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palfrey at 08:21pm on 11/10/2003
palfrey at 08:21pm on 11/10/2003Hey. Here's the longer post I promised, updating WTF has happened to me over the last few months
Summary: Moved to Netherlands, started PhD, all going well with work things. Very little social life yet, but details on what has happened. Lots of ramblings on my personal mental state with explanations/historical details.
I'm now (after 4 moves in 2 months) living in a place called Roland Holstlaan. If anyone from there ever reads this, I'm in room 335 until 30 September 2004. Come visit! For others, it's a big-ass tower block that they seem to throw most of the international students into. Pictures of here and other places I've been on my web site RSN. PhD is going well, lots of time spent messing around with sensor nodes and simulations of sensor nodes. Working on the localization ("Where the hell is my node?") problem. Can't really throw GPS at it (too much power needed, doesn't work indoors, etc) so gotta do complicated things with partial knowledge of locations for some nodes and lots of triangulations with really dodgy radio range data. Or, go all topologist on it and just make up a local co-ordinate system using a couple of neighbour nodes as x and y-axes. Yeah, I'm spending too much time fucking around with this.
Social life: not much. If I was doing normal B/MSc routes then I'd get all the "please join us!" stuff from local societies (which are really fucking weird, and big. Like "own buildings" big....), but PhD's don't get that, so having to find shit myself. Lots of web searching resulted in AEGEE - a pan-european student thing. Went to their little party thing last night (times here are odd, nothing alcohol-related starts until about 10 o'clock at least.... later opening hours kinda alters this.), random room w/ bar, music system playing chessy/dance/random misc. Usual dren. Met whole bunch more ppl, including first other English person I've met anywhere here, and a 6'8" dutchman. Apparently when he went to England various ppl did the whole point-and-stare thing...
Annoying thing about last night was that I broke one of my personal rules. Something I worked out over this last year - in short that how much I will have in an evening depends a lot on my mental game plan. If I'm "on the pull" as such (i.e. am actually making effort to impress women) and I fail (as is too often the case), then I'm a bit pissed off, even if the evening is fun. If I'm more relaxed, and just go for just having a good time, I'll have more fun, be more relaxed, and as a result of not being so stressed about crappy pulling attempts will actually probably increase my odds of finding interesting women. Great theory, unfortunately after a year of not having time to pull/beard/final year of uni/gwen flirting, my first proper social event since then drops me straight back into horny geek mode. Hence my slight pissed off ness. Must fix....
What else have I done: Added stuff to image gallery code, and fully documented plus distributed. Wrote replacement for Dailystrips in Python - still using most of the old comics def format, but added stuff to note that a comic is only updated on particular days, and to allow for multiple search patterns. Docs/code up as and when I write the docs and am convinced it's reasonably stable. It works, but just not totally convinced by it yet.
Need social life! I know who I need to find - I need sci-fi like ppl. These were the sorts of ppl I first became social with back in high-school, and then continued the same pattern at Uni. Don't know how to find them tho, haven't spotted anything equivalent to UoB SF&F or Gamesoc yet. Might have to found the bloody things... Found a beer I like with some help from ppl here - a belgian cherry beer. Pretty good stuff.
That's most of the important stuff. Will hopefully write more now I'm sitting on fast local 'net (Resnet-like thing)
Summary: Moved to Netherlands, started PhD, all going well with work things. Very little social life yet, but details on what has happened. Lots of ramblings on my personal mental state with explanations/historical details.
I'm now (after 4 moves in 2 months) living in a place called Roland Holstlaan. If anyone from there ever reads this, I'm in room 335 until 30 September 2004. Come visit! For others, it's a big-ass tower block that they seem to throw most of the international students into. Pictures of here and other places I've been on my web site RSN. PhD is going well, lots of time spent messing around with sensor nodes and simulations of sensor nodes. Working on the localization ("Where the hell is my node?") problem. Can't really throw GPS at it (too much power needed, doesn't work indoors, etc) so gotta do complicated things with partial knowledge of locations for some nodes and lots of triangulations with really dodgy radio range data. Or, go all topologist on it and just make up a local co-ordinate system using a couple of neighbour nodes as x and y-axes. Yeah, I'm spending too much time fucking around with this.
Social life: not much. If I was doing normal B/MSc routes then I'd get all the "please join us!" stuff from local societies (which are really fucking weird, and big. Like "own buildings" big....), but PhD's don't get that, so having to find shit myself. Lots of web searching resulted in AEGEE - a pan-european student thing. Went to their little party thing last night (times here are odd, nothing alcohol-related starts until about 10 o'clock at least.... later opening hours kinda alters this.), random room w/ bar, music system playing chessy/dance/random misc. Usual dren. Met whole bunch more ppl, including first other English person I've met anywhere here, and a 6'8" dutchman. Apparently when he went to England various ppl did the whole point-and-stare thing...
Annoying thing about last night was that I broke one of my personal rules. Something I worked out over this last year - in short that how much I will have in an evening depends a lot on my mental game plan. If I'm "on the pull" as such (i.e. am actually making effort to impress women) and I fail (as is too often the case), then I'm a bit pissed off, even if the evening is fun. If I'm more relaxed, and just go for just having a good time, I'll have more fun, be more relaxed, and as a result of not being so stressed about crappy pulling attempts will actually probably increase my odds of finding interesting women. Great theory, unfortunately after a year of not having time to pull/beard/final year of uni/gwen flirting, my first proper social event since then drops me straight back into horny geek mode. Hence my slight pissed off ness. Must fix....
What else have I done: Added stuff to image gallery code, and fully documented plus distributed. Wrote replacement for Dailystrips in Python - still using most of the old comics def format, but added stuff to note that a comic is only updated on particular days, and to allow for multiple search patterns. Docs/code up as and when I write the docs and am convinced it's reasonably stable. It works, but just not totally convinced by it yet.
Need social life! I know who I need to find - I need sci-fi like ppl. These were the sorts of ppl I first became social with back in high-school, and then continued the same pattern at Uni. Don't know how to find them tho, haven't spotted anything equivalent to UoB SF&F or Gamesoc yet. Might have to found the bloody things... Found a beer I like with some help from ppl here - a belgian cherry beer. Pretty good stuff.
That's most of the important stuff. Will hopefully write more now I'm sitting on fast local 'net (Resnet-like thing)
annoyed