WIP — I will finish this when I finish this.

A while ago my friend PPershing (who was at a Google internship at San Francisco prior to these events) offered me to join him on a 2-week bike trip across California, spanning about 1000km. Of course, being the initiative idiot who loves challenges and adventures, I was easily persuaded to do so. And so I (i.e. a city girl with poor health and no prior training) have set out for the big scary USA, planning to spend one week with my boyfriend Tomi (who was, and at the time of writing still is, at Google San Francisco as well), and then two weeks swearing about being such an initiative idiot along with biking uphill.

The trip turned out very, very differently. Nevertheless, it was interesting (maybe even more than it would be if everything went according to the plan), and therefore I am presenting my diary.

As I no longer practice my writing skills by doing essays for homework, I feel my ability to express my opinions in a sufficiently illustrative (and pleasurably ornate) way has gotten significantly worse (this claim is supported e.g. by my having written “has gotten significantly worse” instead of “has gone astray; onto the path paved by decline” or something similar (albeit that might be just a tad too dramatic (I wonder, are nested parentheses a sign of bad writing skills?))). So, anyway, I’ve decided to once in a while try to write down my thoughts on some topics which are of importance to me. In order to force myself to write them well, I’ll publish them on this blog. And since I doubt the insides of the mind of a weird teenage girl are of interest to the general public¹, I will not publish them on the blog’s frontpage, but instead dedicate a category “thoughts” to it.²

I have uploaded my presentations for IYPT 2013 - see here :-)

I thought writing a few (photo-accompanied) words¹ about my experiences on this year’s IYPT could be a good idea, so here it is.

I love science. I am planning to become a computer scientist (and a good one, too). Ever since I remember have I been fascinated by science and technology: I have spent countless days immersed in books and articles, feeling a strange kind of joy as my understanding grew deeper. I dare say my knowledge of physics is quite good for a non-physicist, and I’m not that bad at astronomy and other natural sciences, too.

And yet, regardless of my deep respect and love for science, there is a part of me that sincerely believes one day a Gandalf-like guy will appear at my door, free me from this dull, grey reality and let me embark on an unexpected adventure. Each and every day I strive for a rational understanding of the world; and each and every night I dream of dragons, elves and heroes from fairy tales. I feel I belong there, into my fantasies, fighting evil and flying with dragons, being the master of my fate and living a life worth telling about; not here, into the world of the ordinary, of uniform days not worth remembering, of a life that no one will write (or read!) a story about…

One day I might flip and start chasing unicorns. Until then, I will at least make paper dragons so that I can stare at them as I fall asleep.

partitions, filesystems, UEFI+BIOS boot

What I wanted:

• a UEFI boot without a separate bootloader (i.e. bootstrap by the kernel EFISTUB loader)
• a backup BIOS boot with GRUB(2) just in case (it has proved useful a few times already)
• Btrfs (yeah, I will write about my backup scheme one day :D)

What I did not want:

• dualboot ;-)

I have started putting together what I have done to my beloved Thinkpad X1 Carbon. Of course it is going to take a long time (especially with all the competitions that are coming up), but I have started :D

This also means that this page might one day start looking less ugly. (As for the current state: I know the typography still sucks, it hurts me, too! Sorry!)

I have finally managed to start cleaning up my dotfiles. The repository is at github.com/AnotherKamila/dotfiles, and I will hopefully add other config files over time. I am particularly fond of my .inputrc, which contains some things I would love to have known sooner.

The time has come! Finally a new year with a lot of correspondence contests is here! Here, a present for my contest-hungry peers: my LaTeX template, which I am so proud of.

So I’ve started to think about starting to blog too. Consider this a test post which is here mainly to show the world how ugly this website is (so far). We’ll see what comes out of this.

Hey, and stuff like who I am, what this is and… oh, later.