I am NOT SWISS and I DON'T SOUND SWISS either!

i'm currently describing all the different algorithms i originally researched. for most of them this means going back and rereading the whole chapter in the book cause i can't remember anything more than the name. now it turns out, not only are some of the algorithms easier, more interesting and possibly more efficient than my at the time completely overtaxed brain could take in, but i actually managed to hallucinate an algorithm!

in my main table which i used to make the decisions which algorithms to implement and of which i'm supposed to be giving a quick description of every single algorithm (sorry for that sentence, i'm distraught....) i have a nonexistant variant of my main algorithm! it doesn't exist!

i've found the book i must have hallucinated it from, but seriously, the version i wanted to implement is not there! in fact it makes no sense whatsoever! buggrit!

ok, so this could mean i have an algorithm less to explain. but on the other hand it means i have to tell h (my supervisor) i hallucinated algorithms. sorry, didn't i mention, there's a second unconfirmable algorithm. 2 out of twelve, that's 16.66666666% of my algorithms that DON"T EVEN EXIST!!! oh yes, and let's not forget the other one that's not actually an algorithm, but a form of implementation that can be applied to pretty much any division alg...

oh dear...

Labels: arrgghh, division, i'm special, uni

i am not going to quit
i am not going to quit!
i am not going to quit!!
i am not going to quit!!!
I AM NOT GOING TO QUIT!!!
I AM %$*@! NOT GOING TO QUIT TWO WEEKS BEFORE IT'S OVER ANYWAY! I'VE SURVIVED FIVE AND A HALF YEARS I CAN TAKE 14 MORE DAYS!!!
I WILL NOT QUIT
I WILL NOT QUIT
I WILL NOT QUIT
NO MATTER WHAT, I AM NEARLY THERE, I WILL NOT BLOODY QUIT!



help

Labels: arrgghh, uni

oh dear, i mean tastes of coffee of course. it seems the revolting stuff hasn't even worked!

not having slept a wink last night (seriously, i was up all night, made it to my desk at the ETH at 6.45am (!!!) this morning after finally giving up hope of getting any shut-eye), i felt the need for desperate measures. i forced myself to down a cup of that revolting brew that is really just coal dissolved in water with a fancy name.

it must have been the fourth or fifth cup of coffee since i started my course five and a half years ago now. lets see...

1. in my first semester i had my first cup of coffee after falling asleep during the first hour of a C++ lecture. the problem was, being unused to coffee, it worked too well and i was so jittery i couldn't sit still for the second hour and left after about ten minutes dragging my friend andrea with me. we probably went shopping :-)
   
   
2. in my fourth semester i had a practical introductory course in VLSI (very large scale integration/integrated circuits). it was four hours every thursday afternoon, where the first hour or two were just listening to some guuy giving a talk. i was knackered for some reason and felt that since there were only ten students on the course it'd be very obvious and seriously embarrassing if i fell asleep during the talk. so i forced down another cup of coffee.
   
   it worked perfectly. no jitters this time. but it still had a stronger effect than i'd been expecting: it woke me up so completely that when mcdonald's called to ask me to go to work that eveing i forgot that i'd originally been planning to go home and collapse into bed and went off to work where i stayed wide awake and perky until midnight, when i was sent home and finally remembered that my aim for the day had been 'survive until 5pm when i can crawl home to bed'...
   
   
3. i survived until the seventh semester without having to resort to coffee again. then i got stuck second semester project. after pulling an all-nighter i had my third cup of coffee to survive the important meeting the next morning (which was the main reason i'd stayed up all night in the first place)
   

so i guess that makes today's brew cup number 4. couldn't sleep last night thanks to my brain being on overdrive after having disovered a fatal flaw in the quotient digit conversion algorithm. it's a fundamental flaw, so i'm just screwed. meh.

on the bright side, algorithm number three (radix 4 SRT) is pretending to function. if only i hadn't realised about the fatal flaw i could just carry on happily none the wiser... :-(

Labels: arrgghh, coffee, uni

ok, so LaTex is great in some ways. it formats everything for you, there's absolute no need to worry at all about what a page should look like basically. and it's great for referring to other parts of the document.

but sometimes it does make you wonder where all the sadistic trolls who develop these things are hiding!!! it's enough to drive anyone to drink!

i've got a table that's too wide, so i need it to go sideways across the page (landscape format). after lots of research and trying stuff i find the consensus is that the followin code should work:

\begin{sidewaystable}[p]
\begin{tabular}{|lll|}
...
\end{tabular}
\caption{bla}\label{blabla}
\end{sidewaystable}

THIS is what my table now looks like:



it's gone all shy! and not just that! it's not rotated at all! not even 5 degrees! wtf?! arrrgghhh!!!

