Thursday, March 1, 2007, 11:37 - General
Another day, another rejection. This time I found out I won't be going to Seattle, which is rather sad as it was probably my top choice. I was already suspecting though since their visit days are in less than two weeks and I'd not heard anything up until now.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 3.5 / 13 )Wednesday, February 28, 2007, 05:21 - General
Yet another rejection today: this time from Columbia in New York. This one is the first to really sting, as it was pretty high on my list and one of the more highly ranked schools for which I thought I still had a chance. I guess once the responses start they just keep coming.Last night Qi-Qi and I went to bed pretty early (half past 10) so as to get up this morning early. I had a quick meeting with Chris (thesis adviser) at 9:30 so that gave us an excuse, but I really do like to get up early as I'm more alert and can get more done during the day. She made a Chinese porridge with rice, mushrooms, and lettuce - it was simple and delicious. I could get used to Asian cooking all the time. Tonight I'm playing cards with Dutch David and some other dudes from Twee Klaveren, while Qi-Qi's having dinner with Sylvia. Our first night apart since Thursday...
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( 2.9 / 21 )Tuesday, February 27, 2007, 07:10 - General
Last night I first received an email from CMU telling me of my rejection, but just like Berkeley I didn't really expect to be admitted there. It's kind of funny to see the subject line "Admissions Decision" and to see the first few words "We regret to inform you" without having to even open the email. I also got an email from Simon Fraser in Vancouver telling me I'd been accepted which is fantastic. The professor there had sent me an email about a week ago to my ehielscher.org address and it had been captured by my spam filter and thus I'd not seen it. I thus used this as a sign that I should check through my spam folder and I found yet another university email, this one from the University of Chicago saying that as long as I'm not dead-set on OS work and wouldn't mind going into either distributed systems of compilers/programming languages that they're very interested as well. The email was sent on the 9th however - I hope I haven't missed my chance. Exciting stuff.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 2.7 / 22 )Monday, February 26, 2007, 07:17 - General
So Thursday night Qi-Qi IM'd me a bit down in spirits, and after talking a bit online decided to take a cab over here for a night on the couch watching movies. She cooked me some delicious Chinese noodles (as per usual) and we stayed up until maybe 4:30 before finally passing out. We then proceeded to spend the entire weekend together with a brief break for her to go home and get more clothes on Friday - it's Monday morning and she's just left for class. It was great - food, movies, music, staying up late, living in our own world. I'm smitten.[ add comment ] | permalink |
( 2.9 / 22 )Thursday, February 22, 2007, 12:16 - General
Friday I went down to Utrecht to see Ronald's talk. After a bit of confusion wrt finding the location due to the originally listed room being in a building that was closed from a crane falling on it during the big windstorm of a month or so ago, I eventually located the room in another building in which it would actually take place and saw Ronald walking up. The talk was a bit disappointing in the sense that I'd seen most of what he presented already, but it gave me an excuse to head to Utrecht and see Wouter. I walked over to his place from the Uithof as the weather was fantastic and bought a few pizzas before heading up to the 11th floor of the student apartment complex in which he lives. We hung out there for a while eating food, sharing travel stories and photos (he'd just visited Shlomit in Israel), and talking with his Eritrean flatmate. Then we left to meet Gili, whom I'd invited out, at the best bar in town, Kafé België. We had a pretty good time just chatting and drinking some tasty beers, with me at one point insulting Gili quite a bit by telling her that I thought that Dutch was the second ugliest language I've ever heard, with Hebrew being the ugliest. The one terrible thing which happened was my noticing that the huge inflatable shark that had been hanging above the bar all these years was gone, replaced by a 5 inch plastic one. Sad sad day.I walked over to the station and made it home by like 3:30, after being annoyed that the back doors of the station were closed and thus being forced to walk all the way around the station to get to my bike. Saturday Wouter came up to Amsterdam and I met him at the photography museum to check out two exhibits: one on poverty in the Netherlands, and the other photos of families in their kitchens from all around Europe. It was nice, and I then gave him a lift on my bike over to the Asian supermarket on Nieuwmarkt to buy food and then we walked over to my place to cook. The stir-fry ended up quite spicy, too spicy for Wouter even. He then left to meet some friend of his near Haarlem, while I skipped the houseboat party as I was just too tired from the previous night and I wanted to get some work done the next day.
Sunday through Tuesday were largely spent on quantum computing homework. I was making some silly mistakes for a long time and just beating my head against the math, but eventually I figured out what I was doing wrong. I handed in an eight page document for a weekly homework assignment, and I even abbreviated a lot of it. Monday night I continued my streak of going to 2 Klaveren, but even though I thought my setup was good I lost to Michael vying for the prize given to a 2-1 record. It was still leuk though.
