Presentation..

In 20 minutes I'm going to step out in front of the tribunal in order to present my work and get my ass kicked from catalan scientists! Bloody hell!! :)

Do I want to go back to Austria?

No!



Any questions?

El tribunal..

My project is almost done.

I completed the final project report of my work today and was going to hand it in so that the 'tribunal' can take a look at it before I'm going to present it next week. The million pages lasting catalan assignment paper declares I have to give a printed copy of my work to each of the tribunal members. Well, I thought. No problem at all. I know how to print! The first of which took a deep breath in order to laugh at me. When he was finished, he told me I would be the first person ever to hand in a project report without having it binded before. Of course I made my point of being Erasmus student, which is sort of confessing that I'm a stupid idiot. He was very kind and took me to the office where I could finally form my paper to the right condition. It's not over yet.. :)

Teoría e historia del diseño.

It is done! My first and only Spanish exam is over.

Nice!

And I passed it. I got a 6.5.. don't know what this is??! :)

The aftermatch!

The blokes from Top Gear once showed us how to make a convertible out of the mother of all people carriers, the Renault Espace. Apparently, a huge tree can do the same to a Voyager in just a few moments. Luckily there was none in there when it happened!


Some guys were cleaning up the mess while I shot the picture, one and a half weeks after the cyclone has trashed the streets.. Indeed, they left the car at its place, just like nothing happened. Wanna see the face of its owner when she/he wants to pick it up. :)

Nothing is more sexy than intelligence.

Finally, a rival for the Smart city car has arrived. The new Toyota iQ:


Why am I showing you this? This spot has actually been filmed in Barcelona while Kiwi and I were at the Maresme Forum. Well, they changed it a bit, what do you say? :)

Boy, what a storm!

A cyclone with peaks of more than 105 mph (170 km/h) hit Barcelona in the wee hours of this morning. It left some serious damage and even a few people dead..


Even a million year old palm tree couldn't withstand the attack of the wind:


Payback time!! Let me try not to seem too gleeful but to be honest, those scooters are just annoying and most of the time they're driving me mad! :)


In fact, lots of trees, traffic lights, cars, scooters, windows, houses, parks have been really destroyed and it looks like hell on the streets. There are pieces of glas everywhere but it seems that none cares. The Spanish (Catalan?) mentality must be: everything that's laying on the ground can't turn over again and we are expecting another storm in the next couple of days..

The end of the term is near..

When it's hot, you learn how to keep cool.. no matter what comes across. Time to see if that worked out! My last month in Barcelona begins today and Vienna is already stretching its fingers. How nice..

Montserrat

Caballé?

Nope! More like that:


Montserrat is popular for its finger-shaped rocks. I think those look more like faces:

Pure happiness!

If you wondered why my pictures look different this year. Yes! I got myself a brand new digital single-lens reflex camera for Christmas. I don't wanna bother you with technological stuff and details but let me tell you so far, it is truly amazing. Now, look what she (I'm actually thinking of naming her) can do:

I went out to see that huge television tower behind my house but I got stuck on my way there. Flowers blooming in the middle of January? I had to shoot some pictures of them:



When I got to the tower, I recognised the viewing platform is closed until March, but that didn't stop me to take a very close look:


Pure happiness! :)


Look how nice the weather was! I didn't want to go home, so I went over to Mont Tibidabo:


Great view on Montserrat from the back of the church:


You can even get on top of the church to take a look at the theme park from up there:




At the end, I saw a submarine on my way home. What a day! :)

Just the sky.. Vol. 2

This is what the sky around here looks like in January:

Happy new year!

Look what happened! The star of "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" wears a brand new hat. Snow has covered Barca's surrounding mountains making them look like Krapfen.


What now Ms. rental car office? Are you still sure I don't need winter tyres?

Looking forward to...

the man who is formally known as the kiwi! :)

As requested...

some news on the occupation. They're moving in now! :)




I couldn't believe my eyes. Tents everywhere. And suddenly university looks like a camp of scouts.

Somehow I like this graffiti:

Facultat ocupada!

All this started a few weeks ago when the middle-sized Italian city of Bologna finally found its way to Barcelona. During the process of unifying the European education system it has been announced that the Autònoma is about to be privatized. Murmur went through the silent widths of Bellaterra. Since then university life got a bit stirred up around here. Graffitis appeared almost everywhere expressing that "Bolonya" is not very welcome and that a university can not be a money-making machinery.


Bit by bit the situation got worse and finally some students decided to take care of the circumstances by themselves. By now several faculties - including the Faculty of Communication Sciences where I'm supposed to attend two lectures - have been occupied since 10 days and lectures have been suspended for an uncertain period of time.



The university staff and all of the other people working here seem to take it very easy. There is no rush. No aggression. It is more of an adult and honest demonstration against what is about to be done and how this would effect lives. I think some of the lecturers are even participating the occupation. There are complimentary workshops all day long making clear what should be the most important goal of good education. It should be for free and open to everyone..

Empty halls:


Empty lecture rooms:


Empty.. aaahhm.. chairs:

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:

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..