Lisbon - Week5

Radha Krishna Temple, Lisboa

[30/09/2012] August 23rd, 2012 was a Thursday. So my weeks count at Lisboa ends at Wednesdays, and I am supposed to blog on the weekly posts on Thursday, for the past week of Thursday - Wednesday. Anyway, no one is going to assess these posts, and reward me for accuracy. Hence no worries. Here I am blogging for the last 10 days ending with yesterday!

Lectures!

Now the lab sessions have started, and we will get the project descriptions the week starting from tomorrow. We have already completed two weeks of lecture. I will blog about the lectures and how our 3 3-member teams are going ahead with the projects, separately! Ana Milosavljevic and Tamás Balogh are the other two members in my team, and we will surely have some nice projects by end of the semester.

Autumn has begun
We are no more with summer, and it is getting too cold a few nights. Autumn has just arrived! A few of my friends living here didn't forget to scare that winter will be even colder and it will be cold more inside the apartment than outside, at the road!

Templo Radha Krishna

We had a nice time at Comunidade Hindu de Portugal. The temple (Photos) is located at Telheiras, the end of the green line. The temple also has a nice canteen that sells Indian sweets at a reasonable price. The canteen sells lunch too.

Llovizna
With these weekly posts, I can see that blog Llovizna is currently in its third generation. It started in 2008, under my own name ("Kathiravelu Pradeeban") with some random technical entries. By repositioning it under the title "Llovizna," I made my blog to move into its second generation, targeting to address the common reader base of my blog. Recently, with the move to Lisbon, my blog is shaping as more of a travel entries of an exchange student. I can see the difference in the Google advertisements posted on my blog too. Earlier they were almost always about some software. Now they are more about universities, travel and holidays at Europe, and localized content targeting Portuguese. This may be because I am connecting from Portugal, and hence the segmentation. However, I will also keep blogging on the technical aspects, and will maintain the Llovizna-quality in the upcoming posts, that will be useful for the readers.

2013
Just 3 more months for the coming year. 2012 is really going awesome. Vê-lo novamente em breve!

Year 2012 - a year of changes

Opposite to IST, Alameda, Lisbon

Time has gone pretty fast. When I was selected to follow the Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing (EMDC) in the first half of this year, going to Lisbon seems to be far away. But sorry for repeating the phrase again - time has gone pretty fast. I was selected to DMKM (Erasmus Mundus Master Course in Data Mining and Knowledge Management) as well, where the first year will be at University of Lyon Lumière Lyon 2 in France and the second at University Polithenica of Bucharest in Romania. Distributed Computing and Data Mining both are my research interests. Considering the advantages of both the courses, finally I decided to follow EMDC. I quickly accepted the offer for EMDC, and started working on that.

Getting the Portugal study visa of course needed a considerable effort. It also made me travel twice to New Delhi. I utilized my first trip to New Delhi in summer as a sight-seeing tour in New Delhi. It was a great experience, including the negotiations with the three-wheeler drivers. The second trip made me float. I was even worried whether my travel documents got wet by the heavy showers, on my way to the Portugal Embassy in Chanakyapuri. Thanks to God, my bag was strong enough not to let the water in.

I was working at WSO2 for the last 2 years, and it was my job since I graduated. Interestingly I was an intern too at WSO2. It was a great learning experience, as my first job. For some unknown reason, the Emirates decided to send me in the business class, though I had bought a ticket for the economic class. That gave me a positive feeling (Feeling lucky.. :D)

Lisbon seems pretty cool, and started to settle down here. Along with these changes, Llovizna too is facing a few changes (may I say, improvements?) I foresee, the completely new set of blog posts dominating the blog, along with my traditional mixture of technical and personal posts. I see a few posts on my experience on studying abroad, and related tours. Hope that will make Llovizna sexier. ;) To match with this, I have enabled the Google ads into my blog, as I feel they give provide some advertisements that are related and useful to the readers. For example, I could see the advertisements of the European scholarship programs in the blog post that mentions about the European Study visa. Hope the overall reader experience is made more positive.

I hope the upcoming days will be more exciting, as the course is starting on the 17th of September. I will keep the readers updated on this. Tenha um bom dia!