Huge Steps

And what do you do for relaxation in Krabi? We did nothing at all and it was awesome. A day at the beach, a day riding elephants and climbing stairs to a temple.
And of course eating. Thai food is delicious. We ate everything from plain rice with beef and garlic to crabs to fistsize shrimps to barbecue buffets. It costs practically nothing and it’s so damn good. And it puts your handling of spicy food to the test. I learned (or better yet was taught (or better yet was taught the hard way)) to appreciate spicy food in Singapore, but Thailand is in a whole different league. Especially hiding the incredibly spicy chili peppers in the not spicy and delicious Nam Pla fish sauce is a mean trick, that makes your eyes fill with tears. But all in all, the food experience is definetely worth repeating and recommended. 

The bad

Phuket is a shithole. I really can’t get why people would go there. The only things we experienced the first day were masseuses that actually grabbed my ass when I walked past them, with their whiney pronounciation of “massaaage” and the hundreds of tuktuk drivers going “tuktuk?”. Then there were the bars with scantilly clad women (or were they?) with old western guys ogling them. And to top it all off there was this one western guy with a 15 year old Thai boy around his shoulders chatting up other boys of the same age. Made me rage and that’s when we decided to get back to the hotel and not come back to see Phuket’s nightlife. The rest of our short 2 night stay we spent at the beach (as far away from the whole sex stuff as possible) and in the cinema watching the Thai movie Ong Bak 2. We could’ve done this practically everywhere, so in the end going to Phuket was not worth it. Good to experience for once, but not very enjoyable. 

Trashcan on the side of the road

Although in Phuket the filth was crawling around and trying to lure you to watch pingpong shows and get massages, throughout Thailand garbage is quite a problem. Even in Krabi, all of the streets were littered with garbage bags smelling up the place. It’s not really a problem, but it can be a bit annoying. 

Now 

After a one night stay in Kuala Lumpur we had our flight to Yogyakarta. The first day of Yogya is not really the way we imagined it would have been. Both a bit sickish with diarrhoea and a bit feverish, we have spent most of the time in bed. Because of this our plans are not fixed yet, but on our wishlist

 are visiting temples of Borobodur and Prambanan, climbing either the Merapi or Bromo vulcano and finding a nice place to have our Christmas dinner. We’ve got only one week, so it’s going to be a bit cramped, but it are all things you simply have to do when you are around here. And this is an opportunity that will not present itself anytime soon, so we have no choice but to grab it.

2100
The 24 hours started where they would end too, en route to the airport. Had to drop my gf off which was not much fun.

2200
Checking in at the terminal where I would be checking in a couple of hours later too.

2300
A German exchange student I met would leave the morning before I left Singapore, so we decided to meet up the last evening and have some drinks and just talk a bit. He travelled to Vietnam and Cambodia, so we had enough to talk about. We walked around Bugis for a bit, but then decided to get some Tigers at the 7-11 and drink them somewhere.

2400
We drunk the Tigers near Jalan Besar, near Chris’ hostel. We just talked a bit about the last semester and our travels. A worthy way of saying goodbye.

0100
Chris was already at his hostel, I still had to walk a bit. I walked past Mustafa center, a 24h shopping mall in Little India. The place where I bought my bag last year.

0200
Whe coming back to the hostel, I had to prepare for the voyage. Preparation involves putting the right music on my MP3 player and the right games on my PSP. Very important!

0800
I woke up too early because of some noises and presumably a bit of nerves. But there’s no point i sleeping too long and I decided that I needed to do a number of things, buying a new gaming mouse, finding a football shirt for a mate of mine and buying cuff links.

0900
Sadly enough it started raining, so I had to wait a bit at the hostel. Discovery was a good way to kill some of the time.

1000
And that’s where I realized I didn’t have to wake up that early. All the shops downtown were still closed and would only open around 11. So I bought a newspaper and an orange juice at the McDonald’s.

1100
I succeeded in buying my new mouse. Someone told me that razer is a Singaporean brand, so there wasn’t really an option but to buy one to replace the worn out G1 mouse I have now. A nice DiamondBack 3G with green light to match my wall .

1200
From Bugis, where I did not succeed in buying a football shirt because all the bootlegs were horribly obvious bootlegs, I went to Vivocity. Vivocity’s one of my favourite malls in Singapore, so I just went there to walk around a little bit and maybe find my cuff links.

1300
Walking from City Hall MRT station to Suntec City. A jacket I found at Vivocity was not available in my size there, but they did have one at Suntec. So I took the MRT again to go and get the jacket. The cufflinks were dropped as idea for stuff to buy.

