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

i'm a crazy welsh person (who grew up and lives in switzerland)





Wednesday, April 02, 2008



recovering from sleep deprived emo specialness

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?

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 16:52::




Monday, March 31, 2008



basic sums

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 ;-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 00:08::




Thursday, March 27, 2008



hallucinating algorithms

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...

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 19:45::






simple thesaurus search

dani, (the guy sitting across from me finishing his master thesis) just ran a search on synonyms for 'simple'. he was a bit surprised at the results. it's such a great list of insults that i just had to check it out:


dimwit, doofus, nitwit, half-wit - a stupid incompetent person

dingbat - a silly empty-headed person; "you would be a dingbat even to try it"; "yet here he was with an upper class dingbat who just happened to be married to his sister"

boob, booby, pinhead, dope, dumbbell, dummy - an ignorant or foolish person

fool, muggins, saphead, tomfool, sap - a person who lacks good judgment

changeling, cretin, half-wit, idiot, imbecile, moron, retard - a person of subnormal intelligence


i particularly like the second example usage for dingbat. wtf?

check out the full list at the free dictionary :-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 14:36::






survival is everything

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?! ;-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 11:56::




Wednesday, March 26, 2008



presentation tomorrow

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 :-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 19:46::




Tuesday, March 25, 2008



about presentations

ok, ok, i'll get back to work in a mo! but these posts on presentations caught my eye. i have to present my master thesis the day after tomorrow, you know...

i started off on brazen careerist: presentations 101: its about you not the powerpoint

which lead to guy kawasaki: the 10/20/30 rule

and presentation zen which seems to be a blog all about presentations. i haven't really looked at it yet. maybe before my next presentation ;-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 13:32::




Saturday, March 22, 2008



working hard

i've been a very good girl today. i had to work at mcdonald's (the last time before i hand in my project, thank goodness!) and i was planning to take the evening off afterwards and relax. but i managed to convince myself to come to uni and draw two block diagrams i'd meant to do yesterday but not got round to (too much blogging, i guess...)

i only meant to be here for an hour or two and now it's been four! i just managed to finish the last block diagram in time to realise the tram just left and if i leave now i'll be waiting at the station for half an hour :-(

but at least i managed to get three new block diagrams done! woohoo! and i found some stuff to optimise in the code for one of my algorithms. on the one hand that's a good thing, cause hopefully now the one that's supposed to be fastest will actually be fastest! but on the other hand it means i have to re-synthesise everything which puts me back a couple of days again! bah!

anyway, i'm going home to relax in front of the tv. i don't care if i need sleep, i can't sleep anyway until i relax a bit ;-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 21:32::




Friday, March 21, 2008



what am i doing here?

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

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 20:19::






procrastinating

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 :-(

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 16:25::




Tuesday, March 18, 2008



13 days left and counting

i've found it again. the will to live and finish this stupid master thesis, i mean. so, no i didn't quit :-)

in fact i had quite a successful day today. it only took me about three hours to fix everything that got screwed up yesterday... ;-) what a horrendous day! and to top it off i had a match in the evening.

i left uni practically in tears (every now and again a couple managed to escape, so i'm not sure it counts as 'practically', more 'actually'). i was on the train to the match when i realised i was an hour early! thank God (seriously, it was definitely him!) it was the match in erlenbach, which is the next town from where i live. so i was able to just go home for an hour and recover (i live 5 minutes from the station and the trains run on time every fifteen minutes, this is switzerland *g*)

the recovering started with spending a minute or two lying face down on the bed howling into the pillow. sometimes you just have to. once i was bored of that i read a couple of chapters in the bible.

i don't know what would have happened if i hadn't had that hour of grace, but it wouldn't have been pretty! the thought of getting on court was one of the reasons i was leaking. seriously, at the best of times i'm pretty much out of patience with this team, but in the middle of a nervous breakdown? there's no way i'd have made it without storming off in the middle of the match and i knew it.

the coach thought i was kidding when he asked whether i was up to playing middle hitter for the whole match and i said 'well, physically i am...' peter, that was a heck of a close thing ;-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 20:01::




Monday, March 17, 2008



loosing it...

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

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 15:59::




Thursday, March 13, 2008



yuck, my mouth smells of coffee!

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... :-(

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 14:25::




Tuesday, March 04, 2008



the joys of LaTex

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!!!

