Patrick in Spain

Archive for the ‘General Living’ Category

We landed in London in the afternoon yesterday and made our way to St. Christopher’s Inn in Hammersmith. We mostly just walked around to both the east and west. There was a nice park, and London seems pretty cool, overall. For dinner, we ate a Thai restaurant and watched a London soccer game. Vlad wanted to hang around for the Bulgaria vs. Ireland game, but that would’ve been a few hours, so we went on instead.

Also, yesterday, Vlad convinced us to head out to a region known as SoHo where there was apparently supposed to be good bars to hang out in. We were looking for a club named 24:London, which, as I’ve been told, uses Microsoft Surface like technology to create a very high-tech and engaging experience. Needless to say, the nerd in me was more interested in the surface than the drinks, but whatever, I was along for the ride. We ended up getting to the right metro stop, but then apparently those who were guiding us there, which will remain nameless *glare*, did not write down enough directions to actually get us to this club. So, we ask a few people, and they either don’t know or are either secretly hype men for other clubs and advertise those instead. There’s a lot of these hype men, as I’m calling them. They ask you if you’re interested in going to a bar or whatever, and point you in the direction of the one that pays them. They mostly wear black trenchcoats and black bowler hats, for some reason. We end up wandering around in a circle like three times before finally heading in a new direction, which was them deemed too gay, then not too gay, before we ended up heading that way. By this point, people in the group are getting annoyed with this walk and each other, so we just end up in some random cheap club. A few people had some drinks, checked out the mediocre dance floor, waited for Vlad to finish his drink (which becomes a common occurrence on the trip) and headed out.

Walking in what we think is the right direction for 24, we run into another hype man who tells us that Paul Oakenfold is playing at some bar (that I bet he worked for). I don’t know the name, but Ben and Jason do. He is, according to them, one of the more famous DJs that tours, and is supposed to be worth seeing. My comment to the whole scenario was that we’d just gotten a pop-up advertisement, and for some reason a groupmate clicked it. I think my assessment turned out to be the most true as you’ll soon see. A few people paid to go in when we got there, but Ben stopped and asked the bouncers who was playing. They didn’t mention Oakenfold’s name, so Ben inquired further. We realized that no, he wasn’t there, and wasn’t allegedly going to be there for a week. We were assured the current DJ was good, too, but people that paid go their money back and we all left instead. With that behind us, we followed the hypeman back to the bus stop. He told us that he didn’t know that Oakenfold wouldn’t be there for another week, but I didn’t buy it. We got on the bus and headed back.

This morning, we got up and went to Big Ben and the London Eye. Big Ben was really cool looking, and I took a few good photos of it. Vlad, Anya, Dennis, and Tim all went up on the London Eye (like a Ferris Wheel with small glass rooms instead of buckets and seats) for £16. The others of us, Jason, Ben, Conrad, and I, went and watched the street performers. I took a few videos of them, and compiled the first half into this YouTube video. Some of these guys are pretty good, and I’ll have pictures uploaded when I can. If you see any of the pictures and can identify the acts, feel free to comment here with that. I was also interested to find that there were a number of horror genre events in London. We saw a place called Fright Club and another called The London Dungeon, though we didn’t have the time or inclination to actually visit.

I had to talk to Wachovia for a third time (First time was before we left for Spain. Second time was in Spain.) today. I was a little frustrated and disappointed that my card had been locked again, even though they now knew for certain I was in Europe. I found over the phone that what happened was one of the things I purchased was through a company apparently based in Texas of all things, and thus Wachovia put a hold on my card when I made another purchase back in Europe. I got it all straightened out by calling them again. I used Yahoo! Voice, which is an awesome service, to make my call.