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, uni

my test bench has decided it's had enough of being a sensible little programme that does as it's told, when it's told. and regular division's boring anyway. it's decided that non-zero remainders are optional. or at least, they're only calculated for certain division operations which are selected using a (pseudo?) random algorithm known only to the imps inside this annoying computer!!! aarrghhh!!! how can a program that hasn't been changed suddenly start doing different random things?!

so to my great delight, i can no longer tell whether a simulation is going well just by checking whether the report file is still empty, because the stupid stupid STUPID (sorry) test bench is insisting that there are errors. 'i want that remainder to be zero. what a cheek to claim it isn't zero!' ZAP! 'ner-ner, i've reported you for not conforming to zero!'

Labels: arrgghh, bizarre, uni

i had this interview on tuesday (my first proper interview ever!) and the more i think about it, the more i'm convinced i screwed up! it started badly, with me ending up half way across the county/kanton a quarter hour before the interview was meant to start. stupid online timetable sent me on a train that doesn't go to dübendorf!!! luckily i'd planned in half an hour of wandering around lost, so i was only quarter of an hour late in the end. and thank goodness cecile told me how to get into the building (she had an interview there for a different job) cause not finding my way in just might have finished me off at that point ;-) luckily the last thing i'd done before leaving the house was to write down the number, so i was able to give them advance warning. they were very nice about it, but i can't believe i was late to the interview!!! me who's early everywhere (except to lectures of course *g*)!!!

anyway, i don't think i came across as particularly bright ;-) and to round things off, they'd read my blog! in particular the last post. as i posted it, i thought it might not be the best of ideas. ah well, what's life without a little risk every now and then ;-)

anyway, i'm now on tenterhooks, waiting for them to let me know what they've decided. i was surprised myself, but they didn't say 'sorry for wasting your time, but...'

the job sounds fabulous! it'd be so cool! difficult and challenging, but really fascinating :-) and it's near zürich :-)

help! i can't take the supense!

and now i don't dare post this for fear they might read it and think i'm trying to suck up or something. arrgh! grow up vicky!
*smacks self on head and clicks 'publish post'*

Labels: arrgghh, getting lost, i'm special, job search

the club president just sent me another email (see my last post). this time she says 'i tried to adapt the introductory text to suit me, but then the problem is that the rest of the website is only about your team. but i'm sure you'll find a solution'... ??? that's the whole reason i never added the info about the seniors in the first place! does she think i am now going to spend ages changing the whole website, now that the club's suddenly taken an interest in it?! she can go jump off a bloody cliff!

it seems she tried to send me the text as she wants it, but she managed to send me some random word temporary file or something. it won't open anyway. what a shame...

Labels: arrgghh, volleyball

just got a very annoying mail from the president of the feldmeilen volleyball club about how i haven't added the stuff about the seniors to the website and also that i should say that it's a club and they're always short of gymnasts and not just volleyball players. so it's fair enough that she's wondering why the website still doesn't say anything about the seniors' team, i 've been meaning to do it for ages. but i designed the website around the one team. it took me ages to work out the concept and how to organise all the information. no one else was in the least interested, so eventually i just did it the way it made most sense to me. now i'm supposed to add information that has nothing to do with the team i designed the whole thing around, so to me it called for adding an extra page and thinking about how to do it, so that the whole site is still user-friendly (or at least no less so than at the moment). it's just been to much for me, i couldn't face it. and now i've lost the information.

but now she wants to add stuff that's not even about volleyball?! fine. whatever. i've asked her to send me all the information she wants added in the format she wants it to go in and i'll just stick it in where-ever. i've completely lost the will to care. i hate volleyball right now. and that email's just killed my motivation stone dead (and i was doing so well!) so i'm going to post about last night (with the meilen team), i meant to anyway.

it looks like i'll be looking for a new team end of this season. or maybe even a new sport. i don't want to continue in either of the teams i'm in now. but i guess i'm looking for something that doesn't exist: a team full of people who want to win and are willing to put in the effort, but at the same time don't freak out and start verbally attacking each other when they have a loosing streak. we lost again last night. crud. but not particularly surprising. what was surprising (and rather horrifying) was the way that after the match some of our players accused the rest of us of not trying hard enough, of going on court with the attitude 'we're going to lose anyway' and not bothering to play our best. obviously, that's not such a horrifying thing to accuse someone of, it was their tone. just vicious. i don't deal well with vicious tones. it makes me either want to attack back or sulk. especially when i'm being told off for something i didn't do! i can't go on court and not try my hardest even when i've got a broken finger! i want to punch something (or someone). how dare they. i'm not sure i want to go out on that court again with people like that. i don't mind losing (obviously i mind a bit), as long as i know we tried our hardest to win and i always do (try my hardest to win, not lose)! but i do mind when...

