frutti.gummi

One way to waste time productively. Haha. What an oxymoron! :p

It's been over a year since my last post. Occasionally, I did thought about updating the blog but had kept putting it off. Over the last couple of weeks, I get this feeling as though I have not wrap up the work that I have started. I mean, thesis submission is not the end yet!

I started writing this blog when I first moved to Europe for graduate studies. So I felt it should have a post about graduation; the end of graduate studies. Well, unless I didn't graduate. Hahahha.

The fact is, I did graduate. I received my diploma from Germany in February 2009 with pretty good grades (1.3 for thesis, woohoo!) and another diploma from Italy at the end of April. However, I did not attend the graduation ceremonies. I received my German diploma through the mail as I was living in Italy at the time. As for the Italian diploma, I picked it up from the secretary's office after I got back from my London trip. So yeah, I finally graduated in spring 2009 with two diplomas. :D

Update: The reason why I didn't make any effort to attend the graduation ceremonies is there's no elaborate setting and no graduation gown involved :p

I've finally finished my project for the last exam. When I showed my work to the prof, he was satisfied with it and said that's all. I'm going to get my grade for it tomorrow morning. So, all that's left now is my thesis. This is the toughest part. I don't know what I want to do. I realised that I have lost interest in this field. I'm no longer curious about how things work, how things can be made better, or what is missing. I don't even have motivation unless wanting to graduate soon is counted as one. Since it's pretty much impossible for me to propose anything, I'm just looking for something easy, interesting and can be finished by the end of the year. I hope I'll find one soon after I start putting some effort to look for it.

I've finally finished all the exams that required studying of the course materials. :D Only one exam left and I just need to complete the project for it. Somehow halfway though this semester I have lost the motivation to do well in exams. I guess I went back to working mode where I just need to know enough to understand the topic and where to find the details when I need to use it. But in order to well in exams, one need to know the stuff really well. I don't quite like the grades that I'm getting but I know I deserve them coz I didn't take the exams seriously. Ah well..it's over and I'm so glad I don't have to take anymore classes and exams. After I complete this project, it's just gonna be the thesis left. I can't wait to finish grad school. It starts to feel like it's taking too long. Anyway, I'm off to Naples!

I've finally submitted my project for the exam next week. I know I could have done a better job if I'd started working on it earlier. I didn't really have other stuff to work on since Christmas but yet I didn't start on this project. For at least two weeks, from Christmas till after New Years, I have been watching a lot of asian dramas; maybe close to 10 shows and each with episodes ranging from 10-20. I thought I had time because I was only planning to do a simple project. But didn't expect that it was difficult to fit so much information into limited number of pages and also spent a lot of time trying to type formulas with weird characters.

Towards the end of this semester, I just don't feel like studying anymore. I couldn't really be bothered and just managed to make myself do the minimum to pass the exams. While I got pretty good grades at the beginning of the semester, I barely passed the last exam. It's not so bad for the classes that takes the average of the exams. For the next few exams, I'm just hoping to pass them. Eventhough I'd like to get higher marks, I just couldn't make myself to take them more seriously. I'd rather watch more dramas, go out, travel, and sleep.

Even though it's Christmas tomorrow, it doesn't really feel like it. I guess having exams the week before Christmas most probably spoilt the mood. Also, didn't do any Christmas shopping this year. The shops here carry very limited range selling mostly winter sweaters and jackets which I already have enough. The home decor stuffs are very nice but I can't buy them since I have limited luggage space. There is a small Christmas market in Trento but the ones in Germany are tons better especially for the variety of food that you can get. Not much plans for the holidays this year since final exams starts in January. So, gotta start working on the projects soon. Anyway, wishing everyone a blessed Christmas and a marvellous New Year!


Backgound by dimant

I'm just not ready to take any exams only after 6 weeks of classes. It still feels like the start of the semester and I'm just getting used to attending classes again after a long summer break. We had an exam last week and supposedly this week and people around got pretty tense. Although we're also planning for a trip, I don't see any excitement around. The good news came on Sunday that this week's exam is postponed and people suddenly became livelier. I see people smiling again and joy in their hearts. Hehe. And looking forward to the long weekend starting Thu.

