Urban transport planning / Rescuing education / A way to wake up / Daily crono

Urban transport planning

What a great class! First of all, the topic is both very important (traffic and land use in cities is a major problem in virtually all over the world). Second, the professors are good. The Spanish (or Basque) professor Mikel Murga is so serious in arranging more space for pedestrians, cyclist, and people in general. He is also apparently very experienced consultant, and has many war-stories to share. Frederick P Salvucci is just I like imagine, funny, full of energy, knowledge and experience and very polite, too. He also arranged all kinds of refreshments, even brought a coffee maker to the class and brewed coffee for us! And assignments are interesting, too. The first one is to get the flavor of traffic problems by going and calculating traffic flows in Boston. Next one is to take a global database of traffic, land usage, etc and try to figure something interesting out of it. There are 4 assignments, so the workload is not going to be that large. And anyway, traffic planning is a topic I have been thinking about as long as I can remember. Besides, in order to become a great system architect it is essential to study a wide variety of topics. Just studying IT and SW would be a voluntary handicap.

Rescuing education

While the Finnish government and parliament have seen it fit to cut funds and personnel (up to 6000) from the Finnish education system, Singapore is doing the exact opposite. It is not hard to predict, which country is going to better in the future. I just do not get the blindness and incompetence of Finnish politicians. I need to go back and fix them! They should beware.

A way to wake up

The effects of jet-lag are gone. It is hard to wake up in the morning, and even harder to start reading something. Fortunately, I found a way to make it easier: doing some 5 to 10 minutes stretching exercise seems to wake me up, clear my mind, and make concentrating in abstract stuff a bit easier. Try it! Even better is to have a walk and stretch afterwards, but sometimes there are reasons for not being able to walk. Like torrential rain or too many blisters already.

Daily crono

Not an ordinary day was today. I got up late, at 8 am, read some articles for the system architecture class. It was surprisingly hard: either the articles were hard to understand or I was just tired. Then, lunch with Kumar and Bill, the class, the other class (urban t p). So far, close to ordinary. Fortunately we had a graduate student meeting/party in the MIT museum. A few beers, some chatting, checking new exhibits, and then to the student center to play some pinball (Simpson, which is a great game, hard for me to play, but I have sometimes reached 30 million points). Later, back at home, writing, reading, talking with S, idling.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs from July to September 2005".