Cool school

This school kicks ass! VSE is shit compared to HEC. They have some many activities, over 100 student clubs, very good relationships with companies, getting an internship  is a matter of a couple of clicks on the intranet, the professors seem to be experts in their field etc etc etc, i could go on all day. I would need at least one year to exploit most of the possibilities that I'm offered.
Other good news, we're going to get 500EUR for the business project. SWEET!
They also have a huge sports area, with a rygby, 2 football, tennis and god knows what other fields, a lake with a couple of bridges, a man-made waterfall...

It's amazing!

Today the agenda was quite boring, we were told how the school functions and how to take advantage of the numerous resources at the library. BNP Paribas did bring a couple of champagnes, but they didn't really promise anything, so I don't who I'll open an account with. They also "stole" the last bottle and took it home with them. Bastards;-)

Oh, I picked my courses today. I'll be taking a "Management and social behaviour" course; another one called "Network Economy" and another called "Energy and Finance". I also have to choose a businnes project before tomorrow afternoon. It's a tough decision, because we don't have a lot of specific information, but I'll let you know when I decide.

We drank again tonight, just came back from Sonia's room and from Zinc, one of the local bars. It wasn't too bad, we had many a laugh with Tom again;-) But I'm looking forward tio the Thursday party. I luckily don't have any courses in Friday, so it should be good.

Ok, my eyes are sore, gotta get some sleep.

Have a good one everyone!!!!!!!!!!

Another day gone...

So we (Honza, Tom and Gabor) just finished two bottles of cheap-yet-excellent red wine and I'm going to get some sleep.  In the morning the official bullshit is starting, we'll decide which courses to take and in the afternoon BNP Paribas is bringing cases of champagne, to get us drunk and make us open accounts with them...:-)

Good night

First days

Friday night was a small get-together party in a snail-shaped church/chapel here on campus. It was my first time getting drunk in a holy place, surround by books like "Catechisme":-) There were around 15-16 of us, everyone brought their local alcohol and there were some refreshments. I didn't get a chance to talk to everybody, but the one's I did talk to seemed like ok people. There's Igor, a Spanish speaking Japanese guy from Brazil guy; two girls from London one of whom is Kate(I think); there's Gabor and Ditta from Hungary, Kay and two girls from Norway and...I'm terrible wwith names. There's thos guy Tom from Dublin who I think I'll be good friends with, he's got my sense of humor and is relaxed and easy-going...

Yesterday I went on a little sightseeing trip with Honza's parents and his brother. They are a family straight out of a Czech movie. Dad is a bussiness-man with a typical sense of humor, mom is always worried and the son is bored:-) They were very nice to me, didn't let me pay for meals, so I'm going to pay for Honza's beers I guess:-) We strolled around Pigalle and Montmarte and then around Champs-Elysees and La Defense. I've never been to La Defense before and was impressed, it's a very nice business-centre, and the Grande Arche is really amazing. Too bad the weather was crap so I couldn't take better pictures. We came back after getting a bit lost in Versailles at around 9 (I think), had dinner at a achinese restauarant (ever eaten frog legs in a chinese restaurant??:-). At around midnight my friend Tom called, and we had some drinks in Sonia's place with Christoph (a crazy German studying in Ireland) and another French guy whose name I don't remember. We tried to watch a movie, Domino, but since the sound quality was bad and it was getting close to 5 a.m., we fell asleep before the first half of the movie was over.

I woke up at noon today to get lunch in the cafeteria. There's a nice choice of all kinds of stuff to eat (including avocado with shrimp, yum) and you don't pay too much; in fact it's really cheap for France. I still wish I could cook somewhere! There's nothing like enjoying your own pasta in your room, watching a movie:-)
I think I'm just going to relax today, maybe meet the Norwegians in the afternoon, sleep a little and get my room organized (you can imagine it's a mess already:-)

Hasta la vista

Settling in

I have arrived at the HEC campus here in Jouy-en-Josas about 2 hours ago. Wasn't a bad trip, Slavo drove me to the Bratislava airport at 7 in the morning, so I had plenty of time to catch the plane (which was finally 20 min late). The lady at the check-in counter fortunately didn't seem to think that 4kg of baggage-overweight was a big problem. I slept through the whole flight, landed at Orly at around 10. Getting here from the airport seemed to be quite complicated. There was a huge line to buy RER tickets, but in a moment of rare lucidity I have packed a couple of Euro-bills in my wallet so could use the lonely ticket machine and skip ther line. I had to change 3 times, but it was ok.

When I finally got here, I was a bit lost, and trying to find the accomodation office with 30kg on your back isn't exactly fun. I moved in to building E, room number 21. The rooms here are equivalent to Prague's (VSE) "A dorms", but instead of three people they house just one. No kidding, for EUR385 a month!! There is no private toilet though, and the shower is in a kind of mini-room between two rooms. Each room has a semi-transparent glass door leading to it, so you can see when someone is taking a shower (and many more details I suspect:). I had to call the acccomodation office to get a special internet cable (it is quite unlike anything I've seen before, these French have to be different in everything), and then had to find a internet-service centre to get passwords to access the net.

