Patrick in Spain

It’s getting a little too close to time to leave for me to do a whole post, I think, but I did want to put out my travel details so that people would know where I am when, so here goes.

Itinerary:

Bus:
Barcelona to Girona Airport
Departs at 8:30am – Arrives at 10:00am

Flight:
Girona (GRO) to London Luton (LTN)
Flight FR3769 – Sat, June 06 – Departs at 11:55am – Arrives at 1:15pm

Hostel:
St. Christopher’s Inn – Hammersmith
Check in: Sat, June 06 – Check out: Tues, June 09

Train:
London Euston Station to Liverpool Lime Street Station
Tues, June 09 – Departs at 8:07pm – Arrives at 10:20pm

Hostel:
Hatter’s Liverpool
Check in: Tues, June 09 – Check out: Thurs, June 11

Flight:
Liverpool (LPL) to Dublin (DUB)
Flight FR443 – Thurs, June 11 – Departs at 6:30am – Arrives at 7:20am

Hostel:
Jacob’s Inn
Check in: Thurs, June 11 – Check out: Sun, June 14

Flight:
Dublin (DUB) to Reus (REU)
Flight FR1116 – Sun, June 14 – Departs at 12:15pm – Arrives at 3:45pm

So, I’ve been making a lot of chocolate milk this week. I got a bottle of the Cacaolat brand chocolate milk, and I really enjoyed it. It’s more chocolatey than typical U.S. brands, but kind of expensive for the amount of it you got. So, instead, I’ve started getting UHT white milk, which isn’t initially chilled, can sit on a shelf for up to a few weeks, and is cheaper, and I got a kilo (2.2lbs) of chocolate Cacaolat brand powder. The milk is just as good as the bottled chocolate milk, and I get a lot more of it for significantly less money. Unfortunately, the chocolate milk is so delicious that I went through a liter of it in two days, so I’ll probably have to back down on that a bit.

We went to McDonald’s this week, too. It was interesting. I’ve since seen a few more McDonald’s (though still only eaten there the once), and they’re actually nice on the inside, about on par with typical American Starbucks. We walked by the National Theater on the way back. I’d definitely be interested in seeing something there. It’s a very nice, elegant building.

My entrepreneurship class is going pretty well at the moment. I hope we work on some more of our companies and products stuff over the break, but I have some guess that we probably won’t. It’s really excited me to want to start my own company after I graduate, so I suppose I’ll have to take that option into account once I get back home.

We started covering the Fourier Transform in algorithms, and it looks pretty neat and relatively useful. I couldn’t quite execute the algorithm after just the lecture so far, but I’m looking forward to forward to hearing some more about it and how it works. The gist is, as we’ve covered it, that you can somewhat easily go from a set of points to a polynomial and back. I probably won’t go into it in the kind of detail that I covered some of the other algorithms because it’s so prolific, you could probably understand enough of it from a source like Wikipedia.

In Computational Photography, we covered High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging. First, some examples. The idea here is that there is a lot of color lost in images, especially outdoor ones. Regions of an image come out too bright (super white) or too dark (super black) because of various reasons involving your lighting. If you want to get all the color in all the regions, then, you have to take multiple images (unless you have a very, very nice camera) at different exposures. After that, you take the pixels from each image that aren’t over or under exposed, and you generate a new set of pixels from them. That new set is your new image with color in all the right spots.

Lastly, I tried to make lemon chicken the other night. It went over pretty well, but I didn’t have any white wine. I think that would’ve added a lot to the flavor. There’s some good and cheap white wine sold down at the Mercadona, I just have to remember to pick it up before the next time I attempt to make the dish.