Wien in 3/4

Long time no Post, I will try to fill the void now.
I was in Vienna last weekend, to visit Irina, who makes practica there. My journey started on Friday in a funyn way: there was a big hurricane over Europe(evil globa warming) and many flights from Frankfurt were averted. So we decided to drink with Samuil and Bojana until 3 AM, thinking it is possible I won't be able to fly. I checked in Internet to see that I will fly, and had to leave home at 7 am, for the 9am flight, after 3 hours. But if one feels good lost sleep matters less. It was a nice weekend, with culture, museums, and drinking of Schnaps with the natives of Vienna, listening to gipsy music. I met Doris, a nice goa-girl from Vienna. She has been this summer in the big trance festival in Rodopi mountains in BG and she was really excited about it and loves Bulgaria. We got drunk with her, listening to Gipsy music that she brought! Vienna really is an east-west crossroad, where the slavic, german and even turkish influences mix. The most obvious architectural style is the pompous baroque of the Habsburgs and the whole city is a bit snobbish with its culture, opera and balls. I visited the museum of Modern Art, MUMOK, which had some nice things, but the bottommost floor was full of images too perverse and ugly and evil even for me, avoid at all costs :-) I enjoyed much more Heironymos Bosch and The Last Judgement Tryptich at the fine arts academy, which is a depiction of hell's tortures, but it feels like fantasy, unlike the horrors of MUMOK, which are all too real.

The images from my journey are here. Especially for it I bought a new kodak v705 camera. It is quite nice, with 7 megapixels and wide angle lens, it is also small and compact, and I got it at bargain price of 169 euro, instead of 300! Still, i am a tragic photographer, I really shpud practice more to get better pictures. Right now I gotta be lucky to make good shots, somehow i don'T have an eye for details and so.

I am in a study mode now. I have an exam in Visual Analytics on 08.02, i gotta finish my SIGIR paper by 28th, I have to do some more work for my Diploma, I have to work in Fraunhofer, and besides this, I have plans for cooperation and open source programs with Martin, and some art interactive project with Andy, WEB 2.0 rulezz!
I got inspired by this last.fm enhancement, which generates a desktop form the album covers you hear. It is still a bit unpractical for desktop, icons become difficult to distinguish, but is cool, a desktop with content customized by the users musical preferences, downloaded by RSS. Web 2.0 at its finest :-)

Le Grande Bouffet

Wednesday was a day of hard toil! It started with a visit to a swimming pool. I did only 5 pool distances, while Boyana managed 30 ! Shame for me, last year I could do 10, I should swim more often. Than I had a visual analytics lecture, than programmed a bit in Fraunhofer, than finished a draft of my paper for SIGIR 2007 and wrote an email to my Professor.

The Thursday I went to a theatre play in Darmstadt. "Welche Droge passt zu mir", or for those who can't sprechen, "which drug suits me". It was a monologue by a housewive, who is bored while her husband is far away, and her son visits school. So she hooks up with the plumber, who supplies her extasy and cocaine. And then, and then, and then... It was a piece with a good scanario, some realistic situation, realistic description of drug effects, no overdriving in the direction "Drugs are bad, mmmkey" or "Drugs rule". The screenwriter showed well the psychological states of a 32 year old woman experimenting with her body. The one weak point in the play by my humble opinion was the acting itself, the actress was not as good as she could have been, i did not like her voice and her emotions did not convince me enough. I guess this is because I visited 3 theatre pieces in my BG vacation, "Marsrutka", "Stereolove", "Zelenodiwo", and I really think that the Bulgarian actors are quite tallented. Maybe I should go next time to theatre in Frankfurt, it is unfair to compare a city of 150000 like Darmstadt to Sofia which is capital and 10x bigger.

After the theatre we expected to meet Mitaka, who was coming back from Bulgaria, but he was late - some woman died midair (!) by heart attack or whatever, and people panicked and stopped the plane at the nearest airport.

On Friday Jana, Moritz, Gope, Boyana and I visited the An Sibin Irish pub. A real Irish folk-roc-punk band was playing, 6 drunkards and a cute girl with a violin :-) The atmosphere was really nice, Guiness beer is amazing, and we had a good time. The pub was also full of American soldiers, from the nearby bases, who were also really anjoying themselves and their beers. In the good old times before 9/11 there were many times more Soldiers nearby Darmstadt and many discos had them as their primary audience. Now some of the bases were downsized, so the discos closed or changed style, and now An Sibin is the main meeting point for G.I.'s in Darmstadt. On some day one may feel one is in the Midwest - an irish pub with irish waiters and several hundred american customers.