Wednesday I spent the day at my office going to a group meeting and working mostly on my coding theory paper which is coming together quite nicely. I then met Qi-Qi at Nieuwmarkt and we ate dinner together at The Bird. Surprisingly she'd never been there in four years in Amsterdam, so I was happy to introduce her to that gem and rectify the fact that I'd not been there since returning from the U.S. at once. We sat with a couple Dutch girls at a four-person table, which is par for the course at the crowded Bird, and at one point a man who only spoke Mandarin Chinese came in wanting to order food and Qi-Qi nearly played translator for him. After eating we walked over to this bar on the square which she likes (mostly due to it having a red decor I think) and had a drink - she ordering a La Chouffe, her new favorite beer thanks to me. I quite enjoy hanging out with her as we get along really well and seem to have similar thought patterns.
Today I biked over to CWI to meet with Ronald and we went over the current draft of my paper. The weather continues to be great, with the high today around 10 and the daffodils on the way were even starting to bloom. It's February.
I also got my first responses from grad schools this week - I had a phone interview with the systems guy at Johns Hopkins today which went reasonably well despite a terrible connection, and I also got rejected from Berkeley. The latter was definitely expected, though I'm still surprised how little it affected me. I was much more moved by the positive response than the negative one, but I suppose I'm an optimist. I'll hear their final decision within 10 days. I also had Qi-Qi ask her friend who works at Google in New York about my application for an internship there for this summer, and within two days someone from Google had looked at my website and I received an email asking me to schedule a 45-minute technical interview for next week. Not sure whether there's a relation, but in any event it can't hurt to know a girl who has connections literally everywhere.
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( 3.1 / 22 )Friday, February 16, 2007, 08:42 - General
I've had a rather packed few days since I got back from Oslo. Monday I slept in as I was quite tired from staying up until 7 with Ylva Saturday night. I finished my quantum computing homework, went to that class as well as the logic seminar (in which the student who was presenting got completely lost and had to stop the lecture halfway through - I felt pretty bad for him) and then headed off to Twee Klaveren. I'm making a point of going there every week, and this time both Michael and David were there. I'd not seen them since we went to Utrecht together in December, so we had many catching up stories to tell. I only went 2-1 this night. I got back a bit past 12, and then my flatmate from last year Joe showed up. He's in town for a couple weeks because he just graduated and wants to find a job here, and I let him crash a couple nights in our living room.The next day I went off to Watergrafsmeer and checked out the new office into which Michiel had us moved on Friday. Nice and spacious. I then saw a couple masters students' thesis presentations, on of whom was Michael (this being the reason I went). Then it was back home to have dinner and hang out with Joe, Petter, Ansten, and David. We had quite a lengthy discussion over 11% beers about how Petter's the only proponent of marriage, and Petter also told me a story about a crazy argument involving Gaelle's Italian beau and automata theory.
Wednesday was spent doing more work on my coding theory paper before I went to De Zotte with David to meet Petter, Gaelle, Luca (the Italian dude), and Olivia. We had a drink there (I love the place but don't go there much) and then were off to Paradiso, where we met Ansten, his three Norwegian girl friends, and Herman, to see this band Ratatat. The guitarist was pretty technically skilled, but I didn't really like the music. It was very in the box both rhythmically and in its chord progressions. I did however love the sustain the guy was getting so David and I looked at his pedals after the show. He had some pedal called a Fuzz Tone Bender and I think that might have been the thing which was so cool, and his Vox amp wasn't bad either. After this we all walked over to L&B, but I wasn't in the mood for whiskey so much so I didn't stay long. On the way home David, Olivia, and I all had fries at the famous fries place around the corner from Leidseplein.
Thursday I cranked out a bunch on my survey paper which was very much needed. I even proved a trivial result. After a day of this I went over to Qi-Qi's around 7 to cook and eat dinner. We made a tofu stir-fry with pindasaus, but were rather distracted and kind of burned both the garlic and the sauce. It turned out edible anyway. Her housemate Jos was there and we all chilled together, watching this Dutch reality TV show which apparently is somewhat like Survivor, though I've never seen the latter. I thought it was mostly cool to be watching a Dutch show so as to practice my language.
Today I'm going to Utrecht to see Ronald give a talk on using quantum techniques to prove classical theorems, and then I'm going to meet up with first Wouter and then Gili. Perhaps we'll even hit up gold old Kafé België.
