My jacket needs decoration, so I’m going to put a chameleon on it, when I actually get down to the paint shop while they are open. In the meanwhile I’ve made a sketch:

I have a couple of links that I feel like sharing with the world.

The first is Pauls Online Notes, which has by now pretty much fully replaced my calculus curse. I can’t recommend this site warmly enough. Clear explanations are followed up by examples and practical uses all written in a language that’s easy to read. In comparison my obligatory calculus book for the course I’m taking is written completely without prose, only stating theorems in a condensed mathematical language. This might work in case I needed to look up information I already kind of knew, but while I’m learning, I really need a more practical approach. That said I should mention that I’m attending to a French speaking university (epfl, Switzerland) and however universal math might be as a language, I still feel more at home reading English.

The other link I wanted to share is a very well written guide on how to set up Clojure on Ubuntu. Clojure is a lisp like programming language I’ve been playing around with lately to take my mind of the tedious java exercises I’m going through in school. Clojure is a functional programming language that runs on the jvm and it’s pretty neat, although I haven’t spent more than a couple of weeks doing some small projects in it.

Common to both these two sites is a generous time and effort put in to helping whatever person who might profit from the information. I really love when I see other people doing something like that just because. However cheesy it might sound, it kind of makes me believe a little in humanity after all.

So thanks to Jonathan Riddell and Paul Dawkins for making my day.

Last sunday was spent hiking in the mountains and biking through the vineyards along Lac Leman, enjoying what was probably the last hot day this year. I’ve uploaded a few photos from the trip to a gallery.

Yesterday evening I found myself walking home from Ouchy, where I had been eating dinner with a couple of friends. Label Suisse, the festival celebrating the opening of the second metro line in Lausanne was still going on, so instead of going directly home I figured I might as well take some photos, considering I was carrying around on my camera anyways.

So I went to Riponne to see if anything was going on there, to find the place absolutely packed with people, not just on the place itself but hanging from buildings and side roads. Stress, the biggest rap group in Switzerland was playing, and people were going absolutely nuts.

I couldn’t pass by this excellent opportunity to shoot a couple of pictures, so I decided to dive in to the crowd, spending the next 15 minutes stepping on peoples toes, trying to get up front. If I hadn’t met some very determined girls I would never had gotten any close, but by keeping right on their tail as they were moving forward I managed to stand around 10 meters from the band performing.

I love rap concerts. The rhythm and energy makes it impossible to stand still, and even though I wanted to get some good shots, I couldn’t help but dance along. Awesome concert.

Here is a photo anyway. There are more here.

This is a door not too far from Place Chauderon in Lausanne. It’s so wonderful to have a camera at hand again. It’s been 8 months since I lost my trusted panasonic super zoom camera, so a couple of weeks ago I finally decided to go out and get me a real camera. A camera store around the corner had an offer for an old Nikon D70 for about €180, which is ridiciulsly cheap for a camera like this. It’s in pristine condition, and with it I bought a nice 50mm 1.8 Nikon lense that I have been playing around with.

I’m taking French classes at the moment, preparing myself for a bachelor in computer science taught primarily in French. It’s been a while since I was last sitting in a classroom being educated and it’s not exactly easy to adjust myself to the situation.

I’ve been having a real job with real responsibilities for a while and it strikes me how different the approach of education versus work is. In a typical classroom situation, we each get a copy of an excersise sheet to practice some particular grammatical rule or subset. We then all answer identical questions with hopefully identical answers until the teacher stops us and we each give an answer or two. She then, corrects it if it’s wrong, and proceeds to the next person if it isn’t. We might talk a little further about a specific grammatical rule afterwards, and there is a possibility for us to ask any questions regarding the topic we might have. Usually nobody asks about anything.

At work if I needed to learn something new, the situation was reversed. Instead of sitting in my seat, waiting for somebody to teach me what I need, I would usually try to judge the situation at hand and figure out what I needed to know to solve the problem. To attain that knowledge it would be up to me to look for it in the right places or ask somebody competent, and when I found something relevant I would have to try my best to apply it to my particular situation by trial and error.

To me the main difference between the two scenarios is how I at the language class passivly receives the same knowlegde as everybody else, why I in a work situation actively try to find the specific knowlegde that I need. There are of course many differences between solving a particular coding problem and learning another language, but I can’t help to wonder why a voluntary language class is based around an learning method where I have no say in my own learning.

If we all were perfect clones with similar capabilities and equal needs, then it would make sense, but we aren’t. In fact we are quite an add bunch from around Europe with different backgrounds in French and different needs and expectations for the course. Personally I speak French very well but couldn’t spell if my life depended on it, while many in my class has endured years of writing in French classes. Wouldn’t it be an advantage if we, instead of filling out the same worksheets, actually used each other and the teacher as a resource we could draw on to take responsibility for our own learning. Would that be impossible?

I don’t want to be promoting pure educational anarchy, but what I imagine is a situation where the teacher reviews our individual needs, provides tools, projects and knowlegde to help us achieve them, and makes sure that we take use of our collective knowlegde as a class. To make the time spent feel worthwhile the whole deal could possibly be packed up in a project that each person or seperate groups present in the end. This way the teaching is suddenly in our own hands, and we would get just as much out of our education as we put in it.

I suspect that when students are taught to passively receive knowlegde instead of actively gaining it, they will most likely end up doing the exact same thing in real life. I think that’s a shame, especially because it means I’ll be sitting through lots of boring lectures in the weeks to come.

Well…. I’m here in Lausanne starting my intensive french class at 9am tomorrow. I’ll have to find me somewhere permanent to live within the next couple of days. That will be a challenge, but that’s what I signed up for anyway, so I might just as well get started.

I’m looking forward to 1 month ahead in time, when all this will be sorted out, and I can concentrate on meeting people and maybe enjoying actually learning theoretical stuff again. Not that I didn’t learn anything while working with programming, but when you learn to solve a specific problem right in front of you, it’s more of a practical approach of getting stuff to work that I had to apply.

The irony here is that it was exactly the lack of any practical knowlegde that got me so tired of school I had to take a break from the traditional education system two years ago. I wish it were simpler to find a balance between practical appliance and theoretical understanding.

With this in the back of my mind it wasn’t exactly an easy decision to go back to school, but there are other advantages of being a student than what you learn, I’d say, so I’m hoping studying here in Lausanne will be amusing and entertaining, and if I even manage to pick up a little theory as well, then that’s just an added bonus.

I was looking for some vim tips today when I fell over this helpful link. It’s worth sharing.

As a short remark I might add that the folks on programming reddit seems to have a problem with a little light humor… But hey, programming is serious business!

By mistake I included google analytics specific code in the header of the Minimalism Revisited Theme. If you’ve downloaded the theme before this evening, you might want to remove some of the javascript from the header, or download the theme again. Sorry ’bout that.