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

you know, i thought no-one at the day care center knew about us except our two close friends (hmm, what were their names?). one day i thought i was being clever when i asked one of the carers 'you don't know who i love, do you?' (can you hear the 'ner-ner' tone of voice?). i was utterly horrified when she knew!!!

but i got over the horror, and was only slightly more self-conscious about the whole thing (i was a very shy child, adolescent,... in fact, i'm still very shy. i just mostly manage to overcome it with a huge amount of effort. and then you can't get me to shut up...)

the worst thing about everyone knowing... i'm still ashamed and it's been nearly twenty years now!

we were in kindergarten and kinderkrippe (day care) together, and until that fateful moment i was convinced that no-one but our two faithful sidekicks knew and was desperate to keep it that way. i think i might have thought my mum would find out. just don't ask me why that would have been such a tragedy, that's a whole other can of worms.

so one day in kindergarten we were playing a game of some kind of tag. i can't remember exactly what happened. he was standing on a chair next to me, and he'd obviously done something i construed as endangering our cover of 'just friends'. i shoved him, just a little, to show anyone who might have been watching that there was nothing (absolutely nothing, do you hear?!) between us. (can you believe it, i was six! clearly, i've always been a weirdo.)

roberto fell off the chair and hurt himself. not badly, but of course the teacher was very upset, anything could have happened! she sent me to sit outside in the corridor as a punishment.

i was absolutely devastated! i hadn't meant to hurt him! i'd never have... and now i couldn't even apologise cause i was stuck out here and he was inside... i hated myself for hurting him.

and when i was let back in, i was too embarrassed to go and apologise. i don't think i ever apologised for it properly. and although he didn't really get hurt physically, i'm still ashamed of it. how sad is that...

and that was the worst thing about finding out that everyone 'knew about us': that horrendous moment was completely unnecessary (of course it would have been unnecessary anyway to a normal person, but we're not talking about a normal person here), cause everyone already knew anyway.

better memories: the four of us used to play this game where two of us were in the little room at the back of the kinderkrippe-building and the other two went outside the door. it seems to somehow have evolved out of nothing. the two inside would hide under the covers in the bed there and the two outside would creep back in and try to scare them. who knows why...

but it evolved further to the point where roberto and i would always insist on being the two in the room, so we could kiss under the covers. we thought we were so grown up! no tongues of course ;-) i'm not sure we could have imagined it...

our friends got more and more bored of this version of the game. in fact, i think the boy gave up on us completely, long before the girl did. she kept trying to get us to switch places, but i was too jealous... oh dear ;-)

how weird, the things you find hidden in your memory sometimes...

the last time i saw roberto: the final day of kinderkrippe, before we all went off to separate schools in different parts of bern. we didn't want to say goodbye till the last minute. but his father came to pick him up and i was terrified of his father. he was a doctor. i think he was quite strict, but i'm sure he wouldn't have bitten me for saying goodbye to roberto ;-)

but i was too shy and scared to go up and say goodbye. i just lurked and watched him leave without ever looking back. he didn't say goodbye either...

（；_・）

Labels: guys, i'm special, sad, sometimes i don't like me, x365

it's fun. and it has one huge advantage over volleyball: my knees aren't even aware i went to training tonight. i didn't realise until i had to walk up the steps at the station on the way home, but my knees feel completely fine and that is not normal for wednesday nights...

i didn't get much of a sweat going though, as there wasn't much any training, it was all playing. and because i wasn't particularly confident, i didn't chase every ball that might have been mine but let the more experienced players take it, so i didn't move as much as some of the others. but in time that should change. :-)

my left arm got rather cold though as the hall wasn't heated and the weather is back to being a bit chilly. i was going easy on my left wrist (i'd have used it less anyway, as the normal, right-handed person that i am *g*) cause i overdid it last weekend practising for playing in church. i wasn't supposed to be playing, but the guy who was backed out very late. so i started practising friday night, i didn't even know half the songs, and of the ones i did know i'd only ever had a go at one of them once for fun...

