Aachen: Miscellaneous Events

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

As I'm spending my last night in Aachen, here're my two last-minute tidbits from today:

1. Aachen Cathedral
   Visitors are free to go inside the church. However, one has to pay for two Euros in order to take pictures — tripods are not allowed but flash is. After paying, one will get a ticket that is valid on the next visit.
   
   
   Hm, now I'm wondering if the "next visit" actually means "subsequent visits". If it does, then I need to preserve my ticket in case of a tiny possibility to revisit this city in the future. Yeah, I do have a bit of "mental dagang" (i.e. an extremely calculating mentality).


2. Diet cookies
   In a shop selling chocolate cookies, I picked a box of a chocolate cookies (how obvious). When I was about to pay, the lady shopkeeper pointed to the word "Diät" on the box and said something like "this is for diet". I was quite puzzled at first and had to ask whether the "diet" means "for those who want to lose weight"! Which apparently does!! Which then made me to quickly replace with another brand, plus a couple of other choices, and then left (after paying, of course).
   
   Later on, I made this guess on why the diet-cookies reminder: it is because of my excellent physique — I who am not in the slightest need of losing weight! Whether this turns to be true or not, a danke to the shopkeeper is in order. Otherwise I may be getting slimmer after consuming those diet cookies.

They're all the same

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

Q: What's the difference between 3 and 7?
A: As one of my lecturer said from UI, it depends on the context!

For sure, they're mathematically different, strictly speaking. But in the context of temperature, they're the same; for me, of course. It's just like how certain things work: when things go beyond or below a certain threshold, things do not matters anymore.

So, any difference between 3 and 7?
Same lah (seɪm lɑh -- Singlish), same lah (sɑmə lɑh -- Pontianak-style Indonesian which is very much Malay), sama lah (sɑmɑ lɑh -- Indonesian), sami mawon (sɑmĭ mɑwŏn -- Java).

The Nth day in Aachen

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

Here's a recap of my experience with the local weather:

1. Monday morning: 3 degree C


2. Tuesday morning: 1 degree C, and snow everywhere


3. Wednesday morning: -1 degree C (or was it -4?), no snow


4. Thursday morning: 3 degree C, windy

So, my first snow & below-zero-degree experiences.

First day in Aachen

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

Started my travel by heading to Changi airport (SIN) on Sat 01/Mar/2008 21:30 SGT. The flight departed on Sun 02/Mar/2008 00:00. Incidentally, I met with my professor from Fasilkom UI, Dr Stef, who'll be a visiting professor in Lisbon and Dresden for the next 3 months.

After a roughly 12-hour flight, arrived at Frankfurt on Sunday 02/Mar/2008 06:30 CET. Continued my journey by train to Cologne/Köln (about 1 hour) during which I met another Indonesian working in a German education foundation. From Cologne, I had to rush for the next train to Aachen which arrived 5 minute after. Finally, arrived at Aachen after another hour of travel; check in to hotel around 11:00.

After settling down, went for lunch and then tried to make our way to RWTH. During the way, took some pictures of the city and also a visit to the town hall. Heading back to hotel around 16:30.

The weather is windy, temperature is about 2-11 C. And the wind is really strong; one can clearly see the cloud move very fast, unlike in Indonesia or Singapore. With such strong wind, it's no wonder to see wind turbines being used to generate power; something which is not feasible in Singapore (or SE-Asia?) -- at least, as was told by a from-aeroplane-to-hardisk engineer.

Linking [was: Away (Again)!]

Finally the COW code can be built using Pathscale, though it still encounters runtime crashes. Well, at least I can tick one field in my battle plan as both completed :-) and defeated :-(

The problem was solved by compiling the library in which the COW code depends to with a certain name-mangling convention. Basically, the functions name (in Fortran objects) must not be ended with double underscore.

And now, let's conclude the porting activities for this week; let the battle continue after the Lunar New Year.

Away (Again)!

In less than 6 hours I'll start my journey back to my hometown to celebrate the Lunar New Year. So what I'm doing in this hour? As usual, last minute express packing and making sure not to oversleep.

And who says coffee is needed to stay awake? The COW codes I've been porting is giving me all sort of trouble when linking Fortran objects (using Pathscale). And I have zero knowledge on Fortran! Okay, maybe 0.00000000001 since I managed to solve a compilation problem by commenting out two lines of "implicit none".

Come think about it: my cohorts who still stay in the IT field are "moving forward" with all sort of MVC or RDBMS mappers or whatever frameworks. Not to mention those who've attained "enlightenment". I, on the other hand, am "going backward" to Fortran.

D-Day

I am feeling gado2 now: anxious, nervous, afraid, ... Why? Because it's now 22.5 hours before the d-day.

Anyway, it can't be worse than singing that sacred YNWA song or fighting against the wind like mad, can it?

Learning Mandarin

[Original Post at my Blogs | My Blogs]

It is tough to learn a new language as an adult, eventhough the new language is supposed to be similar with one I've known. But a kick in the back is always the best source of motivation, just like a blue knight/wizard learns a new technique after being attacked by the technique.

And so, apart from witnessing how impressive Beijing & Guangzhou are, having to guess the meaning of (nearly) all the conversations which occurred within last week, I've learned "si_1 thong_3" (system), "mu_4 lu_4" (directory), "kuo_2 chi_1" (international), "kuo_2 chia_1" (national), "chi_1 chang_3 fei_1 / chi_1 chang_3 / fei_1 chi_1 chang_3" (airport). As you've probably noticed, those words are not spelled in proper hanyu pinyin and I may have confused the 2nd and the 3rd tone.

Nevertheless, a start is a start is a start.