Halloween

This will be a really short post, as I am completely swamped by work for uni.

This weekend was Halloween (still is today, I know) and yesterday I went out :-). All dressed up as you can see here:

Halloween: witch, green goblin or Fiona from Shrek, take your pick :-)

I had a lot of fun with the two other Unitech girls in Dublin, Ida and Verena. There were sooooo many people dressed up in the streets, so creative! It was an awesome night out.

Now I unfortunately have to get back to work... This Friday we had a presentation in Graphics, on tuesday the Graphics assignment is due, in Vision we got a huge assignment in Introduction to Operation Management I have a MC-exam on Friday... and in 2 weeks I have one in Organizational Behaviour. So yeah, me is very busy ;-). But I still love it here and everything is great. In 1 month I get my first visitors from Switzerland, soooo looking forward to it :-).

Enjoy your next week!

Rainbows and the Perfect Weather - Killarney

rainbow :-)

lake in front of Muckross House and SUN :-)

I am back from my Killarney Trip and I have to tell you, it was absolutely amazing... I totally loved it :-).

There is soooo much I would love to tell, it's already 11pm and I am pretty tired, but I guess I'll just start while my pictures are getting loaded onto the computer... I can tell you how many picture I took in a second... *waiting* It's 434, crazy and I'll have to sort them out first...

Celia and me in our room :-)

Well, lets start from the beginning. We left on Friday at around 6pm from Trinity College and headed south in 2 buses. I was on bus number 1 with the cool busdriver Pasquale. There was sooooo much traffic on the 3-lane motorway, everyone seemed to have the same plans as us... So we did take longer than planned and arrived a bit before midnight in Killarney. There we distributed the rooms and me and Celia got one of the few double rooms :-). Put our stuff in the room and went out to the pub, or rather the night club.


We did not stay there very long... After having one pint of Guinness soak most of our clothes and having our stuff searcher by some random people,... we just didn't enjoy it that much anymore. We went back to the hostel, talked a bit and eventually fell asleep.

The next morning we woke up and first thing first... had a look out of the window... It wasn't raining, but it didn't look very promising. After a nice breakfast we eventually left towards Dingle Bay. It was a nice drive along a really scenic route and the weather made it all the more interesting... rain, sun, dribble, stormy rain, sun... and loads of RAINBOWS... I tell you, I was rainbow hunting :-) with the camera and I got soooo many! I even saw a perfect 180% one and it was even a double one! YAY, I was in paradise. But that was throughout the day.

Eventually we arrived at Blasket Heritage Center... It's a museum dedicated to the people of Blasket Island... which is an island off the coast of Dingle. The amazing thing about the island is that a lot of really good (apparently) books were written by the blasket island people. But the island has been evacuated a couple of decades ago. In general the museum was rather boring to be honest and I was glad when we left again.

Celia, Arne and me in front of Blasket island... really windy

Pasquale took the scenic route back to Dingle and me always sitting in the front seat (yeah, you all know why, lol) I got the best view :-). The road was pretty adventurous at times and I was glad that our bus driver was great... There was once even a stream flowing over the road :-). In Dingle, which is a pretty small village with not a lot there, I had some lunch with a couple other students and we took a few pictures of the harbour... Once we got on the bus it started pouring down again. After this we left for Tralee and the County Kerry museum.

As an explanation... Killarney is the main town of couty Kerry. The museum was really good, but we only had 1 hour to look at it, which was pretty tight. So I didn't get to see everything I would have like to see. After that we drove back to Killarney.

Charlotte and me in front of St. Mary Church

the "hiking" group

the deer :-)

Once back at the hostel some of us had the great idea to go and explore Killarney (not that it's a big city *smile*) and also walk a bit into the national park (which is huuuuge). So we had a look at St. Marys Catherdral, which was really beautiful... It was made out of stone and just looked amazing. After that we went for a great walk in the park. We hear dear and some of us, two guys, Charlotte and me went to have a closer look at the deer... Finally we found them on a big lawn and there were sooo many of them :-). It was already getting dark, so we didn't get any good pictures, but we saw them very good. There was the male deer and he had huge antlers. We also got pretty close to them. It was an amazing experience. When walking back towards town we had a great view of the night sky with the full moon and the illuminated church top.

