A new soul for my laptop

My laptop has been braindead for the last couple of weeks. Every time I wanted to check my mail, work on an assignment or work on the schedule, I had to do something very healthy: walk to Voltaire and use one of the computers there. You might wonder now why it is healthier to sit in front of a computer in Voltaire than in my own room. Simply, because you spend less time doing it. Without a computer you cannot check your mail once again before going to bed, sit down to see who's on MSN or check out the new pictures on facebook. It's great. I did get some trouble with my e-mail, because checking twice per day is simply not enough when you get 50 messages per day, but I was handling it relatively well.

Now, thanks to ASB, my laptop has a new soul, an English one instead of the old Hungarian one, by Microsoft. (If Anne is right and there are angels around us, then mine must be ASB.) I think I managed to get all the files I need before the death of the previous operation system, so now I'm taking my time to copy everything back. Music, pictures, documents... Imagine a completely empty hard drive. Tabula rasa - it's kind of exciting :) The first thing I did was that I installed an antivirus program, after all not having one is like having sex with the whole world without using condoms, and then I got OpenOffice. Lovely. Skype and Messenger are to come.

This whole working laptop issue makes me quite happy. The installation went wrong 5 times, and I already had an Ubuntu CD on my table to be tried in the morning if the last one didn't work out either. So, it made my day. I'll soon have to move to Descartes to supervise the ETSI people and later during the afternoon I'll be tripsitting for my friends. By then, I'll print out a couple of articles for lifespan developmental psych and I'll bring along my concise Dutch grammar to prepare for my grammar test. Tomorrow is the day for programming my experiment and writing my assignment for psychology.

I'm so unstressed. Dancing does a lot of good to me. It's amazing how some exercise and fun can recharge your batteries.

Salsaddiction

Sunch a beautiful and sharp day this is. I went out dancing last night - I joined an advanced class at Trianon, danced till 23.30, had a drink till 1.30, biked home, had a shower, slept and woke up 5 minutes before 8 without needing my alarm clock to get me out of bed. Since then, I've been feeling great. Did literature search for my presentation, wrote stimulus sentences, did some work for ETSI (a bit), wrote some e-mails and I'm still feeling very focused. This is the time to get some work done.

My life is increasingly dominated by off-campus things, which give a new flavor to my time here. It's nice to have a social life outside the gates - usually the priviledge of Dutch students - and to see new faces. Especially latinos :) At the moment I'm not too interested in whether this is an escape mechanism or just a healthy, busy, balanced lifestyle. I'm enjoying it. Salsa is becoming more than an object of interest - an object of addiction. The music, the atmosphere of the parties, the moves, the exercise relax me and clear my head. You just let everything go, become one with the rhythm and let your partner guide you. Heaven.

Antwerp - Interspeech 2007

Here I am again, kind of deflating after the Bartenders' Weekend. I'm ill, I have a headache and I am utterly exhausted. And my laptop is dying. Poor thing.

I promised I would write a bit more about the conference. It definitely deserves more than the casual "it was great" commentary. It was really lovely though. I didn't expect it to be as tiring as it turned out to be - but hey, after all, the keynote of the day started at 9.30 and the last session ended at 18.00. After a day of reading posters and listening to presentations of course all your energy is gone. And you do this for 4 days. Plus the banquets. Bernat and I (and the rest of the students) seriously behaved like PhD comics characters. "Where's the food?" "Look, the food is coming, let's get closer."

I loved the keynote lectures in the morning. They were overviews of what was happening in a specific segment of the field. The demonstrations were nice to see too. One of the programs that was on display was a Spanish speech to Spanish sign language translator. So, I read out a sentence and the digital image of a guy started signing the equivalent. I found that pretty funky. Also, there was a singing sythesis program on display. You could enter the text that you wanted to hear and the notes (or you could play the notes on a keyboard) and the result was a voice singing the text in the specified notes. Very cool. I even heard a Hungarian synthesis program.

Our poster presentation went pretty well. We explained the project to around 35-40 people, which is quite good, I think. Fair enough, we were catching everybody who stopped to read the poster, but still, that's quite a number. The two hours went by fairly quickly after we got into the explanations and the mood. This is Bernat and I, standing in front of our poster:


I met loads of very nice people. Most of them complete nerds, but very nice ones. As a white female, I was definitely not part of the majority, so the setting was very different from that of UC. I spent quite some time with the Hungarians that I met - it was 25 of us, I think. We went out for lunch together and sat together at the reception the night before my birthday. I should write to them.

And shortly about the location: the building of the conference was absolutely stunning and it was right by the zoo where I spent most of my brakes. I loved the aquatic part of the zoo - it was beautiful and I didn't feel as sorry for the fish as for the rest of the animals. I could stand in front of one specific aquarium for half an hour, just staring at the fish. It reminded me of Egypt and I wished I could have plunged into the water with eyes open and see everything from even closer, while the water would have isolated me from the sreams of children running around. Everything was so beautiful and calm inside. My complete opposite.

Post-conference zombieness

First of all, thanks for the birthday wishes. Being 22 of course does not feel different from being 21, but at least if you vertically mirror the first 2, you'll get a heart and that's funky. No hidden significance, it's just funky. I'm fed up with guys anyway. No love, please. This last one was the perfect aversion therapy.

Resolutions? An extra minus 5 kilos, but I don't need a resolution for this, I'm working on it already and it's going to happen. Dancing as much as possible. Enrique, the owner of the salsa dance school in town is being extremely nice to me so this is easy to carry out too. Deciding what to study. Rebel? That would be the hard part.

I arrived back last night and I was showered immediately. I only had time to take my shoes, my glasses and my jacket off and Gijs already picked me up and was carrying me towards the shower. I only fought a bit, since it was a lost fight from the beginning. What could I have done against ASB, Bart and Gijs together? They were very sweet though. We had chicken wraps and by the end of the evening Eva, David and Emily joined too. A few of us went to the bar to dance a bit and I shared my birthday shot with Bart and Gijs. Later, I joined the bar bunch and we were dancing till about 3 or 4, when they decided they'd go swimming and I decided that would be too much for me after 5 days of sleep deprivation, 6 glasses of wine, a shot and a third of a birthday shot. After the shower - note: this was around 4.30 - I was talking to Igor (a guy I met via internet) on MSN and we figured we would meet today.

The conference was great! I'll write more about it later when I've copied the pictures and videos to my laptop.

"Small, fat and ugly." And this is not my opinion. And not even one person's opinion. How funny, seriously...