Der Blog

Here are this semester's exam results:

• Functional Programming 2: 49%
• Designing Algorithms: 62%
• Foundations of Artificial Intelligence: 71%

AI was the one I spent the least amount of effort on, so getting a first in it is pretty surprising. Even more surprising though is the third for Funky 2, especially as I feel as if I've been eating and sleeping Haskell the last few months (my project involves it). Mind you, Dr Sharp (the director of teaching in the CS dept, and incidentally also the lecturer for that module) says that kind of mark, close to a boundary, might get revised upwards. And anyway, it was a truly evil exam :)

Incidentally, the piece of paper I picked up from the office had a mark on it for Computer Graphics 2, which I didn't take (wasn't even enrolled for it), and it didn't have a mark for Funky 2. It took me about half an hour to sort this out, but apparently there was a glitch with Dr Sharp's mail merge which gave the wrong module code and title, though the mark and the actual records were correct. He eventually printed me a new piece of paper with the correct words on it.

On a totally unrelated note, I just remembered something I found out over the holiday: apparently Prof Thimbleby used to go to the same church as my cousins.

My final year project initial document is due in tomorrow, and I've finally got round to doing it.

...

Okay, I've done some of it. A front page, an abstract, an introduction with a slew of references to papers I haven't read, a skeleton structure and table of contents, and a bibliography. All in the loveliness that is LaTeX which thankfully makes these things effortless.

I might manage to get a draft done tomorrow. Then again, I might not. In either case I'll be asking Dr Berger for advice since I certainly need some help to get things into the right form!

Makes me wish I'd picked a project that I knew something about before my first meeting with my supervisor :) (Though I have some comfort from Sean in that I'm not the only one who doesn't quite understand the obscure, advanced, abstract mathematics my supervisor is spewing at me in meetings.)

As a final note, I'm writing this from the SUCS room at half past midnight because due to the usual bureaucratic incompetence of large businesses, the ISP my live-in landlady has picked didn't send us our ADSL modem until yesterday (which of course nobody was in/awake to collect from the postman, so we had to wait another 24 hours to go and get it, assuming that is really what it is). If an internet connection existed at home now, I would be using it instead. (Because my bed is much more comfortable than the worn out desk chairs here :)

Just come back from the (German) departmental meeting in Bamberg. Very nice to meet the other German students again, although some for various reasons aren't doing a year abroad, have exams that clash or (in one case) couldn't be bothered to come.

It turned out that the same hotel is used by the German dept. of Newcastle uni and has been jointly with Swansea for 15 years. So we met some completely new people too.

I also tried a new speciality: Rauchbier. It's pretty powerful stuff. I only had the money for one glass, but even if I'd had more money I'd have had something else - it's not the kind of stuff you drink lots of. But for one glass it's rather nice.

It seems my lecturer for today has been taken ill or something, so the two seminars I had today (Phonetik & Phonologie and Grammatik, both lectures about "DaF" (Deutsch als Fremdsprache)) have been cancelled. Yay.

So what am I doing to pass the time? Well, when 13:30 rolls around I will stick my foot in Frau Gschnaidner's door and get her to sign the forms that I will send back to Swansea so I can finally get my grant. After that I will carry on with what I was doing yesterday afternoon which is converting Milliways to using wchar_t internally using iconv(3) to convert from the local charset. Sounds dull but it's something to do, and does all the people using the bbs account a favour, who since I hacked in half-arsed support for UTF-8 have been unable to see any messages containing any non-ASCII characters.

Apart from the above mentioned seminars I have picked one lecture on Roman history (very ancient, something like 250 BC) and the equivalents of three of the four courses I missed last year (networks, databases and Java, but not computability theory). I've not yet enrolled for them though, since (despite the Germans' reputation for orderliness) there is no central enrolment system. Well, apparently there is one for WI (Wirtschaftsinformatik) but I haven't figured out how to use it yet.

Annoyingly I caught a cold on the weekend, which fortunately recovered well enough for me to go to the lecture at 8:30 yesterday. Ugh. I had a lab for that module at the same time this morning but I couldn't be bothered to go to it. Largely because I couldn't find the room last time I tried to find it, and anyway it's probably not on yet after just two lectures (the first one I missed because I was using an out of date lecture plan).

