jonny goes to england

View at Charles de Gaulle airport shortly before boarding to Narita. I only really realised how unbelievably friendly people in Japan were when I arrived in Paris. I haven’t been treated nearly as badly for the whole week in Japan like in the 30 minutes stop over in Paris ..

I’m flying back to Switzerland today for Christmas. I haven’t been back home for maybe .. 9 months!

This Thursday, I’m going back to Basel for a quick Easter holiday! Looking forward to that .. even though there’s probably quite a bit of work to do.

The picture above shows some pretty cool shape I found in my office, built out of train tickets. My best guess would be that it’s a nonconvex cubicuboctahedron .. or possibly something else.

Diese Woche sieht so aus:

• Morgen Geburtstag
• Morgen ein Seminar an City Uni von Sabelfeld, einem Forscher aus Chalmers. Chalmers gehoerte zu den Unis, bei welchen ich mich fuer den Master beworben habe. Ende 2005 habe ich dafuer Goeteborg und Chalmers besucht… jedoch kam es nicht zum “jonny goes to sweden” und das ist auch gut so
• Freitag Abend (sehr) kurzen Abstecher nach Basel vom City Airport..

Google Maps enthalten jetzt geo-tagged Bilder von Panoramio. Hier ein Blick auf Basel! Zoom in.

Heute Nachmittag flog ich zurueck nach London, Luton, nach ein paar Tagen Basel . Luton war kein super Erlebnis, ich bevorzuge und empfehle eindeutig Stansted als Flughafen!

Diese Woche findet die phd postgraduate conference statt. Ich werde schon wieder ein Poster erstellen muessen …ich denke ich werde jedoch das Mastermind Poster von letztem Monat verwenden.

I’m flying home for a short easter break .. from the 19 – 25 March

Flying back to London tomorrow!

Finally at home again. I sort of forgot how a real winter feels like! Wow it’s cold here…

As a warm welcome to my holiday (ok that was a joke, we never make holidays of course) I received 16 XSLT (an ugly programming language) programs to grade. However the lecturer didn’t say how to grade. So I don’t know if from 1 to 10, to 25 or A to F; not to speak about what criteria are needed to reach these marks. Just a “mark until mid-January” mail. Oh well … one thing is for sure, it’s good the students don’t know that I am the one who marks them. Because in my opinion too many people pass this MSc course.. hrhr

Tomorrow evening is my flight back to Switzerland. I hope my flight this year will be better than the one from last year!

Ich werde bis und mit erster Januar Woche in Basel bleiben..

Today we had the Joint CS/EE (computer science, elec. engineering) Xmas (Christmas) dinner (actually lunch).
The figures speak for themselves. From Computer Science 6 PhD Students and about 4 lecturers turned up, from EE a whooping 70+ persons signed up for the lunch at a nearby restaurant. Apparently, the EE department organised the music and entertainment on their own. This meant we had to listen to self-taught Chinese (EE is mostly populated by Chinese people .. don’t know why) singers — this was cute but on the same time a bit miserable. At least it fit the food we had to eat (and digest now). Goat cheese cake with onions, then some Turkey (apparently, not sure if it really was meat) and then a slimy ball of Profiterole.

This started at 12pm. Later on we went back to our “informatics hub” and had another drinks+food party organised only by our department. This went on until now. I, in comparison to some work mates, am still capable of writing this entry which is good.

In other news, I’m heading home on the coming Wednesday 19 December. That is good too! I will stay in Basel until 6 January. See you there hopefully!