Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

On Saturday I attended the graduate party at my institute. It’s a tradition that all the graduate students arrange a party, and for a small fee the students, who are not graduates and thereby left behind, can join. The menu is simple: food and free bar! This years theme was “Hawaii”, so people had dusted off their nasty hawaiian shirts.
After the main course desert was up. And just to be a little different the organizers had rented an ice cream trailer with ice ad libitum. So pretty quickly a line formed, see the picture. Some of the local companies had sponsored the party, which meant that there was enough money to get a band which played for 3 hours.

It was a fun evening/night, and I enjoyed talking to all the people I started with at Aalborg University. It took me an extra year to find the right education, so I still have a year to go, before I can graduate.

On Tuesday I had an exam in Systems Development Philosophy (SF). The examination was based on an essay, which each student had written during the course. And with a base in this the rest of the syllabus was discussed during the exam. I had written about Remote Procedure Calls, and argued that it has a fundamental problem: it tries to abstract away the network, but sooner or later the programmer has to deal with the network anyway, which ruins the point of abstracting it away. So we talked a bit about this, and how the syllabus relates to distributed systems programming in general. I got to talk about Service Orientation (add an “Architecture” if you wish), so all was good. We also touched on the concept of Quality, which is discussed in the book used for the course. One of these quality aspects is divides quality into functional, aesthetic and symbolism. I was asked to define each. Functional is easy, how good the stuff/thing works. Aestehtics has to do with how well it looks (think Mac). Symbolism has to do with how easy it is to get girls, if you have the stuff/thing. I think the censor liked this last point. She said, it was a very precise definition
Apparently things went well, because I got the grade 11 This is cool, because most of the discussion was based on what I’m planning to write my master thesis on. Reading the book for the SF exam also started some thinking, and I have some notes, which I will use later. Eventhough this course was not as technical as my thesis will probably be, I think the notes will be usable.  I might blog about some of these issues later on.

After the Exam me and most of my fellow students headed over to Nork (the dormitory where I used to live, before I moved out, because I’m going to the States), and we barbecued, drank beer and watched Brazil beat Ghana, and France beat Spain. All in all a nice evening, and a good way to say “have a great summer and see you in January”.

So, on Monday I’m going on vacation in the States with my family. We’ll be visiting some good friends on the east coast, and spent a week there. After that we’ll fly to the west coast, and drive along Highway 1, visit Las Vegas, and generally just have some fun. We’ll return and I’ll be in Denmark for just about 3 weeks, before I fly back to start at West Virginia University.
Exciting times indeed!

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