I'm still alive

I haven't blogged in about two months. I haven't REALLY blogged in about three months (I consider this my last real blogpost). It's been a real busy time since then. I had to study a lot for the exams I took in February, March and the first week of April. It did pay off that I studied so hard, since I passed all of them, except one. There was much at stake, so that was the main motivator I guess. If I hadn't passed all of them (except one), I wouldn't have been able to start my Bachelor's Thesis, which in turn had meant I wouldn't finish my Degree in summer. I would have had to stay at home and take another semester, which would have taken until next winter/spring.

It was hard work, especially the Engineering exam(s). I studied HARD for the written part of the exams but I failed it at first. That was devastating news for me. I felt really really bad, felt that my future was at stake, kind of. Luckily, there was the possibility of taking an oral examination afterwards, which could still secure me a "pass" for it. I knew that the oral examination wouldn't be so bad, because I had taken one with the same professor before and it was really easy and friendly. But of course, timing is a bitch. I don't know whether it was the stress, bad timing/luck/karma, but I got really really sick the Sunday or Monday (I don't remember which) before the exam, which should be held on a Thursday.

I still don't know exactly what caused it but the main suspect is a viral infection my father brought home from Turkey. My parents had been on vacation there and had returned on the Saturday before the exam. On (let's just say) Sunday evening, I started to feel REALLY bad out of the blue. And by out of the blue I mean completely out of the blue. I had literally eaten a huge bowl of Ramen for dinner. Then, when I was driving to our local movie-rental shop, my stomach started to feel weird. When I returned home, it only got worse. I said to my girlfriend that I wasn't feeling well and would go to the bathroom. On the way there, I felt it. I could barely make it there, when everything just gushed out. And not out of the rear end.

Now, normally I'm not the type of person to get sick easily. I haven't been really sick in about two years, the last sickness I got was a small cold that lasted a few days. I can't even remember when the last time was that I was sick before that. But now, it really got me. No substance, be it solid or liquid, remained in my body for the whole night. Naturally, I tried to drink so that I wouldn't get dehydrated but everytime I drank something, I had to rush to the bathroom just a couple of minutes later. That night was really hell. Luckily I got some magic Chinese Medicine from my girlfriend. The next day, when I could finally drink something again, I took it and I immediately started to feel better. I still couldn't really eat though. The next night, I could gradually drink more and more and slept better (I still overdid it one time..).

Naturally, I couldn't really study for the exam during that time, which only left me roughly one and a half day for it. I managed to pass it really well though, the professor even stopped me before my time was over and said "You already said enough to pass". So yeah, the most difficult courses of my whole time at University were finally behind me. I'm glad that I never have to do anything with Engineering again.

Soon afterwards, I could start my search for my Bachelor's Thesis. I knew beforehand that I probably wanted to write it for our Institute of Software Engineering, since that's the institute I'm most interested in and they offer a lot of great courses at our University. Another choice might have been the Institute for Programming Languages and Translators but unfortunately they got closed down after their head professor went into retirement, Prof. Dr. Rainer Parchmann - which I consider one of the best professors our University had. I only visited two courses of his, the compulsory Scheme course, which in hindsight really shaped my thinking about programming in general, and his course Programming Languages and Translators. It's so sad the institute got closed down, they offered a course on Compiler Construction which I wanted to visit but now they don't offer it anymore.

So that left me with Software Engineering. My task translates to something like "Feedback enrichment via mobile phone provided location based data and Web-2.0 services". It's basically an expansion of a software that got written during a software project. You can offer feedback to so-called smart objects, like food in the cafetaria or the quality of a certain room, etc. My task is to enrich that feedback via web-services that tell the system more about the context of the user, like what weather it currently is. Unfortunately, the task is very conceptional and not much programming, although I will implement a little at the end.

About one or two days after all the papers got signed and I could officially start, I saw an offer by a different institute about a traffic simulation and stuff like shortest-path-algorithm analysis. That sounded wayyy more interesting, especially since it sounded like 80% programming. But well, you get what you get and now I'm working on my Thesis, more or less. I haven't done as much as I'd like to but yeah. Whatever. Things will turn out good eventually, I'm sure.

One more thing I haven't mentioned here yet, but which I'm pretty proud of: I took the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) in Decembre aaand I passed! I got the results back in early March or something I think. I did study a lot for it, especially in the last few weeks before the test (it was held on Decembre 5th) but I still had a few doubts about it. There were a couple of Kanji I couldn't read but it seems I managed to get most of it right through context and guessing. What really surprised me, I was really really bad at the listening section, although that was the easiest section of them all. The students (and the professor!) literally LAUGHED at the questions and possible answers. It was something like これは何ですか？ ("What is this?", accompanied by a picture of a dog). A) 犬 (dog) B) 猫 (cat) C) 子ども (child) D) 電車 (train). Ridiculously easy. But I still had very few points there, I wonder why.

Proud of it!

Anyway, I passed it at level N4 (the second lowest level), so I still have a long long way to go. I don't think I'd be able to hold a conversation at a normal level yet, but when I watch and listen to people talk, I think I get what they're saying most of the time. I'm still learning everyday, my motivation these days is this really cool blog, where a calligraphist posts one Kanji a day. So you can take your time and learn them as they are posted. The explanations are really good, too!

So there you have it. A massive post, an up-to-date look into my life at the moment. I hope I can post more regularly.