A Month in France and a Ton of News
First of all, I came back from East Germany on Sunday and I'm leaving for France tomorrow. I will sometimes have Web access there, but not all the time, so updates will be sporadic, but definitely very interesting. This will be a long entry, but I am not going to split it due to time constraints.
The Weekend in Erfurt, Germany
I spent Thursday of last week on three different trains to Erfurt. The Austrian one was definitely the worst of the three, as expected. I love the German
InterCityExpress, because of it's speed, design, and most importantly air-conditioning.
Our arrival in Erfurt was slightly marred by the rain, but after we arrived at Nora's grandmother's house, things greatly improved. East German houses all tend to be gigantic, and this one was no exception, four stories, each of them large enough to house more than one appartment. We stayed in a small room in the attic, which was quite nice for the three nights we stayed.
Nora's grandmother was different than I had expected; I have to admit that I have never seen anyone of her age with such energy that had such meaningful things to say. She told us about the books she reads (her room is like a library with four large shelves, with the entire collections of many international writers (Goethe, Kafka, Neruda, Allende, .....), and then went on to recite a poem. The poem, it turned out, had been written by her that same day, and it was quite deep and eloquent. She recited the first five stanzas without a break, but then forgot the rest, which upset her greatly. She told us that she writes a poem every day, and usually remembers them fully, and that she would have to train harder in the future. Everytime she was tired, forgot something, or made some other small mistake, she said that she would have to train harder in the future. She is 82 and quite a persona.
Nora's aunt and father are both artists, the former designs carpets, while the latter paints, while trying to "preserve his art's integrity" - that reminded me of Joyce's
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
The city of Erfurt also defied my expectations, by being way nicer than I would ever have imagined. The city did not contain any of the typical grayish blocks of concrete, but was rather a charming old town with a beautiful, historic
inner city. Overall, I have to say that this trip was a lot more fun that I would ever have thought possible.
Procedings of this Week
I received three new books from Amazon this week: Unix Network Programming Volume 1, Bringing Design to Software, and Concepts in Programming Languages. The latter two are for classes I am taking next quarter, but are interesting reads nonetheless. I already finished Bringing Design to Software by Winograd, and might review it in the future. For now I just have to say that the book is mostly about software design and attention to the needs of users than about any HCI or GUI theory. I can recommend the book to anyone who is majoring in engineering, because it neatly sums up a lot of things, but it will not tell you much that you didn't know before. I started
Concepts in Programming Languages, but haven't gotten much further than 200 pages. I'm enjoying it, and am happy to note, that the class I'm reading it for (CS 242) does not seem too difficult.
I have been looking into Dashboard more closely, and I have to see I really like it. I'm going to learn C# in September, and will hopefully be fixing bugs and writing small bits of code for Dashboard soon. If I would have to list the four projects that I am most interested in (excluding BattleFungus, which isn't well known yet) they would be:
- Dashboard
- Mono
- FreeBSD
- Linux
In approximately that order.
I will definitely try to do a bit of programming for them next year (2003/2004), but more about that when I come back from France. I still have tons of reading to do (still some Networking, Operatings Systems, Compilers, Computer Architecture).
The Month in France
I am leaving for France with Nora tomorrow, for about three weeks, with an added five days in England (plus an extra day in England, on the way to France - tomorrow). We are going to Dinan, Paris, Roanne, Nīmes and then London. I will blog a few times, but definitely not regularly. So stay tuned for the adventures of Can in France, and read Nora's blog for her view of the trip. Hm, I speak four languages, but was told that none of them will help me in France, because people refuse to talk in a language other than French. Maybe I'll try to learn it while there. Maybe...
Have a nice month everyone.
Posted by csar at August 1, 2003 01:57 PM
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