At the hostel we got some Spaghetti Carbonara cooked by some nice italian guys and after that we went to a pub where an Irish band was playing live music. It was really enjoyable. As I was really tired I went back at around midnight while some of the others went to the night club. Apart from some guys coming back to the hostel really really drunk the night was quiet.

So the next morning me and Celia got up at 8.15, had a look out of the window and there was NO cloud to be seen, then we also had the clever idea to go eat breakfast in our pyjamas while everyone else of the group was still sleeping or dressing. So we enjoyed a rather quiet breakfast and went back to dress and pack eveything (I packed in 1 min ;-)). Eager to hit the road we finally left at about 9:45 (temperature was 2°, it was freezing cold!!!) and headed towards some Caves... Ehm crac caves or something... *looking it up* Yeah Crag Caves. To be honest it was nice and sweet, but just nothing compared to some of the caves I've been to in the south of France. We drove back towards Killarney and headed to the Killarney National Park. All the way we had SUN and the view was just amazing... I took so many pictures out of the bus... just hope they look ok... At the park we left the bus and headed towards a waterfall, Torc Waterfall. It was y bit of a walk, but soooo beautiful. We walked up along the stream and through forest, it was sooo green! I'm not sure if I just notice that it's so green because I know that's what it's supposed to be in Ireland or because it really is this green... Anyways... The waterfall was really nice and we kept on walking uphill... until we reached this amazing place with this absolutely breathtaking view over the whole National Park with the big Lake (with the apparently bad monster in it, can't be bothered to look up the name). I could have stayed there the whole day!

stream below the Torc Waterfall

Torc Waterfall

view from the lower level

view from the upper level

After a while we walked back down and towards the lake we just saw from above and then towards Muckross House, which is this absolutely stunning estate. There we had some lunch (really really really looooong queue) and later we had a guided tour through the house, which was great. Then we had about 30 minutes left to do what we wanted, so me and some others walked through the Gardens belonging to the house. At 4.30 pm we were back at the bus... but 2 people were missing and bus 1 (my bus) had to wait for 30 min until they showed up... then we drove off towards Dublin.

nice view :-)

Muckross House

The lake and the SUN

secret garden

 It was the most scenic drive ever. The weather was till stunning and the view was so great I couldn't stop looking. So while pretty much everyone else fell asleep I was just gazing out of the window and admiring everything :-). It kept getting darker and the sky was all colours, but not in a very bright way... it was more like the whole sky was a faded rainbow! And then the moon came up... this big perfect round yellowish shape and it was right in front of us for most of the drive home. We drove without a break and made it in 4 hours and 20 minutes (there was a toilet on board) and luckily the nice Taiwanese girl Ko had some nice cookies, so I survived :-). Back in Dublin we stopped at Trinity and as the bus driver was going back towards Heuston station anyway he took me along and dropped me off there. The Luas came 1 minute late and so I was home soon :-).

picture of the moon on the motorway (that's what it's supposed to be!)

Ok, that was it from my great trip... It's impossible to describe how awesome it was in words, you really have to see it, but I'm not sure if there ever will be such a beautiful day again ;-).

Oh, and tomorrow is Bank Holiday here, don't ask me why, don't ask me why it's called that way... I don't care, it just means I have another free day. And the best of it all, Cian will be back tomorrow :-).


So I wish you all a great next week!

Wicklow, Computers and Life

So it is actually nearly midnight here, but I decided that it was high time I updated my blog and gave you all some more news of how life is going here...

It is grand :-). I am happily in love (which actually does make some other things less annoying... magically) and university is going alright, home is awesome and well, in general I'm just very comfortable here.

Today both Cian and me were finished at 12 for the day... So as sensible students do we stayed about 2 more hours to get some work done... Guess the only person getting work done was Cian as I was fighting with the computer... I tell you, the computer was winning... He swallowed my program and didn't want to spit it back out no matter what I did. So I have to admit I was pretty pissed off at that (excuse the language) and as the computer kept on crashing I decided I'd go to the library and do something for my organizational behaviour course.