Needles to say, I got lost and somehow ended up in the HEC directorate building. When I was beginnig to get desperate, I overcame the fear of speaking French and asked some lady where to go. She didn't know what I wanted so she led me to Britta Delhay (nice name, Britta:-), the head/chief/boss/overlord of all things CEMS here. I felt like a stupid 5 year old who lost his mommy at the swimming pool:-/ Anyway, we got things sorted out and now I'm writing this nonsensical post...

Next on my to-do list: Find a place to eat! My walnut-cake my mom made was sooo good it just ran out right now, and I don;t want to eat Horalky and cheese the rest of the weekend:-)

P.S. Oh yeah, speaking of speaking French, I have been speaking it the whole day now and seem to be getting by just fine, although I'm clearly missing a lot of vocabulary, and sometimes slip into a different language (for some unknown reason, I said danke instead of merci to a ticket controller...I'm weird)

my flickr

Ehm, I forgot to say that I'll be uploading pictures to my flickr account from now on, until I finally buy some server space to serve my storage needs.

Renewed activity

So, since I'm leaving to France next month, you can expect a bit more activity here...soon...

Madness

Madness
Originally uploaded by empty007.

Just fooling around with Flickr.

Absinth Dragon

Thanks, miso!

Bogus Paper

MIT students pulled off a nice prank on behalf of the "World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics" They worte a program that generated research papers, complete with analysis and graphs and everything. One of the fake papers actually got accepted to be presented at the conference, even thuogh it was complete gibberish. They tried to point out that the conference's sole purpose is to make money, not giving a shit about scientific value...

"Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access
Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation...."Rooter" features
such mind-bending gems as: "the model for our heuristic consists of four
independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible
modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our
scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically
pipelined extensions."
(Link)

The holy grail of greeking-bots has been unearthed! :-0

Links (the submitted paper(pdf), research paper generator)

Veggie Pasta

Yesterday was a good day. I went swimming in the morning, then took advantage of the great sunny weather and took a walk through Prague. It was surprisingly quiet, almost no tourists (later I found out they were all standing under the astronomical clock in the Old Town square, hundreds of them). I felt really hungry though, so I went to Billa and bought some stuff. I didn't want any meat, perhaps owing to the the fact of having seen Skritek(here and here) recently:) This is what came out of my resolution to make myself a healthy meal:

1. Ingredients: Tomatoes, zucchini, white yoghurt, corn, green olives and pasta.



2. Boiled water with a bit of oil and salt
3. While it boiled, I have let the corn thaw in the microwave and cut the veggies (I like bigger chunks:)



4. After 10 minutes the pasta was ready. Took them out and cooled them with cold water. Supposedly it prevetns them from sticking to each other...



5. Then I mixed the pasta with a little bit of the youghurt and a lot of basil (forgot to mention that withthe ingredients:)



6. Added vegies and voilá!





It tasted better than it looked...

Note: I admit I was quite bored :-)

Later I went to meet Zaba, Matus and Ivan, they were rock-climbing on Petrin...I'll post some pictures later...

Update: No takze cestoviny sa vraj nemaju prelievať...(Link)

Lorem Ipsum

Ever stumbled upon this text?:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

I have been searching the web for good looking page layouts, and saw this text on quite a few of them. Since I don't understand as much Latin as I would like to, I got curious enough to do a little research.

Supposedly, "Lorem Ipsum" is a passage from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero, making it more than 2000 years old (2010 exactly)! It has been used since the 1500's as a dummy text designed to keep the viewer's attention on the type or layout instead of the actual content. This actually has its own term, it's called "greeking" (although the text is obviously latin NOT greek). In the process, I have found a couple of nice "lorem ipsum" or "greeking" generators:

This one lets you "greek" in various styles, such as Matrix, Marketing, Metropolitan, Pseudo German and Techno Babble. Here's an excerpt of hillbilly greeking:

"Gritts fussin' her ass yer co-op, done mashed, me hoosegow yippie mule cain't. Shootin' guzzled truck bacon mobilehome rustle, preacher jest jail. Beat, pickled, wild muster up afford. Mobilehome skinny greasy caboodle soap catfight, reckon her said country hoosegow askin' got damn..."

This one actually spits out quasi intelligible english text:

"Just the good ol' boys, never meanin' no harm. Beats all you've ever saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born. Straight'nin' the curve, flat'nin' the hills. Someday the mountain might get 'em, but the law never will. Makin' their way, the only way they know how, that's just a little bit more than the law will allow. Just good ol' boys, wouldn't change if they could, fightin' the system like a true modern day Robin Hood."

It seems to contain passages from real literature, e.g. Knight Rider, A-Team, The Dukes of Hazzard and even Ulysses. Which maybe makes the text too intelligible and thus contrary to the aim of greeking. It's fun nevertheless.

