morning.
After only a few hours of sleep for Dain and me, the two visitors got on their way to the airport to fly home, whereas the two of us caught a train back to Gothenburg.
So although it was quite exhausting and I didn’t get much sleep, it was a very nice trip.

Spring, finally !

After what in retrospective seemed like the longest winter ever (weeks of snow or rain and cold temperatures in general), it appears spring has finally reached us here in Gothenburg — ‘t was about time! The sun is shining, the snow is melting, birds are chirping and the skirts are getting shorter.
I hope this will give me an additional push for completing my thesis. At the moment I am focusing on obtaining more computational results and written things down in the form of a 15-pages-max research paper, which is then to be submitted to a scientific conference in this area — the submission deadline is April 21st, so I’d better get crackin’.
In addition to that I’ve fixed a date for my thesis presentation, it will be on the morning of Wednesday, April 12th. Luckily I have prepared some slides already, which I just need to extend a little bit.

Workshop in Stockholm

This wednesday I will go to Stockholm to attend a scientific workshop about constraint programming (link), a topic I am concerned with in my thesis as well. I have previously been in contact (via email) with some of the people that will attend the workshop, so it should be nice to meet them in person. Also some of the topics presented promise to be quite interesting.
The only drawback is that I’ll have to catch the train here in Gothenburg at 6 in the morning, which is the middle of the night for me.

Busy days — and more ahead

Seems I haven’t written anything for quite a while now. The reason for that is that I’m really busy with my thesis and several other things on top of that.
Regarding the thesis, I’m making good progress (or so I think ) and have some first very promising results. A few details are still missing, though, and some of those are really tricky to implement properly as well. Moreover I need to start writing things down to produce the actual thesis document — I already have a few pages (well, three ) but there are still a lot more to come…

Apart from that I’m spending quite some time planning my life after graduating here in Sweden. As I’ve written before, I’ve applied to the PhD programs of a few universities in the USA/Canada, and just now the first responses start coming in. I’ve also been in contact with a professor at ETH Zurich who has a vacant position in his group at the moment, with interesting research topics.
As another alternative I’m currently going through a number of phone interviews with Google, who have recently opened up a research/development centre in Zurich and are looking for employees. If they really ended up offering me a job, that would certainly be another viable alternative…
In any case, it will be a tough decision in the end! Right now, however, it’s too early to really tell anything, so stay tuned.