nawl

The bad: Princeton's finals are held after Christmas break. Every moment I spent not working during Christmas was guilt-ridden, and I suffered for it later. The good: All of my finals are take-home or projects. I don't technically have to be in Princeton to work.

In an amazing fit of pre-work procrastination, I cleaned my room at home. I unpacked the five boxes of books that have been sitting on my floor for the past year, recycled four years of schoolwork, and cleaned off the desk which has been piled with junk for the past five years.

I did my last algorithms problem set and the take-home final. I went to bab5. I started my computer vision project. I went dancing. I visited Hixie in his new Mountain View location, and he showed me his train set, which covers his entire living room. For scale, you can see the two laptops that control it on the left side.

This image is actually a blended panorama of four pictures, which I created with my computer vision project. I actually intended to try Canon's built-in image stitching software because I figured it would work better, but then I learned that it won't accept images taken in an arbitrary configuration. I linked to the larger version, where you can see better how distorted the left side is, and the imperfect blending along the seams of the tracks. (Or if you're into model trains, you can admire the trains.)

I went to Berkeley and saw many dear friends, both expected and unexpected. Ping gave me a short lesson in poi-spinning. It's easier than it looks. I went to Thai brunch. The weather was gorgeous.

I went to Zachary's with Sarah and Elliot. I went back home.

I programmed in Matlab. I flew to Princeton. I worked the whole plane flight.

This is what Princeton looked like the week before I left, which is approximately what I was expecting to see when I got back.

Instead, it looked like this:

It was sunny and warm enough to walk around without a coat. I prepared my presentation slides. I worked on the cryptography project. I gave my presentation. I flew to Europe. In Amsterdam I paid for wireless to do what I hoped was a last-minute review of the cryptography project before it was turned in, and ended up proving on two hours of sleep that the whole idea I was writing up was fundamentally incompatible with our goals. I flew to Bergen.

My first impression was of mountains, and water, clouds and rain and rocky grassy hillsides. For those unfamiliar with Norway's geography, Bergen is pretty far south and right on the west coast, which means that it gets a lot of light in the winter, and the sea (and jet stream which is in danger of stopping from global warming) keeps the weather relatively mild, where relatively mild means around freezing and rainy.

I think this is the typical tourist view of Bergen, which is of prettily-colored houses going up a hill. (Actually the real tourist view is the row red and orange fish houses along the harbor, but I haven't really been that close to them.)

Notice that the sky is gray. According to a weather-statistics site I found, it rains something like 270 days a year here. When it's not raining, it's gray. And in the winter, it's dark. So the following picture is a slightly more accurate depiction of what I see of the city.

Last night it snowed, which would be an improvement over the miserable rain of the past week except that it turned to slush immediately upon hitting the ground. But actually, it's not so bad. It turns the pre-dawn hours blue.

When I wake up in the morning, it's dark. Dawn comes just about as I get into work at 9 am, though today we were a bit later. The moon was just setting over the mountain as we walked to the bus stop.

It's dark again when we leave to eat dinner at 4 or 5 pm.

I did my cryptography final and my project report for vision. I wanted to start my programming languages final this morning, but I guess it's not available yet, and it's not yet morning on the East Coast.

Norway is a funny country. It only has about 4.5 million people, which means that "national" means something very different than it does in the US. For example, the front-page article in one of the Bergen newspapers a couple days ago was a story about a girl who froze her hand to her freezer, complete with a picture of her bandaged hand covering the full front page. It even made national news. (Tabloid schmabloid.)

Now, admittedly, a US paper might run an article on a similar topic, but it would focus on the "rising tide of hand injuries due to freezers" and feature national statistics on injuries, interviews with industry spokesmen and freezer victims, and investigative reporting into the lives of the workers in the Chinese factories producing 90% of the freezers owned by Americans.

One night we walked home past the stave church. (Also a panorama.)

So the story is that it was an 800 year old wooden church, perfectly preserved. (According to the internet, the stave churches were so designed because it elevated them off the ground and kept the wood from rotting. I guess it was also coated with tar.) Then it was burned down by a satanist on June 6, 1992. They found a charred rabbit inside. He was sent to jail for murder and other things.

But it just so happened that they had complete plans of every single piece of the church, so they chopped down a bunch of endangered trees and rebuilt the whole thing down to the last detail. Why did they have a complete catalog of every piece? Because the church was originally built somewhere else, and a century or two ago the townspeople were going to knock it down to build a new church, so some rich guy bought the whole thing, had it deconstructed piece by piece, kept detailed records, and reconstructed it in Bergen.

I'm going to go study architecture. No, the boring kind.