First week of classes has been tough. Still having 8:30am classes everyday. I get headaches after attending classes on theoretical subjects. Need retraining to think like a scientist. Still quite lazy to study; prefer to watch videos whole day. Quite a bit of assignments and assessments throughout the semester so can't afford to start studying later in the semester when the final exams come. I find that most of the new students this semester are really enthusiastic about the courses and damn hardworking too! Makes me feel like I am extremely lazy, which I probably is. Oh, I miss the first year. It was pretty relaxed at the beginning of the semester so can slowly adopt to the change in workload. Well, I gotta start picking up more books to read before I drown in the courses. Hopefully I'll get more productive starting this week. No time to lose.

It's gonna be a tough semester to get through. Sigh!

The exam period sure felt like a very long time even though I took a one week break to go on vacation. The last exam turned out better than I expected. I did quite badly in explaining the algorithm of my applications. I was just spilling out formulas which I memorised the day before. He was expecting some sort of presentation like a set of slides but we weren't aware of it. His assistant told him that she told us that we need not prepare slides. Well I managed to show him that my application works but I doubt he understood how I made it work. He asked to explain the code and I started taking a long route instead of showing him directly the important parts. After a couple of minutes, he suddenly just asked for my exam book. When I passed it to him, he said he'll give me the marks after they look at the other student's application. He somehow made me feel that I'm wasting his time.

I was very nervous during the wait and tried to distact myself from listening to the other student's exam. They seemed to have a better strategy with him and he was using the blackboard to explain stuff. Each of us have different projects so I can't tell whether the explaination is good or not. After the student finished, I thought they would need some time to discuss our marks. A minute later, he told us that they propose the high score. I thought it didn't apply to me until he asked me if I'm ok with the score. I said yes. Then he continued to propose that he would give us the highest possible score if we do some documentation. The other student agreed and so I followed suit. He asked if we could trust us and give us the score now and expect to get the documentation later. He then wrote the scores in our exam books. After they left, we started working on the documentation and finished it a few hours later. This morning I got replies from them that they liked my slides. Phew!

I survived the 8:30am classes! Towards the end of the semester, it was starting to get difficult to get up at 7am every day. And I did ended up late for class a couple of times. Now that classes are over, I can go back to my normal sleeping hours. Hehe. Still have some projects to complete and also to study for the final exams. After that, it's holiday! :D

Had my first exam this evening and it was an oral exam. I never had this kind of exam before so was a bit nervous. Oral exam is usually given when there are about 15 or less students in the class. It's like an interview session where the professor asks question and you answer and it lasts for 20 minutes. I guess it's a good style to see whether certain concepts are understood and it's definately easier to explain by talking rather than writing. After the session, you wait outside while they discuss your performance and then you're called back into the room where they'll roughly go through the questions and comment on how you did on each one. Finally, they'll tell you your score. I did quite well partially coz the professor asked the same questions that I asked him to explain to me the week before :) Glad I took the effort (45 minutes bus ride) to visit his office last week.

Oh, before the exam, I went to McD for lunch and they have curly fries! Hehe. I thought I wasn't going to have any this year. There's no prosperity burger but they have special edition burger called Best Pork this week. It looks really good. I might just go try it.

It's the last week of class and despite having final exams starting Monday, I still went to Aachen for german class this morning. I survived this long long commute throughout the semester! :D It's special today because it really snowed in Aachen. I finally get to see the place covered with snow and it was just magnificent. Plus on the train journey home, I get to see the little houses, plains, forests, mountains all in white.

Tomorrow is my last day of class. We presented our group project yesterday and the only thing left to do is to spruce up the website detailing our project progess. I have started reviewing the materials for some of the classes and I still feel quite nervous about sitting for exams. I'm not sure if I can remember all the materials covered in the semester. One of the reasons why I don't like system with only one final exam. I guess I just need to do what I can.