i told myself no-one could complain if i didn't play them as well as possible, given the short notice. and no-one would care. i knew this. except that there was one single person who would have cared if i hadn't given my all: me. so i ended up getting one of those infection thingies in my wrist (sorry, i only know the german name: sehnenscheidenentzündung) from going from playing the piano for an hour or two a month or an hour per day if i'm playing in church on sunday to four and a half hours of serious band practise one saturday morning... bad, bad idea. (and if i'd realised it would be that long, i'd have had breakfast first...)

anyway, after putting cream on it and bandaging it up to keep myself from using it too much, my wrist feels mostly better. mostly. and now my right hand hurts too from the fistball. my little finger feels seriously bruised and i can't work out how that could have happened. i hope it's not broken...

and i'm playing again this sunday. and the week after. hmmm...

ah well, same old same old, my hands hurt and my shoulders hurt (but that's just from habit and cause they've needed a serious massage for years now, but i'm too ticklish to let anyone near them). but my knees don't! hurrah! success :-)

Labels: fistball, i'm special, music, volleyball

i woke up this morning to a loud, confusing noise. well, when i say woke up i mean got up, or perhaps stood up. because i certainly wasn't awake! i lurched towards the bathroom, passing the source of the aggravating racket. it had to be stopped. my hand reached out, lifted the receiver and slammed it right back down again, never even breaking (my admittedly lurching) stride.

until... i woke up. and realised what i'd just done! oh crap, i hope it wasn't important...

i went back to bed and woke up again to the sound of the door bell ringing. still slightly befuddled, i initially thought it was the phone again. 'i'm not going to get it, i might slam it down again, best just to let it ring.' my brain doesn't really work properly until an hour or two after i've got up. by the time i realised it was the door bell this time, i couldn't be bothered to get up. 'anyway, i'm in my pyjamas. and it's probably just one of my sister's friends and she's away anyway...' were my more or less lucid rationalisations.

eventually whoever it was gave up and left.

this guy from the insurance company phoned up and went on and on at me about something and insisted i take a message for mum. i hope i can decipher it when she comes home, cause he himself wasn't particularly coherent and my writing is bad to start with, but when some german guy is mumbling at you down the phone at top speed, it starts looking rather hieroglyphic...

a friend of mine who works for a recruiting company phoned to give me some tips on my CV. that was the one good phone call today ;-)

then some woman trying to sell burglar alarms phoned up. i've had her on the line before. it's getting annoying. she did mention that she'd tried to phone this morning and not reached anyone... that cheered me up a bit :-)

i'm surprised the woman from the piano tuning company hasn't phoned again. yet. i should probably run away in case she does ;-)

i'm off to try fistball. hope i don't break anything...

Labels: fistball, i'm special, job search

wow! i'm on indie bloggers. how cool is that :-)
thanks stacy!!!

doing the sitting-down happy dance again :-D
yay!

(here's the original post btw: the moment)

Labels: happy dance, i'm special, literary genius?

ok, the last post was a bit freaky. sorry about that. i was in a freaky place...

have recovered quite well, thank you, after spending the last two days sleeping, with a few breaks to relax, eat something, maybe watch a film (love stardust, almost as good as the book *g*) and then go back to bed.

i kind of went from freaky to being slightly depressed (while i was awake, anyway). but i'm slowly building up to excited. currently i'm at pleased. maybe even very pleased. i'm getting the urge to do cartwheels again, which is a good sign :-)

i should celebrate. but how? can't go out drinking, my drinking buddies are all in bristol :-(
maybe the cinema. but there's nothing on that i'd want to go see to celebrate having survived uni... hmm, what to do about it?