The funny thing about that is.. haha, I had to read the "Motivation" chapter and I felt pretty unmotivated... so unmotivated actually that I fell asleep and only woke up once I got a text from Cian. So that was that.

We went to Dundrum, got the car and drove towards Wicklow... The streets are VERY narrow and sometimes they have walls on both sides, it's a bit freaky, but I was in good hands :-). We stopped first at a place with a stunning view over Dublin, it was absolutely breath-taking... As we continued along the road the land kept getting more barren, but in a nice way and not a lot of other cars were around. The landscape all around was really nice and sometimes we'd see the Sugarloaf (that's dublin's house mountain... or rather hill... apologies to the Irish, but it really is a hill). A bit further down the road we stopped in this really boring spot and Cian wanted to show me something.

So we got out of the car... took my scarf and fleece jacket and we walked away from the road, up this little footpath... Once at the top the view was stunning :-) and so was the wind! There was this little lake, perfect colors in front of a hill and it just looked amazing. We took some quick pictures and enjoyed the view for a very little time... otherwise we just might have become part of the scenery as frozen ice status. Man that wind was something... and it was a sunny day! Don't want to know how it would be like on a stormy night ;-).

We drove on, got warm again in the car and somehow already a bit on the way back towards Dublin we stopped a third time. Got out of the car and walked a bit uphill, the wind was alright, but as soon as we walked over the top part I thought I'd actually get blown away... both by the scenery and the wind. It is this amazing lake that looks like a pint of Guinness from space. Here's a picture from google maps (just google lough tay):

So after a bit of wandering around on the hill and Cian's camera giving up on the battery (I think it might just have been frozen, lol) we drove back to Dublin. So that was about a 2.5 hour drive, very lovely!

Other news:
You might just like to go see social network, it's actually pretty good as long as you take it as a piece of fiction rather than fact.
Tomorrow afternoon I'll leave for Killarney with DUISS, which is the international student society of Trinity College. I'll be there for 2 days and I'm assuming it'll be loads of fun.
Ah, pictures from the Wicklow drive will follow as soon as I get them from the photographer with the camera.
Oh and Ireland is starting to catch uf to Switzerland regarding the hits on my blog :-). The ranking is Switzerland, Ireland... a wiiiiiide gap, then Sweden (guess that's because it'll find it until sweden and then get lost) and New Zealand :-).
And something else: Basel beat AS Roma, yay, go FCB!!!

1916 Rising or a History Lesson

Library Online ExhibitionI would like to mention that I do not guarantee the correctness of things mentioned in the following text, also these are my personal views and don't necessarily represent the truth! At the end of my post I will add some more links for those interested. Because this is actually a crazy topic to write about in a blog entry... It's way too complex to cover everything!

In order to get an understanding of the 1916 Rising - which is something like a revolution, but it might all together be a different thing depending on how you look at it - we will first have to look at the past of Ireland's history.

 Picture I took at the museum of the Easter Proclamation.

Before 1916 - A Short Irish History
The English rule over Ireland began in the 12th century when King Henry II secured lordship over the south-eastern area of Ireland, which would mostly be Dublin and its surroundings. Only the Tudors in the 16th century managed to get a hold of the entire country. From then on the Irish were more or less ruled by the English. At first the English set up in Dublin and ruled the country from there, but as the centuries progressed a system called Home Rule was put into place, which basically gave the Irish a bit more freedom in decision making (at least this is how I understood it). Also how I understood it a lot of the Irish culture and especially the language was being suppressed during those times. ***Just an aside, I think this Home Rule system was actually never really put into place as events seemed to happen in a really quick manner around that time...***

Involved Parties
What we also have to look at first is who was actually involved in the party and what were their political goals and motivations? I will sum this up very shortly:

• IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) - formed in 1858, secret organisation with the goal of Irish independency
• Gaelic Athletic Association - founded to promote Irish sports primarily, but also dancing, music and the Irish language in 1884. 
• Gaelic League - founded in 1893 to promote the Irish language.

Through both the Gaelic League and the GAA many future political leaders that would play an important role in the Rising met.

• Sinn Féin - founded in 1905. As I understand this party was formed to bring together the various nationalists across the country.

