Sunday 30 September 2018

Relocation phase 0

At 8 o'clock Monday morning on, let's see, the 17th of September, some workers fixed the heating in my apartment. I had heard that it would happen "one day", but Monday morning, ugh... While they were working right in front of me, I checked online for new apartments. 30 min into my search, an e-mail came into my inbox via the GSI housing list with the perfect apartment; larger, on the 1st floor so a lot brighter, almost everything new and nobody had lived there before (an old office), my own washing machine, nice hotel grade toilet + shower, radio-controlled radiators (wat?), huge TV which I won't use, the only living space in the building so I can continue pretending to play the violin, and it's in a small town closer to work (a lot of people refer to that place as the unattractive dead end of the world, which suits my personality just fine). All for exactly the same rent, not one euro more or less. Thinking this was just too good, I wrote the e-mail in my pigeon German which took quite a while, called in the evening to set up a meeting the next day with not much hope, went there to look at it, said YESPLOXIDOX, signed the contract the day after, moved in last Monday, and I'm thinking now why in the name of someone precious did I stay in my old dump for so long...

I made cookies today! Finally I have an oven so I can let my destroy my health by indulging in lavish torrents of sugar and butter. A new Ph.D. student at work comes from the US and somebody brought up chocolate chip cookies, and I decided to have a go. Not too shabby for a first try, in a brand new oven. Right after I had splatted out the dough balls on parchment paper I figured I should probably run the oven once before I inject my cookies with lovely factory residues, good thing I thought of that.

For some reason the ceiling is covered with brass-colored sheets that look great when all the lights are on. It's really a luxurious place, I feel so strange being here still. And a bit excited, the old sous-terrain apartment probably did me worse than I thought.

"Relocation phase 0", because I don't want to stay here for too long. I'll do some experiments and make sure what I've done down here on the continent works, and then I'm gonna fly!

Enough of this, where did I put the violin?!

Monday 17 September 2018

First page done

No, I didn't just finish reading my first page in a book ever, not sure when that's gonna happen. First page on Project Euler! Progress is pretty slow, but I tend to solve a few problems in one shot once or twice a year, sometimes with many years in-between. I did solve #48 in just a few minutes, it can be brute forced since higher significant digits have no influence on the lower. I also use these twisters as a means of playing around with Lua, the prettiest littliest language. I've noticed a lot of people write their solutions simply to get the right number to post, but I get the most joy out of making every solution run in less than a second (with LuaJIT... ye I'm a cheet), and to actually verify solutions when asked, e.g. #44.

Because I'm tight I didn't buy the armband for my Seiko yet, i.e. no photo...

Gave up on BWV1001 for now, focusing on 1004 and 1006 gigues and some etudes which I still find very difficult to play.

And no beam for experiments this year :( Might get a few hours of silver towards the end of the year for testing, so anyhow we need to be 100% ready to go. I should plan my ~30 days of vacation (mhm, 6 weeks, how do people spend that?) that I still have this year, and to find a new place to stay, should've done that a long time ago.

Been playing around with Vulkan. Not sure what to say. Was it really necessary to force that ridiculous amount of code? I should do something more useful with my life :p

Like going to sleep. First a big peach, which I forgot to eat earlier even though I love them, then I'll go to sleep.