💾 Archived View for soviet.circumlunar.space › pjvm › log › 000012-utrecht-and-other-things.gmi captured on 2023-11-04 at 11:51:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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by pjvm
13-10-2023
log entry #8
I currently travel to Utrecht every monday morning, specifically to Utrecht Science Park, for some of my courses. In the Netherlands, certain mathematics courses are organised jointly and students from all Dutch universities come to one place to follow them. I'm doing two such courses at the moment.
One of those two courses is the PhD-level course that I was doubting whether to take, as I talked about in my previous proper log entry.
said log entry: phones, queueing theory and a software project (see section "queueing theory")
There's some good news here: in contrast to what I thought back then, I've been able to organise it in such a way that I can take the course without jeopardising my graduation if I fail it. If this hadn't been possible, I wouldn't have taken the course, because it simply would've been too risky (and being halfway through the course now, I can say there really is a pretty high chance of failure).
My curriculum has become a bit of an interesting construction now: in principle, I take two PhD-level courses, but if one of those fails, the PhD courses are replaced by two master courses. Normally, my university would not allow this: if a course is in my curriculum, I'm supposed to either pass it directly, or pass the resit, or pass it next year, in any case I'm not supposed to just obtain the credits from some other course. However, in this case we argued that these courses are very difficult, do not offer a resit opportunity and cannot be re-taken next year, and this was sufficient for it to be approved.
Anyway, the result is that my mondays now involve waking up early, using a lot of public transport, and arriving in Maastricht in the evening. Getting up much earlier than I do the rest of the week is not ideal, and this combines with my usual trouble falling asleep, so it's safe to say I'm more tired than usual. Of course, what doesn't help is that I also sometimes have trouble going to bed on time, such as recently when I kept writing until I finished a rant about copyright licenses, of all things, and published it around 3 ante meridiem.
Given the conditions under which it was written, I think it turned out pretty well, but I definitely regret writing it at such an hour. I don't really understand my own state of mind in such moments - it should be clear I will regret not just going to bed (or so at least I think now), yet I continue. I'm trying to work on better understanding why this happens, and on going to bed on time so I can be slightly less tired. For now, I'm tired.
A completely different thing to do with mondays: last weekend I looked at some graphs, saw that those graphs had been trending upwards for a few months, and then thought about being packed like a sardine into a Utrechtian tram next monday, and the result is that I now wear a mask on public transport again. I've seen pretty much no one else do this and it is a little weird to be the only one, but otherwise I feel good about this decision. I'm mostly doing this because I don't want to get "long covid", the aftereffects of covid-19. An uncle and aunt of mine have this, and from all I've heard the more serious forms of long covid can really hamper one's functioning, and for a long time too. So being cautious feels right.
In the already mentioned previous log entry, I talked about how I begrudgingly was going to get a new smartphone. I ended up buying a second-hand Pixel 4a (obligatory "ceterum censeo Gugollem esse delendum") and indeed putting DivestOS on it. I found this to be quite doable, although there was a bit of a scary moment where the device was stuck in a boot-loop. It turned out there had been an error and only part of the OS image had been flashed onto the device, and running the failed command again made everything work. One frustrating discovery while setting it up is that watsep just, throws all your data away without warning if you move to a new device. It's still backed up somewhere, but not in an accessible form and getting it back would be a pain, so I think I'll just leave it for now.
So far I'm very pleased with this phone. I already do things on it that I wouldn't have considered an option on my old iPhone and moving files to and from my computer is just so much easier.
Since the start of this month I have a proper personal website:
I already made a website when I was trying to do digital rights advocacy at my university. I could more or less copy the about page, and the basic setup is the same although I fixed and reorganised some things so it's more future-proof. I added a page about webcomics and wrote a short gemini explainer, and that is more or less the whole website so far.
I expect there will be basically no overlap between what's on my website and what's on my gemini capsule, and this capsule will remain the more important of the two. Of course, I could also do without the website but I think it's nice to have one, at least if it's a small, hand-made website like this.
Edit 14-10-2023. Expanded a bit more on long covid; switched to "Gugol, Gugollis, n."; the index previously gave the wrong date for this post.