it was suggested that somehow, team spirit was what we were missing. well, my spirit for that team just left. i quit. as soon as possible. damn! i hate looking for new teams!

there goes one of my reasons for looking for a job in switzerland. stupid volleyball. what other sports are there? football - i'll kick myself as soon as the ball; basketball - i only hit the basket when i'm aiming for something completely different (for instance if i'm trying to play volleyball); hockey - similar problam as in football except more dangerous to other people with the stick... i'd only be any use in either of them as goalie and i need more exercise, not less; handball - lack of aiming ability again a problem... crud. i like volleyball really. there's just something wrong with my teams. oh dear, it's probably wrong with me, not them. double-crud!

the other team (feldmeilen) have decided to try and pull themselves together and actually make an effort in training. peter (the coach) read my blog and they discussed it are trying to fix the problem. what a horrible moment when he told me he'd read it! and told them about it! but i went back over everything i've written and it turns out i was very... restrained ;-) thank goodness for that :-)

so hopefully things will be getting better there. but i can't imagine i'll change my mind about quitting once the season's finished. although i can imagine being to cowardly to actually do it. aw crap. i hope not!

it's typical: last time the matches clashed, i'd promised to play for feldmeilen even though i'd much rather have played with meilen. in a couple of weeks there are two matches on the same night again and this time i've promised to play with meilen. but after last night, i'd rather break a leg than have to go on court with them again... seriously.

Labels: arrgghh, volleyball

it has now advanced to generating completely random overflow and divide-by-zero flags and returning all zero quotients and unknown (xxxx) remainders... i'm going to fail my masters project! that was the one thing i expected to pass. typical! :-(

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, uni

i blame my friend pij! he seems to be a bit obsessive about wrapping every present uniquely superbly. sorry pij, but that's how it seems to me ;-). we've been chatting about this for quite a while now both online and face-to-face. in fact pij sent me a picture of his complete works of art cause i was so curious about the whole thing. hmm, i wonder if he'd let me post it. dörf i, pij? they look incredible. absolutely stunning.

problem is, now i start wrapping presents (not bad, i did it christmas eve this year, instead of waiting till tomorrow *g*) and feel like i've got to prove something. ok, so my presents are quite crap and now i feel a lot better about them, having spent almost an hour each on wrapping them. an hour per present?! that's just sick! it gets torn off in such a rush, what an awful waste of time! aww crap.

see, this present wrapping stuff confuses me.

i always took care to make them look nice and none ever looked the same. but this time i was freaky about it. the worst thing was, i did the first two and then tim comes along, looks at them and says 'they don't look christmassy. oh, they're nice, but not christmassy'... so i decided to cut out silver/grey stars and stick them on the blue paper to make it christmassy. except it turns out that my pad of coloured paper with 10 different colours doesn't have grey... guess what vicky does (at midnight, don't forget): she hunts up a pristine piece of white paper and colours it silver with a silver pencil... no wonder it took me ages...

if nobody notices how nicely i've wrapped the presents i'm gonna throttle pij! nothing personal of course, gäll du ;-)

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, random

buggrit. i know exactly when and where i lost it: i was running to catch the train and just ignored whatever it was that fell out of my pocket ('i haven't got anything important in my pockets' i thought) and carried on. as soon as the train started moving, i realised that the pocket the iPod had been in was alarmingly empty... went straight back, but couldn't find it anywhere =-( i'll have to go to the police on monday (it seems the police run the lost-and-found), but the terrible thing is there's a drain exactly where i dropped the iPod, so odds are it's drowned =-(

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special

i just had about two seconds of 'hurray, it finally divides 1:1 correctly!!!' until i realised that instead it's decided that dividing things by zero is no problemo... wtf? :-(

perhaps i've found a new kind of maths. it's a bit like complex numbers. until someone came up with complex numbers you couldn't get the root of -1, before i came up with my revolutionary new divider you couldn't divide by zero. now you can! maybe i'll win the nobel prize...