1400
I had lunch in the basement of Central in Clarke Quay. I would meet with my ex-housemate Peter in Clarke Quay, because it was central and close to my hostel. I had a nice mixed roast meat plate which tasted very well. Sadly enough that was to be my last meal in Singapore.

1500
After my meal I decided to have my after lunch dip on the banks of the Singapore river. A nice moment to just think about the last semester, for which I took almost over an hour. I still don’t really like Clarke Quay, but this day it was nice and windy and not too crowded. Plus it was an easy place to rendez-vous with people.

1600
Peter and me sat in ‘the Coffee Connoisseur’ (no typo) with Peter, talking about his trip to the US and my tour around SE Asia while watching the pictures. Just sitting down for an hour and chatting was fun. But once again it was saying goodbye to someone, which isn’t really fun.

1700
Going back to the hostel to get my luggage and head towards the airport. Sadly enough this was the last picture since I got kind of nervous when heading to the airport. Plus I was very sweaty and gross, because the last day in Singapore was really hot.

All in all, the flight went ok. Transferring in Zurich was cold and it’s going to take some time to get adapted to the cold again. I lost 4kg during my stay and I think that’s all fat that I am going to miss when it isn’t there anymore to keep me warm. My new jacket has proven its worth already though .

The Computer Vision course is hella fun! We’re working on an algorithm that stabilizes video material which it is doing pretty well already. I can’t show you any results yet, since my eee doesn’t do coding video that well . I have a small clip that shows you how we find the movement in video via which we try and remove the shaking that people usually do. Some more than others…
The video looked better before uploading to Youtube… what you should see is a movie clip with in it arrows pointing in the direction in which points in the movie move. For people that are interested: Shi and Tomasi feature finding and pyramidical Lucas Kanade optical flow. YEEEE!

And as far as holidays go, we have it locked down. The mrs. is coming over 5th of december from which we will spend a whopping 5 days in Singapore. Then fly to Krabi, Thailand for a week of sunbathing, seeing … whatever… and doing… whatever… I don’t know about Thailand. And after that we’re flying to Jogyakarta to meet a friend of ours and a teacher of mine. It’s going to be weird, yet awesome. It is kind of weird, but he is the only 40+ person who actually commented on this blog, so that kind of levels stuff out.

Anyways, now off for dinner, than bed, then school again. Cheers!

Luckily we had a break last week. Recess week lead me together with 5 of my friends I met here in Singapore, to go to Bali. A place Dutch people normally only visit during their honeymoon, but since it tickets were only around 70 euros and hotel/food/daily life in Indonesia costs really little, although you have to pay millions of Rupiahs (yay hyperinflation), we decided to go there. So after finishing one last proposal for a course on Friday, we went to Bali on Saturday.

Bali

We had a hotel with swimming pool and breakfast, for a whopping 7 USD a night. It’s situated in the most touristy place on Bali: Kuta. You couldn’t go out without random Indonesians yelling obscenities like “transport?”, “rent motorbike?”, “buy t-shirt?”, “buy another t-shirt?”, “braid your hair?” and stuff like that, which was quite annoying. At night, the t-shirts changes into weed that smells like oregano and the braided hair changes into boom-boom. A dodgy place is what it is!

[singlepic id=4 w=320 h=240 float=left]Since we left Singapore to avoid a crowd and overstimulation, the first days in Kuta weren’t really the way to go. We left for a monkey forest on the first day, which was nice. But the second day already, we left to the north part of the island to a town called Lovina. Being the heroes that we are, we rented two motorcycles (proper ones! Honda Tigers! 200cc, monocylinder, 16.7HP, full manual gearbox and fugly helmets) and a map and tried getting up north, where the other 4 went by car. The only thing we needed to do is lie about drivers licenses and sign some stuff about how we accepted full responsibility in case of a crash.

Lovina

[singlepic id=14 w=320 h=240 float=right]Since I don’t actually have a drivers license, only a couple of hours going back and forth deserted roads on my dad’s bike, I was quite nervous. Needless to say, the start wasn’t the best ever. I got separated from my bikebuddy after about 10k and from that point on got completely lost. I was scared, but getting more confident with the bike, so we decided to meet up at our hotel and go for the second attempt.

And from that point on the day was made out of pure awesomeness. Being at ease enough to look into my rear view mirrors, we managed to leave the ridiculous traffic between Kuta and the capital Den Pasar behind us without getting separated again. We took breaks quite a lot, because of dehydration and fatigue. And eventually, since we had to cross some mountains, just to take pictures and admire the view. It’s a bit ridiculous that I can rent a bike without a license and see the beauty of the Balinese mainland, where the girls are beautiful, the view is breathtaking and the food is delicious. So that was one of the best experiences that trip I think.

