Oops!…I Did It Again

Yes, I ran again! It happened yesterday and even though it’s almost November, I was lucky enough that it didn’t rain. Actually, I got so warm that I had to gradually remove my long sleeves top, my gloves and my neck warmer.

It has been a bit more than a month since my last run and many more will pass until the next one. Unfortunately the weather turned bad enough that my training ceased. During the past month I went running just once and so I didn’t expect an extraordinary performance. On top of that I also spent the day before with some friends playing on the Wii. In the morning it proved to have been be a bad idea as my back and arms were completely sore. I thought I would do so badly that I would be ashamed to report the time. But it proved to be ok: 32min6sec. I am looking now for some inside training while it’s cold outside and I really hope I will find a game for the Wii that will keep me in shape.

PS: It seems that this time the camera was my friend :-)

What about Arts?

When I was a kid my parents sent me to various activities, most of them being sports related. Among those the most prominent were swimming (for many many years), dancing (for 3 years) and volleyball (for just one year). For some reason they always avoided sending me to art related activities. But I guessed the reason behind that: my dad studied piano for about 8 years and my mum played the accordion for some. It seems to me that my dad actually enjoyed it but I don’t think the same applied for my mum. Whatever the reason behind it was, I still feel like I could have gained so much from it.

For starters, while I was in secondary school, I had arts class – where, apart from learning arts history, we did a lot of drawing and painting. My teacher said I had talent. I would also entertain myself at home drawing clothes that I designed myself and also drawing Sailor Moon, of which I was a huge fan at the time. I also drew my whole room one day, just for the fun of it. My mum even suggested that I painted the walls, but that project never became reality. When I reached high-school, I didn’t have arts classes any more and my drawing activities became scarce. Instead I started playing the guitar. I lacked strong motivation so I stopped rather fast. When I got close to finishing and started thinking what to do next, my parents came up with an amazing idea: I could go into architecture! A really cool idea, just that I was lacking all those years of practice that are required for successful admission. I could have taken private classes to prepare for it, but it was too late: I had less than a year left and we knew it took more than that to get good at it. So we dropped it and I went to computer science, the first option that I had in mind.

Arriving at University, I had a friend that liked taking photographs and edit them in Photoshop. This way I was introduced to the digital arts. I started playing around with it, editing pictures and slowly moved towards vector graphics. I even designed the logo for the Students Association from my Faculty! But it was never more than a hobby that I came back to every now and then. But life went on and I moved to Denmark, where I realized I didn’t have any hobby that I stuck to. Therefore I decided to paint again: I bought everything I needed and got started. Unfortunately I stopped after the 3rd painting. Why? Beats me. I got a bit annoyed with the water paint I had and I kept thinking about buying some oil one, but I never got around to it. But finally something came up that keeps my skills a bit more awake: I started designing cards for BiRC. Whenever we had an event for which we wanted a card (either someone’s birthday or defence), I ended up doing it. I started a bit weak but as I moved on, things became better and better. I generally use the internet as my inspiration and until last week all the cards were, in some way or another, remakes of what I found on the net.

But the last one I made has a different story. The problem was that I couldn’t really find anything nice out there that I didn’t use already, so with Andreas’ help, we made a card concept of which I am very proud of! The card is for a student who just defended his PhD thesis on Friday. He already got a job at Google in Germany and we decided to use this to make a very personal card. And this is what we came up with (the long message is still internet inspired):

Ciorbă de Perişoare

Remember Lavinia? She is my Romanian friend with who I share the difficulties of being so far away from home. One of those is the lack of our beloved food! I was complaining before of the impossibility of buying basic ingredients that makes it so much harder to cook traditional food. On top of that we also discovered that vegetables are not the same – in Romania they are more sweet as they receive more sun and heat then they do in Denmark – leading to dishes that just don’t taste like the ones we are used to.

Against all odds, we decided to try some recipes. And so last Thursday we met at my place to make Ciorbă de Perişoare. Back at home we have two main types of soup: the normal one which is sweet, and ciorbă which is sour and generally has some sort of meat inside and lots of vegetables. In this case the meat is represented by perişoare, some sort of meatballs. The biggest challenge we had was to make the soup sour. In Romania we have different additives to obtain the sour taste, such as the juice from pickles. But the most common one is called borş, fermented wheat bran. Luckily in Romania you can find on the market something called Borş Magic, a powder that you add in the soup with the same effect as the original liquid. As I have a very carrying mom, I wasn’t missing the key ingredient. Recently I was also amazed to discover that you can actually buy it on Amazon!