I’ll now spend a minute pushing Yahoo! Voice because it was really great. Essentially, you need speakers, a microphone, and a cable/dsl level connection and you can call anywhere in the world for a great rate. The service is Pay-As-You-Go, and prices range from 1¢ a minute to call the United States to 27¢ a minute to call Moroccan mobile phones. It doesn’t matter where you’re calling from. Also, United States 1-800 number calls are entirely free. You don’t even have to put money in your account to make those free calls. The program is a free download for at least Windows and Mac (didn’t check on linux). Anyway, my kudos to that service.

We rode the metro system around a lot since we arrived, and it’s a pretty nice system. The locals seem to mostly refer to the below ground train system as the Tube or the Underground. The passes we needed were £5.60, which is about $9.25, so a little pricey, but they lasted all day, and we made sure to get our money’s worth out of them. Like Barcelona, the London metro system beats Atlanta’s with its eyes closed. Atlanta definitely needs to take some cues from the successful metro systems in the US as well as abroad. I think London’s system is overall more comprehensive and reaches more parts of the city more easily than Barça’s, but more of Barcelona’s trains and technology are newer. The London tubes feel like they’ve been around forever, and Wikipedia agrees with me, dating the system to the 19th century.

I guess that’s a good segue into how old things are in London. Unlike Barcelona which has older parts, London just generally feels older all over. It’s got an interesting aesthetic about it that I’d probably like to explore more than I have time for. I have a feeling that many of the great and old cities of Europe share this kind of quality, and hopefully, I’ll make it to some of them as well.

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.

I had a pretty good week this week. I’ve been mostly walking back from school to get some exercise in (it’s right at 4.0 miles) as well as to save trips on the metro. We also planned our trip to the UK. I’ll probably try to cover things in this post mostly in the same order as I have in the past couple of posts with classes first followed by things I visited and things I plan to go to still.

My classes were good this week, but I have to say that I didn’t quite enjoy them as much as last week. In Algorithms, Merrick covered mostly modular arithmetic and finished up some thoughts from last week. Although we covered modular arithmetic a lot in CS 1050, he found a lot of new material to present, in my opinion. The gist of modular arithmetic, to explain it briefly, is that sometimes you can take a long (often infinite) set of numbers and have them fit on a much shorter scale with repetition. So, for example if we wanted to do all the integers from 0 to 15 in mod 4 it would look like this:

Normal: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Mod 4 : 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1, 2, 3, 0, 1,  2,  3,  0,  1,  2,  3

So, if you thought of time as a number line of all the hours since the start of time, that would be impractical. It’s a quarter to 1.22721379 × 10¹⁴ O’clock (About 100 trillion hours) just doesn’t compute. Instead, we work mod 12 such that hours go 1 through 12 repeatedly (or 0 to 23 in mod 24) because this makes more sense for us.

Note: Mod is similar to the remainder after division, but is distinctly not the same. If you divide 37 by 5, there’s a remainder of 2, and that is the same as 37 mod 5, but when you take negative numbers, it doesn’t work the same. -37 mod 5 is 3.

Anyway, there are some neat tricks that come about from this kind of math. An example would be (we did this one for homework) is the number 4¹⁵³⁶ – 9⁴⁸²⁴ evenly divisible by 35? At first, that definitely seems like a daunting task, but if we work in mod 35, it’s easier. Assuming mod 35, we want 4¹⁵³⁶ – 9⁴⁸²⁴ to be zero because if it is evenly divisible, then there won’t be a remainder after division (and anything that comes out to 0 after the mod is the same for positive and negatives). So, I’m going to hide the solution in a box both because it is long and mathy in case you don’t want to read it and to give anyone time to think if you want to try to see for yourself if it is evenly divisible.

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Anyway, enough math for now. Kevin, Joe, and I went to Mount Tibidabo the other night to take some evening shots of the city.  Unfortunately, when we left, it looked like my camera was fully charged, but when we got there, it seems I misread it, so I wasn’t able to take many pictures. Kevin, however, was able to, so I think I’m going to ask him for those this week.