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 17:42::




Thursday, February 28, 2008



not too bright...

i thought this was supposed to be a building full of engineers and aspiring engineers! sadly it seems that some of the females on this floor are not the brightest of them all...

there are two cubicles in the female toilets on each floor. i went to the loo a while ago, and the first cubicle was closed. not locked, not occupied (the thingy (what's it called?) was green), just the door closed. i automatically carried on to the second cubicle. don't ask me why, could be anything that made me walk past. complete and utter laziness? could be.

i left the cubicle to find a highly pregnant woman standing there looking surprised. i couldn't quite understand what she was saying, she seemed to be switching between english and german randomly, but it sounded like she was expressing her surprise at so many people being in there at the same time. it's the top floor of the department for electrical engineering, if both cubicles had been occupied at the same time i'd have been surprised too, you don't have to wait here very often. but seriously! the door was just closed!

just now i go back again (i drink a lot of water) and the first cubicle is still closed. again i automatically head for the second one. while i'm in there, someone walks in to the loos, walks up to the two closed doors, huffs in exasperation and leaves again! wtf?

i put the first one down to random not-too-brightness (no, i didn't blame it on her being pregnant! though that might have been the reason *g*). but it happened again! what is wrong with these people?!

i couldn't resist checking when i left, just to make sure. yes, the first cubicle was unlocked and empty!

i should have closed it again ;-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 16:25::




Tuesday, February 26, 2008



more bizarre dividing

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!'

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 16:23::




Friday, February 22, 2008



compromising my integrity

i've fixed my eth webpage. i've taken out the links to this blog, cause as far as i know it was the only way that linked my blog to my full name. it's the only way i've ever found my blog (indirectly) though google by typing in my name.

i know it's compromising my integrity as a freak who doesn't care who reads what on her blog, but it was just too weird. they asked me whether my second project went badly because i disliked the professor! i didn't realise where they got that random idea until the third interviewer told me she'd read the blog. then it became clear to me that they must also have read the eth page where i'd said i didn't recommend doing a project under that professor. i've taken it out now, more compromising... but the reason i specified the professor was that there are two professors in that lab with two completely different fields and i only have experience with the one and i don't know what the field's called...

the only criticism i have (other than the fact that he complained after our presentation that he hadn't understood how PLLs worked because we only explained them very quickly, assuming everyone else in that room knew more about PLLs than us anyway, and especially him, since we'd taken the diagrams out of his lecture notes!!!) is that his english is really horrible! every fifty or so swiss people, you come across one who sounds as if he were still speaking swiss german, when really it's meant to be english. and that professor's one of them. *shudders* but other than that, i have absolutely no reason to dislike him (and even for me that's to ridiculous a reason to actually dislike a person. he can't help being linguistically challenged...)

so anyway, from now on i hope not to have to field such bizarre-seeming questions at any job interviews i might have. trying hard not to think about the last one. still a week to go until i find out! gaaah!!!

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 18:01::




Thursday, February 07, 2008



second semester project

i've been asked by some person from some recruiting company to send her more detailed information than i had in my CV so far about my university projects. i managed to cobble together something more or less sensible about the first one, but then i really enjoyed that one and did well in it too.

the second one is not going so well. this is my first draft:

it was crap. using simulink, which is crap. and the results were crap. but luckily the professor was too clueless to realise... crap

it's ok like that, isn't it?

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 16:58::




Wednesday, January 02, 2008



stupid divider!!!

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! :-(

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 15:33::




Thursday, December 20, 2007



technorati

i've found another random online platform to waste my time on. it's beginning to get out of hand... doing loads of random other things is my procrastination mode of choice and the internet is just so handy for it! yesterday i spent ages looking for a job, but not actually bothering to do anything about it when i actually found interesting offers... i can be such a moron. no wonder my projects not getting anywhere. well, the fact that i seem to be too stupid to understand the simplest way of dividing properly is also a factor. hown on earth did i make it through highschool, let alone the ETH?!

anyway, today it's technorati. i found it when i was checking out what has become one of my favourite online time-wasting sites: the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. it's just made it into technorati's top 1000 ranked blogs. i followed the link and couldn't resist having a look whether i could find this blog. i could :-) my rank's not particularly impressive (what a surprise!) at 4,446,976th... i wish i weren't so competitive. the moment i see a number, i have to know how everyone else is doing, how many there are below me, how many above. now here it's obvious, 4,446,975 blogs are better than mine. fair enough, it's a crappy little personal blog. but how many are ranked lower?! that's what i want to know! don't ask me why, it's just some flaw in my personality somewhere.

so now i've signed up to technorati and am trying to claim my blog. and this is what this post is all about (well apart from wasting more time inwhich i don't have to agonise about why my divider still isn't dividing): i have to post the following link to my technorati profile for some kind of verification. and now i can go play around on technorati. hurrah!

that's all for now :-)

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posted by I am NOT SWISS!!! at 14:48::




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