Last Post

It has been some four months since I came back home and I would like to make this the last post of my blog. Union was great. There has been a lot I have not covered here, a lot of things will stay just in memory  :)
I am sure that at some point, I will start another blog. In fact, it may be quite soon. Until then,

goodbye

Jak Na To

Tenhle clanek smolim trochu se zpozdenim, ale verim ze pomuze. Jeste dodam ze co tu ctete jsou me osobni nazory.
Takze: jedes na Union? Rozhodl jsem se sepsat par postrehu ktere jsem tu nabral a mohly by se ti mohly hodit.
Nejdriv trochu nutné omáčky: Studuju informatiku na FELu, vyjel jsem sem na 3. ročník mého studia (Pozor, skola tu je jen pro bakalare, pokud jste magistr, na Union nejezdete. Ani vas sem nepusti, resp. nemeli by, kvuli moznym problemum s nachazenim ekvivalentnich predmetu.), a to v roce 2012-2013. Tudíž něco z toho co řeknu asi nebude relevantní pokud jste třeba strojari, nebo pokud tohle čtete o několik let později.

Auto
Pokud si chcete půjčit auto, nejlepší je to udělat přes stránky německého ADACu (googli adac autovermietung), kde je možné si zarezervovat auto z Hertzu ve Schd'y. Vyhoda je v tom, ze nedostanete poplatek za to, že je vám víc než 25. A to se vyplatí :) Podle meho nazoru je ale mnohem lepsi se na auto s par lidmi slozit a koupit si ho. Bez auta je to v USA proste tezke. Jiste, tuhle vas vezme roommate nebo spoluzacka nebo si ho pujcite.. ale mit vlastni je nej.

CS kurzy
Nebojte se zapsat si jakýkoli CS kurz. Pokud za sebou máte 2 roky felu, dáte tu z CS cokoliv. (pozor, nerikam ze tu vsechno date s prstem v nose! Obtiznost si muzete do jiste miry nastavit sami, proste tim co budete delat za projects.) Kurzy tu vyžadují práci přes semestr takže se nemůžete ztratit. Někdy ani není zkouška (místo toho je projekt). Post o kurzech co jsem bral je nekde blizko v historii. Na http://cswiki.union.edu/ se muzete podivat, na jakych projektech byste mohli delat, treba v ramci independent study.

Humanities
Union je liberal arts college. To znamena, ze tu muzete studovat spoustu humanitnich veci, na ktere FELak normalne kouka s velkym opovrzenim. Pokud jste fakt hardcore felak, asi jim radsi zustante. Pokud ale mate zajem i o jine veci, jdete do nich! Fotografie byla supr a zpetne vidim jako druhou nejvetsi chybu to, ze jsem si nevzal hru na nejaky hudebni nastroj. Musite ale vybirat peclive. Vykaslal bych se na nejake manazerstvi, berte kreativni veci, treba herectvi. (Herectvi?! jo - nic vas lepe nenauci vystupovat pred publikem.)

Independent Study
Pokud chcete pracovat na něčem vašem / chcete dělat něco co nenabizeji / vzít něco více do podrobna, nabízí se independent study, ktera spociva v tom, ze si najdete profesora, ktery je ochotny vasi vec supervizovat a pak se máte týdenní meetingy. Me osobne to velmi vyhovovalo.

Práce
Pracovat můžete max 20 h týdně. Asi X generaci Cechu tu pracovalo na několika místech:
Library (max 10h/tyden, 9.5USD/h): Podle me bezva job. Spociva v tom, ze sedite za pultem a vydavate/prijmate knihy, dvd apod. Bezva na ni je, ze 95% casu muzete delat na vasem laptopu ukoly (ci cokoliv jineho). Mene bezva je, ze kazdy 2 ze 3 trimestru dostanete smenu v patek nebo sobotu odpo, a to do zaviracky, coz pro nas byla pulnoc. Nocni zivot tu zacina o dost drive nez doma a o pulnoci je uz vetsinou pozde neco zacinat... Me to ale zas tolik nestvalo. Kdyz checete nekam jet, sluzby si vymenite, no problem.

