Memory Holes

Today, at 12, crypto group again gathered for the morning breakfast meeting. Recounting what they had done for the past week, most people had serious problems - it seemed noone remmembered what they had been doing even a few days ago.

I wonder if the two crates of beer and 8 liters of wine that got drunk yesterday had anything to do with that. Probably not though.

But yes, there was the "Crypto group spring party" at Ivan's place. It was quite fun. We had mexican food (tortillas) and live music to go with it: initially in the form of me borrowing Ivan's guitar to play La Bamba, later in the form of Ivan playing all sorts of famous songs, both Danish and international (Beatles, Abba). As no-one really knew the lyrics, all the smartphones people had were actually put into good use googling them up so we could all sing together. Claudio singing Macarena was one of the most memorable parts, probably.

Im going to miss this place when I leave here. And the people too. Chances are I will meet most of them on conferences in the future, but still.

People are nice here

I just went out to get some coffe from the employee lounge at the university when I walked by 4 masters students having a barbacue on the balcony. They waved at me and offered me a garlic bread.. so I sat down with them and talked for a few minutes, then helped them clean up.

:)

My plan is to stay up til 4 in the morning, studying and then to go and watch the sunrise on the beach. Im about halfway through the material so I think I will finish at just the right time for that.

Dodging a bullet

I had another off-by-one-month error. Third one, in half a year, and second one in two weeks. Maybe I should rest, or something...

Then again, rest is for the weak. This one did get resolved, however - I called the travel company and they had not bought the plane tickets out yet so I could change them to one day later - so now I am going to a wedding just before going to Australia. And will be back just in time for Viljandi Folk (although - I am not entirely sure I am going).

In other news, I went to see Bjarne Stroustrup who gave a lecture on the design principles behind C++. It was a very interesting lecture, with quite a few fun facts. For instance, while Sun and Microsoft spent billions on their Java and .Net respectively, Bjarne had at one point also discovered he had a marketing budget - of 5000 dollars, 1000 of it having been spent when he discovered it. So, he just used 3000 of it to buy beer at the first C++ conference, and then sent the rest back, as "it was clearly ridiculous".

I may or may not have an exam on monday. Depends on whether I will have time to study for it, as Ivan has kindly agreed to call it off if I havent, since I don't want credits for it anyways.

A week more

I slept longer than usual today. I mean, I still woke up at 8, but instead of getting up I decided to sleep in today. Result was that when I woke up for the second time, at around 11, I felt refreshed and actually wanted to get up. And it was nice to be back at work after a long weekend.

It turns out I managed to mix up months again, this time when planning my Australia trip. I would have nearly bought the tickets for one month earlier, than I should have. If it were the first time, I would not worry too much. But after the Metallica incident, I think I should better take it as a symptom...

For overthinking.. not giving my brain a rest. Having it on full-time while at work, and then also on a different topic, while at home. Not healthy.

9 more days of waiting. Hopefully.

A walk in the park

I went for a long walk today. As I have mentioned before, there is quite a nice forest nearby that goes quite a way along the seashore. I tried to see just how far.. but it seemed to be more than 5-6 km, at least.

I finally also found the Deer park, where (unlike in Estonia) they have real deer walking around. It was truly idyllic.. so I sat down and started reading a book... and then suddenly an umpf-umpf-umpf kicked in. I knew there was supposed to be a concenrt at the shore today, but I kind of assumed it would be pop-rock, not dance music. And seriously, that thing could be heared for most of my walk so literally for miles.

Other than the somewhat annoying music, the walk was truly amazing. The nature here is quite nice, especially considering just how close to the city the forest was. The shore is about 50 m lower than the surrounding landscape (with a very steep slope to the beach, but no cliffs), which is also quite a sight to see.

I also had some new insight into the cultural phenomenon of low power distance recently. At friday bar, Rikke told me that most people try to live by a set of informal rules called Janteloven that basically emphasises that everyone is created equal. I would not have thought that anyone actually codified this thing, but that seems to have been the case. Still, this is not an actual law, but interesting nonetheless.

Also, I had a bass string break on me today. Looking at the strings, you would not think them capable of that but it seems it can happen. I recently also got a new strap for my bass and it actually improved my playing because it holds the (very light practice bass that I have) in place so that it does not swivel around as much as before. I have still tried to get about an hour of practice in every day. Playing is improving, but at a fairly slow pace. Same goes for my ears, who, after 4 months of bass playing have slowly started to pick up on basslines in even most genres of metal. It is not too reliable yet, but progress is definitely taking place.