Labels: i'm special, sleep deprived, uni, weird urges

in 8 hours and 20 minutes i have to hand in my master thesis in electrical engineering (and i'm going to make it if i don't get distracted again) (oh yes, and if the computer finally coughs up the last set of results i need desperately). one would assume someone who's made it this far could do elementary sums. such as 4=1+3 for example. but no. not i... (me? i don't thinks so. who knows? Dr. Grammar, but right now i really don't care)

anyway, i had to make copies of my project definition (i don't know, that's how leo translated 'aufgabenstellung'). i need four copies of it. so off i went to the photocopier. made one copy to make sure the machine was working ok. it was. 'right, i need three more copies then,' i say to myself. four copies, that's what i need.

sorting them out on the desk just now... hmm, why are there... oh. oopsy...

well done vicky ;-)

Labels: i'm special, sleep deprived, uni

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've survived the presentation! hurrah! the beginning of the end! and i mean end in a good way :-)

i don't seem to have embarrassed myself too much. my supervisor helpfully pointed out afterwards that you could tell i was nervous. next time tell me something i don't know... other than that and the fact that i forgot to label the axes of my time-area plot because the results only turned up half an hour before the presentation and i was so stressed, he said it was ok.

damn, i'm glad it's over!

i got here at 7am, my brother tim got me up at ten to six (thanks thanks thanks tim!!!), managed to fix the slides and stuff in the following two hours, all the while chanting 'calm, calm, i'm calm' with a 'shut up vicky, you're making yourself more nervous' thrown in every now and then for good measure...

now i just have to finish the report in three and a half days. 92 hours and 20 minutes to be precise. i'm still missing rather large chunks of it and keep thinking of more stuff that needs to be added :-(

ah well. i'm off on my lunch break at the moment, i can never work properly right after giving a presentation, have to wait for the nerves to calm down... so glad my legs worked when it was my turn to get up there. wasn't convinced they would ;-) and my stomach rumbled right at the end of the previous presentation! but luckily it restrained itself during mine. can you imagine?! ;-)

Labels: i'm special, presentations, uni

two minor problems:
a) the results aren't available yet, even though i've got the top 5 processors at the department synthesising like mad.

b) i've sat here staring at a blank slide for the last 10 minutes trying to think up some personal conclusions. the only thing that came to mind is 'i wouldn't do it again'. so i've decided to rename the last slide from 'conclusions' to 'conclusion' and finish with 'i conclude.' see how they react :-)

Labels: i'm special, presentations, uni

i'm a moron, there's no doubt about it! after having a temporary lapse of insanity and actually getting some work done, i have now spent all night at the computer playing games and listening to music on youtube... because i sleep too much anyway? you complete idiot vicky!

anyway, to horrify and offend anyone reading, here's the list of the music i listened to:

• started with mary chapin carpenter, i usually do :-)
  
  
• then some leona lewis
  
  
• music from the disney film hercules
  
  
• while i was at it, some more disney: mulan
  
  
• then some kenny rogers
  
  
• a load of a-ha to finish it off

i think that about covers my crimes last night ;-)

Labels: i'm special, music

it's a bit late to ask that now, 10 days before the due date of my master thesis, but why am i studying at the ETH? seriously. i'm not the studenty type. ok, the drinking-loads studenty type, i guess so, but the studying-hard-to-learn-stuff-and-get-a-good-degree type? seriously NOT ME.

so why? i guess cause i could and it sounded interesting. you know. it was interesting, actually. i do like learning about stuff, but not actually studying it.

take the second year exams for example. about 40% fail and have to repeat, so it's a big deal. i remember turning up for one exam and as usual everyone was having the big 'i've been swotting for this one eight hours a day for the last fortnight and i still don't know everything! how much time have you been putting in?' discussion.

my contribution was 'i managed to get my minesweeper highscore down to 92 seconds! yay!'

that's the kind of student i am. what am i doing studying engineering at the top technical uni in switzerland? :-s