76:0 = -5 rem 4 for example. it's very complex mathematics, way too difficult to explain... ;-)

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, uni

i'm just getting miserabler and miserabler (yes i know that's not a word. eff off). i'm in one team where they won't listen to me, just carry on doing the most ridiculous things quite happily. aggravates the heck out of me. and in the other team i'm one of the worst players. now this would be fine, in fact for me it should be the ideal setup, cause this way i can learn the most from them. the problem i've got is that they're insisting on playing me, no matter what utter crud i play. and the coach won't bench me until we're 22-something down in the final set, even though the middle hitter on the bench is wayyyyy better than me! thank god we've officially completed phase one of building up the team with this match today (3-0 defeat). now, the aim is no longer to let everyone get some court time in to build up the team, but to actually start winning stuff so that we don't get demoted... if that doesn't mean more bench time for me, i'm gonna have to fake an injury. oh no, wait, no need to fake one, i can pick: the bust elbow, bust fingers, chronically screwy right (i.e. main) shoulder... stupid sport.

and apart from the not being benched, he keeps giving me the same instructions over and over again. fuck, that drives me mad! if i'm playing so badly, that he has to give me the same basic simple instructions in single syllable words 10 times, surely anyone can see that either i'm the biggest moron ever to stumble onto a volleyball court (in which case i should be benched in case i start trying to score goals) or I CAN'T DO IT, I'M FUCKING TRYING AREN'T I!!! and again, SHOULD BE BENCHED, telling me the same thing ten times makes things WORSE not better. fuckit.

Labels: arrgghh, rant, volleyball

my wonderful division block is really beginning to worry me. in latest news, one is too large to be divided by one. maybe the fundamental basics of maths changed last night and that's why i now get an overflow for 0001:01 which even in binary representation is still one divided by one (but it no longer equals one...)

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, uni

i'm trying to translate my dad's text about the region around their appartment in klosters for the german holiday homes website cause my mum has suddenly decided it's a priority (after about a year of not worrying much about it) now that i'm stressed silly by my final year project. just gotta love the timing...

i hate translating anyway, it's horrible, sometimes i wish i only spoke one language, then everyone else would just have to translate for me if they cared enough and i'd be happy either way ;-) but my dad seems to think he's a frustrated literary genius, you wouldn't believe the stuff he comes up with. and it just makes translating soooo much more of a nightmare!

anyway, i'm looking for some online machine to give me german antonyms (opposite of synonym *g*) for some words where i can't find anything that won't make the translation of dad's oh-so-beautiful prose sound even more ridiculous, only some word that means the opposite. after searching for ages for some 'gegenteil-wörterbuch' i stumble across the word synonym, which jogs my memory and i start looking for an 'antonym-wörterbuch'. a hit! hurray!
...
   Antonymwörterbuch {n}
              dictionary of antonyms

Gaaahhhhhh!!!


@14:37: crap! i was certain i had it now! it said 'Wörterbuch der Gegenwörter' so i was going 'yes! that's exactly what i'm looking for!'
...
   Wörterbuch der Gegenwörter (n.)
              Antonymwörterbuch

google's just having me on!!! i guess i might as well give up now. especially since i've forgotten what word it was that i wanted the antonym of... :-(


@15:27: arrrrggghhhh!!! i thought i was almost done, only 10 more lines. and then i read the next sentence. it's getting worse!!! listen to this:
'If you want something a bit more special, you can take the train through the tunnel and over the world famous, and simply stunning, Bernina Pass line down to Tirano in northern Italy...and of course, being Switzerland there are plenty of trains so you won't have a problem getting back again on the same day.'
da-ad!!!
it just makes me want to lie down and wail! why am i having to translate this tripe?! :-((


@15:38: i think the rest of the people in the room are beginning to get a bit worried. every so often i start (silently) growling and swearing at the screen, hitting my forehead and trying to pull my hair out in frustration. so far i've got 'Für einen ganz speziellen Ausflug' as translation of 'If you want something a bit more special'. crap, damn, buggrit, fuck, fuck, fuuuck!!!
so much for swearing less.

Labels: arrgghh, literary genius?

i can't believe it! hubert (my tutor) and i spent ages scouring the web for a table with taps for maximum length LFSRs (linear feedback shift registers, if they're maximum length they cycle through every sequence of 0s and 1s except for the all-zeroes sequence, which is very useful for generating random test vectors for an exhaustive test). we found this incredible looking table, gives a solution for LFSRs of width up to 786. and when i saw the date (26th oct 2007, i.e. two weeks ago) i thought, wow lucky for me they published this just before i needed it :)

but now the very first LFSR i try fails! 13 bit, seriously! crap! it's supposed to have a period of 8192, guess what i get... seven!!! seven different vectors!!! i could have made seven different vectors on my own, thank you very much!!! gah!

now the question is: have i made a really stupid mistake (really stupid cause from the document it should be so easy to implement that even i should have got it right first time) or have these geniuses in new zealand managed to get the 13th vector of 786 completely wrong?! craaaaaaaaaaaaap!

maybe they weren't very good at counting: 1, 2, many, lots...