Finally got round to enrolling at the uni today, which means I have now got a username and password for the uni's computers. Hence this blog entry. I've also posted two more, for last Tuesday and Wednesday, with the appropriate timestamps. I can't be bothered to do more right now so I'll finish it tomorrow.

The only other thing I did today was attend another orientation lecture, this time about how to pick courses. It seems the system here is rather ad hoc - instead of enrolling for all your courses in the same place at the same time you have to enrol on each one separately. I'm hoping to do something different with my year than the usual slog of CS and German, but until Swansea's German dept tells me, I have no idea if that is allowed.

I must get round to buying a mobile, if for no other reason than that my bank wants a phone number for doing foreign transfers (currently my German bank account has nothing in it). I've also seen a rather nice laptop in the shopping centre, but it's a tad expensive so I'll have to wait for my Socrates grant before I can get it.

Woke up - relatively late for the hostel on account of being knackered, relatively early for me on account of having gone to bed early due to being knackered. This was a bout 7:30 am. Had breakfast of bread and jab, muesli, and coffee, then a shower, then checked out and proceeded to the bus stop to go to the university, hoping I can find the AAA this time. Fortunately I met a nice Ukrainian girl at the bus stop who was also going to the university. Again, having no clue as to how to pay for the bus journey, I didn't.

Turned out that the central part of the campus is on a concrete plateau, which you get to by some stairs - rather like the University of Essex, but less accessible, there being no lifts (and one set of stairs being cordoned off as unsafe). I was still knackered from dragging the suitcase (and having a heavy rucksack as well, though by this point I had offloaded my A4-sized German dictionary into the suitcase to spare my shoulders). I went into the AAA room and gladly took a cup of tea (apparently not as rare as I'd feared, though it seems to be sold in very small quantities, with the teabags in individual packets like with herbal tea). I got my keys, and had explained to me what I had to do in the next two weeks, with the help of a 'welcome pack' (not actually called that, but that's what it would be called in a British university). Among the welcome pack were maps of the university and the city (the former being comprehensible to me only because I now knew that much of it is not at ground level), and a (more or less) London Underground-style map of the bus system. I still failed to understand it but at least I had a chance to find my way "home".

Before going to my new room I got a Mensa-Card, which is superficially like the Flexible Dining Card in Swansea in that you can (read: must) pay for food in the refectory (Mensa) with it; opened a bank account, which is apparently necessary for paying rent as they don't accept cheques; and (rather late, having found it hard to find the lecture hall where it was taking place) attended the first information lecture, which was just general information about (again) what needs to be done in the first weeks and how to do it, and what pitfalls to avoid.

I picked my suitcase up again from the AAA (having managed to leave it there instead of lugging it about everywhere), and somehow figured out which buses to take to get to me hall (which had been highlighted on the map so many hours earlier). It was probably here that I finally undertstood how the buses work - very like the London Underground in fact, as you just buy a ticket for a journey regardless of how long it is as long as it's inside the zone you bought it for and doesn't last longer than 90 mins. Later I figured out that you can buy a ticket in advance (e.g. from a vending machine) and use it by stamping it on one of the little machins on the bus, which gives it a timestamp.

On each floor of my hall (rather annoyingly my room is on the 3rd floor, so I took several minutes to get up) are two or three living rooms, with their adjoining kitchen and 2 bathrooms, plus the common room for the whole hall. Off my living room (at least when I arrived) are Lidija (Slovenian), Rafael (Brazilian), Kasia (Polish), and a German girl and another bloke whose names I forget. There's also another Slovenian called Lea in the next group of rooms.

Being knackered again I went to bed pretty early, just unpacking, chatting with the other people, and having one of the instant rice packets I brought from home, before going to bed.

Posted retrospectively on Monday 10 October 2005

Got up at about 5 o'clock. Got to the station in Petersfield with about 15 mins to spare. Uneventful journey to Gatwick (1 change at Guildford) except that there wasn't really anywhere on the train to put a big piece of luggage like my suitcase, so I had to leave it in the corridor by the bike rack where it narrowed the gangway somewhat, but not as much as it would have done in the middle of the passenger coach. (Too big and heavy to put overhead.)