Labels: i'm special, uni

i should be writing my master thesis like mad. but i've got stuck and am surfing the internet instead. i've joined a new network: Twenty Something Bloggers. Typical ;-)

in my search for a suitable profile picture i stumbled over this old example of my infinite specialness that i don't seem to have posted:


my phone can take panoramic pictures and standing in the bar at the top of the guiness store house in dublin i decided to try it out. after carefully reading the instructions (really carefully! twice!!) i took the three pictures. and then declared my phone was too useless to stick them together properly. would you believe it took me about ten minutes to realise i'd taken the pictures in the wrong order...

i'm never going to be able to tell the difference between right and left.

ooh, i did post about it, i just didn't put the picture up...

so, back to describing division algorithms and drawing block diagrams :-(

Labels: dublin, i'm special, networks, pics, procrastinating, uni

pij and i had dinner at the Uni cafeteria tonight. note the capital U in Uni. that's cause i don't mean any old uni, i don't mean the one i go to (the ETH), i mean Uni Zurich (the ETH's much better *g*). right now it's an important distinction, cause you wouldn't get such bizarreness at the ETH ;-)

afterwards i headed off in search of the loo. set back from the entrance i find a series of doors. the first one has a sign on it saying 'MEN A 11' and one of the usual little male figures after the 11. i think 'isn't that overkill, they already said MEN...' and look at the next door. which has a sign with 'MEN A 12' on it. what, the men get two loos?! ok, so where's the women's?

i then realise that the little figure on the second sign is wearing a skirt. is this some kind of a joke?!?!?! it says MEN, why is there a female stick figure next to MEN?!

i'm a little touchy about rest room signs because, speaking from bizarre experience, i am easily confused even when there is absolutely nothing to be confused about.

i thought i'd posted about it, but i can't seem to find the post. maybe it got left behind in my imagination :-s

i've walked into the men's room before after concentrating hard on reading the signs and getting it right, even when the signs simply said 'damen' and 'herren' which shouldn't be too taxing after growing up in swtizerland!!!

so it took me a while to work out that MEN A stands for mensa A not men's loos A. what moron thought that was a good idea? maybe there's a hidden camera there somewhere ;-)

Labels: bizarre, i'm special, random

i can't sleep :-( it's this stupid master thesis, my brain can't turn off (i know it's stopped working properly, but it's still on...)

anyway, i've been thinking some more about these weird near-irrisistible urges. remembering more occasions where i've beaten the urge or given in to it *eeek*

• when i work the late shift at mcdonald's, at some point this plastic cup full of bright blue liquid appears on top of one of the grills. it looks like some delicious cocktail. or poison. whatever it is, i'm hugely tempted to try and drink it... so far i've managed to refrain, but it's always close.
  
  i'm tempted to drink the extra-specially strong grill cleaning fluid even though i am aware it would probably do it's very best to kill me. how special is that?
  
  
• another drinking temptation: remember the white stuff? ;-) it's quite a scary memory. it was saturday night, the first week of my work placement in the UK, and my first night out with the guys from infineon. we were drinking outside the llandogger trow (a pub in bristol).
  
  towards midnight, someone discovered an almost empty wine glass containing some unknown milky white fluid. i know, it sounds bad! but i'm sure it wasn't. the glass was otherwise clean, how could it possibly have got in there?! there was much speculation as to what it might be, accompanied by sniffing to see if it smelt familiar. it didn't.
  
  eventually james and stuart (i think it was them anyway) got bored of that game and started emptying all the almost-empties on the table into the wine glass with the white stuff. once it was all in the one wine glass, they found that the mixture of various beers, wines and white stuff actually smelt pretty good.
  
  so i smelled it too. and lo and behold, was tempted to drink it, knowing that there was some undefinable scary white substance in it! d'you know what? i drank it! the whole glass! i did offer the others some (it tasted good too) but they were perfectly happy to let me have it all to myself...
  
  and i can't even claim i was already drunk, because i'd only had two or three beers... can you imagine?!
  
