Melting

I may have gotten a little to used to sleeping in. Getting up at 9am was pretty brutal for me. At least it doesn't take that long for me to eat breakfast and get ready. The weather honestly wasn't too bad today. There's still no sign of the sun, but at least it wasn't foggy or rainy. Yes, it's still cold to me, but high 30s is easily tolerated (and I'd certainly prefer that over 20 degree weather). In fact, it's so unseasonably warm here that the ice on the river is melting. While it seems a natural progression to me, this is apparently crazy early for it to be this warm.

My first class of the day was Intro to Coding Theory. Teacher is still good and material is still interesting. (Noticing a trend? I'm happy with all my classes!) We did a quick review and then jumped into a discussion on Block Code, Hamming Distances, Decoding Error Probabilities and Maximum Likelihood Decoding. Most of my classes consist of a lot of mathematical notation, which I haven't had for a couple semesters. It's taking getting used to but I've found that I missed the ease with which you can consolidate what would have been a complicated, long-winded statement into a few symbols.

Next item on the schedule was Religion and Politics. Luckily the building that this class is located in is just down the street from the CS building, so a quick 5 minute walk. It's nice to not feel like I'd be late for class at any point, as sometimes the teachers here are prone to letting us out late. Classes are typically supposed to run from (x):15 to (x+2):45, where x is the starting hour. This provides 30 minutes in between classes that would be back-to-back. The campus buildings are rather spread out, so it makes sense that the time is needed to navigate around the city. Anyway, back onto topic. The class itself was fairly interesting, the main focus of this lecture was secularism and secularization. (Secularism being a set of beliefs that advocates the marginalization of religion from other spheres of life, and Secularization being a general decline in religious individuals, religious practices, and a differentiation between religion and other spheres of society.)  The teacher is slightly difficult to understand because he's quite soft-spoken, but his english is clear enough. I just wish he'd speak a bit louder, any sort of noise (nose blowing, coughing, chair moving, etc) is enough to drown him out completely. Regardless, I'll have to deal with it. Regarding the actual content of the course, it was thought-provoking to say the least. No mind-blowingly amazing topics were brought up, but there were a few class discussions that were interesting to me. I always enjoy hearing people's views and opinions, and to listen to different cultural perspectives on religion and secularism was a great experience. One of the most striking (and amusing) things was the view that most people held of religion in the United States. The teacher made a comment while we were discussing secularization: he said that religion is still so prevalent in the US because our healthcare is so expensive. Needless to say, the other American students and I shared a good laugh. (Though I don't necessarily disagree with him.)

The teacher also encouraged discussion between students regarding our personal opinions. He posed the question of which among the processes accompanying modernization seemed to contribute the most and the least towards secularization. There were some interesting variances in opinion regarding this and I enjoyed the small discussions I was able to have. The more I think about it the more I'm glad that I decided to take this class. I think that with only CS courses I would have missed out on this cultural insight, and lost a chance to gain some new perspective. While I'm certainly immersing myself in a new culture just by being here, this allows for a more intricate view of some of the thought processes that Estonians, and individuals of other cultures, posses.

One last note regarding this class: there was a tidbit that the teacher said that I found quite thought-provoking. He asserted that religion has complete legitimacy over death. He said that Estonians are not church-going people and that they do not identify with any particular religion, but all of their soldiers are buried. Something of the religious influence remains present, even in a culture where religion is such a non-factor. Food for thought.

At this point I'd been through 4 hours of non-stop classes, I was pretty hungry and ready to go crash. But no such luck, I had one more class to go. Basics of Cloud Computing was next on my list. I confess that despite my best efforts to stay focused and pay attention I was zoning out after the first hour. For the time I did pay attention I was interested, but the teacher delved into a couple of long-winded but not actually necessary explanations of things that weren't able to hold my interest. We mostly covered specific cloud infrastructures and storage services such as: Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Storage (EBS). We went into a LOT of detail regarding these, (too much in my opinion) but I'm not yet sure how we'll apply this knowledge.

Once class was over I headed over to the University Multimedia Center to pick up two documents I sent to be printed. I've been getting all of my papers together so that I can apply for my Estonian residence permit. I contacted my tutor (UT assigned student-guide sort of person) and asked for her assistance at the migration office, as it was advised to bring along somebody who could speak Estonian. I'll be meeting her and Ariail at the Town Center tomorrow at 12 to head over to the migration office and submit my application. I've been told the process takes a while, but hopefully it's not too bad. Not that I have anything better to do, I just like my free time! (No classes on Wednesday, thanks to my re-scheduling.)

Lesson of the day is: 6 hours of class with no break is absolutely exhausting.