I’ve been eating in a lot more this week. Both Thomases (How do you pluralize Thomas?) and I have been walking the 4 miles back from school each afternoon in order to save trips on the metro. When we get back, we’ve spent a couple euro on bread to get baguettes, and then chorizo meat and edam or gouda if we’re out of meat or cheese. For dinners, I’ve found that vegetables and pasta are pretty cheap to buy daily, and I’ve been getting a kilogram of meat or so that lasts a bit. I haven’t found any ground beef, which I find surprising. All I’ve found is ground beef pork mix, which tastes pretty much the same, in my opinion. Overall, I’ve found eating in to be a mostly nice option. The biggest flaw is that I lack some basic cooking equipment that makes it a little more difficult. For example, an oven and measuring cups.

So, I found one and was shown another ice cream shop here recently. The first is over by the Picasso museum, which I need to visit. The flavors I’ve tried there were chocolate (which was amazing), Rochet (Which tasted just like the candies), and Café (which actually tasted a little like rum). They were by far better than most ice cream I’ve gotten in the US, especially the chocolate. A few days later, Anya showed me this place in Plaça del Rei where she said her family thought had some of the best ice cream (and by ice cream, I mean gelato). I had their chocolate, which was also amazing, and another flavor that I can’t recall, so I guess I’ll be foreced to go back there to find out.

The city also goes crazy over soccer, or fútbol. The Barcelona team won, I believe, the European cup. Bacelona rioted after the game that night and apparently did 100.000€ (Where we use commas in numbers, they use decimals, and where we use decimals, they use commas. Go figure.) in damages. I started to go out to take pictures of the mayhem, but I was hearing explosions so loud that they hurt my hears with the window closed, I decided to stay in instead. It was certainly interesting to see from the room, but too dark and distant to get any real pictures.

Lastly, a few of us are planning to go to the UK. We bought tickets and we’re going to visit London, Liverpool, and Dublin. I’ll post details later in the week.

Well, I had a pretty good second week here, probably a lot better than the first, to be honest. There are once again still a ton of photos to be published and captioned, and hopefully I’ll get some of that done later today.

So, I believe I last left off around Wednesday of this past week. On Wednesday, I had a relatively long day. Algorithms class started at 9:00 AM, followed by Barcelona Leap (Entrepreneurship) at 10:30, a 30 minute break at 1:30, and then Ethics from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM.

Algorithms was generally good on Wednesday. We spent nearly the whole hour and a half going over the homework from the night before, and everyone kind of got into it. On the last problem, which took around 40 minutes of discussion, we were trying to find a way to tell if there is an odd-length cycle in a graph. For those who don’t remember their graph theory, a graph is essentially anything that can be drawn as a whole bunch of circles with lines connecting them. If you took a city map, the intersections of streets where you could from one to another would be a circle, and the streets would obviously be the lines that connect them. More formally, the intersections would be nodes and the streets would be edges. It’s a super useful concept in computer science. Additionally, a cycle is anytime you could drive away from place A and get back to place A without repeating the exact same path. And finally, an odd-length cycle would then be to leave place A and get back there having only crossed an odd number of intersections in the process. Anyway, the class was nearly done coming to conclusions, and I thought of a way that what we were deciding seemed wrong, so I asked and put it on the board, which basically required nearly the rest of the class to discuss more. Professor Furst got about 10 minutes of actual lecture in edgewise at the end.

This discussion and other similar ones took place a bunch this week, so I won’t bore anyone with all the details, but when Merrick finally showed us the solution to the problem, we were awestruck by its simplicity. Feel free to try to figure out how to determine if there is an odd-length cycle on your own first.

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Okay, I lied, one more. How can you, algorithmically/programmatically solve xⁿ (x to the n power) in log(n) time?