[edit@19:16: oopsy, i've found my devastatingly stupid error: i originally just wrote an LFSR with random taps so that my code would compile before i worked out where to get some sensible maximal length taps. when i wrote the proper LFSR, i forgot to remove the other one, so everything was being done properly and then overwritten... i'm a moron, i know...]

Labels: arrgghh, i'm special, pratchetty, uni

had a match tonight with the meilen team (my other swiss volleyball team) and of course we lost again. at the moment we're just practicing playing together, since only about half of us have played for this team before this season (i hadn't, i used to play for the mixed team, but we ran out of guys and gave up). and we almost won the third set (lost 27:29 in the end), which was quite cool.

but once again i managed to hit the floor and have the floor hit me back :( my elbow is killing me and i've got a driving lesson first thing tomorrow morning! with the exam coming up!!! buggrit, millennium hand and shrimp! and i didn't even get the ball (as usual...) crivens! i shoulda kicked meself in ma ain heid!

Labels: arrgghh, pratchetty, volleyball

arrgh!!! how come everyone else in the room manages to murmur quietly to their collegues, while the ticinesi have to chatter on at full volume?! how come they never ever turn it down?! it's driving me up the wall! last time i worked in this room (two years ago) they were doing a project here too, but at least then they were half-way across the room from me. this time they've got the desk next to mine! i'd have to turn my ipod right up and blast my eardrums to kingdom come before it could drown them out!!! i hope they started their project long before i started mine, otherwise i've got another 5 months of this!!! arrrghh!!! it doesn't bear thinking about!!!
help! help! HELP!!!
(btw ticinesi are swissies from the italian-speaking part of switzerland ticino)

Labels: arrgghh, rant, uni

i'm a student, of course 9.15am is early morning! so naturally i felt an energy drink would be in order. i went to the migros to buy some of their cheap red bull knock-off (1.- a can and it tastes almost the same as red bull!) before the lesson. it's easy to find, it's the small 250ml cans with the migros budget pattern... can't miss it except now, now!!! they seem to have introduced a new product: energy cola. difference in packaging: on closer inspection (when the taste is completely different from what you expected, more different than can be blamed on the whopping great cold i've got) the writing is dark brown instead of black. how on earth did i not notice that?! i must be going blind!!! don't miss the sarcasm. and the top line still says 'energy'... how on earth are you supposed to tell them apart, especially half asleep?! i was proud of myself for avoiding the diet stuff (until i took the third mouthful (as i said, it was early in the morning, my brain was not up and running yet)). meh. managed to drink it after reminding myself that i really needed to wake up. but i'm not sure i can face drinking the second can... :-¦ maybe if i take it home and stick it in the fridge gabriela will drink it. she's always drinking any red bull or cider she finds in there. dad gets really annoyed cause she keeps opening his beer thinking it's cider and then puts it back when she finds it's not and of course it goes flat... ;-)

the driving lesson went well though. we did a mock exam and i did really well, inspite of the tricky little roads we went down where irene (my instructor) refused to give me any directions. there were lots of barely marked one way streets and i didn't go down any of them the wrong way :-) and we survived the killer motorway slip road (not kidding about it beinig killer, it's really short and at the end there's no hard shoulder to continue on if you can't get into the traffic. apparently one instructor can't drive anymore cause a lorry went into the back of them... eeek!)

in fact only two things went wrong. i stalled right at the end in the car park (moron me, i know). and the other thing was that i got confused: i thought we were somewhere else and when irene said we were heading for heuried i was convinced that was left. but when we came round the bend the signpost said right, so i was a tiny bit confused and my brain couldn't quite work out what the rules are if the lights are flashing but the barrier's not down yet at the level crossing... oopsy. so irene braked hard (i'm not a hundred percent sure my brain wouldn't have come to the right conclusion in time, i was going relatively slow) and i failed the exam... wooooopsy. thank goodness it wasn't the real exam. and i've learnt two things: never assume you know where you are, just follow the signs (these are guidelines for ME, obviously anyone with half a brain and maybe a bit more experience than me might well actually know where they are (and be right about it, too)), and i don't think i'll ever forget that i absolutely have to stop no matter what if the level crossing lights are flashing...

but anyway, apart from that it was fine, irene said i'd have passed if not for the level crossing, which is something i'd never have believed last night :) hurray, maybe i can actaully learn to drive ;-)

Labels: arrgghh, driving

...has left comments.
the moron can't even spell. no i'm not talking about the usual abbreviations, i mean 'didn't jesus ADVICE you...'
go jump off a cliff. meh.

Labels: arrgghh