And on Saturday was the event that gave the name of this post, and where the pictures are from (stupid blogspot, how can I set the coordinates of the images ?). Actually, "Le Grande Bouffet" is a classic dark comedy from the 70's, which I plan to see soon, and it means in translation "the big eating". On Saturday Boyana and I prepared a nice dinnner for Steffen and Miriam, because we lost a bet. So we tried our best and cooked rabbit stew, inspired from a French cooking book. Rabbit with thymian, parsley, garlic, onion, bacon, red wine and potatoes. It was amazingly delicious, a real step forward for our cooking skills. It was also the first time in my life when I eat rabbit meat (or I just don'T remember), and it was gorgeous ! Afterwards I planned to see the movie "LE Grande Bouffet", I expected it will ba a biting satire of western culture of consumption, but I was too tired for any long intellectual movie :-)
So I watched "Dwoynikat", or "The Doppelganger", a classic BG comedy from 1979. I watched it for the 5th or 6th time, but still the comedy genius is amazing. It is the story of a scientist, who does not have enough time for both social and academic responsibilities, so he asks his cousin, a barkeeper, to help him. The cousin has no idea of science, but he enjoys drinking at cocktails and seducing the science co-workers :-) Well, watch the movie, it is a piece of genius, and anyone who has something to do with science in Bulgaria, BAN or Sofia Uni, will enjoy it fully, it captures the essence of "nauka", with the stress on the letter a :-).

Quiet Days in Darmstadt

Yuppie, I am back.

The year is starting slowly again. I went Monday on work, and was surprised to see that my room in Fraunhofer institute has been changed. I am now in a new room, with better window view and less crowded. Still, the old room had some odd charm - no windows, weird medical sensors , torsos and mannequins. They are builind a CAVE device there right now, which should be something like this, but even better with never before seen technology, as my advisor Rene boasted. And if really is so good I will test it and blog it here, I promise.

On Monday I visited the Visual Analytics exercise for the first time this year. This a lecture course about combining the strengths of human and machine pattern recognition, for better analysis of data. Sounds too abstract and sometimes it tries too hard to describe things we see intuitively with academic terms, but it is also fun sometimes. This exrecise we tried to see the pattern in this sequence of numbers visually - 5, 20, 60, 36, 36, 51, 153, 129, 9, ... The answer was not elegant enough for my taste, but it was good exercise. It reminded me of Hofstadter'S book about analogical thinking, where he seeks for patterns in number sequences by using simple observations humans may make when looking at the numbers, finding peaks, valleys, etc.

But even though I did some stuff on Monday, i am still not 100% efficient, and have fun with other things than math. I drank a lot of bourbon for Boyana'S name day on Saturday. She gave me Henry Miller as a present for the New Year, and I am really excited about the book. Isn't it weird, Henry Miller is a realy old author, often overlooked, I learned about him accidentally while browsing on the Net and got curious. An than Boyana gives me this book, because she has been reading him the last several weeks, funny coincidence. I cooked some Indian food for Boyana and Welislawa on Sunday night, and played poker and drank on Monday night. I also watched a good drama with Nicholas Cage with Gopeto and Stoyan. I started playing Defcon , a simple board-game-like strategy, where the world powers devastate themselves with nuclear weapons. The game is very cute and mimimalistic (ohh yeah, i love the word) . "Perfection in design is achieved when you have nothing more to remove" - Antoin de Saint Exupery. DEFCON has also added Mod support , so many fans are creating more beatiful maps of the earth and weapon icons. It will be really a cult game, especially for fans of Dr. STrangelove

I am wondering how to embed short audio clips in my blog. I enjoy listening to music a lot, and sharing it in my blog will enhance the emotion. For now, i will embed YouTube clips, but this is a bit unrealistic, because i don'T enjoy videoclips of music as much as the music itself. Well, this autechre video i show here is good on its own, the weird world of Pi the Movie and autechre music blends perfectly, but when i listen to autechre I don'T have such paranoid ideas :-) But besides the ferar and paranoia, the math part of the world of Pi really matches the moods I feel with Autechre, this music really stimulates me to think abstractly and go deep in math. I guess I will be hearing more of it the next few weeks...

The Beginning

And so it is. After ignoring the trend for so many years, I finally got my own blog. It is Sunday, January 7 now, a time for a fresh start of the year...

The airport lost my luggage, so now my room is even more empty than usual, but I am not too pissed off. Still, it is funny that this should happen on my first flight Sofia-Frankfurt as a EU citizen, but hopefully tomorrow it will be back. I don't have any clean clothes, so I can't jog in the woods, or go swimming, or go to any cool party, so starting this blog is the best thing to do with my time right now. After all, all I need is a clean mind, and an Internet connection.

I am sitting in my student dorm. I am in the mood to change things and improve myself. I am cleaning up my room, throwing away old stuff and old letters away, the feng shui way, organizing stuff on my hard drive, scribbling notes and ideas for my diplom thesis. I am also planning for the months ahead, what to do and more importantly how to do it in an organized way. Well, one more day of relaxed holiday mood, and tomorrow the real world begins again. So long for now. And to leave a sweet taste in your mind, some eyecandy from my vacation in Sofia