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Leap was also awesome both times last week. I’ve gotten used to Merrick’s no laptop policy, and he’s plenty interesting, so it was a good time. We first performed a technique called Market Gap Analysis. The technique basically lets you identify a market to whom you would like to sell a product. As we learned, it’s entirely a mistake to say “X would be a really cool product. We should make it, and I’m sure people will buy it”, as this succeeds only about 5%. Instead, you should find a group of people that have a need and sell to them a product that they can use. Additionally, innovation is probably necessary since you’re relatively unlikely to have invented a new market. Our group identified the Entertainment sector as the area we were going to focus on, then the groups of children, teens, college age adults, and adults. We expanded each of those, but chose teens as emo, goth, punk, prep, fangirls, and a few more. The group decided on fangirls (girls 8-18 that have an obsessive love of different media such as bands, book series, movies, and celebrities) as a market we could analyze and serve with the members we had.

Computational Photography was pretty decent also. The biggest thing we discussed was JPEG compression, which is basically a way that computers and cameras can take very large raw images and compress them down to just a few megabytes without making the pictures look terrible. The gist is just that you analyze the pixels and throw out things that are relatively uncommon. This works really well on real photographs, but not so well on computer generated images.

In terms of travel, Kevin and I went to La Sagrada Familia and actually went inside this time. We took some great photos, but I have to say, for 11€ for entry and 2,50€, I found the experience slightly disappointing. I don’t want to downplay how beautiful and awesome a structure it is, but it’s significantly less complete than I could’ve imagined. The inside, except for the ceiling and a little bit of stained glass, is scaffolding. The most complete and amazing part is the outside, which can be seen from the street just as easily. Going up to the top was certainly neat, but there was essentially one walkway and a couple balconies that had good views, but I don’t know if they were an extra 2,50€ worth of views. Lastly, there was a museum on the bottom most floor that was included in the initial 11€ that was rather nice. Definitely not one of the best museums I’ve been to, but it did have some neat exibits. Overall, I’m glad I went, and I would recommend people to go in the future, as it’s neat to get a piece of the history of the building as it’s being created, and it’s only going to get more complete.

I’ve been trying to decide where I want to visit on the break next week. Most of Barcelona Leap group seems to be going to London, and that sounds like it would be fun. I would kind of like to be able to have a real conversation with the locals. Brian and Vlad have said they were going to Paris, which also seems cool, but maybe somewhat expensive. I kind of wanted to go to Germany, even, but I think it would not be best to go alone, so unless I can find someone more or less today that wants to do that, I’m out of luck this time around.

Went out Sunday night for Kevin’s birthday. It was a pretty good time. We wandered the city and found some new places, and got some ice cream. It was just the two of us, as we were both a little burnt out at the time from big group things that didn’t go as pleasantly as possible. We also went out last night and found some delicious ice cream next to the picasso museum.

On a final, and unhappy note, I found out last week that Stephan’s father passed away. I’ve tried calling him a couple times, but I can’t tell if I’m even getting to the right place, since I don’t think his message had his voice on it, and he put the menu in Spanish, if I recall correctly. So, I think I’ve left a message, but I’m not sure if he got it.

It’s hard to know where to begin speaking of the events of yesterday, but I guess the beginning is the place they usually suggest, so here goes.

I can’t say we quite scrambled, but there were a number of things I needed to get that I still had not gotten. So, we went to Dillard’s and got some Ecco slip-on leather shoes and a sport coat, then to Best Buy to grab an electrical converter/adapter (Onix, my hotel, uses outlets that look like this, type F plugs. Much of Barcelona appears to use these as well.) since they also use 220 Volts instead of the 110 that we use. I also bought a Canon Powershot SD790 IS. So far the camera is great, the software it comes with is great, and the photos come out really nicely. It autocorrects for motion, so I was able to take photos just fine even on a moving bus.

