James’ travelog

Well here I am in Melbourne! I almost missed my plane from Schiphol Airport because I slept through my alarm. I woke up at 5:30 AM, looked at the clock, and thought nothing of it. Then, realizing shit was hitting the fan in fairly large quantities, jumped out of my bed and made it to the airport as fast as I could. Then, the train to the airport broke down, the airport computer didn’t recognize my passport number as having a visa, but, luckily, everything turned out okay in the end, and I made my flight. Barely.

The airplane journey was really long. Watched some movies, listened to some music, slept on occasion, and entertained myself by trying to puzzle together the build-it-yourself food kits that are supposed to resemble meals. Then, about a full day later, I stepped out into summery Melbourne. Yay! The university arranged a pick up service for me, free of charge, and brought me to my hostel. I’ll probably be staying there until I find myself some accommodation.

I quite like Melbourne so far. The climate is very agreeable, it’s sunny and around 25 / 30 degrees Celsius at the moment, it’s spaciously built, and has a very modern and busy, but open-minded and relaxed atmosphere. I still have a lot of exploring to do though. I’m definitely still a bit jetlagged, but had a pretty good sleep last night and feel loads better today.

I just went to the Orientation Welcome Center at the University. The university has an absolutely beautiful and huge terrain here in which it’s fairly easy to get lost as it’s about the size of the city center of Amsterdam. I’ve been filled in on all the details of my orientation period, which starts tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to all of it.

Well, I’m off house hunting now. Until later!

PS: I wrote this post yesterday, but only managed to get internet access today.

While I write this, it’s snowing outside. I couldn’t have picked a better time to travel towards the Australian summer.

In a matter of hours I’ll be at Schiphol airport, about to embark on a 24-hour journey to Melbourne.

Did I pack everything? Passport, visa, ticket, credit card? Check. Clothes, toothbrush, clean undies? Check. Alright, I think I’m ready.

So long Amsterdam, I’ll see you again in six months or so.

Melbourne is less than five days away. Today I spend my day cleaning and boxing up my apartment.

My flight leaves Monday morning at 7:15 AM from Schiphol airport. After close to 24 hours of flight time and 2 quick stopovers (in Vienna and Singapore) I’ll arrive at Melbourne airport somewhere around 5 PM, local time. Due to the 10 hour time difference, I expect a near-death-jetlag for the first days there.

For the first time in my life I’ll set foot on Australia, the biggest island of the world, home to Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, Heartbreak High and Crocodile Hunter Steve Erwin. Also, it’s the most uninhabitable continent with its extreme heat, lack of natural water ways inland, vast stretches of desert, lethal ocean currents, and the most dangerous animal species in the world.

Melbourne on the other hand, is the self-proclaimed “world’s most liveable city”, which seems an outright contradictio in terminis. I’ve been reading up a bit on the city where I’ll be living and studying the next five months, and it seems like there is quite a bit of truth in their statement though. Supposedly Melbourne is Australia’s most cultured city, with many museums, parks and art galleries, a strong coffee culture, 3.9 million inhabitants of many different ethnical backgrounds, bicycle paths, and trams. It sounds a bit like a big version of Amsterdam, only with a much better climate and a beach. I can’t wait to go explore!

I’ve got a hostel booked for the first few days, but will start looking for a nice little apartment as soon as I get there.

The university project I blogged about in my last post has finished. We presented our results last Friday, and were - much to our own surprise - rewarded with the Project Information Retrieval 2006 award. The main reason being that it was a challenge in a completely uncharted area. It’s been a very creative and inspiring project, I must say. I’ve really learnt loads about the blogosphere, programming, and team work.

The process of the past four weeks in a nutshell: we were presented with a data set of 1 million blogs with 10 million posts. The assignment was to automagically find, analyze and visualize communities within this data. This was realized through the development of a fair number of algorithms that analysed link structures and blog content. The final results of our endeavours can be seen at BlogsLikeThis. Most of the website has been implemented by myself (visualization excluded), as well as a part of the underlying algorithms. For the interested ones: a more technical and detailed explanation on the process can be found in our final paper, downloadable on the BlogsLikeThis About page.

One of the great things about blogspace is that word spreads around so quickly. Just a day after the project’s finalization, some posts about BlogsLikeThis started to appear, such as here, here and of course here. I’ve become so enthusiastic about the whole project, that I actually wouldn’t mind spending another four weeks on improving the service (making the data set live, for example, would be a very cool challenge).

I should probably write a little bit on this blog again about my university exchange with Melbourne. About the things that have been going on with regard to my travel preparations and such. The thing is: I haven’t been really busy with it. I’ve been spending most of my time on a fulltime university project which involves a giant dataset of the blogosphere, from which we have to automagically extract weblog communities. It’s extremely interesting, but time consuming. I could fill pages with the nifty things we’re doing right now, but hey this is a travelog so I won’t bother (maybe I should start a “James’ Geekblog”).

Ah yes, there are some updates on my ‘trip’, come to think of it. I found someone to rent my room to during my absence, which is great of course. I also had a decent talk with my student adviser who shedded a lot of light on the options of how to handle the rest of my bachelor studies. At first I was under the impression that it would be best if I skipped the first semester of the next study year, but as it turns out there’s quite a bit of flexibility with regard to the schedule of writing my thesis, starting my Masters, and so on. My brother Tristan and I already vaguely discussed that if I’d have the first semester off we could do the Trans-Siberian Railway together, a trip which has I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time. But if I get enough study points in Australia which I can transfer to the University of Amsterdam, I guess I’ll have to postpone that voyage for a bit later. Ah, the burdens of time! Speaking of which:

20 days left until I’m in Australia!