Category Archives: University

Thesis time almost over

It’s done. Finally it’s done! When I cut out all the days when I didn’t do anything at all but went swimming instead the stats look somehow like this:

  • 19 days
  • 100 pages altogether
  • created my own sexy LaTeX document style based on the great template from Matthias Pospiech
  • completely re-written the whole application including all the views

I’ll have it printed on Monday and will hand it in on Tuesday – And after that: Barcelona, here I come! 😎

update: I recieved the two copies today and hand them in tomorrow morning – this is the last thing I’m doing beforeΒ finally getting my Diploma πŸ™‚

My mom and typesetting programs

Hey mom, look at this! I’m so totally cool and write my thesis with LaTeX!

Oh! So you’re wearing those strange gloves when you’re typing on your computer?

Love you, mom πŸ˜€

66 pages…

… and counting! Keep your fingers crossed because I want to finish the first draft of my thesis by tomorrow evening so that I can hand it out to semi-voluntary test-readers πŸ˜‰ and have it completely finished by Wednesday or maybe Thursday!

PS: And yes, it’s 3am right now…

Spaces (or simply multiple desktops for the non-Mac users here…)

I love ’em! A bit scary, though…

thesis_desktops

Thesis…

This is the only thing I’m doing at the moment: Sitting at home, trying to write my thesis… *sigh*

roland_at_work

LaTeX

I love it and I hate it…

Koseki-san, Robot BBQ, Sax, final exams, summer festival, beach clubbing, NRJ in the park…

… well, it’s been a busy time for me πŸ™‚

Last weekend, I finally managed to meet up with Koseki-san who was staying here in Munich for a business trip. It was good to see him again and also to hear that his little daughter is doing fine! Life in Japan seems to be going on quite well πŸ˜‰

Koseki-san in Munich

The semester’s almost over so my colleagues and me have already taken all exams. Right then, everyone was only waiting for the grades to be published and there was plenty of time for barbecue, party etc. Especially at the university’s summer festival we computer engineers openly demonstrated being the biggest nerds at the campus: The grades were about to come out and of course the server broke down in the very moment everyone wanted to see theirs. We literally had three laptops and an iPhone hammering the server with requests like “Gimme my grades, hell yeah!” – on just one Biertischgarnitur πŸ˜€

At the BBQ of the robotics team IMGP2165 After-BBQ-Drinks at the Sax
Computer engineers... IMGP2185 No more exams!

Knowing my grades now, being fully satisfied with the certitude that I’ll never have to write exams again in my life (most likely, I hope), and knowing that all that stands between me and my diploma is the thesis I gotta write about the Ruby on Rails application I developed during the past few months, I happily returned to my parent’s place, where I was taken hostage by my friends and dragged to a beach clubbing event and the NRJ in the park festival πŸ˜€ Oh, and did I mention that the weather’s been awesome lately? Well, it surely was! 😎

After diving into the foam at the BeachClubbing Foodstock at the festival Homemade sandwiches - thanks, mom!
Cheers! I wanna be a hippie :) Being bored to death from Mando Diao

The beach clubbing thing was okay. Well, for a small, off-the-beaten-track city like Bad Aibling it surely was one of this year’s major events. However, I was annoyed most of the time – maybe this is because I don’t drink πŸ˜‰ Eventually, the electronic floor was fun for a while but then the DJ had the biggest, most epic FAIL in history: No music for roughly ten minutes (or at least it felt so), blank-faced morons fuzzing around with the mixers and the players, the MC desperately trying to keep the crowd’s mood up… And when they finally managed to start music again, it was just shitty *sigh* The day after that, some friends and I went to the NRJ in the park festival. The lineup was Jennifer Rostock, Jan Delay, Mando Diao and Franz Ferdinand. Being a person who almost never listens to radio and who doesn’t give a crap about the latest charts, I’ve never heard anything of Jennifer Rostock. The names Mando Diao and Franz Ferdinand were familiar, of course, but I barely ever heard something from them – apart from “Dance With Somebody”. Well well, Jennifer was … errm … okay. Definitely not my favourite style of “music” πŸ˜‰ Mando Diao totally sucked and Franz Ferdinand was pretty cool. Ah, did I mention that their guitarist went to the same school as I did? Anyways, Jan Delay and his band really made the crowd jumping and it was definitely the best performance of that festival 😎

… and now, I’ll have to cancel every other party activities and write my damn thesis πŸ˜€

This is why I’ve been so busy

This is it. The world-famous M.O.G.U.E.R.A. robot I spent most my time on during the past few weeks. The text at the end basically translates as “Even if we don’t win we still look cool!”

Sleep, actually

Phew… It’s been a crazy time since my last post! To start with, sorry for being muted for so long – I just could not find the time and energy to write a few lines. Yeah I know it sounds like a lame excuse but still I hope someone’s going to buy the story πŸ˜‰

Ok, where shall I begin? Right, the EuroBot contest I went to! Well, let’s just say we’ve not been over-blessed with success… To be honest, we only managed to get through the “homologation” rounds and in the qulifications we only scored the last place πŸ™ That was a little frustrating because theoretically, our robot was one of the most promising ones in Dresden – theoretically, I say! In fact, we had several sensor- and motor’s precision-related issues and had to fall back to a somewhat “dumb” strategy without all the cool A.I. and pathfinding features my colleagues and me implemented from scratch in just a matter of weeks *sigh* But “participating is everything”, right? We had an awesome time in Dresden nevertheless and even thoguh we lost we totally dived into the city’s nightlife (which is quite cool in Dresden, by the way) πŸ˜€

Think you can imagine that I SO had to catch up with lots of hours of sleeping after that weekend and the weeks preceeding it πŸ˜‰ This has basically been one of the primary things I’ve been doing this week: SLEEPING, SCHLAFEN, 寝る… Oh no, I also had tons of good food, enjoyed the terrific weather we’re having in Munich lately, finally met friends and had time to relax – at last!

Now I realize there’ll be other tasks eating up my free time soon: Finding a job in Tokyo, completing the software I’ll write my thesis on, writing this just-mentioned thesis… Oh, and there will be my (hopefully) final exam season soon! So you can see, no time-out for poor Roland πŸ˜‰ And again, keep your fingers crossed πŸ˜€

Pix will be coming soon, promise! πŸ˜‰

Japanese intensive course – or yet another era of sleepless nights

Booya! Having started from March 23rd, I’m currently attending a very good (and intensive) Japanese language course which takes place 9 hours a day, 6 days a week until this Saturday. Adding to that, I’ve also started implementing parts of the A.I. of a robot that’s supposed to go to the EuroBot 2009! As cool as all that stuff is, my daily sleep quota dropped to a new record-low around 3.5 hours a day… When I’m not in the classroom,in the robo-lab, in the gym or out running, I’m sitting at my desk spending hours and hours studying, repeating, preparing. *sigh* Well, at least the language course totally rocks πŸ˜€

But I’ll be celebrating and sleeping (finally) when it’s over πŸ˜‰