Patrick in Spain

Posts Tagged ‘Planes’

We got to Dublin early this morning around 7AM. Unfortunately, this was a little too early to check into our room, so we had to do something to kill the time. Even though we couldn’t officially check in yet, they let us eat the complimentary breakfast, which was nice. I wasn’t too tired, but after breakfast, most everyone else took a nap on some couches in the lounge. I guess I mostly just checked email and wrote the Liverpool post. Speaking of the Internet, there was free wifi in the building and the rooms, so big score there.

I finally woke everyone up from their nap around 10:30 AM when it was time to go on this free walking tour thing they had. We followed this redheaded Irish guy around for 15 minutes where he mostly just talked to one person. It was kind of terrible. Then, we actually arrived into a big crowd only to realize that what we just experienced wasn’t part of the tour, he was just getting us to the beginning of the tour. So, we adjusted our disappointment meters back down and gave him a second chance. Fortunately for us, it was awesome from that point on. The guy was really entertaining and shared a lot of facts about Irish history. He made some jokes about the Irish not being very good at naming things or planning, but all of his stories were really good.

Apparently in Ireland, they don’t say “What’s up?” or “What’s going on?”, they say “What’s the crack?” While crack does also refer to crack cocaine there, unless you’re using it in a drug related context, crack typically refers to fun or a good time. In many of his stories, Ireland “called” some other nation (obviously a jest in some cases since they wouldn’t have had phones at the time). Every time he did that, it was “Hey Spain, what’s the crack? What do you think of the English?” or “Hey Germany, what’s the crack? We think we could use your help.” So, we all found that pretty entertaining.

The tour ended up being rather long and afterward we went back to Jacob’s Inn, checked in, and took a nap. The room was a 10 person room, but our remaining two roommates wouldn’t be checking in till later that night. There was one bathroom + shower in the room, and there were couple community bathrooms + showers  in the hall, which was rather convenient. By the time we got out again, we were really hungry. We stopped at this Georgian (as in the country) restaurant where they had a student discount and had all you can eat. It was totally delicious, and we certainly ate our fill.

I was starting to get a little burnt out on people after spending the past week in close proximity to 8 individuals, a couple of which I found that I didn’t quite see eye to eye with, and I needed to call Wachovia one more time about a fee that seemed incorrect, so I went to the lounge downstairs, which was quiet at the time. After I got all set up, I made my call. It turns out that the fee was supposed to be there, unfortunately.

I chilled out in the lounge for a while and played couple games from Kongregate.com, which is a pretty easy way to waste time when you’re feeling a bit brain dead. I might’ve watched something from Hulu or the major network channels, but those don’t work over here. Bleh, stupid licensing. Anyway, I was enjoying the quiet when a lady lead  herd of children in to watch a movie on the big projector screen. I still wasn’t quite in the mood to head back yet, so as I played my game, I watched most of Johnny English. I’m not really sure how those children choked it down, but it seems that they actually enjoyed it. It’s a spy movie parody starring Rowan Atkinson of Mr. Bean fame. The movie was dreadful to say the least, and I don’t know that I’d even consider exposing children to it. IMDB’s rating of 5.7/10 is generous, and I think it deserves closer to a 4.7/10.

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.