• Ulster Volunteers - founded in November 1913. They were happy with being ruled by London and didn't want anything to change.
• Irish Volunteers - founded in 1914. Many members joined them (possibly even 200'000), but only a couple of thousands got military training.

The First World War
Come August 1914 the First World War broke out and the reactions in Ireland were very different. Many men in the Ulster Volunteers were going to postpone the issue of Home Rule and actually went to fight for the British Army agaist the Germans. But the IRB thought that the British involvement in the war would be an amazing opportunity to seize power themselves, seeing that the military forces of England would be focused towards Germany and not Ireland. Also a small percentage of men in the Ulster Volunteers didn't want to help England and so the party split (those ones with England: National Volunteers, the others Irish Volunteers).

The Planning
I think the planning mostly started in 1915 with primarily men both in the IRB and the Irish Volunteers (they were in both organisations) being involved in the process. Names include: Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, Eamont Ceannt, Thomas MacDonagh, Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott, later on also James Connolly got involved. These 7 men were going to plan the rising and had the idea that they were going to accept any help they could get from Germany... I think the main problem was that they didn't have enough weapons and so they tried to get weapons shipped into Ireland.

The 1916 Easter Rising
On Easter Monday the Rising started. Strategically important points were seized throughout the city, but they didn't succeed in taking over Trinity College (only armed with a handfull of unionist students) and Dublin Castle (also not very heavily armed).
On the first day the English forces where generally rather surprised and uncoordinated in their response.
As the rebels had failed to seize the train stations or the harbour the English just brought over reinforcements. Also they brought in a vessel called Helga on the Liffey. So together with the guns positioned inside Trinity and the support of the Helga on the river the English were able to get the situation under control. Eventually the rebells had to surrender to avoid further loss of life.
I think that over 400 people died and more than 200 of these were civilians.

Aftermath
What happened after the Easter Rising is in my view not a nice chapter of history... An enormous amount of people were arrested and the leaders were sentence to death and executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Jail in Dublin.
By 1922 the Irish Free State had been created which later became the Republic of Ireland.



Traitors or Heroes?
I guess there is two main views of the people involved in the 1916 Rising... the ones that were executed can be seen as martyrs, seeing they died for a cause they believed in. But also they - in a way - were traitors to their country, which at the time was ruled by the British.
Also opinions as to wheather the Rising was necessary to make Ireland become an independent republic are different. Some think that yes it has helped and some would argue that with the Home Rule acts and how things were going it would have happened anyway.

Seeing the exhibition at the National Museum about the 1916 Rising I personally tend to rather admire the courage and dedication the leaders showed and I am appalled by the fact that they were executed. My knowledge of the events is too basic at the current time to make any different judgement than the one based on how I felt after reading all the material at the exhibiton.

If you are interested in this event I would absolutely recommend you to have a look at some of these links. The whole situation was a lot more complex and there were many other things going on as well than I was able to write about in this post. Also please feel free to comment!

Library Online Exhibition
Home Rule and Ireland
The 1916 Easter Rising
Personal View of 1916

Printing Slides...

So today I decided to catch up on some of the course work and thought I'd start out with printing the slides of my lectures...

If this seems like an amazingly simple task... well, it's not :-).

So I knew that I can print for free in the computer science labs. I managed to get the slides, put 4 on 1 and send it to the printer... (eventually I even figured out which one was the right one). First problem: No paper in the printer...

I set out on a "paper-stealing-mission" and nicked some from a photocopier machine, went back, put the paper in and it started printing... Just not MY stuff :-(... So all my stolen paper got used for someone else's report about Hacking... And again... I set out to steal some more paper ;-). Managed that without being caught by a securtiy guard, got back to the printer and finally it started printing my slides, yay... Until it ran out of paper again and then there was a printer jam and nothing worked anymore.

At least it did actually print most of the slides... At least those that were available on the net. Some of my lecturers don't seem to understand the notion of "putting slides online after the lecture"...

About the other blog posts I was going to make... Haven't forgotten about it, just didn't find the time to write about 1916 (I will do that, my Irish friends insisted on it) and I'm still trying to somehow get pictures of people walking around in crazy outfits... The problem is just to have your camera ready and not be obvious when trying to take a picture of a girl with blue hair, a mini skirt and not a lot else in autumn...

