The end of February

As you might notice, I changed from writing in Czech into English. I don't know why I'm doing this, maybe just to be free-cool-in. Because I won't read this text twice, it could contain some mistakes and nonsenses, so don't crucify me. I also make a lot of mistakes in Czech too, so eventually it makes no difference.

I'm here for a month now. The time here flies fast as a flying pig and to prove it, Australia's time is 9 hours ahead compare to Czech Republic. During the last week of February, I attended all of my lectures. This is how I would sum up my first impressions from my subjects this semester:

• Programming in the Large - I gotta feeling that this is more or less the basics of Java. However, you need to know how to program before sign up to this subject and the teacher promised creating bigger applications than "Hello World", but I doubt that these apps will be as big as the ones I worked with before like intrade.com or Česká Spořitelna bank, which means I can chill during classes. Nevertheless, I never underestimate and so I borrowed the required book that has over 1000 pages and weights 5 kg min! At least I didn't have to buy a new one because it could cost me about 130$.

• Introduction to Web Design - this course would be a little bit tedious and a lot of f***in around because I'll have to come up with a idea first, write it down and then create nice web pages using HTML, CSS and JavaScript to fulfill the idea. Last time I did this from the scratch was in high school, so it'll be a refreshing course.

• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) - UX and these stuff are now a buzz word, that's the reason why I chose this course. I guess HCI could be challenging because the emphasis of the subject is mainly on how to design a good UI, not the implementation itself. There are not only students from IT background on this course, but also from multimedia or psychology. For this course I had to buy a new book, because we need the newest edition and in the lib they have only older ones. Again, the book weights about 5 kg and has almost 600 pages and costs 82,95$! I'm glad that this is the only book I have to buy this semester :)

• Web Information Systems - programming again, this time JSP and PHP and AJAX and JQuery, so mainly server side stuff. Again, most  of the stuff I know from work (except PHP), so this should not be a big deal and I can chill again. But the syllabus looks really interesting and I've never studied these things before in school, so I'm looking forward to it.

Pub Crawl - Saturday was a hot and dry day. In the afternoon, the event called Pub Crawl started at 4pm. I went there with a white tee and jeans and shoes and I was sweating like a draught Carlton (Australian beer). The organizers of the Crawl came up with some funny rules, mostly about scratching something on your white tee:

• draw the flag of the country where you come from - because I was sent here from the Czech school, I wanted a Czech flag on my back. I asked a guy from Finnland if he can know how to draw a Czech flag correctly. He sounded really convincing while saying that he knows exactly how to draw a Czech flag. At the end, the Czech flag was upside down and the flag was photographed and is now on Facebook, luckily no one has tagged me yet :D

• got 10 phone numbers - I think I didn't complete this task, I got some drawings on my t-shirt instead and Facebook contact on my phone. Looks better than a telephone book on your t-shirt.

• create a straight flush -  we got a random card on arrival, so we have to form a straight flush with other people to get a free drink. At the end, I got free drinks even my straight flush partners weren't there with me.

The Pub Crawl itself contains 6 different places, from pub to clubs. I persisted until the end, which was In da club in Fortitude Valley. But I got tired after 7 hours of pub crawling and 1 hour of dancing, so at 12pm I crawled home. But I wasn't drunk by any means, because the drink is so expensive here, so you can't drink till you pass out or throw out as in Prague.

On Sunday I went to play football (soccer here). I decided that this semester I'll take part in the UQ league or something, which will cost me about 133$, 75$ for the membership and the rest for clothing.

On Monday, I attended the board games night. The membership costs 5$, but it's worth the price! I got stuck there from 5pm until 11pm, but I had a pizza for free :) I played about 5 board games, all of them for the first time, and didn't win nor loose any of them.

On Tuesday, I attended two of my lectures and one voluntary lecture. The voluntary one was the Business law lecture. It took place in Schonel (probably a misspelling here) Theather, which is a theather inside the campus. And it looks really like a theather, not just a big room, so I was impressed. The lecture itself was quite boring at the beginning as the teacher was talking about administrative stuff (how to pass the subject, tests etc.), so I felt asleep for a while. When I woke up, she started talking about the history of Australian law. This was more interesting, because the goverment is completely different in Australia than in CZ. In the evening, I went to the CS party. The party was quite crowded and I met few new people there, so I think I'll go again next time.

On Wednesday I did nothing but running in the afternoon. In Brisbane, everybody runs like Forrest Gump, so I decided I'd run and become Forrest Gump too. I ran about 3km, not much, but I can't exaggerate too much on my first run of this year. On Friday, I'm planning to run again, this time I'll raise the stake to 3,5 km. I also denied to go to the pub tonight, first event denial in Australia!

Thursday was finally a sunny day after a week of rains, so during the morning I did my laundry. Later on I went to school and joined the experiment about brain activity. I got a cap full of electrodes on my head. The experiment was about moving the circles on the PC screen to the right position using touch pad . But the screen was blinking so much that if I had an epilepsy, I would die in thirty seconds. The experiment lasted about 45 minutes, but I got 20 $ for it. Not much, but still better than a punch in my face. Afterwards I went to a pub and drank few beers, because I had no school today :D  So nothing really interesting happened today :)