This project is for UI design class and there are four members including myself. We're working on the flash prototype of our application and we split our tasks such that the only person who knows Flash in our group does the Flash. The rest of us do the user inteviews, testing, documentation, etc. My group members are all fresh from undergrad and coming from a technical background, it's really tough for them to come up with good design. We did the initial layout and all on paper before the first flash prototype. When I first ran through the initial flash prototype last week, I immediately noticed all the little inconsistencies in the UI; font type, font size, color, alignment, etc. I guess work habit kicked in. The overall design and layout is just like the design on paper but I'm not able to just overlook these little stuff. Well, I tried not be too picky because then it would seem like I'm criticizing his work. But alas, I succumbed. Our task this week is to evaluate the prototype with the design rules and I ended up giving him a long list. He didn't understand why the labels for input need to look the same (even though there are in different section like search and login) or why the title of a subsection on the right need to be aligned with the left, etc. Sigh! Well, at first he was using funky fonts, different fonts with different sizes for all the different sections too. At least that I could explain that we should use font types that people are familiar with looking at so that it's easier for them to read. I also feel a bit frustrated that my suggestions are being "challenged" with no substanstial backing; because at work, I usually get the last say. Furthermore, as we only need to implement the UI and not the engine, we can just assume the application can work wonders. As such, most of my ideas for this application are novel and they just don't "see" it because it was not implemented elsewhere so it's hard time for me to explain and convince to them it's a good idea. We have a website to document our project progress and the flash guy chose to do it in flash and it has horrible UI but none of the other two members have problem with it. Sigh! I guess I need to confront him soon. Well, it's difficult when they don't see anything wrong with it. Plus, final exams starts in about a week. And flash isn't exactly easy to change. I should've offered to do the website earlier.

I've completed one class! :D Submitted the 20 pages long seminar paper and gave the presentation this morning. Presentation wasn't very smooth coz I had to present it in a different way that I prepared for it. Nevertheless, the professor said despite my confusion with the slides, it was good overall. Hehe. I hope he's not just being nice coz can't really tell. When he replies our emails, he never addresses us by our names; it's always "Dear Student" and it's always just a few sentences. Then again, I'm surprised he remembered my name when he announces that I'll be the next speaker. Maybe I give him too much trouble. Haha. Still, there are two more papers to finish for the writing class. Just waiting for the feedback on the short paper now.

Another nice event today is it finally snowed! Well, more like flurries but it still manages to make the ground white in color. I guess that's about as much as we get here. Maybe there's more in Aachen. Shall see tomorrow. A friend also said that this year is one of the coldest in Bonn coz the temperature fell to like -8C and friends are already complaining cold. It has only been below 0C for this week. I hope it continues to be sunny and cold. I like it.

Oh, I did finally went through the materials for that class over the past weekend and I got most of my questions answered by the TA. I wasn't so 'lost' afterall. This weekend, gotta go through the past 3 weeks materials for Virtual and Augmented Reality class coz I didn't see it in the server. So I emailed the professor and he said it has been there all along and when I looked again, these new files are on the top of the list. Earlier, I just scrolled to be bottom and didn't see anything new beneath "file 9". yah, "file 10" would appear on top. silly me.

Been feeling lousy this whole week. Couldn't sleep at night so ended up having difficulty getting up in the morning. And I also blame the weather for being so gloomy. Since I have no classes in the morning this week except on Monday, I could only drag myself out of bed past 10am. Sometimes I would still be daydreaming. Then I spend 1-2 hours with my morning routine; breakfast, check weather, check mail, etc etc. Before I know, it's already 1 and it's time to go for class. Then I realised I haven't taken lunch and I'll be hungry at 4 during class. The timing is just so screwed up! And when I get home from class, I don't feel like working on assignments. It's like when you go home after work, you leave work behind. Arrgghh this doesn't work when you're studying. Plus, I feel more alive working on work problems than doing my school assignments. I guess probably I have no interest in the subject and I still have not much understanding of the subject. Which is why I have been planning to review the subject since last Christmas but I have yet to get to it. I shall be determined and start doing something about it this weekend. Can't afford to flung the final.

