A lot of stuff has happened since my last update. In this post, a focus on the official side of things — the rest is pending pictures :)
As you may know, the Université du Luxembourg is a very young university. As happens with young and dynamic universities, stuff gets done, and then the results are celebrated. First up was the opening of my apartment building (which gives me a good reason to show off once again what a nice building it is!). The Minister of Education dropped by (to put it nicely, he and his secretary of statecame to my house just to shake my hand ;-). There were some talks in Luxembourgian. Turns out that I can follow Luxembourgian only if I sort of know what they are saying — so I understood all the pleasantries, but all the extrapolations for future projects went by. Then we had a tour of the building, and it had quite a bit of surprises for me! We even have an altar hidden in there, and a lecture hall. And of course a nice place for a drink, where they had the drinks.
The next uni.lu event was the first doctorate defense within the CSC research unit (roughly speaking: the CS subgroup of the department of technical sciences here). It was the second or third defense of the university, so there is no set way of how to arrange this. Of course, I am used to those defenses I have seen in the Netherlands, which are quite formal. So you can imagine that a much more informal approach was already quite strange to me. That coupled with the attempt to find a form for such an event really ment that my previous expectations of how a defense is conducted, and what happened here, are quite far apart :) Still, good to see how these things are evolving here.
Third uni.lu event was the opening of our office building, here on an old picture. There was some planning in advance, since a lot of journalists would be invited and this was the ideal chance for CSC to showcase itself to the Luxembourgian world. So, the various subparts of the CSC all prepared nice presentations and what-have-you-not. We participated, I patched up an old poster and took it from .nl with me to hang up. The event was kicked off by official talks by the dean of the department, who was followed by the rector. The rector had quite a long speech in French, talking about short-term work contracts and how it is better for academics to move on. He then wanted to recapture that in English, but somehow missed the mark at times. There were some funny remarks made, but the overall message was quite clear: fixed-term contracts will not be extended — if it is up to the rector. And it seems to be. This has of course been playing a bit longer, and there are varying views on the subject.
After the speeches, there was a round of drinks and a sighting of the building, after which we got back to work. The poster presentation was planned as the final part of the program, and of course the invitees were by then overflowing with information and looking to get home, so that part was skipped.
The final event was the first inaugural speech within CSC, by Leon van der Torre. He gave a nice overview of his planned research. The form was once again different from what I was used to, but by now I was slowly adjusting and expecting differences :)
Enough for now, more updates later!
Recent gaming: acquired a GBA Micro2Micro connection cable, trying it out with Sasa! Mario Kart Advance is the winner until now.
Recent cooking: couscous variants :)