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( 3.2 / 22 )Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 07:02 - General
Wednesday I went back to "the office" and met up with Michiel with the intention of just installing Debian on the Alpha and then doing other things. However fate wasn't prepared to make it that easy on us and when we arrived to continue the Linux installation the CD rom drive had just stopped reading our CDs. After about an hour or so trying to get that to work we tried various other things, including asking the IT guys for a SCSI CD rom drive (they didn't have one), then asking them for floppy disks (which they also didn't have) since we decided to go to an old version of Debian which still has floppy images. However then the floppy drive wasn't reading our floppies, so we pulled a floppy drive out of the old Sun machine in the room and plopped that in the Alpha. Sure enough it worked, but then when we brought up the bare install we found that the floppy images didn't have the driver for the network card (quite important to complete an installation). Thus we found an old tar file with drivers from the same kernel compile, pulled out the network card driver, and inserted it into the kernel via a floppy. It worked. Thus after an entire day we were back to where we had left the previous day. However when we went to ask for a network connection we were rebuffed as apparently those are entirely governed by an office in the city center. Gotta wait again to finish I suppose. Also it hailed and snowed quite a bit, and so biking was kind of a pain.Wednesday night I tried to get some stuff done, but didn't get all that far. Mostly I finished the first homework assignment for the quantum computing course I'm going to take this semester. I don't really need the credits, but I was always a champion of getting the most for your money and thought it silly that people would take 13 credits during undergrad when they could take 18 for the same price. Plus I've been reading a fair amount about it already and would like to ground what I know in some solid foundation. Quantum computing is interesting, but also I get the impression that it's overhyped in the media. It's not all that crazy sci-fi amazing, just a realization that 1. computers are simply physical devices and 2. we thus should look for ways to exploit all of what we know about physics (including that of quantum mechanics) to perform computational work for us. Also Wednesday Ansten had two guests arrive, one from Switzerland and one from Brazil, who are friends of his Swiss friend Isabelle. They stayed until Monday but I didn't see them much as I was in Oslo. I did however lend them my bike and my keys while I was away.
Thursday I went to Watergrafsmeer to meet both Ronald and Chris. I didn't have much to discuss with Ronald as I'd not progressed all that far on my project beyond what I'd had at our last meeting, and thus this meeting was short. Chris was a little late (he's a busy guy) to the other meeting, but then we had a fruitful discussion about what I should do this week as he's away on holiday (the rest of the world uses this word instead of vacation by the way - I still think it sounds silly). After this I just biked home through much snow (we got 10cm that day) and got ready to leave - my flight left at 20:30. Petter arrived around 5, then ran an errand, and we got underway toward the airport at 6. He brought a back that was so big he had to check it which ended up being the source of much friendly ridicule coming from me (I don't especially like to wait for bags upon arrival). We flew Sterling, a Danish cheap airline company of which I'd not heard before. We weren't delayed at all in spite of the snow, and I found that it's nice to have someone to talk to on a flight. I usually fly alone.
We arrived and then took the train for 20 minutes from the airport to the city. This cost us $25 each. Norway is the most expensive country to which I've ever been by far. Luckily Sverre was picking up that tab. :) After we got to the central station we waited for Ylva to arrive from Sweden as she'd been delayed by a customs inspection at the border. The three of us took a cab to our hotel in a pretty swank area of Oslo and I stupidly turned on the TV and started watching - of all things - a rerun of the Super Bowl. I only caught the first half, but I thought it was cool that it was raining and not all glamorous and polished as such games normally are.
The reason it was stupid to have done that was that I had to get up at 7 or so (via a knock on my door as the hotel didn't offer alarm clocks or telephones) to get ready and catch breakfast in the hotel restaurant (which doubled as a sushi bar by night). Petter's uncle and (presumably) his wife were also in the same hotel and the five of us ate breakfast together, but I was quite tired and I also don't speak Norwegian so I was a little less talkative than normal. We took the metro along with Petter's grandparents to the university. Petter's grandmother asked me whether I only spoke English - I replied in the negative, but we still had no common tongue with which to converse. We arrived and met up with Sverre, where he gave Petter and me signed copies of his printed thesis and we got a coffee before he gave his dissertation lecture. The procedure was that he had to give a lecture on a topic related to his thesis but chosen by the examination committee, then he had to perform the actual defense which involves two profs grilling him for about an hour each on various issues they had with it. It's all a big show though, as if you've gotten to this stage then you're guaranteed to pass. One of those relics of the old school academic process. The lecture was cool, and the disputation was more or less interesting, but I was crashing from lack of caffeine and sleep. It was rather funny when the woman presiding over the ceremony kept pronouncing the name of his degree as "doctor scien-TUH" - i.e. with a huge accent on the t. She seemed to be taking her role pretty seriously.
