This week I chose to experiment with my schedule. The project I work part-time on needed a bit more work this week. I haven't worked the last 5-6 weeks because school took up too much of my time. School doesn't take up just as much time right now (the last 4 weeks it's been 10-15h per day in school) so I decided to work a bit now, but while I spend like 8 hours in school it is kind of hard to get home and work 2-4 hours after that. To manage to do it at all and still have time to eat and read news and like, be human, I had to cut back somewhere. I decided to try to cut back on sleep. As you might be able to tell from this blog post, a weeks worth of sleep deprivation haven't exactly been good for me =P The first couple of days it worked really nice and it felt awesome to get a couple more hours of awake-time each day. But now toward Thursday and Friday I feel pretty trashed. The weirdest thing is that in high-school I usually didn't sleep more than I did this week, quite often I slept less. A lot of weeks during high-school I got 4 or 5 hours of sleep on average and some days I didn't sleep at all before going to school the next day. Sure I wasn't 100% okay after one of those weeks back then either, but I'm sure I felt quite a lot better than I do now. I'm getting old :/

I spend a lot of time on the Internet. It is where I get all my entertainment and all my news. For a long time now I've had a "Reddit liked" widget out to the right-hand side of the blog here. Since Reddit has deteriorated much in quality I have stopped visiting Reddit so much. The list in the widget was automatically generated from my upvotes. I've been looking for a solution and I actually came up with a use-case for link-collection sites; namely collect links for display via RSS feeds. I chose to use Gnolia since I already had an account there. What this means is that whenever I find something cool on the internet, I will quickly add it with my gnolia bookmarklet, write up a little title and a description and the link will automagically appear in my little sidebar here on the blog for the rest of you to find and enjoy. The title is usually just the title of the linked page, but I try to write my own thoughts in the description of the link, so if you hold your mouse over the links you will see my comments about them. I hope you like it!

I just got my posters for this winters rendition of The DreamHack Game. They are printed in awesomely good quality on 170 gram glossy paper in A3 format.

Don't mean to toot my own horn here, but I actually think they look really professional!

The school year is divided up in four parts, each one is 7 weeks. The first one is over now and it feels really awesome, because this means I have almost 4 days of complete freedom. Next period will start on Monday and I will start a new course and continue the big-ass nuclear+atomic physics course. The new course will be numerical methods for solving differential equations.

The purpose of the course is to give knowledge about methods of numerical calculations and using computers to approximately solve both ordinary and partial differential equations. This involves construction, analysis and application of numerical methods and computational algorithms for differential equations. Solving problems with computers is a central part of this course.

Which actually sounds pretty fun! But I have signed up for an extra course as well, and I can't really decide whether or not to actually take it. The course name is Complex Economy and this is the course home page and this is the description:

Why do banks, consulting firms and insurance companies hire more and more physicists? - Because the methods from statistical physics become increasingly important to model economical systems and, in particular, the capital markets. This course is an introduction to this quickly expanding field. It is often called Complex Economy or Econophysics.

The only real downside of taking this course is that it adds two lectures per week, and one of them is on Monday mornings. This really sucks since my first lecture on Mondays would be at 1pm otherwise. The upside of this is that I will get 2 hours every Monday that I'm pretty much forced to stay in school and work. But since I can't decide I thought I would let you decide! [poll id="3"]

For the non-technically inclined people reading this you could read it just to gauge my emotions and get a glimpse of the future, but this post will probably not mean much. Watch this first and read later, you can skip a bit of the start since he really doesn't demo the new tech until after about half the video. The first half is an explanation of why the tech is needed. For the first time in a long time I am really excited. I am giddy with expectation and I can't stop thinking about how much I want to switch over to coding Cappuccino for all front-end purposes. I don't like coding HTML, CSS and Javascript. I don't think a lot of people actually do like it, it's just something we do because we love the web and that's the only way to do stuff on the web (give or take). Now I now what he talks about in the video has been done before, Google don't spend ages coding HTML, CSS and JS, they use Google Web Toolkit. But I've attempted to try GWT but just can't get it to work. It's very un-mac like and I frankly can't even be bothered to get into it. These guys in the video on the other hand. This shit will rock. Not only does it provide a nice way to interface your app, it provides you with built-in code modularity. I can break up my different front-end functions into modules and have the UI builder automatically interact with the application code. I have a lot of ideas. Most of them I don't have time or knowledge to follow through on, but recently I've gotten two ideas I do really want to follow through on! I really think they could be good things and I really want to see if they will hold up to scrutiny. 280 Atlas makes me want to follow through on my ideas. I'm not a great front-end developer and not graphically inclined, but Atlas gives me a decent UI to work with from scratch and if the idea holds water I can hire a graphics guy to make it great. Most my ideas are applications and I've always been fascinated by desktop application development, I've always thought of it as a much more scientific and "structurally sound" (if that makes sense to anyone else?) process than web development. The problem is you can't get it out there. You need some sort of vendor to deliver the app through and all my ideas involves being completely computer and OS agnostic, I.E. you should be able to use the app from any computer with any operating system anywhere in the world - that's how everything should work. With Cappuccino and Atlas, it could work!

Arguments - price per month, bullshit Searches Titles, genres Not being able to monetize ads

Yesterday I participated in a programming contest. Unfortunately the required language was C/C++ or Java, since I have no idea what available data-structures there are in C/C++ we chose (like last year) to code in Java. But the thing is - I haven't coded Java since sometime last year. Because it sucks. Neither had my partner and we were out a third team-member. This all resulted in us finishing in 37th place of 40 competing teams :P If the language had been Ruby on the other hand I do believe I would have kicked a bit more ass. We had somewhat finished solutions for 3 tasks but were just debugging for like 2 hours on two of them, so we only got one task finished. The contest was followed by 8 hours of studying electrodynamics. So I spent a total of 15 hours in school... Gonna go get a shower now (after spending the morning reviewing the solutions we had for the other tasks yesterday) and then go back to school again. Our team-name for the contest was "The Owl Exterminators" it's a name I use pretty often when I can't think of anything awesome, it's a reference to Futurama. Though on my way home yesterday I thought of a perfect team name, it's witty, it's Ruby and it shows how beautiful Ruby can be, it is the title of this post.

Creativity: the process by which one utilizes creative ability

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/creativity

I've been keeping quite busy lately. As a sort of surprise, school is becoming more work. It's not necessarily harder, but just more work. I have to spend a lot more hours. Which leaves me with a very few amount of hours to be home before I go to bed.

This is a stage in life which... strangely enough; I kind of like. Maybe not being in school all day, but at least being busy. I think Emanuel explains it very well in his latest post (including a hand-drawn graph!) over at eferm.com.

He comes (with the help of the notorious _why) to the conclusion that a person who creates things, have private projects running and actually produce something real is defined by their creations instead of something as, to me, extremely non-defining as school or music taste.

To tie together with my quote from the dictionary. Creativity is something often used for artistic people and people with huge abilities to inspire emotion by way of expressing themselves through creation. I would not call myself a creative person, but after reading "the process by which one utilizes creative ability". I must say that I am quite familiar with this process, so perhaps I am indeed a creative person? I don't know. I just know that I like to create, and I would much rather be defined by my creations than by my age and preference in clothes.

While you ponder this bit of philosophy, I shall leave you with my latest bout of creativity - which will be put up on location at the DreamHack event: