Monday 21st - Friday 25th March: studying, procrastinating, and picnic.

I'm not really sure what I did for all these days. I've written this blog too late. I think that I was feeling a bit frustrated for quite a few days probably because I didn't get enough sleep. I think I didn't get much sleep because I decided that this week I'd eat breakfast each day. They stop serving breakfast at about 9:25. Way too early.

On a few days there was really great weather. I was walking to lunch and got a message from Marion saying that she was having a picnic with some people near the Portland building. I got some pasta with my card money and met them. The weather was really great. I tried some of Marion's Austrian bread. They had too much food. After eating we walked closer to the lake and fed the ducks with the leftover bread. It was great fun.

These pictures were taken by some other people:

Sun was in my eyes!

One of the geese was very mean. I threw bread at its head a few times. It was unperturbed.

 A few nights this week I went walking after dinner with Amanda, Amelia, and some of the other international students who live in the same hall as me. The weather was really good so it was still warm-ish after the sun went down. There are quite a few bats that fly around the lake at night eating insects! Amelia pointed them out for me. Billie sang an impromptu song for some complete strangers. She sang a section of the Chinese national anthem. I think I annoyed Amanda a little once because I am not a very big supporter for some decisions the United States government makes at times.

One night I think I went and did some studying with Matthias, Fred, and Charlotte in the library. I got quite a bit of work done. It was good. I made good progress in Coding and Cryptology. Maybe I stated it in an earlier blog already: I find it really cool that data on pretty much any digital storage device is encoded in a way so that errors are expected to occur regularly and be corrected using redundant extra information in the encoded data. I didn't know this. I also think this Richard Hamming guy, who invented the concept, was really cool. He just wondered, that given that the computer knows an error exists, why it can't then also correct it. He developed some theory, and then the computers could correct the errors. Hooray.

On Tuesday night I met with Paul and Didier in the Mooch bar and had a beer with them. I think Paul had drunk a little bit already. He made me sing a ridiculous Belgian song that apparently made me say something silly. He wanted me to teach him an Australian one, but I couldn't really think of any that wouldn't make me cringe with awkwardness.

On Thursday night I was feeling very stressed trying to finish my scientific computing assignment. I couldn't get access to the lecture notes until quite late because the lecturer kept forgetting to upload them. I got them really late on the night before it was due. Before that, I spent some time in the George Green library trying to find something that could help me figure it out. But the concept seems to be one that isn't very popular. None of the books talked about it. Very frustrating and stressful.