Monday, April 12, 2010

Just another day in Paradise

Today I had the pleasure of witnessing the Crypto groups weekly "Breakfast", which was basically a real breakfast followed by the weekly meeting where everyone tells everyone what they have been up to in the past week. I, like most others, had not gotten much done, but the BRICS retreat and settling in were good enough excuses :)

I also met Thomas Toft for the first time (he had not been at the retreat) and we discussed the sharemind protocol he had developed.. and I think managed to improve on it by roughly a factor of two.

Right after that, I was grabbed by Ivan who asked whether I would be attending his lecture.. I had completely forgotten but I did plan to take a crypto protocols course while being here so of course I followed him to the lecture hall. Ivan is quite a good lecturer by the way, as it turns out.

After the lecture, we stopped by an office two storeys below us where complexity theorists reside. I had a question about BDD-s and it actually got a rather satisfactory answer. This means I can start writing a paper together with Ivan about general secret sharing now. Hopefully, anyways - Ivan said he did not know how much time he will have for that, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Just when I was about to leave, Dominic (a post-doc that considered coming to Estonia before deciding for Aarhus) came to our door, looking for an internet connection. That was quite a surprise, as I thought he would be arriving in the beginning of may. Anyways, he is here now, which is nice - yet another familiar face.

I then proceeded to the guitar store yet again. It turns out the larger of the small amps does not even fit my (relatively roomy) backpack.. so I decided not to buy it but instead try to get a small headphone amp. Unfortunately, they did not have the model I wanted.

I also managed to rent a bike while being downtown. The bike is very light, but has only front brakes. It will take some getting used to - and I hope I will not kill anyone in the process. Again - fingers crossed.

All in all, I would like to quote a famous reggae singer:
"Sun is shining, the weather is sweet"
Life is beautiful. At least, for now :)

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