Shiny happy people

People around me are really happy today as quite a few of them had a large burden lifted from them yesterday. There was a submission deadline and three people (Dominik and Tomas included) stayed up until two this morning to finish their papers on time. Rikke (pronounced Regge) finished her status report (the midway mark for PhD here) and I just finished writing up the last bits for Sharemind protocols.

Dominik turned up today especially happy - besides finishing the paper, he also managed to finally get Internet installed at his new house, and to get a CPR card.. and a new telephone. He thought life could not get any better until we told him that today the Friday bar is sponsored by a private company, which means free beer for all. Seriously, I have yet to see the guy this happy :)

As for me - Im doing fairly ok. In some sense, I literally cannot wait to get back to Estonia. But it is nice here and as I have been doing a lot of work for the past month, I am going to try to take it easy for the remaining week and a half and try to look around and take in a bit more of the culture here. The weather is still good and will hopefully remain so for at least this weekend.

Ill make this brief

In case anyone has seen the jumbo pack of Toblerone and wondered whether it is a REALLY large chocolate or just a set of smaller ones. The answer is - it is one large piece.

Quote of the day, from Ivan, when describing a set of protocols: "There are constants involved and they are not small."

If "No sex and no future" sums up the Estonian language (and culture) pretty well, having no word for "please" is a pretty good indicator of what it is like in Denmark :)

Beware of this code. I have only proved it correct, not tested it.

Reimo found a bug in my bit shift implementation today. It took nearly 3 hours to figure out what it was about. And it was a nice one - not something stupid, but rather something that did actually take some ingenuity to piece together. Basically, one sub protocol was faulty - but with probability 1 over 2^32 so the bug would not have occurred.. except I had used the protocol in a way that magnified that error to one half under certain cases.. Thankfully, Reimo found these cases and figured out the pattern of how to reproduce the error. If he had not, I would have easily spent a week without figuring it out. And I am fairly sure it would have passed academic peer review in the paper without any problems.

Today was the first day in Aarhus that the temperature rose above 20 degrees. It was a nice early summers day.. about time, considering how envious I have been over the weather in Estonia for quite some time already.

I have wanted to talk about cycling here for quite a while.

First of all my bike. On the plus side, it is very light. It has wide wheels but due to its lightness, I still quite often just glide past other cyclists who are actually pedalling while I am not. On a minus side, Its gear system is fairly bust so only the central gear can really be used.. and it only works when the bike is going fairly slowly.. so in effect, there is an upper limit on the speed at which I can pedal myself up to.. which is not nice since it is somewhat lower than I would like.

Now, most roads have bike lanes on both sides of the road. I have gotten so used to them that I now get confused whenever there isn't one. There is a negative side to that too - namely, to make a left turn, you have to go along with the pedestrian traffic, which usually means waiting for two lights instead of just one (as it is for cars).

The lanes see a fair bit of use, however. I have waited with 10 cyclists for a light to go green.. And I usually drive past at least 5 on my way to the university. The lanes are fairly tight in some places and the passing maneuvre might be fairly tricky on some occasions. Also, the lanes are used by scooters.. so one does have to be careful when trying to pass someone as he might otherwise well get reared by a scooter.. which is not nice..

I discovered that on my way back home (which is mostly downhill), I can get down to the next intersection precisely for the time the light is green if I pedal myself to full speed before the slope and then bend down to a low position and just speed downhill. This of course assuming my leather jacket does not start flapping in the wind.. otherwise, I just barely miss it.

Also, when my grandfather heared I was in Denmark and was driving a bicycle, he remmembered something from his youth. When he was a small boy, his father, a sea captain, frequently visited Denmark. Since they did not really have bicycles in Estonia yet, it was quite common for sailors to steal them from Denmark (where the streets were full of them) and bring them back home. So for all we know, Estonian sailors might be to blame for the bicycle locks being invented and becoming commonplace :P

Cultural remarks

At the lunch table, talk shifted to gay marriages and finding gay handymen. To which Ivan replied that it would definitely be easier to get a gay organist than a gay handyman - as half of the organ players in Aarhus are openly gay. It also turns out that the church here is completely ok with that and even allows its ministers to perform gay marriages in churches.

After lunch some people went to the roof. I joined them later and they seemed to be discussing theoretical biology. I joined in - turns out following the theoretical biology list has its benefits - and Ivan remarked "why am I not surprised". It seems they have realized that I am weird already, and they do not mind. Always good to know :)

The student faculties are very nice here. For instance, the cellar here houses a ping-pong and a fuseball table and in the building where the lectures are held, there are about 10 whiteboards for student use.. along with comfy chairs. Faculties for the staff are also fairly nice, of course (except possibly for the outdated Redhat enterprise linux being used, although you are free to install your own operating system).

