The hostel crowd

First day I arrived with about an hour delay to Shanghai’s Pudong airport. No big problem, I was in no hurry. So after I managed to find an ATM and got some money (it’s amazing how the highest valued bill is a 10€ bill) I went to have a ride in the Maglev. These trains are awesome, 350km/h over magnetic tracks! Makes your trip from the airport to the nearest subway as short as 10 minutes. Then it was the usual finding the hostel drill, took me a good sweat as I wasn’t still used to Shanghai humidity.

The hostel crowd
The entrance in my room was the most pleasant possible. Four Asian guys were having fun and all of them were my room mates, and they quickly offered me a beer haha Some moments later Tommy showed up, my savior! He’s a British Chinese from Hong-Kong and was visiting his girlfriend. Then I went to play some billiards with Charlie, the big uncle (Da Shu!) and met our leader, or boss of boss, Lau Da a 15 year old kid hahaha. No wonder the folks in the room were following his rules of no women, smoking and drinking in the room ;)
Tommy was of much help during the initial days and he kept me amused with his love story that seemed very hard for him to hold on to, nothing I hadn’t been through and gave him some advice.
A couple days passed until I actually got to meet the remaining great people in the hostel. Me going there with the iPod touch to check email also helped a lot but pretty much thanks to a bet with my room mates, I met the cool people quite easily. They didn’t believe I could drink 5 bottles of Tsing Tao (each bottle has 0.6l) in a night. Well they were right about me not drinking 5 as I drank 6 But during that night I met a few great people, like Lesi and Veronica ( I still think the compliments were for some passer-by ), and more of the cool foreigners staying around.
Charlie bought, the next day, something good for virility (must be a hobby from the Chinese, to have those) a small bottle with a very sweet liquor with … tiger penis! hahaha It was very good tho!
That day I went to have dinner with Charlie, another Chinese mate and Maggie. I don’t know what was the first impression I gave her, as I was tired for some reason and after helping Charlie with his tiger penis drink and the previous night of beer drinking I must have been quite a boring person. That night Henry came up, an Australian teaching English in South Korea, and we kept making rounds of billiards and card games with the remaining mates.
No wonder Henry would be so little motivated to get out of the hostel, all the fun was inside and the weather was quite weird, with some rain and lots of humidity. But he did manage to find the post office, something I haven’t been able to do at all!
Next day I met Li Na, my french student. She has an interesting character and it’s amazing how she could take any topic and make it the subject of conversation! She later told me she was trying to learn french and from there on I’d be her pig English teacher. Yeah pig … because I have blond hair in my arms
By that time I would just go out to take some photos and have lunch and I pretty much remember coming early my last day so that I could spend it with the people at the hostel. My last night a few more people joined the group, and we went all for dinner. Later a South African guy (and he’s actually white! go figure *ducks*) joined us. He too was an interesting character, he seems to speak a bunch of languages and we were amused to speak in as many languages together as we could. So our conversations would switch from English to french to Spanish during a sentence and we could always understand each other. Amazing guy!
That night Veronica left to meet her imaginary friend, as being my last night I couldn’t properly say goodbye to her I usually get sad when I have to say goodbye and that’s why I was postponing it to the extreme … still, that night I had time to go to a leg/foot massage with Henry and Maggie. What an experience! First I was supposed to relax even more, complained the masseuse. Well only if I would drop dead, I was really relaxed actually. So by the end, and since Maggie still hadn’t finished I paid 10 more yuan and had my nails cut. It was quite a good job I must say, even if the masseuse told me she felt I didn’t feel much. In fact she was right as I didn’t felt parts of my feet the next day!
For my surprise, and joy, when we got back to the hostel Alice was still waiting for us! And even after I said goodbye to Maggie she actually came back and hanged out with Henry, Alice and me some more!
I must say those were very good moments and I was truly happy to just hang out until late and do nothing.

Tommy was amazing, helped me a few times, specially with the subway card. Hang on in there, I’m sure that relationship will bring you much more joy ;)
Charlie was the best big uncle ever and the 205 room were true companions in all the drinking I had during my stay! Cheers!
Henry was a great person, even if he tried to swindle our money with his golden Chinese Olympic game cards and the extra ace of spades :P
Maggie was quite an interesting person and she kept showing her true engineer nature, appearing with the gadgets I would have bought if I had the chance in the past ( I still think that laptop is quite awesome ;) )
Li Na gave me a few laughs with her theories and questions … I still laugh at her french pronunciation of “poussez” :P
Veronica and Lesi also treated me great, specially Lesi. I loved talking with her and all that time playing billiards and cards and for some reason, even she’s an Ox, she made the Goat have one of the most interesting times. Hope you two get your visas and come to Europe! We should definitely meet then :)

To continue …

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In Amsterdam

I’m just killing time (and money) in AMS right now. The flight back from Shanghai was great, I slept most of the flight.
The only problem I seem to have is … I’m homesick of my hostel! I’ve been around a bunch of hostels these past years and no hostel yet gave me what I experienced in Shanghai. The group of people that we formed was amazing and I miss them a lot!
Last night I spent most of the time with Henry, Lesi and Maggie and it was awesome. The dinners at the local restaurants were no less impressive, with a constant good mood around the table.