IT Services (8USD/h): Vim, ze nekdo driv pracoval u helpdesku, coz je nejspis jeste lepsi nez knihovna. Hodne lidi, vcetne me, pracovalo pro Kesheng, ktera dela vselijaky support pro profesory. Ja hodne delal stranky ve wordpressu a dokumentaci, minimalne php, css a js. Osobne bych tohle nakonec nedoporucil, protoze jsem nemel pocit ze to, co delam ma velke vyuziti a asi i kvuli tomu me to moc nebralo. Nejspis by se dala v Cesku najit zajimavejsi prace kterou by clovek mohl delat tu. Pro bylo to, ze kdyz jsem chtel nekam jet, nebyl problem praci vynechat.

Rosie
U Rosie jsem nepracoval, ale co vim, tak je to byvala profesorka a o vikendech potrebuje vypomoc s domacima pracema vseho druhu. Bere vzdy treba tri Cechy a plati dobre.

Na campusu je spousta dalsich (nekdy flakacich) praci (posta, gym, language center...), nevim ale jestli na ne Cesi maji narok. Za zeptani nic nedate.
Jeste bych dodal: kdyz se pujdete zeptat za praci do international office, Michelle vas nejspis posle do human resources at si vyplnite formular. Ten vyplnite a uz nikdy od nich neuslysite. O mnoho lepsi je se jit zeptat primo na misto, kde si myslite ze by vas mohli vzit. Pekne vsude chodte, poptejte se a ono se neco najde.

Summer Research (SR)
Pres leto se da delat summer research s nekym z profesoru. Nejlepsi asi je se zeptat kdo co dela za research, a zeptat se jestli by vas vzali. Podivejte se na tu CS wiki, veci tam by se daly delat jako SR. Dostat SR neni uplna samozrejmost, takze pokdu to nevyjde (jako me :D ) je porad moznost zustat a pracovat (ale pouze ve vasem field of study). Nakonec jsem pokracoval v ITS (10USD/h) a bylo to celkem fajn.

PhD
Premyslite o PhD? Zkuste s nekym z profesoru na necem zapracovat. Nemusi to byt jen v ramci Independent Study, muze to byt nejaky projekt v ramci kurzu. Kdyz udelate pekny kus prace, ziskate pak cenne reference. A reference se hodi; nejen pro PhD.

Explore
Takove magicke slovicko :) Tady tim chci rict, abyste nebyli lini a snazili se potkavat nove lidi, chodit na eventy ktere skola porada.. chodte na fratparty, opijejte se a delejte blbosti (ale fire alarmy radsi nezapinejte :P)... cestujete (hlavne stredni amerika byla supr, floridu bych spis vymenil za west coast) a tak. Nenechavejte veci nahode a planujte dopredu, co chcete udelat,. Utece to jako voda. Uz jsem tu asi psal, ze muzete delat take vlastni eventy, na ktere vam skola da penize - to je taky dobre. A jestli chcete na Unionu nekoho znat, az tam pojedete, vezte ze kazdy rok od zari do pulky prosince jezdi asi 20 Amiku na CVUT :) A ted, jestli sem vam predal neco uzitecneho se mi napiste do komentaru. To bych byl blazen abych jich tam nemel za mesic aspon 20 :)

Vojta

White Water Rafting

This was totally amazing. The outing club organized a rafting trip and I woke up at about 5:30 to make it to the sign ups which started at 7:30. In case you are wondering: no, I wasn't the first one there.

Anyway, it was worth it. The trip was on Sunday and took place in Adirondacks about 1,5 h from the college. It was pretty chilly, just above freezing. We got all the gear - wet suits, gloves, vests, etc... I had about 6 layers of clothing on my body and we headed over to the river.

We started at the Indian River with a steersman whose name I don't remember :D. She was a woman, about 35 and was kayaking/rafting since she was 8. First we were taught how to paddle and how to not fall off the raft. We spent some time practicing the commands from her and then -- let's get it started!