Speaking of photos, I’ll be posting them as soon as I’ve configured some kind of photo gallery software. I looked at 4Images, Coppermine, and Gallery, and I’m sure Chris would be strongly recommending Gallery, but I’m just not feeling it. So, since this is WordPress, I looked for a plugin, and I think I’m going to settle on PhotoQ. (Edit: See End of First Week)

Anyway, after I gathered my stuff, it was a little later than I wanted it to be, but we made it to Hartsfield pretty quickly. I breezed through security without any trouble and headed up to Gate E7 to wait. Brian and I talked for a second while I checked in, then we headed for pizza at one of the airport shops. We made it back just after Zones 1-6 had loaded, which was great timing since Brian was Zone 7. I waited another 10 minutes and Zone 9 loaded.

The plane ride was rather long at 9 hours, but I was able to keep myself more or less entertained. Each seat had a screen in the back of the headrest that was a touchscreen and there was a headphone jack in the armrest. It was all On-Demand style, so I watched an episode of Law and Order, one of Law and Order: SVU, one of Family Guy, the movie Taken, and the movie Quantum of Solace. (Taken was good if you like that sort of action movie. Quantum of Solace was not nearly as good.)I read Physics for Future Presidents for the remaining couple of hours, but I was feeling more motion sick from reading than I normally do.

We landed around 8:15AM Barcelona time (Barcelona is GMT + 1, and Georgia is typicaly GMT – 5, so 6 hour difference). The plane unloaded on the tarmac and we were bussed back to the terminal. We were escorted to the busses from the plane by 8 people with breathing masks on, which was kind of odd. We got into the terminal and went through security which just took the H1N1 influenza forms and stamped our passports.

From the airport, we got on charter buses and rode to Onix, our residence for the time we’re in Barcelona. The room is nice, and I’ve been describing it as the room you would get if a small condo and a freshman dorm had kids. There’s a market just around the corner with set up like an open air market on the first floor of the building (not actually open air since it’s inside the building) and a regular grocery store on a lower floor.

Brian, Ben, and I spent most of the rest of the day wandering the city looking for places to buy phone plans, electrical adapters, and food. We had little success in the directions we were given and probably walked quite a few miles before eating back near Onix. I eventually learned from Eric and Katie that there was a store called El Corte Inglés that has pretty much everything. It has 12 floors and contains a restaurant, a grocery floor, an electronics and toys floor, kid’s clothing floor, men’s clothing floor, women’s clothing floor, youth clothing floor, accessories floor, appliances and hardware floor, and enough other stuff to fill any floors I couldn’t remember. There, I slightly overpaid 13 euros ($19 US) for an extra adapter. I was told by and English-speaking employee when Ben was looking for one that voltage converters are illegal to sell in the European Union, but I can’t seem to find any mention of this online. For the record then, El Corte Inglés does not sell volatage converters.

The day was about 36 hours long because of the time change on the flight, so I crashed pretty hard and started writing this the next day.

I figured it would be best to get a post in before leaving the States. I’ve accumulated most of the stuff I think I’m going to need for the trip except a camera, which I’ll shop for Sunday. Plane leaves Monday (May 11th), and I’ll be flying Delta with the rest of the group. I’ve got a few books to read and a new laptop battery, so I should stay pretty well entertained.

I got a number of things from Rick Steve’s Travel Store like a money belt, small lock, travel guide, and phrase book. I took 4 years of Spanish in high school, and I hope that with that and the phrase book, I’ll make it just fine. From what I understand, many of the residents of Barcelona speak Catalan (Wikipedia, Ethnologue, Multitree) and Spanish, and they do not speak so much English on the whole. I figured as much, and I’m prepared to mostly be speaking Spanish when not in the room or at school. Speaking of which, I’ll be attending the University of Barcelona.

Krystal and I watched Disney’s Bolt today. It was pretty great. A good, cute, kids movie that was still enjoyable for us. It was definitely one of the better things I’ve seen recently. There was a lot of light-hearted humor, and it was not weighed down by the darker parts. Overall, it’s a pretty solid movie for just about anyone, safe for work, kids, and those with delicate sensibilities. It actually felt a lot like a Pixar film, in my opinion, and while Disney owns Pixar, it does not seem like they actually did any work on it, so good job Disney.