Apart from the printing experience it is going great here... A quick update for everyone:

I am down to 4 of my initially 6 courses... Mainly because the 2 courses I dropped were pretty boring and also because my courses - especially the Vision one - do take up a lot of time. So my 4 remaining courses are actually great and I enjoy going to lectures and doing the work. Also I did get a Final Year Project supervisor, which is great. I will get to work on a really interesting project and work with an existing program called SARA :-). The project is situated in Information Systems and more accurately in semantic web. The general idea so far is that my project will allow school children to enter queries in natural language about mountains and the output will be generated using SARA and various information sources, such as DBPedia.

Ok, hope you are all well :-)

Grafton Street and Shopping on a Saturday

So I'm back on my blog...

No time to change the design tough, sorry for everyone who's complaining about my lovely green background, you'll just have to suck it up some more days or copy the text ;-).

This afternoon I met Nilay and Jason in town. I got to know them over the internet while looking for accommodation in Dublin. We met at Stephen's Green (seeing they live in Dundrum and take the Green Luas to Stephen's Green), so I had the pleasure of walking through Grafton Street on a Saturday... You can't imagine it, it's a no-cars-allowed street and there's sooo many people, I'm sure it looks a bit like a really busy ant-hill from the air ;-). And then there's all these street artists playing music or doing something else and a lot of people watching. Also there's all these guys with the most amazing job ever... They stand there holding a sign on a post and they sort of wave the post... On the sign there's usually some sort of special offer ad for a shop... It's just crazy! And all of them have an umbrella fixed to their post...

Well, so I met Nilay and Jason and we went into a nice café... it was really big and really full, but we found a place. We talked and talked and then went out into the city to go shopping. So you need to know that Grafton Street is to the south of Trinity College and we generally walked north, walked through Tempel Bar and crossed the river over this lovely bridge and went to shop some more on the north side. By then about 3 hours had passed and I went back home again.

So now I just got back and I feel very tired... And I'm supposed to do a lot of work for uni. I kind of couldn't be bothered this week and last week I was still trying to figure out how everything works at Trinity. So now things have started to pile up a bit... Guess later today and tomorrow I'll have to try and catch up a bit seeing that Cian is gone anyway for the whole weekend... I might just do something sensible for once ;-).

Ok everyone back home and in New Zealand and Ireland or wherever you are from (I get hits from all over the world, yay) enjoy your Sunday!

Oh, some more info: I will at some stage put some more pictures on facebook, I will also change the design of the blog and I am trying to get pictures to show you what I mean by eccentricity... but it's quite difficult seeing that I keep forgetting my camera at home.

And suddenly I like it even better...

How could this become even better? Well, great place to live with really nice people, an awesome university, a lovely town and country and now this :-).... A real Irish man *smile* with red hair and freckles (no kidding). So now every morning I have an awesome reason to go to university, the sun is a bit brighter and the rain a little less wet ;-).

And that's about all I'm gonna say now. I should actually be working on my grad really bloody difficult assignment for Computer Vision... it's taking me ages and I'll be graded on it.

So enjoy your days!

I'm in Love...

... with Dublin :-).

The city is just so beautiful on a sunny day.

Today I had an awesome day, nothing more to be added to that.

I'm working on getting pictures to illustrate my Eccentricity post that will follow soonish.

By the way, if you want to have a look at some really nice pictures of Ireland:
http://www.cianclarke.com/component/option,com_gallery2/Itemid,49/?g2_itemId=324

Lucky Monday

And so the next week starts...

I woke up and the sun was shining :-). Had a nice breakfast (porridge, yummy!) with a cup of tea and then I had to run to catch the Luas and caught it. I walked into my lecture 1 minute before it was due to start and it was a fairly interesting start into this week. After this 1 hour lecture from 10-11 I had 3 hours of nothing... Seeing that I was still not 100% recovered from the stupid cold I didn't go swimming. Instead I tried to do something useful.

