Jani Bizjak

Yesterday we did our last great push and finally finished our project. Now I can say I’ve build my own working Skype with chat and video conferencing, Microsoft watch out, you’re going out of business!

I’m still not done with the course though. I need to write my “home exam” but I’ve decided that I’ll do that after I come home. The due date is till 20th January so I’ll have enough time to finish it, and after that I will have an oral exam over Skype. I can already see my grandma coming into frame just at the moment of the exam…

In other news; after long deliberation, if I should still continue working, after I come home, I was forced to decide yesterday, when I received invitation from my old boss to come there after New Year’s. I’ve finally decided to let it pass, last year was too intense in regards of work and school. This year I’ll take it easier. I’ve left an option open to get there though, I may choose my topic for master’s thesis about something they will need. It could be good motivation to get paid for doing school work although I’m not sure they can offer me interesting enough topic. We’ll see how it will go … I think my topic of interest has started to drift from AI (artificial intelligence) to Multimedia (Games/Entertainment).

Haven’t written anything in a while, not because I don’t have anything to write about but because I’ve been incredibly busy last few days (weeks). I had a project presentation last Monday, seminar presentation this Monday and we are rushing as fast as we can to finish our last project as soon as possible. We were hoping we will finish it until today, when one of group mates is leaving Lulea, but sadly we missed this deadline.

As usually when you are in a hurry nothing works as it should and I’ve got yet another confirmation to avoid 3rd party APIs when it comes to programming. Not that we choose to use it, it was mandatory, but still the thing is less documented that the code I write, it only works on my computer, so instead of programming simultaneously with 3 people, only 1 is programming and the other two are looking at my screen giving suggestions and comments.

Anyway I’m so fed up with it that I just want to finish minimal requirements and get a pass on it, instead of working on those extra features to get better grade.

In other news as you may have guessed majority of people is leaving this week. So usually when you see people around they all look kind of sad, be it for leaving Lulea or leaving all newly acquired friends behind.

For me it’s something in between. My time has not yet came, though some of my friends will leave shortly. Unlike majority of others I have Veronika’s visit coming next week, which is really keeping my spirits up and adding views to blog’s statistics, since I’m checking every few hours how much is it still left on the timer that I’ve posted in one of the previous posts.

Lately we’ve had some really nasty weather here. It’s gotten surprisingly hot, around 0 or even 1 degree, so snow is starting to melt, on the other hand it has snowed really hard in previous few days so now we have ice and snow everywhere. Thankfully Swedes are putting gravel on the ice so it’s not that slipper and they are doing this almost in real time, I saw one truck sprinkling little rocks yesterday at 4 am in the morning (what I was doing up at that time is a story for another post).

Hm so this is becoming quite boring, wall of text with no pictures again. Today we had our last training of hockey so here is a picture from there.

One more thing before I forgot. Today I’ve sold my hockey equipment and bike to a friend, who is going to resell it in next semester. So from now on I’ll be walking a lot again.

Finally, today my Slovenian record for lowest temperature was finally broken. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time.

Symbolic picture from yesterday's hike 11:32h (more on this in next post). Click on picture to enlarge it.


Update (19.15h). I've just received news that some exchange students went to Kiruna today. It was -35 there today. Maybe I shouldn't be laughing but they are stuck there now. Their car froze (they actually couldn't get inside) and when they finally did they found that battery is dead. If my information is correct they will spend the night in ice hotel there.

Ok, so this week I was helping at International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM), here at LTU.

So what exactly was I doing? Well first two days I was mainly at the reception helping with registration of newly arrives and showing them around. I was also allowed to go to listen to whichever presentation I wanted and of course all the food and drinks were free for us.

I’ve managed to listen to keynote presentation by Google and I think it was really good. He showed some nice applications we’ll be able to see in near future and of course didn’t forget to show us all the new Google toys aka Nexus 5, Google glasses etc…

For each day of conference we got a coupons that covered all expenses in central restaurant, for lunch. Almost all volunteers (students) were finally able to try the most expensive dish from the menu, with all the extra drinks and stuff (which normally costs around 10€). I think this was the first time since I came here in Lulea that I had pork and some other kinds of meat. Usually I only eat fish or chicken since other kinds cost more than 30€/ kg (and you can’t buy less than 1kg).

Here in Sweden they have a tradition of having so called “Fika” every few hours. Hm how could I explain this? It’s something similar to English Tea (time) though it can happen any time of the day. So every 1.5h of conference we got Fika, which included cakes, drinks, sandwiches, cookies, etc…

So despite being volunteer and not getting paid, I saved around 100€ in this week on food and drinks alone (since I didn’t eat/buy anything at home), and probably gained few kg (of winter isolation :D ).

We also got invited to welcoming event in 4* hotel downtown. Needless to say it was awesome.

Overall it was really great experience and I’m happy I’ve been given an opportunity to be involved. I’ve been able to listen to some very good presentations, meet and talked with a lot of new people including presenters. And lastly if I’m not mistaken we are going to get recommendation letter from professor next week. All in all it was great!


Me listening to Google's presentation. Photo by: Benjamin Planche