Ahh … in some sort of way it was better for me to be the first one to leave. I swear if I didn’t start walking faster from the hostel this morning I would shed a tear or two. Ok yeah that’s normal, me being the same old mushy Daniel as ever. But being the last one wouldn’t be any better, seeing everyone departing. But on the other hand, spending another couple nights in that same mood would be quite awesome.

Last night I went to get a leg/feet massage with Maggie and Henry and even if the girl doing the massage said she felt I didn’t feel a thing … well she was sort of right. I still don’t feel parts of my feet! Still it was quite relaxing … for the price of 30 Yuan (3 euro).

I’m glad I got the contacts of most people, I’ll try to get the remaining contacts like from Veronica who went visit her inexisting friend :P

Ok, I’ll go to the gate to take my last leg of the trip. I only have 4 minutes left on this expensive KPN access … bastards …

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From China

Hey!

Just decided to update from Shanghai ;)
So far this trip has been great. If I don’t count me loosing my debit card ;P And not being able to make phone calls (thanks Vodafone for that, you bastards). I’m in a shared room with 4 other chinese people and they’re great.
After going to Japan so many times and now coming back to China made me realize how different China is. Even of this is Shanghai it looks like some sort of rural city haha

I need to figure out where to buy postcards coz until now I have been unable to do so. Where in hell do I get those? Grrr

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Done!

And everyone’s invited!

Tuesday, 22nd July @ 14h
B2 room - Dep. of Informatics Engineering - Polo2 - University of Coimbra

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks and their current capabilities to maintain Quality of Service (QoS) levels in a network through the use of Quality of Service Routing is a problematic area. While such networks are becoming inexpensive, new ways to provide traffic differentiation are needed, as it is expected that their main use will be for multimedia content, very demanding on network resources. This demand is already causing trouble to wired networks which have more bandwidth resources than shared medium wireless networks, being hard to provide in effective ways differentiation between best-effort and traffic with QoS constraints, while maximizing network utilization.

This thesis proposes a new interference-aware metric for Wireless Mesh Networks routing protocols, the Class-Based Metric Interference Aware (CBM-IA), which supports QoS through class differentiation. Furthermore, it makes use of multiple interfaced devices and ISO Layer-2 interference information by means of cross-layering techniques.

An extensive comparison of existing metrics is performed, by means of simulation. The results are compared to the main proposal of this work, the CBM-IA metric, showing not only that the CBM-IA metric achieves its purpose of differentiating classes of traffic but also improves the existing metrics in dense scenarios.

Final grade 19/20 - 95%

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Only MS Word could come up with this …

Good thing I needed some humour. I’ve been busy with my thesis, so those who have been trying to reach me, hang on a little more. Thankyouverymu…

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10 years

I’ve been so busy with work I nearly forgot the 10th anniversary of hide’s death. Dang! Already 10 years, it sure didn’t felt like I would survive this much 10 years ago …

Always missed, never forgotten …

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Of trains and dreams …

Ah yes … good old life. Good? Hmm it certainly is getting old for me ;)

The other day I saw on flickr.com a photo that reminded me of life. It was a train track and at some point it got divided into two train tracks. It, somehow, made me remember my life, as I’m finishing my MSc and have some decisions to take. Which one of the two tracks shall I take? Only certainty I have is that Pimbolinko is part of the next track.
As of today I don’t have 2 tracks anymore. I have 3. I got a proposition from my advisor and it is a nice way to boost my ego, but it is incompatible with very important things to me. But in a way it is what I like doing.
I won’t end this post without making it very clear that it is not a choice between Pimbolinko and my career. Pimbolinko has top priorities in my life. I’m just wondering how seriously I should take into consideration this new opportunity given to me.

I’ll give it a good thought this weekend. I think now is the time. Just like Faye Wong, I also wanna have no regrets later on ;)

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Research blues

I guess a good research experience has it all. The ups … and unfortunately the downs
The downs are also a good experience, even if it is agonizing while it lasts. I’m too much of an optimistic and stubborn to think it will compromise my research, so I just keep hoping my coordinator allows me some time to keep my stuff together.
My main problem is I’m starting at some point where someone else finished. The code has no comments, it’s not working as it should and it’s a whole new API to me. No wonder I have to spend way too much time at this point. One thing I know I have to keep doing is to hang on and keep learning it all, even if it seems impossible sometimes. I still have 4 months of research left, but I also need to write some papers and document my thesis …
I’ll do my best to get out of this pit

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Throwing the white towel

For the second year in a row I wasn’t shortlisted in for Vulcanus. Taking into consideration I’m doing research for my MSc and I had a kick ass recommendation letter from one of the most prominent researchers in the area, all I can do is think why I wasn’t shortlisted.
It might be possible there was no internship for my area … Quality of Service Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks is an area with no interest in a leading country in telecommunications.
Other reason might be my age, me being 28 might not have helped, but I thought there were laws against that, as it is not part of the requisites. It could have been since I slacked off … oh no wait, I’m finishing a 5 year degree in actually 5 years … hmm
What else, I didn’t insult anyone in the motivation letter either.
Other reason might be that they think I smell bad Yeah, that must be it.

On the other hand, I’m perplexed by the amount of Spanish, Italians and Polish shortlisted. Some insight in the shortlisting criteria would be great, but alas I won’t be getting any.

I don’t understand it and it doesn’t make sense. Their loss

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Speaking of metrics … ;)

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