  
• the emergency brakes in trains. now they're just begging for someone to pull them! surely i'm not the only one who feels that way! thank goodness i've managed to control myself so far, but i do have to take a step back sometimes, just to make sure it's out of arms' reach...
  
  
• and those little hammers to smash the window with in case of an emergency. i'd love to find out how hard you have to hit, and how the window shatters... i'm a very curious person.
  

i'm plagued by almost irresistible urges that are liable to get me locked up or even killed. help!

;-)

Labels: drinking, i'm special, weird urges

i just selected a line of data onscreen, pressed ctrl-c to copy it and then spent a rather long minute confusedly trying to work out where the interface to my notepad had gone. and when i say notepad, i don't mean a basic computer text editor. i mean the physical notepad lying on my desk in front of me. the one you need a pen or a pencil to operate... i just tried to copy-paste to it.

i think my brain's done as much work as it's going to today ;-)

Labels: bizarre, i'm special, random

i just walked past one of the small lecture rooms where professor loeliger was giving some of the younger stundents a lecture or something with the door open. i was almost overcome by this almost irrisistible urge to poke my head in and start making weird faces at the students stuck there!

is this normal? does everyone get such weird urges?

last week i came home to find mum and dad in the lounge rearranging furniture (as they do) with mum's favourite porcelain lamp lying on the settee.

the urge: to go sit on it and see what would happen...

so i ventured the opinion that the settee might not be the safest of places for a porcelain lamp, someone might sit on it...

dad found this incomprehensible, how could one possibly sit on it by accident (i still think tim (my brother) would, he seems to spend half his time on a different planet anyway). when i mentioned the temptation to sit on it, dad was even more baffled.

mum, however admitted to feeling the same way. so the lamp was moved :-)

the question is, is it only the women of my family who are just generally special, or is this a more widespread phenomenon? and how to find out? hmmm...

Labels: i'm special, random, weird urges

another bad idea. i probably should have learnt my lesson that time when i was working at infineon and couldn't find my badge one morning. i spent ages rummaging through my bag until eventually i started emptying the contents onto the surface in front of security-guard-stuart's desk. i found my badge and began dumping the stuff back into the handbag, at which point i realised my spare thong was lying there in plain view... the horror!!! ;-)

don't ask me why i had a spare (clean of course, btw!!!) thong in my bag, i have no idea :-s

i'm not sure why i've got a pair of pants in my bag today either (again, clean!). and i'm pretty sure nobody noticed them just now when i was looking for my headphones and thought 'must be a glove' and pulled the pants out and waved them around before realising my error...

;-) typical!

Labels: i'm special

oh dear. i had managed to kick my addiction to red bull and energy drinks in general. i hadn't had one for months. but i was soooo knackered yesterday, that i wasn't getting anything done... actually, i seem to be slightly ill. but i haven't got time to be sick, so cocadamol and red bull will have to do.

anyway, i have found a new reason why red bull is not good for me in particular. it's bad for your teeth, your stomach etc. that's true for everyone. but i've found something else: it's bad for my eyes! the problem is, somebody as clumsy as i am should only ever drink water.

it's completely normal for me to spill stuff all down myself, whether it's my drink (with or without alcohol!), salad dressing, any kind of sauce, ice cream, toothpaste, anything that'll stick to my clothes, and everything else too... but managing to splash red bull into my eye!!! while i'm drinking normally from a can! how on earth do i manage it? there were absolutely no sudden movements (on my part anyway, obviously the red bull made a sudden unexpected movement upwards...)

why? why? WHY?????

grrrmmf.

Labels: i'm special

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

i got the list of songs for sunday (yay, i get to play the beautiful grand again! *g*) so i opened emacs (an editor) and copied just the song names into a file, then got distracted. quarter of an hour later i suddenly realised i hadn't picked it up from the the printer yet.

i spent ages looking for that stupid list before i realised i hadn't actually printed it yet! how can you be so confuddled?!

Labels: i'm special