After meeting up with the 4 others, we of course had only stories of bravery to tell and confidently started calculating our average speed which ended up around 15km/h… And that’s where the bravery stopped. We enjoyed our stay in Lovina with the obligatory eating and drinking, listening to coverbands and drinking, hanging around in our hotel rooms and drinking and sleeping and not drinking. We rented a boat to watch the dolphins the morning after.

I don’t really like dolphins, but in fact, when you see them swimming around and jumping and floating and what not, they are actually majestic sea creatures. I hate myself for liking it, but the majesticness was awesome! I didn’t bring a camera, since the boats were a bit dodgy, but I should’ve. Better luck next time.

[singlepic id=18 w=320 h=240 float=left]Since we didn’t want to drive into Den Pasar in the dark, we left for Kuta quite early. One stop at the Gitgit waterfalls, which were nice, and of we were. Same trip, but about 3 times as fast. Not as many breaks, since this time we actually knew the road and a bit faster, since we had been practicing riding bikes. We had heard stories about corrupt police stopping and fining/forcing to be bribed by tourists, so we half conveniently mistook the stop signs they gave for waving and half missed the stop signs. We did have the fastest bikes on the island, so no police chases whatsoever. It was easier for them to stop tourists on slower bikes. Awesome! Illegal driving _and_ not being fined.

Surfing

[singlepic id=26 w=320 h=240 float=right]The rest of the days we spent in Kuta. A bit of surfing, a bit of tanning, a bit of eating, a bit of drinking and all good fun. Surfing was hard to start with, since I don’t really like water. But after inhaling bucketloads of salt water, you learn to appreciate wiping out and being drowningish. Plus actually getting up on a wave and riding to the beach on your 8ft longboard is an awesome sensation. Yep, once again I was getting my rocks of riding. No asphalt this time, but water. And hey, water is nothing but liquid snow, so it’s basically snowboarding isn’t it?

One of the people I met here is here on a Rotary scholarship, so she knows all kinds of fancy people. One of which being the owner of the Ripcurl surfschool, who offered us free lessons. We didn’t even consider going there in the first place, with their prices starting from 60USD, but this was an offer we couldn’t refuse. One downside on the story: we had to wear helmets that lessons. One upside on the story: “Mark Grams” (I think that’s me) has a certificate that he can use the words gnarly, ripped and stoked.

In total we surfed for around 4 halves of a day and I kind of got the hang of it. But I still prefer wearing Burton over Billabong.

Singapore vs Bali

[singlepic id=25 w=320 h=240 float=left]Bali is actually just as crowded as Singapore. Just imagine a climate a few degrees hotter, replace all Chinese people with Australians. Replace all Chinese food with Nasi Padang. Replace staring Indian people with Indonesian people that offer shit you don’t need. And that’s Bali for you. It’s been awesome since it wasn’t as uptight as Singapore though. As opposed to Singapore, drinking was cheaper than in Holland, there’s no rules on crossing the road and you can spit everywhere you want. So we all got our compensatory relaxing in and are now able to study again!

We had one night of partying, since we had to celebrate two birthdays. We started off with eating cake, proceeded to a joint as stripclub as you can get without being dodgy and from there on it went downhill. What happens on Bali, stays on Bali.

POLITIXZ

Corrupt police sucks!

School

After recess comes midterms. I had one horribly difficult midterm and one really easy. I have two more tomorrow, I think they will be easy. Furthermore, two projects started. One is going to be on predicting stock prices based on information on companies derived from annual reports (so not me…) and one has its proposal pending on stabilizing videos we shot on the bikes on Bali. Using the perception topic of optical flow to do stuff is more me. It’s both going to be hard work, but I think I’ll like it.

The rest of this semester will not really be a lot of traveling anymore. I need to watch my money a little bit, plus I need to spend more and more time on school. And on top of that, Mrs. Grams is coming to Singapore on the 5th of december (64 days, I’m counting them…) for a month, which will surely lead to a bit more of travelage.