As I said, the first part of the trip was on the Indian River and soon the first white water appeared. I enjoyed it very much. Our steersman yelled loudly the commands: ..."forward HARD!"... "left back, right forward"... her scream was almost deafening but I didn't mind. Later the Indian River merged into the Hudson River and the water was even wilder and I liked it even better :)

So it was really cool but on the other hand I should mention that it was freezing and OF COURSE I got totally wet - there was no way I could avoid it. We made a lunch stop, where I realized I could not feel my toes at all and it was windy so it was colder than in the raft. It didn't take long to get to the end of the tour, though. I was glad I could change back into my dry clothes and get warm. Speaking of clothes, I forgot to take a second pair of underwear with me, so I just didn't wear any after I changed :D (I didn't tell anyone :D)

Another cool experience.

My classes

I'd like to talk more about the classes I have taken. Let's go by the terms.
Later, if I'm not lazy, I will write something about the education at union in general.

Fall

AVA 101 - Photography 1 (prof. Benjamin)
This class was fun. We were given film cameras (nikon fm2 - really cool stuff!!) and 10 film roles. There we three projects throughout the term:
Photography of light because light is the fundamental part of photography and good lighting is a necessary part of any good photograph. It was mainly about finding interesting shadows of trees, wall structures or anything else...
Photography of people because -- that's just a cool thing to do :D I photographed on my trips to NYC and then I photographed Sophie in the studio.
Love / Hate final project, to bring a bit of our own ideas into the class. What I did is described here.
I spent a lot of time in the lab, because I had to develop the film and make prints of the pictures I liked, which can take a lot of time. I took about 450 pictures over the term, so just imagine.
Overall I have to say I enjoyed the class. It was my first encounter with photography and I took from it how the camera works (the technology behind it is actually not part of the class, which is sad, but I was curious) and generally speaking, I got interested in the subject. Thanks to that I later bought a used DSLR - Nikon D90. A new model only a couple of months ago (january 2013) was $1000. Until now, I took about 6000 pictures with it. I kept about 3500...

CSC 321 - Data Mining and Machine Learning (prof. Webb)
Sounds cool, right? Nick is among the coolest professors I have ever seen. He has a specific sense of humor. Hard to describe. (Actually, not so hard. But do you really wanna know...? :D). As for the class, it was a lecture-based course with some homework, presentation about a research paper (I presented face recognition) and a final project. There was a strong component of showing problems where DM&ML can be used which was a great motivation. After the presentation there was room for questions. This mind-provoking is something I find good. Being able to ask the right questions (at the right time) is great ability that I lack.
I thought 300 level courses are really hard, but it is not so bad. I expected to work more. I learned how to use some features of Weka and my final project was about detecting spam in SMS messages. I achieved about 97% accuracy, but it wasn't a really big deal.
Overall, I think more homework would make the class better.

GER 200 - German 200
This class fought a long fight with my laziness and lost. There is a lot of work for this class, but just doing homework doesn't help in learning a language. One has to be 100% committed to learning and spend every free minute by practicing.
The class has a problem: The teacher is not there to really introduce a topic, write it down on a blackboard and explain to students. All the grammar is sort of explained on-the-run and student is expected to understand it (which is not happening) or study it at home from the insanely expensive textbook (which happens sometimes). The classes are mainly used to go through homework and correcting it, reading aloud and that kind of stuff. The quizzes are too easy and did not force me to look at the material. For instance the vocab quizzes require to just connect an english word in one column to a corresponding german word in the second column. Too easy! You can guess it!

Winter

Because this is a liberal arts college I wanted to taste the non science/engineering stuff more. It was not a good decision but it made me realize how I like CS.

MBA 551 - Managing people and teams in organizations (prof. Nydegger)
A lot of theories about what people's needs are, what research has been done about job performance and a lot more... The lectures were fine and the professor is a really cool guy and good speaker, but my opinion is that studying management does not provide you with any valuable skill. At least I din't have to spend a lot of time with this crap.

ECO 101 - Intro to Economics (prof. Davis)
This course was exactly about what the name says. Micro and macro economics. Supply, Demand, opportunity cost, GDP... Ok choice. The professor's daughter lives in Prague.