There are tons of greeking bots out there. My favorite is http://ungreek.toolbot.com. It lets you greek using the U.S. or Canadian constitutions, Immanuel Kant, Charlotte Bronte, the Dada Manifesto, the GNU Public License in Swedish or esperanto (and more!):

"Mondskalaj lingvokomunumoj kies parolantoj estas senescepte du aux plurlingvaj Cxiu komunumano akceptis la! Pri la lingvo Ni estas movado por lingvaj. Lingvon ekmastras gxin Plena posedo de Esperanto eblas ecx per. Movado por lingvaj rajtoj Lingva diverseco La naciaj registaroj emas konsideri la. Estas unu el malmultaj mondskalaj. Kaj pritaksi aajn solvojn al la lingva malegaleco kaj lingvaj konfliktoj Ni asertas. Kondamnas al formorto la plimulton de la lingvoj de la mondo Ni estas. Kaj neoficialaj kunvenas sur neuxtrala tereno dank' al la reciproka volo kompromisi Tia ekvilibro? "

Translation of Lorem ipsum at www.lipsum.com

I have to do some (i.e. a LOT) schoolwork today as it is due tomorrow...Hopefully I'll overcome my laziness. At least today...

Google Sightseeing

I love this blog. Too bad it's only USA Google sightseeing though:-( My favoites are the plane graveyard and the Large Type section....

http://www.shreddies.org/gmaps/

Area 51

check out the famous Area-51 in Nevada!! Thanks to google:-)

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=groom+lake,nv&ll=37.272835,-115.798731&sll=36.518555,-115.561924&spn=0.060081,0.085402&sspn=0.127029,0.120678&t=k&hl=en

How does Batman pee?

Last night I stumbled upon a hilarious conversation on imdb.com, discussing the methodology of Batman's urination ..:-) My favorite:

"I think Batman is very territorial...the way dogs, cats and bears are. Perhaps there is a zipper in the Barsuit and he wizzes in certain areas (alleys, rooftops etc) to mark his territory?"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372784/board/nest/16403624

"Revolution in Military Affairs"

How We Lost the High-Tech War of 2007
From the January 29, 1996 issue: A warning from the future.
by Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.
01/29/1996, Volume 001, Issue 19

A very interesting and alarming article describing a possible scenario of a future attack by "fanatics" on Amercia. It was written almost ten years ago so now a lot of it is not quite right, but the general idea is still aplicable today, I think. I did not enjoy reading it...

Face Analyzer

click to view results

Beta academic: Not as intelligent or ambitious as Alpha Academics, but still focused on being materially successful.

Expected Occupations: Lawyer, Doctor, Investment Analyst, Accountant, Architect, Engineer, Professor, Researcher, Psychologist

So, it seems I'm a Middle Eastern Beta-Academic female!!!! Haha:-) At least I'm not gay 8-)

Also in my supposed profile:
You are a long-term planner, diligent worker and avoid risk as much as possible. You are of above average intelligence and have the ability to focus on tasks that seem unimportant at present, but can lead to greater things in the foreseeable future. You are not keen to interact with others or make social connections. You would rather gain material wealth before putting yourself in a position to be judged. You are not confrontational unless someone directly opposes your intellectual beliefs. You are highly concerned with your social status. You are keen to avoid risks that could jeopardize your long-term plans. You take a calculated approach to life, working hard to control all aspects of it in order to not leave anything important to chance.

You tend to be a perfectionist and quite self-conscious. You sometimes wish you were less reserved and more like some others you see who are more bold and outspoken in social situations. But as much as you try to be like them, you cannot, because you care too much about the future to ever be comfortable taking risks in social situations.

Most of it is elephant dung. Take yours and let me know what you think...

Shame!

Wow, this isn't worth commenting on!!!!!!!!!!

Another embarassment, insult even?, George W. did not take his gloves off for the handshake with our president, nor with the wives of the politicians (nor did his wife)!!!! Talk about rude! That's like Diplomatic Protocol 101, I mean, that's common sense, basic education, whatever you want to call it...Oh well, I guess it's not worth getting excited about either...

my nerd score 8-)

This is Now

Jonathan Harris (ckeck out his other projects) has created a really cool way of reading news. 10x10 takes a 100 of the most frequent words from recent headlines of many news servers (BBC, CNN, etc.), assigns pictures to them and creates a "news table". It's an awesome and simple idea, I'm already using it instead of google news....

www.tenbyten.org

Terrorist Threat

Out of pure recession, I've recently installed a Homeland Security Terrorist Threat Level Indicator for Firefox. The current level is "Elevated". :-D
In the process, I found a great site, cleverly designed to keep American's "ready" for a terrorist attack, to create portable terrorist-attack kits etc..."Terrorism forces us to make a choice. Don't be Afraid...be READY!", "Preparing makes sense!" and a whole lot more propaganda.
So let's everybody call 1-800-BE-READY, to get a free survival brochure!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Become a certified disaster action kid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!