Copenhagen

Friday started with me waking up at 6.30 to get to the CS faculty by 8 as I had made an appointment to play a tabletop role playing game with my friends over Skype and while they started at 9, I had to begin one hour earlier.

It was quite fun - possibly even moreso for my coworkers as they just saw a guy with two computer screens in the staff resting room laughing and occasionally talking in Estonian.

The game lasted for about 4 hours. After that, I went back to my office and told Dominik I would be ready to leave whenever he was. Since he was writing a paper and the deadline is coming up very soon, he had some more work to do so we could only leave about 3 more hours later. However, that was still ok as I also had some unfinished stuff I needed to take care of. We got to Copenhagen at about 6.30 PM.

We settled into the hostel and then got out to catch the metro to the center and to meet up wtih Kaur and his co-workers. We did so about an hour later, in a Pakistani restaurant.

The food was great and so was the conversation. After the round of introductions, the conversation shifted to pornography in less than 5 minutes. One guy then explained how he had had fun with a fake publisher who spammed people with PhD-s to publish their thesis as a book. He first used SciGen to generate a whole thesis.. and when that got published, he then sent Darwins the Origin of species to them.. Nearly verbatim, with just one section added, explaining why he was doing it. That, too, got published. Both are now available on Amazon.com, by the way :) Also, as I was sitting right next to an Australian native, I asked him for some travel tips for my summer vacation.. and got a few quite good ones.

We then went on to have a few beers. At about 1.30, we started heading back. As we heared that Kaur was living in a hotel, where each room was designed by a different artist, we also took a look at his room.. which was quite artsy, being white with black inkblot-like patterns. It also had touchpad light switches so you had to move your finger on them to dim the lights. Fancy, and not at all that expensive.

One nice thing about Copenhagen is its Metro system, for it is open 24 hours. They also have regular ticket inspection - me and Dominik got checked twice during our 4 metro trips.
We got to our own beds at around 2.30.

The next day we took a nice 5 hour walk around the city, visiting the queens palace and the old fortified castle (which was still owned and used by the military, but thankfully open to tourists), also wandering through the main restaurant and shopping streets and finally ending up on the central square next to the Tivoli.

All that in pouring rain. Leather jackets are a godsend, by the way.

When heading back to the hostel, we passed by a protest directed against Scientology. When they realized we cannot speak danish, they explained in english that "Scientology can break up families and ruin lives". Both me and Dominik agreed. "So can any other religion," I added a bit later, when we were alone again, "but the older ones have evolved ways around that most of the time".

The drive back was fairly silent. We were both tired and I was somewhat preoccupied with my thoughts. Why do relationships have to be this complicated? The radio was playing hits from the last 4 decades. "I will survive" seemed most appropriate of the ones that got played. Don't really feel like wollowing in self pity any more, at least. I suppose that is an improvement.

Learning to breathe again

It is easy to forget just how beautiful the world really is.. especially when being overworked. Thankfully, it all came back to me today. I took a walk to the seaside and then back through a park. The night-time is truly beautiful - stars in the sky, distant lights reflecting from the lake surface through the trees, streetlights providing for beautiful light-and-dark contrasts.

When under stress, both mind and body tense up. Letting it all just fade away into the darkness, feeling the tension just lifting away, freeing oneself to literally be able to breathe deeply again.

Such experiences are few and far between for me, but I am thankful for every single one of them. They cleanse, refresh, restore the balance and give strength to face what is yet to come.

Martin's defence

I have a presentation tomorrow.. so I started this morning by looking through my old slidesets to see whether anything would be reusable. Turns out that I have actually given the exact same talk I planned to give tomorrow (in terms of material and length). I have no recollection of it whatsover, but the slides are just perfect. Always nice when that happens.

Martin Geisler defended his PhD, which was on an MPC framework (VIFF). The defence was somewhat different from what it would be in estonia. For example, the supervisor plays no formal role what so ever. Also, the defence talk is 45 minutes.. and the questions went on for about the same time.

After the defence there was a reception. What surprised me was that the two eminent computer scientists on the board (N. P. Smart and B. Pinkas) were essentially left alone between the two of them while everyone else just gathered in their normal circles and started discussing everyday stuff. Low power distance yet again, I suppose, as in more status-concious cultures people would have been gathered all around these two. They seemed to be managing fine, however - talking about the faulty systems in place in university administration and in societies in general. All in all, a rather interesting discussion :)

Oh yes, and in the morning, N. P. Smart showed the people sitting around him a picture from 1967 where BBC had commisioned an group of experts to come up with a vision of the future.

This was the picture, labelled "The Worldbox":


Turns out some people do get the future right every now and then :)

Meaning of life

This morning, as I was getting coffee for the weekly breakfast meeting, I accidentally saw a paper lying in the printer room.. that seemed to be exactly about the same thing I have been working on for 2 weeks, only they seemed to be doing it better.

