Showing posts with label germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label germany. Show all posts

20080218

Heading Home

Woo-hoo!

Today I booked my flight back to Canada on the 14th of March, from Hamburg to Montréal. Can you tell that I have a huge smile on my face as I write this? Hehehe..

In the next month, I'll be writing my exams in Advanced Signals & Systems, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, and then I'm organizing to write my exam in Digital Communications at McGill via some awesome department that will proctor exams for external universities ;-) I've never even heard of that before.

But hey, if it means that I don't miss out on an exam and I get to be in my new apartment with my lady friend and Julien, then that's entirely wicked in my opinion!

Oh yes, and by the way, version 2.0 will be named Julien Jacob Friedt - although I'm not 100% sure of the spelling of all of it - Erin and I both agree that Julien should be with an 'e', but I sort of feel like using a 'k' in Jakob just because that's how they would spell it over here.

By the way, if anyone feels like buying a few baby clothes, these ones are definitely on the wish list:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/5ace/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/59cc/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/6c71/
and my personal favorite
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/kids/9b11/

Sigh, comic relief ;-)

I spoke to Sammy D.J. just yesterday, and He and Emily are also expecting a newcomer in July - Ethan Donald. Dwayne Williams also has one (or two) little ones already, and countless numbers of others must be married at this point - jeez, I'm starting to sound like a 30 year old! AAAAGGHH!!

It seems as if it were yesterday that we were wearing hospital pants and hardhats and getting completely $h17-faced in the 4th floor of Pitman Hall. I know, I'm a bit of a sentimental, but hey - what a wild time; the nights without sleep studying for exams, practically living in the basement of the building formerly known as T... sometimes I can't even believe that I'm here in Germany now doing my master's. I'm meeting so many people from all over the world - I hope I stay good friends with all of them, just because having friends in other countries just makes the best excuse to travel ;-)

Speaking of travel, the feeling that I will be 'going home' to Montréal hasn't even really sunk in yet. What I mean, is that it seems like I've been renting rooms for literally the last decade of my life! Moving from city to city, province to province, country, continent, etc. Now Erin & I are pretty much starting out together in a beautiful plateau apartement à côté du Parc LaFontaine. I can't wait! The next year of my life is going to be full of the most amazing experiences.

Well, I'd better get back to work / studying

Hasta Luego

20070720

Done Exams!

I've finished my exams for the 2007 summer semester here in Kiel. Both of them went pretty well. The first was Computer Vision II: Stochastic and Topological Approaches to Image Processing, and the second one was Neuroinformatik. CVII went pretty well, although I was a bit pissed about the last question. Neuro went better actually, although I like CV a bit more. CVII is actually a fairly hard course, not as hard as CVI, but still.

I had a beer, as per tradition, as soon as I got out of the last exam, and then on the walk home, the air smelled fresher, the sun felt brighter, all of the music on my iPod seemed to fit perfectly with everything - a good sign ;-) Actually, having the ability to take time and walk home was a big change all by itself ;-) Usually I have no time what so ever, and am racing to catch the next bus too hand something in, or meet up with my study groups.

I'm looking forward to coming home ____SO____ much!!!


Now I can focus on my work a bit more, and get a couple of big projects out of the way. I'm excited to actually be able to concentrate on one 'job' for the summer, getting new toys to play with (i.e. embedded devices), and doing some electrical design / hacking too! I'm also planning on hacking a couple of open source apps like Banshee, iPodLinux, and writing more interesting code for my various embedded devices.

Finally, I can design some image processing hardware too, once I learn about the PCI bus and interface with the new TS-7800 boards ;-) Since I tore apart my old crappy 1.3 megapixel digital camera, I'm also hoping to put linux on it.

As of next semester I'm going to be registered in the M.Sc. in Digital Communications, which is taught in english, as opposed to Informatik, which is taught in german. That should lighten my load considerably, but also provide the same type of challenges that I'm used to in areas such as DSP, communication theory, analog & digital circuit design, and so on.

Digital Communications is an engineering program, which I like better. Not to say that I didn't like all of the experiences I had in Informatik - Professor Sommer's lectures are exactly what I was looking for by travelling halfway across the world, and I can't even put a price on some of the things I learned studying with him. The things that I have yet to develop will likely be some of the most advanced in my life.

I've also learned some very interesting things in CV, Neuro, Numerische Math., and yes, even Mathematical Logic!! Unfortunately, I have to give up my office, which is a bummer, but the change to Digital Communication will surely have plenty of benefits to make up for it ;-)

The best and most important part everything now, though, is enjoying the summer!!! I'm really looking forward to meeting up with all of my friends in Canada, seeing all of my family, and of course Erin too :) woohoo!

20070514

First 'blogger' entry

"Hello World!"
- anonymous programmer


It was a very hard decision, but I just decided to move my blog to a remote service. Formerly, I had done all of the web-hosting and setup of the blog engine myself from home, using no-ip.com's service and a linux box (www.perpetual-notion.myftp.org) - you wouldn't believe how easy that is. However, now that I'm living my digital life out of my laptop from virtually wherever I am in the world, I feel that having something static would probably be a much wiser idea.

I suppose that there are a few other methods I could have pursued, such as:

  1. Hacking the linksys router to incorporate a flash memory reader / writer
  2. Hacking the linksys router to incorporate a USB port / external hard disk
Aside from the possibility that I could wreck my Linksys router, or that the flash memory would die in a matter of months, or the hard drive would die because of the crappy external enclosures that I bought, I believe the university is blocking all incoming traffic on port 80 & 443 (http, https). Therefore hopes of hosting my own blog have been somewhat extinguished.

Eric had mentioned that I should continue with my blog, and I guess there are good grounds for that request (the primary reason being that I'm anti-social and don't call home nearly enough). In spite of my anti-social nature, I too sometimes feel somewhat disconnected from the rest of 'the world' back home.

Thus, I went with blogger.com Since Google already has the right to search through all of my email, I would imagine that they would love the opportunity to search through my blog postings as well. However this will probably also be an easier way to publish photos for everyone to see and also to get some feedback from my friends & family abroad.

My current method to communicate is skype, but mainly with Erin, and mailing photos as postcards by simply writing an address and fixing a stamp to the back - that's one of the best parts about digital photography (Erin is really a way better photographer than me, but I still like sending her pictures as postcards too ;-)).

In any event, I'll write something fairly soon so that you can all have some idea about what's happening in my life. That might be tomorrow, because I'm a bit busy with schoolwork and work tonight - I would have loved to go to the danish film that's playing at the university tonight, but I thought that travelling to an island and walking a kilometer out into the north sea was enough fun for one weekend!! heheeh...

ciao 4 now