ByteLabs

Last friday afternoon I was anxiously awaiting Christina at Waverly Station. She arrived by train from Watford, where she is working as an assistant teacher at two schools. The first evening we went to the Bannermans right across the street and catched up on what was going on in the past 6 weeks.

After a real English breakfast we went to the Royal Museum of Scotland and had a wonderful day insinde, because outside it was raining!

Then we headed on to Edinburgh Castle and went down the Royal mile to Hollyrood Palace and enjoyed the Scottish flair of the city as Christina has never been here before!

Just have a look at it yourself.

Today we went to see Falkland Palace and East Lomond Hill. Falkland Palace is in the middle of nowhere one hour from Edinburgh but it is really worth a visit. East Lomond Hill offers some nice hiking routes. Christian, Ulrike and myself were trying to get from East Lomond Hill to West Lomond Hill.

Unfortunately there was not enough time to achieve our goal but at least we tried really hard :) – as usual you can take a look at the gallery to get some impressions of that trip.

The workload at uni is slowly increasing and since I finally got all of my books I’m starting to catch up on all of the reading assignments. This weekend should suffice though to get all of my reading done.

Today I went on another trip with the ISC, namely to Pitlochry which is considered by many to be the gateway to the highlands. The town is set at the foot of Ben Vrackie’s mountainous slopes and is on the eastern shore of the River Tummel.
In the morning we made an interesting tour through the local Blair Athol Whisky distillery and even got the chance to taste a little bit of the self made 12 year old single malt Blair Athol Whisky.

Now I’m not a big Whisky drinker but I have to admit that it was pretty good!

Afterwards I went on a little hike with Ulrike, a really nice girl from Berlin whom I have met on the bus that morning. We kinda explored the surroundings of Pitlochry. There are really many beautiful hiking paths but unfortunately we only had enough time to walk along the shortest hiking trail.

Finally I got around setting up Majordomo with Sendmail. Yeah, I know, you are thinking: “Why the hell doesn’t he use Postfix and ...put your favourite mailing list software in here… to do the job?”

Well, I wanted to go see Glasgow this weekend but I caught the flu and had to stay in bed since friday :(. At least I had the chance to check out the local health service and I must say it was better than expected. On friday I went to see the doctor and it was a really really nice lady trying to help as good as she possibly could!

Today I finally feel better and hope to be able to go to UNI tomorrow.

Well, I wasn’t just staying in bed and sleeping all time, I used some of my time to get a third of a two weeks assignment done in Inf2A (Processing Natural and Formal Languages). Part of the assignment is theoretical and the other part must be implemented in Python, a really easy to learn programming language.

I also fiddled around with a new window manager called wmii-window manager improved 2. So if you are working in a Unix-like environment and want to be able to efficiently use your window manager you should definitely check it out!

Today (Sunday), Christina is also leaving Austria to go to London as an assistant teacher! Good luck Chri!

Every tuesday night the ISC meets at the Bannermans and celebrates the so called international pub night. But this weeks tuesday wasn’t just an ordinary tuesday pubnight, Chrigl, my friend from Switzerland, celebrated his 23rd Birthday – Happy Birthday Chrigl!!

It was quite a lot of fun and I even met a girl from St.Valentin, Magda and 2 of her mates from Linz, at the Bannermans! It really seems that we live in a small world!!

Jakob has made a little blog aggregator which merges all the blogs from JKU students currently studying abroad! It’s nice, go have a look at it!

On Saturday we went to North Berwick, on Scotland’s east coast, about an hour’s drive from Edinburgh. North Berwick is the site of a dormant volcanoe, a quaint fishing village, the massive ruins of Tantallon Castle, the Scottish Seabird Centre, a picturesque beach and the impressive ‘Bass Rock.’ It was a relly nice trip and we even had beatiful weather.

I even got into the water since the locals were doing it but I couldn’t stay in there for too long because of the chilly water. As usual there are many more pictures in the gallery, enjoy!

Today I was really lucky to get a ticket for the Introduction of the Semantic Web Talk by Professor Sir Tim Berners Lee. It was a pleasure to sit in the lecture theater and listen to the ideas and intentions behind the Semantic Web. It was a very well prepared presentation and of course it was done in HTML.

The talk has been recorded, and the video recording will be made available in due course – so stay tuned!

After having visited some course introductory talks I went to my first lecture called ‘Informatics 2A: Processing Natural and Formal Languages’.

It looks like it is going to be a very interesting and well prepared lecture, let’s see what happens! On Monday I signed up for the The University of Edinburgh Computing and Artificial Intelligence Society and will try to take part in some of their activities. For Saturday I signed up for a trip to North Berwick organised by the ISC (International Student Center). Looks like a really nice day trip – I hope that I will have a nice story and many pictures of that trip up by the upcoming Sunday so stay tuned.

Today we had really nice weather so I decided to go running around Hollyrood Park. You can take a look at a live webcam which is located somewhere in Holyrood Park. Tomorrow there is going to be an Informatics Colloquium by Professor Sir Tim Berners Lee about the Semantic Web. I really hope to get tickets for that event so that I can actually get to see it live!

Last night we had a pretty cool BBQ (barbecue) thing going on at Robertsons Close. It was organized by Will, a really cool guy from New York (cheers Will). So we had hamburgers, hot dogs and even marshmallows! I also got to know a lot of new and interesting people from many different countries like France, Italy, Brussels, Spain, Mexico…

Today I finally booked the flight which get’s me home over the christmas holidays so for all of you guys@home: Watch out! I’m gonna be there from the 21st of decemeber until the 3rd of january. I also finally had the chance to talk to Ralf over Skype (*cheers to Frostburg :) *)!