The prospect of throwing away my two weeks work did not sit well with me, so I asked whose it was and whether I could borrow it. I could, on the pretense I would write a review for it while I was at it. Which was quite OK by me as I got to write my very first paper review.

Thankfully, they were working in a different model and achieved their results with a lot of precomputation. It was still an interesting and somewhat inspiring read though.

I finished coding for now, having finalised the division protocol just this Sunday. I will take a few days off during the end of this week - Thursday is a holiday and I was told most people take the Friday off too while they are at it.

The indian guy seems quite nice. Has a good sense of humor though. Like publicly telling everyone he is currently trying to install a keylogger to his friends computer because his friend wants to spy on his girlfriend.

Oh yes, and I think I actually feel good again.. there are quite a few hard things ahead but at least I think I have a direction again...

Or something resembling one, anyway :)

Odense

Friday night was actually the first time this week I got a full nights sleep. Which was kind of good, since I had some work to do in the morning.

However - me and Dominik had plans to go to Odense this weekend. Which we did in the afternoon. We arrived there at about 5 and met up with a local, who D. had met at a camping trip in Sweden. Nice guy, studies electrical engineering and organizes Discoes (being both a technician and a DJ). We had a nice walk around the town and then hit the nightlife.

First up was a place quite akin to Genialistide klubi in Tartu or Noku in Tallinn - very bohemian and ad hoc. I was told that this style of interior decoration is not really common in Denmark though (the place was called "Tastless taste" - presumably due to the "tastelessness" of the decor).

They turned up the music considerably at 9.30. It got somewhat harder to hold on conversation, but it was still manageable.

Secondly, we went to a classical british-style pub... well.. almost. It had a DJ. Who turned up the volume to the point where conversation became impossible at 12. Why anyone would do such a thing in a pub is beyond me, however.

The third place was a Tropical-themed tequila bar with a disco (so - not a bar and not a nightclub but something halfway in between. Are there places like that in Estonia?). Which was the most fun of the three. I got to dance a bit but the fairly small dance floor got a -bit- too crowded for my taste at some point... so we left and headed back.

I was told most bars and clubs usually close at 5. We got to the hostel by 2.

Effective basking in Reflected Glory

I went to a lecture on Peer review process. The talk was actually very good in general. However, the person (who was speaking from an editor's perspective) actually managed to put in quite a bit of blatant self-advertising.

For instance, he spent 10 minutes on describing one special issue of the journal that he had made and how he managed to get famous names (Penrose) on board and how some other famous names had been very thoroughly impressed by it.. because, of course, he had sent a free copy to all of them. Granted - such antics do not work for bad journals but still - that was pretty blatant self advertising nonetheless.

Of course, he was also somewhat pissed that editors get no credit and that it is just charity work. With reason, probably - we all want to be acknowledged and respected for the things we do, and it often feels that we are not, because people do not explicitly mention it. But yes - that applies to pretty much everything.

All this is meant not as a critique but as me seeing something I'm very familiar with in my own behavior.. It just helps to put things in perspective for oneself, for I have similar problems, similar feelings and behave quite similarly blatantly at times.

Then again - doesn't nearly everyone?

Waiting for Godot

An intern into our group was supposed to arrive in the evening today. Since he was to be staying in the same dormitory as me and was expected to arrive after the office closed, they asked me to take his key in the morning and to hand it to him in the evening when he arrives.

There was a small problem however - namely, it was not certain whether the information about that had reached him. So - my best bet was to wait for him outside at about the time he should arrive.

Some notes:

One does not want to try to practice bass in a cold weather - the strings are made of metal, after all.

In-ear headphones really do have good bass reproduction though.

One has trouble reading a book when he should be on the lookout for someone and there is general traffic around.

Doing nothing for 20 minutes is also somewhat strange.

Most importantly, however - one should always first check whether the person being waited for has already arrived.

In my case he had. So I gave him the spare key I had and asked whether he had had anything to eat yet (as I know what long trips are like and what one would usually want after them). He did not, so I asked him to come to the kitchen and I microwaved him some noodles with vegetables (which I had prepared for my own dinner, making sure there was enough left over for him too). I also asked whether he knew how to get to the university in the morning.. and offered to show him the way there tomorrow morning.

Getting started in a new place can be tough.. especially when you come from a culture so different as India. It helps if, on arrival, you at least get a friendly greeting.. and a good meal :)

To those wondering

Past one and a half weeks have been fairly slow. Just working on the protocols for Sharemind, practicing bass and resting. Business as usual. People are still nice, so is the weather. I myself have been feeling a bit down but I'm managing.