With that problem fixed, we got started. We also faced some difficulty in finding bones to make the stock, but after long searches in a variety of shops, I managed to get exactly what we needed. And the result was amazing! We were so happy that we decided to make a habit out of it: meet once every week or so and cook some food we really miss. We have already made plans for next Thursday. If you want to know the result, stay tuned!

New Office

When I started my PhD I got a desk in a rather big office: we were 4 students and after a while we were joined by yet another. Of those using the office, only three were constant: a Chinese girl, a Danish guy (the Giant Dane, by his real name, Andreas) and myself. Across from that office there was a smaller one with only three desks, all taken by computer science students. Those three, Andreas and I were the only PhDs with computer science background.

Time passed and the others grew up and went to face the real world, leaving Andreas, me and an empty office behind. An office that for the last three years was occupied by computer science and we thought it would be a shame to hand it over to biologists: so we moved in!

Being a girl and moving into what used to be an all-males office, I felt like things weren’t organised in the best way. So, with Andreas’ support, we rearranged the office, moving the desks, shelves and white board (which also benefited from being cleaned). It was a slow process that finally ended up with placing our own stuff in, filling the shelves and the desks and making the office feel like our own.

I present to you my new office!

Proud Owner

I present to you a very proud owner: myself!

It all started some weeks ago when I decided I had enough of carrying my laptop back and forth from home to the University. I briefly considered the option of asking my supervisor for a work laptop, but the profound need for possession took over: I wanted something that I can call my own. I first aimed for a netbook: I wanted something to keep at home, to take with me when I travel back to Romania or other places. It had to be as light as possible and it didn’t really need to be able to do more than browsing the net, chatting, editing documents and browsing media. While searching for the best option, I started thinking about tablets and how cool they are… but their price made me stick with netbook, I didn’t really see the point in investing so much money for such a simple need.

But then I talked to Jesper and I also remembered my mother’s advice: why earn money if I don’t satisfy my needs? And this was a very basic need! So I gave up the netbook idea in favour of a tablet. After thorough research on the tablets on the market, reading reviews and comparing quality – price options, I decided to go for the Asus Eee Pad Transformer: a nice 10″ tablet which has the option of connecting to a docking station – a keyboard with extra slots and, more importantly, more battery life! While connected the tablet’s battery should last for up to 15hours which is by far the longest on the market! This seemed to fit exactly my needs plus the docking station makes it so much easier to type – a need that I must have satisfied. So I took a deep breath and I bought it.

I had it now for a few weeks and I am still very excited about it. There are a few things that bother me, such as the impossibility of changing the default download folder. I still have lots of features that I want to explore, applications that I want to try and, more importantly, I have to figure out how to connect it to my laptop – so that, even though I don’t have a very powerful computer, I could still do work from home if needed. One of the things I like a lot is that I can read articles on it, highlight text and make notes – I really hate all the waste of paper from printing articles. I can also use it as an ebook reader and I recently acquired The Tales of Beedle the Bard, in an attempt to still be connected to the amazing world of Harry Potter (yes, I am a fan) that I recently finished reading.

Rights and Obligations

This is just a small note so that I can express my outrage.

A couple of weeks ago I received an email telling me about a seminar planned for today on the PhD students’ rights and obligations. Initially I thought I would be busy at the time, but I was happy to realize I could attend the seminar as I found the topic very interesting. I went there just to be told that I have to leave: the presentation was taking place in Danish. The women I talked to were very nice though and they offered to answer any questions I might have. They also gave me a business card with the contact details – in case I ever had anything to ask. But still… I really don’t understand how they can make such a seminar and have it in Danish? If you count the international students you have in Aarhus, most of them are PhD students! And I have never attempted to attend an event for PhD students which was going to be in Danish.

And just to brighten up the spirits, here’s the PhD comic from today:

Failed Attempt

This post is merely to keep my fans happy. To be more precise: to keep one fan happy who recently asked for some special pictures. It happened when I shared the random facts with you as I have been nominated for the Versatile Blogger Award. In that list, one item was about me attempting to shave my head. Being foolish enough to reveal that I also have pictures, not just memories from that time, my faithful reader rantonit rushed in asking me to make them public.

So here I am.

For those of you too lazy to click on that link and read the short account of that happening or for those with too short a memory (and I don’t blame you, my memory is just as bad), here it is:

In Spring 2008 I attempted to shave my head. I went to a hairdresser and asked her to shave me but she refused. We came to a middle ground and she gave me a very short haircut.