After this and lunch in the university cafeteria Petter, Ylva, and I all went back to the hotel to catch a nap. I slept for a few hours which really helped. We then took a cab along with Petter's uncle and aunt all the way up to the far west side of Oslo in the mountains near an enormous ski jump. The views along the way were amazing, and likely would have been moreso had it been daytime. We were heading to the celebration dinner, which was at this nice resort building with rentable rooms and fancy food. I was one of the only men without a suit jacket, but I was dressed reasonably well nonetheless. It was quite the strange experience for me - first a lot of the people were higher up academics and dressed all fancy, and second almost everyone was speaking Norwegian. I grabbed a glass of champagne and we went into the dinner room where we had assigned seats. I was seated far from Petter and Ylva, but that was perhaps more interesting as it forced me to converse with others. I was to the right of Petter's father's wife's mother who used to be a teacher of both French and German. Thus we spoke German with each other all night long, though I'm not very good at it anymore. On my right was Petter's uncle Jan-Erik who was very nice. He told me (in fairly good English) about how he wanted to go back to university to study English and Russian and how he works for a power company and heads up to Murmansk on occasion. Petter's step-grandma at one point tried to offer me money but I turned it down - this seems to be a universal desire of grandparents. The staff had made special salads for me to replace the many fish dishes others were eating - seafood is very much a component of the Norwegian diet. We had a four or so course meal from candlelight with much wine and speeches and laughter. Petter sang a traditional Swedish folk song, then Sverre sang a rag in Norwegian, then a group of people dressed up as doctors and nurses went up and sang Aquarius/Let the Sunshine in but with other lyrics which were quite amusing. It gave a very informal flavor to the formal dinner, which I think suits Sverre's personality quite well. It was sometimes a bit boring for me to listen to hours of speeches I just couldn't understand, but at one point someone talked in English for a bit and I could at times catch the translation that was being given to the visiting Dutch prof Arend from Utrecht. I actually caught up with him after the dinner was wrapping up and we chatted in Dutch for about 20 minutes - a language I could understand! I then had a beer and a coffee (eschewing the standard Norwegian cognac) with Petter, Ylva, Arend, and Jan-Erik amongst others. We caught a cab back at around 3.
I slept until 9 when Petter woke me up by knocking at my door. Our plan was to go down for breakfast before it closed, then head back up to sleep some more. When in Norway you have to look for any way to cut costs. :) This is what we did, and I got up around 12:30 as we'd said that 1:00 was the latest we should meet. Of course the Swedes were late, but they'd been told by Sverre that we shouldn't come over to his place until 3 so they knew that was fine. The previous night we'd all been invited over for a relaxed family get-together. We got ready to go soon afterward and decided to walk over to this bakery called Ĺpent Bakeri (open bakery) which Ansten had recommended and was also listed in my guidebook. It was very good, replete with fresh baked goods and stunningly beautiful Norwegian girls. I thought before that a good plan would be to move to Norway and marry into their wealth, and after visiting again I'm all the more solidified in it. Anyway we had a coffee and sandwiches for about $12 and then proceeded to walk toward Sverre's place. It was pretty far away and it was around -10C outside with much snow, but it was very sunny and we were all in good spirits at being in Oslo. The city, or at least what I saw of it, was quite pretty and clean. We walked past the palace grounds westward to the Frognerparken, the famous park with all the little statues. After walking through that we continued up to Sverre's - I think the journey took not much more than an hour. We had a rather chill afternoon with much food including three homemade cakes, salad and beef stew, and cloudberries with cream. Mmm, I'd not had cloudberries since I was in Finland. I took my picture with Sverre, sat at the fireplace, and just took it easy for a few hours.