CSC 235 - Modeling and Simulation (prof. Barr)
You may ask why I took a 200 level course if a 300 level was not very challenging. The answers is that 1) I checked the syllabus before and knew there was going to be more work. 2) there were no 300 level courses that I didn't take at home. (the CS dept. here has about 8 professors).
We did Vensim and later on Matlab. However, I'd enjoy the class more if was covering the material more in depth. Especially the topics of the classes later in the term were quite brief (Monte Carlo, High Performance Computing, Random walks). The problem is the students are not all CS majors and even if they are, some of them haven't even taken Data structures class, so most of them are kinda handicapped. (programming, compilation, interpreting, two's complement etc are things the students just don't know).

Spring

To move my studies back to CS, I am taking:

CSC 325 Robotics (prof. Webb)

I talked with the professor beforehand and what I'm gonna do is use kinect camera to take a picture, detect text in the picture (the text is gonna be written on some boxes) and then use robotic arm to grab the box I ask (all based on detecting and recognizing text in image). Pretty cool!! I'm excited about it. update: It took me some time but I managed to do it.

CSC-490 Independent Study (prof. Striegnitz)

Independent study in web programming. I have to do that because it is a requirement of my university. It's good that it is independent study so I don't have to spend time learning what is html.

AVA-380 Physical computing (prof. Orellana)

I thought this is gonna be a chill class but it seems like it's gonna be a lot of work. I'm not sure exactly what it's gonna be yet but I will be building an art robot and use arduino to do so.

Florida

Hi again,

I just found it worth mentioning that I spent the spring break in FLorida. 10 people, 2 cars, a lot of driving, sun and fun. That's the short way to describe it. Here is the longer one:

We left on Thursday the 21st of March after lunch - at that time there was 11 of us, but Baru was parting from us, only to join us again on the last two days. As I said, we rented two cars, each of those having two drivers. Me and Libor drove dodge caravan. Very spacious and comfortable car, I have to say. It made the road trip quite comfortable.

The ride down to our first city took the afternoon and the whole next day. The first stop was the city of st. Augustine, the very oldest town of the US (just forget about the indians for a while). Not so surprisingly, the center of the town resembled centers of European towns more than any other place I have seen in the US. We visited a fort build by the Spanish, walked around and experienced how a tornado warning weather looks like. After the storm was gone, the streets were full of water and we had to take our shoes off on the way back to our hostel because crossing the streets and staying dry was impossible. I have never seen such a thing :)

Next cool stop was the Kennedy Space center, the place I was looking for the most. All the history of space exploration, rockets, simulators... reealy cool. Probably the only place on earth to see that kind of stuff. The only downside was the weather - we were again under a tornado warning and a heavy rain followed. We got stuck inside a building that contained the Saturn 5 rocket and the bus transport back to the visitor center was not in service. We lost about an hour there and so I didn't get to see all of the things - namely some 3D movies. The second group of guys put some food on the roof of our car which attracted a number of birds that, of course, pooed on it several times. Later they also put a sticker on our car. The sticker read 'FART ZONE -- enter at your own risk' :D I should emphasize that the warning was not based on true.

Then? Miami Beach. Beaches, some drinking and also having our car towed. Haha that was fun. We were about to go to a party when I took the car keys to go to the car and get my shoes. But the car wasn't there. Instead, there were two Rolls Royce limousines :DD

Libor got the car next day and we could leave to another Miami location. We stayed in Marriot :P The price was $114 per person for 3 nights, which was great. There was a TV, fridge, and it looked really nice. This place was our base for trips to Key Largo and Everglades.

In Key Largo we did snorkeling and in Everglades where we spent two days, were all about nature. The area is incredibly flat and actually, quite boring. Even the alligators get quite boring when you see like 50 of them just lying on the ground without movement. Incomparable with Central America.

The last day was the BEST - the universal resort in Orlando. Roller coasters, HOGWARTS, more roller coasters... actually it wasn't much more but just these two sort of thing were just amazing. I had a particularly great time in the Harry Potter area. They built a beautiful model of the village of Hogsmeade and the castle. In Hogsmeade, there were the Three Broomsticks, Hog's Head, Honeydukes... and the castle had paintings of Witches and Wizards who moved just like in the movies, there was a lot of other small things that I enjoyed. The best was the roller coaster ride. It wasn't the traditional roller coaster thing. You were sitting in a 'bench' and the content of the ride was partly projected in front of you and partly was real. For instance, when you were flying down on a broomstick, the image of you moving in the air was projected an at the same time the bench was moving and bending in a way that made it look real. On the other hand, the whomping  willow and some of the dementors were real (not projected). AMAZING ride. I have to say the guys did a great job. The visit was worth the money.