Got to Gatwick on time (~7:55) so in theory I had half an hour to check in and another 5-10 mins to board the plane, but due to slightly awkward signage I managed to get to a self service check-in kiosk in the north terminal with only 5 minutes to spare.

The plane turned out to be a 737 - two columns of 3 seats, and rather excellently I got a window seat. Was fascinating seeing the tops of the clouds for a change - some are like puffs of smoke, some are like thick patchy fog (which in a sense they are), and most intriguingly of all, stratus clouds (the ones that fill the entire sky) look like an Antarctic snowfield. Complementary food was a ham and Leicester cheese roll and a little pot of fruit salad, plus some orange juice and a cup of tea.

Arrived at Munich airport a bit early, at almost exactly 12:00. Once there I phoned home, then cast about a bit for a way to get to Regensburg, eventually finding a travel desk where I bought a bus ticket to Freising, where the S-Bahn from the airport meets the Munich-Regensburg railway line, and a train ticket from there to Regensburg. Arrived in Regensburg about 3pm, wandered around the bus stop for a while trying to figure out which bus to take (by now getting rather tired of lugging the suitcase around even on wheels), gave up and got a taxi to the University. There I got totally confused and failed to find the Akademisches Auslandsamt (AAA), the department where I was supposed to pick up the key to my room in halls.

4pm (or as all of Europe except the UK calls it, 16:00) came and went, the time at which the AAA closed during the first week, so I gave up and took the bus to the bridge over the Danube on the east side of the city centre (Eisenbrücke), walking the bridge the rest of the way. (The buses are totally bizarre to someone used to the British system - you can get on as well as off at the side doors, and noone seemed to pay. I just got on and off and hoped noone apprehended me for not having a ticket.) On the way to the youth hostel, on the north side of the bridge, a local stopped and told me I was a bit off course for the youth hostel and gave me directions. Being totally exhausted at this stage I didn't go immediately but stopped for a rest and a bit of a chat. The woman asked me if I was Swedish. Weird.

I tired myself out yet more lugging the suitcase up the stairs (there being no lift in the youth hostel - where do the disabled people sleep?!) and washed my face and feet before getting into one of the bunks. It was about 5:30-6pm by now and I just read for the rest of the evening, until I finished my book, then I chatted for a while with the other occupants of the room - a couple of cheap Aussies on business, and a German with a new job trying to find a flat - before drifting off to sleep.

Posted retrospectively on Monday 10 Oct 2005

As all who know me should know by now, I am flying off to Regensburg in Germany tomorrow to start a year studying in the university there. It's a bit daunting - I anticipate language and culture shock. I could have picked worse countries though... at least there are pubs (Kneipen) and good beer in Germany :)

Today was spent in preparation for the flight tomorrow. I went to Petersfield with my dad to get some cash in Euros and a train ticket to Gatwick, as well as some tea and coffee from the tea shop (since I hear you can't get decent tea anywhere in Europe). Petersfield boasts quite possibly the best tea shop in Hampshire. Yes, even better than Whittard's. This one actually lets you try the tea and coffee out before buying it (for a small fee of course).

Mum suggested having a good British dish for dinner as a send-off, so I picked fish and chips. Yum :)

I didn't finish packing till about an hour ago, largely because I had done some more washing which I had to let dry first. Some things I'd have liked to take I've had to leave behind due to weight constraints, such as my 40k army, and my guitar, which is too big to carry as hand luggage, and I don't have an appropriate case for it, only a soft case that would just let it get snapped at the shoulder. My German dictionary (A4 hardback about 3-4 inches thick) was originally packed in my suitcase since I don't like carrying such a huge thing about on my back, but in the end it had to go in my backpack as the case was overweight.

Now, the worst things that could happen are my baggage getting lost or stolen, and the first leg of my train journey getting delayed so I arrive too late to check in. And since the train leaves at 6:29, I'd better get some shuteye...