_{I should’ve probably broken this up into two posts, but whatever…}

_{Wat is het met deze neusophalende mensen? ik word para van al die mensen die naast me schudden met hun been en om de 5 seconden hun neus ophalen en gestresst kuchen. Ik voel me ook niet tof op een tentamen, maar ga ik geluid maken? bah bah!}

Lectures and courses
I’ve been following so many lectures on so many papers. It’s been crazy. Subjects ranged from “A comparison between Heuristics Evalutation Methods” to “User Research using Mechanical Turk”. I’ve been trying to attend to a lot of usability lectures, some of which were really interesting and some of which were plain bad. It was nice to see the difference between academic work and corporate work.
On the general however, it’s just like school. A lot of people sitting and listening to a lecture. Some people taking notes on paper, some taking notes on their macbook pros and some just taking pictures of the projected slides.
I took a course on Wednesday. I figured that if I want to know anything about usability and study this in a psychological fashion, I need to know how to apply it to designs. So I registered for this course by Mike Atwood and Tom Hewett from Drexel University called “A practical approach to interactive system design”. I learned a couple of methods that serve as a basis for designing and evaluating interactive systems. I did this together with two PhD students, Malte and Javed. It was really fun, since when we were putting our skills to the test in the assignments, we did a great job. And we made puns, like ’snackquisition’, which I still like to be honest. I’m writing it down, knowing that this is typically a “you had to be there”-kinda thing, but I don’t care too much bout that now.

Social stuff
This whole course thing also lead to me going to the google hospitality event. Which basically is a free drink at some expensive ‘Grand Hotel Firenze’ aka standing in line for your drinks for too long with too many people in a place that is too posh. It was however nice to meet some people and talk about geeky stuff. It’s not that different from a gaming weekend to be honest.
I didn’t go to bed too late, since I had to present my poster on Thursday. I was scared that people would come up with some tough questions (which they did), so I decided I needed a good night’s sleep.
Poster presentation
A large part of CHI consists of poster presentations. On Wednesday Brian and Daan presented their researched. I presented a poster I made on a research on Thursday. It was quite nice, because some people even showed an interest in our research, even though it’s nothing applied like the majority of CHI papers. Also funny that most people would read the poster and then touch my upper arm briefly to ask me for comments. (check the poster if you want to know why that’s funny).

The trip back however was hell. Our plane left at 10am, which forced us to be on the airport at around 8am, which forced us to grab a train at 6:30am, which forced us to leave the appartment at around 6am, which forced us to wake up at around 5am. Luckily I did wake up early enough every day, to not be completely deregulated timewise. Anyway, after a week of Florence, Eindhoven is even uglier than it was before and colder too. It’s been a great experience to be at a conference. I did meet a lot of new people and saw people I hadn’t seen in a long time.

I had an extensive preparation prior to getting in Florence that consisted of booking a flight, getting accomodation and partying the night before departure with crazy exchange students in Eindhoven. Needless to say, the first day in Florence was hectic.

[singlepic id=56 w=320 h=240 float=left]I did make it to the apartment yesterday quite effortlesly (somewhat to my surprise). I did however completely misunderstood Karolien’s Belgian accent for Italian, which lead to me speaking English to someone who’s talking Dutch to me. And while writing this, I realize I haven’t explained that to her yet… But the apartment is way too nice for a shitty student like myself. I’m there together with 3 phd students from my faculty, who I don’t know that well. I think that this might be different when the week is over. I’ve got my own bedroom, with nice kingsize bed. And I’ve got my own bathroom, with bidet. We’re sharing a living room and kitchen, together with the conversations and thoughts that come naturally.

Day one

[singlepic id=58 w=320 h=240 float=left][singlepic id=60 w=320 h=240 float=left]The first day, due to my lack of preparation, consisted mainly of walking to the conference center (in a medieval fort) and banks close to the center. I didn’t have a registration yet, and apparently you can only pay with US currency or credit card. Having neither, I had to make a stop at the bank and having the memory and foresight of someone that woke up too early after a day of travelling, I didn’t change enough the first time. So all in all, I’ve seen plenty of the city already. Considering the weather and the absolute gorgeousness of Florence, not a bad thing. Considering this is the world’s way of telling me I need a creditcard, I’m still ok without one.
Having taken care of my registration it was time to decide on what to do this week. There’s so much to learn at a conference, that this was in fact a bit scary. I’ve found a lot of presentations on usability and registered for a basic Human Centered Design course on Wednesday. I think this might be a nice (applied) extra to my somewhat theoretical masters program. On Tuesday I’m meeting with some people from Carnegie Mellon, with whom I hope to be able to arrange something for the exchange program of my curriculum. On Thursday I’m presenting a poster (link) on one of the researches I finished last year.

And throughout the week I’ll be walking around and taking pictures of this town with my new Nikon.

Click here for the rest of my pictures.