So, what is it that you do, exactly?

Today I:
* Moved a few dishes that were left over from yesterdays conference to my office and sent an e-mail to the caterers about it
* Comforted one of the tutors, who is having trouble deciding what to do for her bachelors thesis
* Sent an e-mail to the first year students with links and recommendations from yesterday
* Scheduled two lecturers for my "Introduction to informatics" course.
* Spoke with one of the professors about a possible curriculum change
* Had a talk with the vice dean about how best to accomodate the change.
* Counseled three masters level statistics students about organizational matters
* Found a cardboard box for the caterers so they could take the dishes away.
* Spoke with another professor about the curriculum change
* Talked with the head of the institute about an idea to teach high-school students a programming course with the same materials as we have for our first years.
* Uploaded new course plans to the institute website, which I had technical problems with and in the end the institute IT person had to do it for me.
* Helped a first year student figure out what extra courses to take for this and the next semester
* Supervised one of my to-be bachelors students
* Re-scheduled the time when I was going to start helping students with course content.
* Turned out that the uploaded files still didn't go up correctly, so I had to exchange a few more e-mails.
* Had a talk with study systems specialists to resolve the fact I had still not been made the program manager.
* Had a brief discussion with the program manager for mathematics courses and sent an e-mail to the statistics one - both about a single EAP.
* Spoke with the lecturer holding the upcoming course about the said curriculum change
* Patched the curriculum documents to reflect the change.
* Stopped by the defense session for the internships of masters students
* Given a 15-minute interview
* Spent an hour with the vice dean discussing the curriculum change
* Spent half an hour on marketing ideas for UT Science school.
* Reviewed a homework statement sent to me by a guest lecturer in one of my courses.

The game is called hot potato. If you're lucky, it is the game you will be playing for the rest of your life

The better you can motivate others to do important things, the less you have to do yourself. Or rather, the more you free yourself up to do other important things. Simple, at least in theory.

Trouble is, it gets a while to get the hang of it.

In any case - it has been a hard week. 7 days straight with 8-12 very intense working hrs, mostly with people.

And, although exhausting, I have enjoyed most of it. Three reasons:
a) Flow - I usually look at the clock only to realize 2-6 hrs have passed without me having time to notice them do so.
b) Anxiety relief - I had a fairly strong anxiety of not being able to cope with all the responsibilities I have newly received. Well, now I have evidence showing I can, and am actually doing fairly well, all things considered. It is natural to fear the unknown future, but once it actually arrives, the fear is often unfounded. This has been the case.
c) I'm actually fairly good at what I do. Or at least I do not think my time would be better spent doing something else. Not at this point in time, at least. After all, I am doing something I like doing, that also seems to be worthwhile in the long run, and also provides immediate gratification on occasion. Hard to ask for something more.

All that being said, it is very exhausting. At home, the only thing I want to do is to just collapse onto the bed and sleep. Thankfully, on most days, I can. :)

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