another week goes by...

and it's already my third week here. well, at least labor week, as I arrived on a monday. I'm still working on my first project at TUDelft and it seems end of April will be a little bit optimistic. But looking at my timing here I'm not too afraid. The kilo-vector project is more about discussion than doing implementation so I can probably overlap the two projects a little. still so.. my goal is to have it finished asap

One of the more interesting things here is how the group at TUDelft is organized compared to my department in Barcelona. What I observed so far is that there is overall a much more tight integration between teachers/professors, phd students and master students. There are two factors for this: one is the personnel distribution. From the point of view of a phd student I observe that the students per room (SPR) ratio is much lower than in barcelona. Down there we have about 8-10 students per room. There are only a couple of these large rooms and they are quite separate (even in different buildings) so the relationship between students in different offices is quite small. Often weeks if not months pass before you meet a student in a different room. As a consequence relationship (and friendship) builds mostly within the same office. The SPR ratio here is around 3. The first consequence is that office space is much more silent and quite. You can actually get some work done most of the time! The second is that relationship builds more between people from different offices since there are not enough people in one office. The second reason why there is much higher integration between students and teachers are the department politics. Social events are of great importance here. And I mean that social events receive funding. For instance yesterday our group organized a karting event. Who went there were basically phd students and master students (in a future post I may include some pics of that). At upc-barcelona the interaction between master students and phd students is inexistent. Master students are located in a single room in one of the buildings and you never get in touch with them. Ok, this comparison is not very fair since master programs are likely more tied to the department in delft than in barcelona, where they are basically tied to a project that a professor proposes. It seems to me that here the department has overall a much higher overall responsibility with master students. The higher integration between students and teachers can also be seen at lunch, where we usually share table space with some of the professors. Often our sysadmin is also there. Needless to say, this is very different compared to bcn. There you'll find many small and quite closed student circles while here there is almost like a single large group but very open and with constant fluctuations. At least at lunch master students don't come to eat with us others :-)

For today I decided to post some pictures of Schveningen where we went to the beach last weekend and some pictures of Delft

To start, this is a view of the beach at Schveningen. Amazing how many people are out there. C'mon, this is April! In the Netherlands!




Guess who's the funny guy here... a little white still, don't you think? :-)



Obligatory PIC of the Faculteit Elektrotechniek, Wiskunde en Informatica of TUDelft. This pic I actually took on april 2nd, my first day in Delft. As you can see it was 5 minutes to four as I was arriving to the building.



A canal in Delft close to zuidpoort. not the nicest canal but the only image I could find :P



The niewe kerk (new church)



And the oude kerk (old church). As you can see, due to terrain conditions in netherlands it's no longer completely vertical



that's it for today :)
have a good weekend there!

busy weeks and trips

Two weeks now since I arrived at this place. Guess it's getting time that I post an update :)

It has been two busy weeks now, full of activities. It's completely impossible to describe it all in one post and, since I'm already a little tired while writing this, I will not even try to give a full account, just some comments and ramblings.

Delft is a very nice city. It has many bars and the city center, with the two churches (the oude and niewe kerk) and the canals is really beautiful. However, Delft is also quite male. The presence of the technical university in this city has quite an impact on the kind of people you see when you go out at night.

Besides that, things are going along quite well, though also quite slowly as tends to be my way of doing. One of the main things I have been working on (and still have to finish) is how to arrange financial stuff. Having a spanish account is not too practical here. First, VISA (the main network in spain) is not as frequently used here. Here the cirrus/mastercard network seems to be more widely used. In addition, these people like to use cash cards, something which never worked in spain (in spain they were called "monedero 4B" but I don't know anybody who tried to use them). Of course, the way things are, getting such a cash card for me is currently not possible. well, actually it is, but at least not under good conditions. The only non-personal non-bank card that I have found is a prepaid Chipknip card provided by a company called InterEgi (www.interegi.nl). These cards you just can buy (there are options for 5€, 10€, 20€ or 50€) and then use them to pay without entering a pin code (since they are not tied to an individual person). Unfortunately they cannot be reloaded so you'd need to buy one every now and then. The problem is that these interegi cards are not too popular and can only be bought in some places. From their list of places (see website) it seems that I would need to go to Rotterdam every time I want to buy one. That is not too practical. The temporal solution is to use cash which you can use everywhere except on some vending machines. But then you have the problem with ATMs. My spanish card is tied to the local network called "ServiRed". Guess what, these guys will take a commission of 4% every time I try to withdraw money. That's not very nice. Opening a new account is something that I wanted to avoid (I'm only staying three months here) but it seems that it's probably the best solution.

I leave you with some pictures before going to bed:

The hostel at sebaastiansbrug (where I'm staying)



A sculpture of some sort of gigantic lizard. This is in a cave close to Maastricht



A camera attached to a speed radar. It carries the legend "Go Fast" (click to enlarge)



Me in front of the cathedral of notre dame in Antwerpen (yeah, we did a nice trip last weekend. maybe I should post a specific entry)

Delft!

Amigos,

I'm finally in Delft. So far it has been lots of work and little time for myself, but no worrying. 3 months will generate enough good moments, I hope :)

Monday was quite a story. After having woken up at around 5:45h to catch my 9:00h flight to Amsterdam I landed here at around 12:00h. That's actually 40 minutes of delay but I don't know where they came from, since we had only 10 minutes of delay in Barcelona. After landing in Amsterdam and taking something to eat I ran into the train with my 30+kg of baggage to depart for Delft via Den Haag. Once at Delft I went by feet to the offices of Duwo. This was a little suicidal for my hand as the trip is not that short and the terrain (stone-roads mostly) is not the best to pull a 25kg bag. Once I got the apartment keys and got installed I was lucky to find a large supermarket just in front of the hostel. And surprisingly it opens until 22h. This I think is quite strange for a country where people have lunch at around 12h. I know of no supermarkets in Barcelona that open until after 21h. Anyway, since it was not too late at this moment (around 15h) I decided to go to the TUdelft building to see my advisor. So there I was, with a sequence of meetings until at 20h I finally went home, visited the supermarket, ate something and finally had time to sleep. I have prepared some photos of my new room:
















For some reason or another my new sony camera decided not to be mounted within my opensuse 10.2 so I have to reboot into windows every time I want to collect new images. I've not been able so far to figure out why this happens. At some point the kernel prints a message such as "chose option 1 from 2 choices" or something like that. This seems a little strange and may be related to my problem but for now is not something I do care about. More interesting is how to setup all the internet things with TUDelft. Apart from the department you need an electronic association with the university. The university provides you a login/pass that you need not only to access some specific services, but also to access internet in general from the duwo hostels. The duwo connection itself is quite strange. It requires you to install an rpm (in the case of linux) to provide as special configuration of adsl (!) using a pppoe link. This rpm was later upgraded by opensuse 10.2 which installed a different version of the tool in which commands are named pppoe-start/stop/status/setup instead of adsl-start/stop/status/setup. This looks more logical than the adsl name since there is no adsl modem in all this process! Anyway, getting it working was a little more difficult than inserting the appropriate values in the adsl-setup script, but now it's working (otherwise I would not be writing this :) ) so I'm happy. I'll tell more stories soon :)

diary.close()
see you