We left around 8 or so I think, catching the metro with Petter's grandparents. We'd had plans to meet up with this couchsurfer Tine whom I'd contacted before coming as I think it's always more fun when traveling to hang out with a local. She'd been feeling sick earlier in the day but had decided she was feeling well enough to come out with us. I'd smartly bought a cheap duty-free bottle of Bombay Sapphire as alcohol is extremeley expensive there, and Petter, Ylva and I all first went on a hunt for tonic water (which we just couldn't find and ended up settling for grapefruit flavored Schweppes) and then each had a drink in my hotel room. We were all in very good moods and we went off to meet Tine at the metro stop nearby before heading to another of Ansten's suggestions - Spasibar. I guess the name is a pun on some Russian word. It was quite cold and at first we couldn't find the bar so we almost gave up. However after picking up three cute Swedish 19 year old girls who also wanted to go there and had just moved to Oslo from Sweden that day, we realized that to reach it you had to go into this gated area that looked rather swank and not at all like a place you'd expect to find a bar. The decor was rather odd, the music was pretty cool, the crowd was interesting and diverse - in short I liked it. We had a few drinks there with the seven of us before Tine's friends showed up and they convinced us to take a cab up to Grünerlřkka to some other bar. This was a great experience, as from the outside the bar seemed like one I'd write off as not my type - it seemed to be a normal rap music trendy place. However the DJ was quite cool, playing some fun dance music which had an African feel to it and he even played a flute and a hand drum during his set. We got a table and a drink and then all got up on the dance floor until the bar closed and I really had a blast. After this we did a very Madison-feeling but apparently international thing - we headed for some alcohol munchy food at a convenience store called Deli de Luca which had a lot of random hot food like premade calzones and so forth. This actually is a very Scandinavian thing, and 7-11 is basically the most dominant store you'll see. Anyway there were many drunk people in there buying food at 3:30am and I talked with some people from Göttenborg before we all dispersed - Tine's friend with one Göttenborg boy to play some Playstation, Tine back home to sleep, and Petter, Ylva and I back to the hotel to hit some more Bombay. Petter was quite adamant about hitting the sack as he was to meet his father after checkout at noon to discuss the fact that he is likely going to turn down his PhD spot, but Ylva and I were too awake to go to bed. Thus he went off to sleep while we finished about half the bottle and stayed up until like 7am. It was really chill - just slowly sipping drinks and talking random things from politics to history - but it was the first time I'd really talked with Ylva and I found that she's very cool and interesting. As she said, it was a bonding experience.
I woke up at like 11:15 or so and tried to get my stuff together but I found that, while I wasn't hung over, I was quite sleepy and thus had a hard time concentrating. I remember starting to fold a pair of pants only to notice a shirt that also needed folding and putting down that half-folded pants to pick up the shirt, then realizing the inefficiency of that move. I did get my stuff together in more than enough time and went downstairs to briefly use the internet terminal which was in the lobby. Sverre showed up, and after saying goodbye to Ylva he, Petter, and I walked to the metro stop where I would take the subway up to meet Tine at her place for an afternoon stroll through the city. It was again quite cold with a temp of -12C, but hey, it's Norway. Tine and I took the tram up to the northern tip of the Akerselva river which clefts the city into a west side and an east side and started a walk from the frozen lake there down along the river path. I noticed that when we were on the number 13 tram we actually passed the spot where the YMCA hostel was where Gordon and I had stayed in the summer of '05. Anyway, the walk was filled with gorgeous scenery and the brisk air kept us awake and talkative. After about an hour we wound our way into a student cafe and I got a coffee and a scone, but sitting down in the warmth caused the lack of sleep to catch up to me so we quickly got walking again. We kept along the river for another hour and saw lots of cool things like a frozen waterfall, a really cool looking industrial park-come music and art district, and many kids sledding all over the place. I really like Scandinavia, and I sort of fell in love with Oslo, but I'm always pining over new places. Tine was fun and seemed genuinely interested in showing me the less-traveled paths of Oslo - a perfect guide. We parted at the train station around 3:30 where I paid another $25 to get back to the airport (yay).
I have to mention quickly the advertisements which were all over Oslo. They involved a picture of a woman in a bra and the phrase (in English) written across her body "we love all boobs." I don't know what else to say about that though.
I had like 65 kroner left over in cash and so I bought a bunch of Toblerone at the airport and ate one of those. Eventually Petter found his way over to the gate and we flew back home to the 'dam. I really enjoyed my stay, and I feel I got the most out of my time there too. I'd really like to thank Sverre for inviting me up there. Scandinavia remains highly recommended.
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( 3 / 45 )Tuesday, February 13, 2007, 10:08 - General
I just noticed that the grad student visit days for Berkeley and Seattle are around March 13th or so each, so I'm guessing I'll have to hear back from those schools (and presumably others as well since I imagine the schedule is rather similar across the board) quite soon. Exciting but also makes me nervous. Oh, and Ansten got his first response from Irvine - a rejection. Kind of tough as he thought that was his sure-bet fallback school. Man the next month is going to be intense for the three of us.Still working on the Oslo post.
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