French + Spanish = Catalan?!?

It was back in September or so when the Internet connection of our flat failed. So I had a little chat with my good old flatmate Buddy (name has been slightly altered). He told me that it surely is a problem of the internet provider itself and there's nothing wrong with something inside the flat. He mentioned too that ever since their provider has been taken over by a French company it failed a lot. Once formally known as 'the guy with the Internet' I spread my wings and checked it by myself. It didn't take long to find out what it really was. I followed the wire to the outside phone connection - which has been laid through several rooms, open doors and even open windows - to find out that one of those windows broke it. I fixed that in a couple of minutes and everything worked just fine again. After that Buddy felt a little embarrased and actually apologized for blaming the French.. weird stuff!
A month and a half ago it started to become cold in Barcelona. To call these days winter goes a little too far but since then there has always been a slight breeze out there to remind you about wearing the right clothes. It actually would have been the right time to start heating the apartment when Buddy found out that it was broken. It took him more than 5 weeks to get someone to look at it and that certain someone somehow failed to repair it because of a mysteriously broken water pump. So, we all had to wait another one and a half weeks in a frozen apartment for a new one to arrive. Buddy's girlfriend, she is from Poland, forced him to go after it because all of those Spanish people are lazy bastards. Buddy agreed but it was his pleasure to mention that he is of course Catalan and that has nothing to do with Spain. Well, today another plumber came carrying a very new water pump but he had to recognize that nothing ever happened to the old pump. Nothing was broken at all. But neither the previous plumber nor Buddy did actually turn on the heaters to check if they are heating.. fuck that shit!

Camp Nou.

Past weekend my dad came to Barcelona for a short visit and this is what we did. We attended the 257. unofficial very unknown competition of miniature photography at its best. Magnify the following image and you will know what I mean. :)


Of course we went to Camp Nou to watch FC Barcelona vs. Getafe CF. Camp Nou is Barcelona's famous stadium. It has around 100.000 sitting places and is dedicated to good old football only and therefore Europe's biggest stadium for this purpose. The atmoshpere is sheer amazing. It is like a monstrous version of a theatre. People of all ages sitting side by side watching how their team is doing and supporting it with all they have.



As you can see from the following picture Getafe CF was well organized and at the end it was no more than 1:1. Anyway, it's been a great evening and an unforgettable experience.


There were hardly any security issues and we could even stay a little while after the game for a personal tour through the stadium:

The challenge!

3 times air line from Amsterdam to Zurich.
2 brave Austrian men.
1 tiny Spanish rental car.

It was back in spring this year when a friend of mine and me drove 240km by the beautiful blue Danube from Traun in Upper Austria to Vienna by bike in less than 36 hours. That sounds not too bad you may think at first. But reconsider the fact of two quarter-century old more pencil pusher than athlete kinda guys fighting against stupidly heavy rain showers, amazingly friendly old women offering free vine and lots and lots of candy bars to keep themselves alive. For sure it was a lovely trip. :-)

So, the next ass-flattening challenge is about to be conquered. On the 21st of December we are going to drive all the way from Barcelona to Traun by car. This may be around 1600 to 1800km, depending on which highways we are going to take. There is no limitation of time here, except for Christmas Eve maybe, but as far as I know my colleague and myself we are going to get that thing done as fast as possible. :-)

The countdown starts now..

This is what I do.

I'm doing this research project at the Computer Vision Center in Barcelona which is called 'Motion Analysis In Terms Of WVCE'. What is Motion Analysis? What does WVCE mean? Well, I'm currently trying to find that out. :-)
Well, WVCE stands for Wireless Video Capsule Endoscopy and takes its part of medical imaging technologies within computer science. Imagine the following situation: Something hurts inside your stomach and you don't know what it is. You go to the Doc and she says, she has to run some tests on you. Finally she tells you that if you really want to know what it is and where it comes from you have to let them do a procedure on you that is called intestinal endoscopy or gastroscopy. Long story short, they stick a camera mounted on a tube up your ass and taker a closer look from inside. Not good! Therefore some eggheads from the lab have discovered a new method. They let you swallow a capsule with a camera inside. This capsule is not much bigger than a regular pain killer (the very strong ones :-) and follows your digestion like everything else. After that, someone has to elaborate the video. For a trained expert this takes up to 8 hours. This is where the lovely words motion and analysis come into account. A computer should do all of this work instead. So, my work is to find out a sequence of different procedures to make the computer able to "see" and to look through all the videos and identify the motion of the intestine. Weird thing!
The images from inside the intestine are lovely. Unfortunately I can't show them to you because I had to sign a contract to state that I'm going to use all this material very very confidently. I'll keep you informed!

Garraf.

Now look at that! I travelled to Garraf today, a little village settled between the sea and a beautiful national park, just 30 minutes away from Barcelona. I was excited from to moment on I got out of the train:




Fishing seemed to be one half of the work the people of Garraf enjoy.



I got on top of this hill to overview the village and the sea..


.. and an amazing scenery came across my eyes:



Apparently satisfied:



Spoiling tourists seemed to be the other half. To be honest, where else can you see those signs? Parking only for tourists:




Well, I'm still some kind of shy and I didn't want to act like a complete geek taking a picture of a stupid car while its possessor takes his frappucino right next to it on a terrace. But what can you say.. an Aston is still an Aston.. I didn't want to disturb its silence either..

Oh boy!

I can't really believe what happened today. My supervisor proposed me to contract me for 1 year in order to work for him and to write my master thesis here. I suddenly have the opportunity to stay here in Barcelona for another full 12 months, join the medical imaging group of the computer vision center and get a grant of around 12.000 Euro for my master thesis. Am I still dreaming? And all that because they are so convinced of my work here. Success!! :-)
The thing is though, I'm not 100% satisified with medical imaging and therefore I am going to reject this offer. Don't rush by calling me a damn stupid jerk. It is indeed a huge satisfaction for me to see what I can reach when I work hard. And by now I know much better what I want and what I want to go for. And I will. You can believe me when I tell you that it was very, very hard to decide. But I stand by my decision and to be honest, I am as happy as I can be by now.