24

woo.

...as my friend alex used to say. 24 is exceptionally not the name of the famous tv-series but my new age. Yesterday we had a very nice and cosy birthday lunch with about 15 people from Austria, Spain, France, Sweden, Canada and Germany here. Annina was a great housewife (she will kill me, hehe) and girlfriend and prepared an excellent applecake and a fantastic blueberry-tart.

Thank you all for the calls, packages, postcards, greeting cards, GruXkarte(danke Uschi!), icq-messages or whatever. It's very nice to have the feeling someone thinks of you, even if you are 1500km away!

The last week we had awesome weather. It was sunny and warm every day and it seems to last for this week too. Unfortunately I did not have too much time for enjoying the sun, since I am pretty busy during the week by doing my work for university. Since I haven't written too much about univesity so far I will shortly summarize, what's going on here. In Sweden the semester is divided into two "studyperiods", each lasting for about 8 weeks. Since the courses are more work than those at home (and you get more credits, of course) I only have 2 courses each studyperiod - wich means 4 courses each term. The coures I take this term are: "Mobile Computer Graphics" and "Language Processing and Computational Linguistics". The first one is really awesome, the lecturer damn motivated (and motivating!), the structure very good, as well as the teaching materials and the lectures. The course is dealing with 3D-graphics in general with a strong focus on mobile devices, like mobiles or the playstation portable. Mobile devices means very, very limited ressources and so very strong care has to be taken to make the implementation efficient and fast enough to run on a mobile. We had two assignments so far, the first one dealing with some nice 3D-scenes on a mobile, ending in writing a small screensaver very similar to the starfield screensaver existing on many windows-pc's. Some screenshots of what we have done:



To finish the course we need to set work on a project, and we have choosen to make a cute 3D-game for a mobile. The plan(!) is to make a little, cosy bomberman game in pseudo 3D (view from above, but 3-dimensional objects). The only problem the time pressure, we have only 2 weeks left to finish the project which is way to short to make a really cool game, but we hope to get the basic bomberman features into it with some nice graphics. We will see how the result will look like in two weeks.

Über den anderen Kurs schreib ich lieber in Deutsch, dann kann ich bissi schimpfen (von Antschgi abgeschaut ;)). Der Kurs ist wirklich nicht gut, der Vortrag einschläfernd und mehr verwirrend als nützlich über die Assignments kann man sich mithilfe des Lehrers, der durchaus bemüht ist, aber leider halt keinen guten Vortrag/gute Struktur zusammenbringt, ohne größere Probleme drüberretten. Die gute Seite: Es gibt keine Endprüfung. Die schlechte Seite: Wir müssen stattdessen ein Projekt im Umfang von ca. 2 Wochen durchführen. Is aber erst in der zweiten Study-period, also wir haben noch Zeit.

So das wars wieder mal aus Schweden. Annina wird in den nächsten Tagen noch eine Zusammefassung unseres wirklich geilen Wochenendes schreiben. Stay tuned...