Went into the computer lab (found out something really useful there, but it's a secret *smile*) and tried to do my first assignment for Computer Vision. Couldn't do all of it as I just didn't get the video loading part. Then I had 2 more lectures where I luckily met Cian in one of them. He's in both of my computer science courses and he has already done assignment 1. So he helped me a little to get the loading parts right... After that I got so excited about perfectioning the result that I forgot all about time. I handed in the assignment online and realised that I was 25 minutes late already for my next lecture...

Arriving there I realised I could have perfectioned my program even further because it was soooo boring... We did these very awesome project management charts and looked at Forward and Backward Pass and Latest Start, Early Finish and so on (for those that don't have a clue: I did all of that in Software Engineering at ETH). So after that it was already 6pm and I had yet another lecture. At 10 to 7 I was off and the weather was pretty iffy... (learned that word today). It was windy and the sky was coloured in a way that didn't mean something good. Walking to the Luas I felt like in a Hitchcock movie... The birds where going a bit crazy, flying over the buildings in swarms and making a lot of noise...

At the Luas station I had to wait couple of minutes and as soon as I got into the Luas it started pouring down. And come Rialto stop it stopped :-). So I walked home fighting the wind and when I got inside Fionnula was already asking me whether I was hungry :-). I was hungry and so I dinner was just ready! So this was a really long long day (uni from 10 to 7, the longest I ever have) and I'm tired now, so I'll go to bed...

As to my next post... I'd like you to vote on the theme:
I can write about:

• clubs and societies at Trinity
• 1916 Rising (I was at an exhibition yesterday about that, it's one of the most important historical events in Dublin and Ireland)
• Eccentricity of Irish people with respect to clothing

Thank you and have an awesome week!

What should I write about next?

Lectures

So I'm back with a new post, yay... Honestly I'm not too motivated right now to write something, but I'm a bit bored while waiting for Visual Studio to download. My head feels about twice it's size, my nose is really red (I look like Rudolph, *don't laugh, it's not funny!*) and instead of going to my 3 lectures today I slept most of the day... stupid Irish bugs ;-) *sorry* Actually it's just a bad cold. So enough of this boring stuff...

Lectures in Ireland are really really strange... I already miss my awesome lectures at ETH and all the great lectureres there! Just KIDDING. So far it's been great except for some minor details.

What am I doing this semester:

• I do Computer Graphics (taught by an awesome woman, Carol O'Sullivan). ***The course seems to be really interesting http://isg.cs.tcd.ie/cosulliv/teaching.html and dear ETH people, if you want to have a laugh just have a look at the LinAlg slides... Yeah, I thought she was joking, but she wasn't. As a short explanation to this extremely crazily kindergartenish introduction to LinAlg... also non-computer-scientists, such as mathematicians can take this course (doesn't seem to make sense tough anyway...). *** So I'm waiting for the interesting parts!
• Also I do Computer Vision... the peculiar thing here is that we're about 12 people in class, YES, it's crazy... and I think 4 of these are exchange students. Also funny, it's supposedly the best course and it really seems great. Guess the reason is that there are only about 30 students in 4th year of Computer Science... sucks!
• I do 3 Business courses:
• Introduction to Accounting (yes, seriousely, no joke!)... I met the professor personally already, yay... and he seems like the nicest person :-).
• Introduction to Operations Management... No idea, that course would have been today.
• Organisational Behaviour... This 2 hour lecture was hilarious, the lecturer is like an exaggerated form of Prof Kossmann and he's really really good! Imagine... we're in the biggest room in the arts building and people JUST fit in... So there's over 320 students (in all of these BESS courses) and the professor (Martin Fellenz) is making the whole lecture interactive... So he's walking around all the time, asking the people in the last rows questions and illustrating his points with great examples using the students... *** So, he said that people get motivated by money... One student said that this is not true, so he told her to stand up and wave at everyone... He went to this other guy, telling him to get up, that guy didn't do it, so the prof actually offered 5 Euro and the guy got up and gave the money back ;-). Later he offered money again for something and this time another guy kept it ***

• And I also do Management for Engineers... there we'll do a business game called SimProject (yes, VERY creative), but it looks like a bit of fun at least. 

So this all adds up to 40 ECTS (both computer courses are 10 KP each and the others are 5 each) and I have 23 hours of lectuers and tutorials.

So that's about it for the moment...