Hello my intrepid readers!! (I haven't said that before, but it seems to be something that a blogger must say at least once!) Once again, sorry sorry sorry for not having been very good at updating this! I'm just really busy, and the there's always been some important deadline coming up which forces me to work instead of write blogs.
It's all going well though, don't worry!
Aaaanyway rather than ramble on about the usual “this week I went to a nightclub and then did some work” shenanigans, I'm going to give you a wee run-through of a standard Tuesday so you can get an idea of what Informatics life can be like once the initial “crazy-woooooo-erasmus parties-I didn't understand a word of what he just said-oops I slept in-how the hell do the printers work” phase has passed.
8.00am
"♪ La radio... de los éx-i-tos! Los 40 principales! ♪ Son... las ocho! Las siete en Canarias." Time to get up then. Shower, shave, breakfast, teeth, prepare stuff for uni.
9.30am
Walk down Carrer Nou de La Rambla, catch the metro (doing some Catalan homework on the train)from Paral·lel to Palau Reial, then walk up the hill to uni.
10am - 12 noon
2 hour CDI Lecture (compression of data and images). Today we're learning about the "discrete cosine transformation" and its use in JPEG compression.
11.15am - 12 noon
I have an overlap in my timetable, so leave the CDI lecture early to go to ER lecture (Requirements Engineering). Today we're contrasting Kano and Volere's methods of classifying requirements.
12-2pm
PROP theory lecture (Programming Project). All about how we should be using the Model-View-Controller pattern in our projects.
2pm
Go down to the menjador and queue to heat up my lunch in the microwave (leftovers from last night's tea... it's kinda the done thing here!)
2.10-2.30pm
Sit in the Plaça de la FIB (School of Informatics Square) and eat.
2.30-4.30pm
Go to the labs and work on my Cryptography project; at the moment I'm trying to get my implementation of the Advanced Encryption Standard to work in "CBC mode" but it's not working and I can't see why.
4.30-6pm
Catalan class. Today we were reviewing the imperative... by the way, you do know that we use the imperative to give orders but the subjunctive to give prohibitions, don't you? We have been told this a trillion times. We know.
6pm – 7pm
Preparation for DSBW Lab (Design of Web-Based Systems), today it's about Struts so I'm trying to get myself up to speed so that I'll manage to finish the lab practical in the allocated time.
7pm – 9pm
DSBW Lab... high speed stressful programming! Got it finished just in time, and submitted with 1 minute to spare. Phew!
9-9.30pm
Travel home on the metro. *tummy grumbles*
9.30pm-10pm
Cook dinner and eat. Since it's late, it's good old traditional Spanish... Heinz Beans and a baked potato. Can't be bothered being a culinary whiz this evening!
10pm-11pm
Doing some more Cryptography, time is running out for the deadline on Friday!
11pm-midnight
Writing up up the report for our CDI practical, measuring the average length of a grain of rice by using a picture of... a plate of rice. Never said the word arroz so many times in my life.
Midnight-12.45am
A cheeky bit of revision for the SO Partial exam on Friday. I hate partial exams!
12.45am
Bed! Got the usual 9am meeting with my PROP project group tomorrow, need to be up in good time to get my laptop all ready and organise what I've done.
No exaggeration. And there are many worse days than this! Future informatics Erasmusers, do not expect to be able to come here and be lazy!! Admittedly Tuesdays are generally a busy day, but every day is a busy day. Obviously I don't have class until 9 every day, only twice a week... but still!
Socialising during the week usually just consists of catch-ups and cocktails, and lately a bit of "let's just go and have ice cream on the beach"... but the actual fiesta time only really happens at the weekend.
Time is running out, and the most annoying thing is that I want to be making the most of every day, but there just isn't the time to do everything I would like to.
But it's hot again now and I think it's going to stay hot. My Catalan teacher moans a lot about it, "no li agrada gens." Well I like it, although it's not as though I actually go out and enjoy the weather if I'm slaving away in the labs!