Still hasn't got used to attending classes. I was yawning quite a bit during the 11am class on Monday and only managed to get off bed at 11am today. As the school break progresses, I eventually slipped back into my normal operating hours from about 10am to past 2am. If I managed to get up at 4am tomorrow to go to Aachen for german class, then I think I can fix the hours. After spending a week speaking English, I find that my German has deteriorated a little. Words doesn't come to mind as easily anymore. The same happened with the German lecturer in class on Monday. At times, he was struggling to get the words out in English. Well, the good news is I managed to finish the first draft of my seminar paper! Couldn't believe that I could actually produce a 20 page paper. Two more days to work on the paper before submission is due. Then gotta work on the powerpoint version of the paper for presentation next week. In a way I couldn't wait for the semester to be over but then it means that finals is only a month away.

Was planning to finish the first draft of my seminar paper, review German lessons and go through the materials for the network class during the Christmas break but I failed badly. I've only managed to finish three quarter of the paper, reviewed German lesson once, and not even have a glance at the network stuff. I did have a lot of time during the long Christmas weekend but somehow I wasted a lot of time being lazy. Sigh! Now, I need to continue to work on my paper in London. Still, I look forward to having a good time during the one week vacation. :D

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!! May 2007 be a better year for all.

At first I was quite pleased that most of the courses here doesn't require writing programs. I wasn't sure if I could still write anything in C++/Java. However, having experienced the tedious process of writing papers, I'd rather write programs now. You can just start writing the program and it either work or it doesn't. So you know whether you are doing it right. But with papers, you gotta read tons of materials written by other people first and then decide which of these papers are useful for your paper. Still, you can't be sure whether you're on the right track especially when you're not sure what exactly needs to be written. I'm in that situation with my seminar paper now. It took me days to write the "table of contents", basically a detailed outline of my paper. Furthermore, over the weekend, we had a writing assignment in pairs to write about Douglas Engelbart, the person who "invented" the computer/web as we know it today. It's already difficult to write in pairs and yet we are also graded for writing style! I forgot most of what I learnt in English 101 and 102.

If you're interested in Engelbart's work, check this out. You'll be amazed what he had built in 1968 and some of the nice features in his system are still not available in ours today.
Video:The Mother of All Demos
Article:Engelbart talks about his demo

I found out that not only does the German uni has compulsory courses, the Italian uni has compulsory courses too. And we have to satisfy the requirements of both unis. These are the requirements for the standard students enrolled in each uni and somehow it applies to us as well; which makes life super difficult for us since some courses are only offered during a particular semester. So, we'll end up with a lot more than the required 90 credits of course work. These courses are mostly intermediate level general courses which I have no interest in whatsoever. Luckily I managed to get exempted for 2 mandatory courses since I have taken in undergrad. But I'm still only left with 2-3 courses which I can choose for myself.

Besides compulsory courses, the uni in Germany also group courses in categories and we have to satisy a certain amount of credits in each category. Which means I need to check which category the courses I want to take is in. And these courses will be taken in Italy so have to make sure it satisfy the German uni as well.

I think this is the third year the programme is running and things are still unclear. Plus, the school break is also not in sync. Classes in Italy will start mid February when we're still having final exams in Germany. No school break for us and we'll miss 1-2 weeks of classes.

In relation to the previous post, it seem to me that it's expected of us to also study or do our assignments or research in the weekends. However, the libraries and computer labs are closed on weekends! I know Germans don't work on weekends and everything is closed on Sunday but I didn't think that university facilities would be closed as well. So, they expect us to do so much stuff but they don't provide the environment for us to do so.
Furthermore, you would think that if the CS departments have their own little libraries, they would have quite a collection of books. Wrong! They only have 5-7 shelves of reference books; mostly in German. Though there are quite a number of shelves holding journals from ACM, IEEE, etc. I have yet to check out the main library in Aachen but I do hope they have more books. Othwerwise I would have a tough time writing my technical paper with only a few references.