And then? Ride back... back to cold weather at union. I arrived wearing shorts and flip flops. :D

Boston

It's been a while since I made the last post, so lets break the silence. I visited Boston! (a month ago, so it's not really a fresh piece of news :D)
Anyway, I joined the guys from the Graduate College who have their own cars so getting there was fairly easy. The weather was fine - it was cold but it wasn't snowing so we could make it through the freedom trail and saw the most important stuff that's to see in Boston. I took some nice pictures that you cannot see unless we're friends on facebook :P and we headed towards one of the main attraction of Boston: bars.
We had the first beer at about 5 pm and the guys then went to find another bar, closer to the center. I, however, wanted to see the MIT, supposedly the best engineering university in the world and one French guy joined me. Pretty much all I wanted was a t-shirt as a souvenir and so I googled the hours of the MIT store. We had about an hour until the closing time so we set out for the walk. Finding the store turned out to be quite a difficult a task because nobody we asked knew where it was. We managed to find it eventually, but it was only 15 minutes before it was closing. That was enough for me to buy what I wanted :)
Unfortunately, it was too dark to see other MIT's facilities and I believe (or hope?) I didn't miss anything huge, as this kind of stuff usually isn't publicly accessible. So, bars followed. We met the rest of the guys in the center in a bar where the beer was $2/pint (473ml). We started drinking... and at about 10 pm paid $230 just for beer and shots. We were four. More places continued and soon I couldn't drink more.
In a state of not feeling well I left and walked (!) in snow back to the hotel. I have no idea how I found it because it was at least a 20 minute walk. Anyway, I arrived safe and with my camera. Not losing anything makes me feel especially proud of myself.
The morning was bad, though. I had huge bags under my eyes and I wanted to do nothing but sleep. Sadly, we had to check out and leave. The original plan was to go and see the universities but it was snowing and so we decided to go straight to Schenectady. I spent the whole time sleeping...
Ha, definitely cool!

End of the trip

All right. The last day of our 45-day trip. We woke up early and took a collectivo to Playa Del Carmen. In playa, I bought a pair of nice leather shoes. Except they are a bit small. They didn't have bigger ones, though. :D I will donate them to a charity, I guess. We did a good job getting to the airport on time and everything went on well. Sitting at a restaurant table, we enjoyed a stylish yogurt-bread lunch. The staff promptly asked us to leave :D The only thing I messed was leaving a sunscreen in my backpack. They took it.
NYC welcomed us by unwelcoming change in temperature. Funny thing happened: when I walked up to the immigration desk and handed the policeman my documents, he said "Čo tu robíš, Vojtěchu?" (what are you doing here, Vojtech?) He was Slovak. For those who don't know, Czech and Slovak languages are very similar. We spent the night at the JFK airport  - we had to catch a bus to Albany in the morning. We had a truly american dinner - McDonalds followed by KFC and slept on the floor just like homeless guys do. We weren't the only ones. Next to us was camping a group of five blond girls from Sweden who were headed exactly to the places we came from! We talked a bit, I gave them an experienced traveler :P advice and we parted.
Air train, metro, waiting at Penn Station and walking to the bus for Albany.
We arrived to Albany at about 10 am. It was FREEZING! There were two options: taking an expensive train which was coming in 5 minutes, or waiting outside for the cheap bus. It was really freezing and we wanted to come to Union as soon as possible, so we decided to take the bus (good logic, huh?).
We asked some people to be sure in which direction we want to go, so it was pretty straightforward. However, it was not so straightforward after 15 minutes in the bus when we figured out we were going in the wrong direction, away from Albany and Schenectady. We got off and waited for another bus, according to the bus driver's directions. No bus was coming and eventually we got on the bus with the same driver when he was returning to do another lap. After that, it was fine. One more transfer and we arrived in Schenectady shortly after the noon and walked in the freeze to the college. I took a shower and went to upperclass, to meet aaaal the other guys :)
That's it! It was AWESOME!!