Back in the old days I had some crazy hairstyles. And they all happened as a result of a rush decision: if I waited too long, I changed my mind. I had and still have my favourite hairstylist and whenever I felt like my hair was getting too long, I would just phone her and find the earliest time I could see her. She is only one year older than me and she was very happy to have a customer that would basically let her do whatever she wanted. But when I decided all of a sudden I wanted to shave (it wasn’t the first time I was thinking about it) I figured there was no point to go see my regular hairdresser, I didn’t really see what could go wrong. So instead I went to this saloon that was 1min away from me. And then… well you know what happened. And the following pictures stay proof of that.

Science Teaching

Being a PhD student comes both with rights and responsibilities. And such a duty takes the shape of hours spent teaching others as an instructor. This teaching is slightly different depending on how far you are in your studies but most students end up doing it. I have started teaching last year and I had a few classes until now, most of which were master classes where the exercise classes were more oriented towards discussing different topics or papers rather than solving actual exercises. Nevertheless, when I found out that there is a PhD course entitled Introduction to Science Teaching, I could clearly see its usefulness.

While in Romania I took a whole module in pedagogy and I was disappointed by it being too theoretical. We did have some practical sessions when we attended some high school classes with the final purpose of teaching one lesson ourselves. I remember back then I had to teach 16 year old kids about some computer science topic. It went quite well and it made me feel that one day I could become a good teacher/professor. This is also one of the reasons why I got involved in teaching and for which I chose to follow this intro course. And I certainly hoped that it would be less theoretical than its Romanian counterpart.

It started yesterday and it will span 3 weeks, two full days (9 – 16) per week plus a lot of individual and group work outside class hours. The course is given by the Centre for Science Education at Aarhus University. This centre is actually located in the same building as BiRC and yesterday in class I could recognise  some of the faces I see on a daily basis in the corridors. I have to admit that their logo amuses me slightly, I don’t really see how an apple is related to science education and on top of that the apple logo is associated in my mind with… something else.

Anyhow, after the first day I can give you my first impression: it rocked! It was a very involving class, we had to do small exercises, the students were very active and the presented topics were very interesting. We even watched a movie made at Aarhus University about teaching. During the following weeks, the main assignment will be the simulation of a teaching situation, where we will have to teach for 15 minutes to our group partners and record ourselves – so we can be evaluated at the end. If everything goes well, I will share this video with you! But until then… I still have a lot of work to do!

Versatile Blogger Award

It seems that in the blogger community there is an ongoing award entitled Versatile Blogger. It is an informal award that is passed from one blogger to another, following some basic rules. I have googled it and haven’t managed to find its origin so I will just stick to the rules of the game. I have to say that I managed to find different versions of these rules so I will just share the average:

1. Thank and link back to the blogger that nominated you.
2. Share seven random facts about yourself.
3. Pass on the award.
4. Contact an congratulate your nominees.

1. Thanks rantonit for regarding me as a versatile blogger. And even more, thanks for being such a faithful fan! Ok, I know that the word fan is a bit exaggerated, but I always dreamed of having some fans!

2. This will be a bit more difficult. Let’s see…

• When I was 12-14 years old, I was a huge Backstreet Boys fan. My room was completely covered in posters with them, I had clippings from magazines organized in folders, etc. It all went away when I started high school and turned to rock music instead.
• One of my favorite dishes is a Romanian sour soup made of cow tripe (Ciorbă de burtă) . It is a controversial dish, and it is very easy to get wrong and end up with something that tastes horrible. My belief is that you can divide Romanians in two groups: you either love this soup or hate it with a passion!
• I am only 158cm tall (as I proudly mentioned it before). What I haven’t told you though is that my name comes from the Latin surname Paulus which means small. I guess my parents predestined my height!
• When I was a kid I liked to pick my clothes on my own and I would always try to make them fit. One day while walking on the street with my grandma, I saw some woman in front of us and I told my granny that I though the woman didn’t dress properly, her clothes didn’t go together. She heard me, stopped and turned around to ask for an explanation. It seems that I did give her one and the woman was very impressed and in the end agreed with my opinion.
• In Spring 2008 I attempted to shave my head. I went to a hairdresser and asked her to shave me but she refused. We came to a middle ground and she gave me a very short haircut.
• I took guitar classes for about half a year in 2003. I still have my guitar in my apartment and I play a bit every now and then. I am not very good at it, to say the least :)
• I look a lot like my mom. Once she put a picture with me as her desktop – at that point my haircut wasn’t very different than hers. A coworker saw it and said she looked so young in that picture and asked her when it was from!

3. My nominations are

• Lavinia
• Shiella
• Ed

I hope you enjoyed my random facts. I squeezed my brains to find something remotely interesting!