About 4-5 days after arriving in Regensburg I finally remembered my PDA's cradle was still stowed deep in my rucksack, and the thing itself was running out of charge, so I fished it out, plugged it in, and stuck the PDA in it. The green light that usually lights up when it's charging spectacularly failed to light. Looking around the back of the cradle, I noticed that the power cable was lolling halfway out of the socket, so I attempted to rectify this by pushing it back in. The socket promptly gave way. Oops, looks like it got damaged in transit. So onto eBay I went, looking for a replacement. Getting one direct from Palm or Amazon.co.uk is guaranteed to cost 10 times what it costs to make the thing, and there are always people on eBay with spare cradles. I found one for sale in the UK for 1p, he says he can send it to me for a couple of quid more than the UK shipping price, so I place my bid and win the auction. 1p for a Palm cradle, not bad :) I saw that other people in my hall have put their names on their letterboxes. I am told that even if the address on the package is right, they won't deliver it unless the name on it matches the name on the letterbox. Being a busy (har har!) foreign student, and having in fact received a couple of letters addressed to me, and being skeptical that any modern postal service can really be that backward, I hadn't thought this important enough to get round to putting my name on my letterbox. Two weeks later, the cradle still hasn't arrived. But in this instance I think the seller has sent the thing off and Deutsche Post haven't delivered it. Why? Because I still hadn't got round to putting my name on my letterbox. So this package, as well as my bank card (though, weirdly, not my PIN slip), have been returned to sender. Gah! How can any postal service really be that backward?

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.) Read the rest of this entry »

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). Read the rest of this entry »