Return to Budapest

This time with my Mum and Brother :-)
Excellent company, great city, delicious food and incredible weather (10C more than in DK or PL at that time).

Any idea how that something (a thermometer?) works?

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Defended!

I must admit, because I did not know what to expect, I was expecting the worst: a sequence of questions pointing into weaknesses of my PhD work. And instead I got a very constructive discussion about both, the strong and the weak parts. Plus a very positive atmosphere and a couple of jokes! And the after defence discussion was even better!

Summa summarum - a very enjoyable day !!!

And the feeling of having the 3.5 years process completed - priceless... :D

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far too serious post

While drTBBE is snowboarding in Georgia with a group of his good old friends I suddenly have so much time for myself ;-)
Until yesterday most of this time I have spent on preparations for the defence - Incredible how difficult it is to go back to own work after 3 months of not thinking about it! - but yesterday's very sad news:
two-polish-climbers-missing-on-broad-peak
completely distracted my attention and made me thinking hard about serious things...
So far I have been a very lucky and happy person: relatively healthy, loving and  being loved, enjoying what I do at work. But somehow I feel like the time is passing by between my fingers... And it is not scary that I do not know what I will be like, where and what I will be doing in, let't say, 5 years. But it is terrifying that I do not know what I want to be like and what I want to do in 5 years...

The two Polish climbers died while realizing their dreams...
I guess it is time for changes because I do not even  have a dream...


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Krakow

It was so good to be back to Krakow again. We stayed there for a little bit more than 2 days but used every single minute of the time :-) It was great to see good old Friends again (and their kids, some for the first time), wander around streets full of small caffes and pubs.... Excellent time!!!

We highly recommend visiting the Rynek Underground museum placed underground the Main Square and presenting the history of Krakow with a lot of cool installations and visualizations. I promise, you will not be bored there!

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Rainforest

Visiting Randers Regnskov in the middle of Winter in Denamark can be a real treatment to your mood and soul.Temperatures between 25C and 30C, green and colorful, blooming plants and animals running free around you... Veeerrry relaxing... Especially in a company of my Brother!

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Trial lecture - one step closer...

Done!!!

The last step before a PhD defense in Norway is a trial lecture. And I passed it yesterday :-)

The idea of the trial lecture is to check candidate's scientific maturity and therefore the topic of the lecture, given 10 working days before the lecture, is from outside of the candidate's main field of research.

My topic was actually completely new for me "Image smoothing with anisotropic diffusion" ... no, nothing ringed the bell when I read it for the first time :-D 

Just to give you a taste of what I felt, have a look at the Wikipedia site about anisotropic diffusion and focus on equations... They are pretty scary, aren't they ?

Well, it took me quite a while to understand that the topic as such is very interesting and could be very useful in my future work. Nonetheless the two weeks I had were definitely not enough to refresh my mathematics/physics knowledge, learn new things about image processing and prepare myself to talk about all that for 45 minutes... Needless to say how "uncomfortable" I felt when the audience started to ask questions... 

All in all, it was an interesting experience and the evaluation committee was very friendly in their assessments :-) 

It was also good to realize how tiny piece of science my brain is able to learn/remember/comprehend...

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Happy 2013!!!

I tried to restore a list of my resolutions for 2012 and although I haven't learned to play guitar (yet), most of the bullets are ticked off the list!!!
The big plan for 2013 is to go back to regular working hours after the last months spent on wrapping up my PhD and to travel more, much more!!!

While looking for an inspiration for detailed travel planning I found 40 Creative Remakes of World Map.
Some of them are really interesting, have a look in spare time.



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