Stockholm-Riga-Stockholm in only 51 hours by boat
Hej!
A week ago, some of my friends from Tyresö and I went on a boat trip to Riga. We choose to take the Tallink ferry because this is much more friendly to the environment and additionally pretty cheap. It was especially cheap, because Tallink had its ‘Crazy Weeks’. When we booked our tickets, we had no idea that this loose promise of craziness would be fulfilled.
Before we entered the ship, we saw at the check in desk a weather forecast. In there it said something about a gale warning. Since we are not used to this jargon we asked the officer behind the desk, what we should expect with having a gale. As nice as the man was, he just said something about some waves, which isn’t quite a good explanation for this phenomenon.
We had the pleasure to travel with the Regina Baltica, which is a ship with quite a bit of history – as one can read in this article. I like especially this part of the article!
The bad thing with the good consciousness regarding the climate is that the such a boat trip does not take only 1.5 hours but 16 wonderful hours. The great challenge is to spend this time, without going crazy. So one has to avoid the ‘best band in the Baltic Sea’, which is playing almost constantly in ‘the night club’. Further, one has to make sure to make a big circle around the karaoke event. If one is really curious about very individual personalities, which do not care to make a fool out of them self, one might want to have a look at this. However, this is basically the same as American Idol but without the experts comments – so not so much fun. Anyway, the most exciting thing on the MS Regina Baltica is the show dancing event. This is so strange and boring that I can’t explain this here.
So long story short moral: it is a good feeling to leave the ferry in Riga for a couple of hours.
Riga itself seems to be a beautiful city. Unfortunately we did not see to much of the city, because the weather was so bad, this means it was very windy, cold and snowing, that we stayed most of the time in cafes, churches and restaurants.
Nevertheless we had a good time at this place and returned back to the ship just in time. As we were making our plans, how to spend the time on the ferry in the most possible pleasant way the crew anounced that the departure would be delayed for approximatly 10 hours due to the bad weather conditions.
This basically meant, that a collegue and I could not make it to the presentation of our homework at the following day. So we checked if they could provide us with an internet access, which the crew could not arrange. What we did finaly was sending SMS to another student in Stockholm, asking him to tell the teacher, that we are stucked on the boat in Riga.
The evening was actually not to bad, however it makes a huge difference if the boat is moving and you know that every minute that passes by brings you closer to Sthlm or not.
In the end we left Riga 14 hours later as originally intended and passed the rest of the storm.
back in town…
hej,
just got back from Kiruna… was a pretty rough night on the night train. gonna tell you more later.
More 3D Graphics for Game Development
Hey,
here are some pictures of the 3D world we created for the second assignment of the 3D Graphics for Game Development course.
We created this scene using the Blender Game Engine. It is really straight forward to use this software and to create easily quite impressing scenes:
So if you are interested in the secrets of creating recommend you to take a look at the Blender website.
Cool Music
This is the best sound track for long Tunelbana rides trough this lovely city Stockholm!
Course: 3D Computer Graphics for Game Development
The second term of the winter semester has started. One of my new courses is 3D Computer Graphics for Game Development. This course is taught at the Stockholm University at the Kista IT campus. Unfortunately the materials and the lectures are in Swedish. This is quite a challenge for me since my Swedish is not very good. In fact I understand in the best case 50% of what the teacher is talking about.
What do I do to catch up with the course anyway? Well, what I do is to make as much notes to every slide as I can. This unsorted and unstructured bunch of information needs to be processed afterwards. For this, there are wonderful services available on the net. The first service I use is of course Google Translation. Another great service I use for translation of Swedish is Språkrådet. Finally I use other resources as the SiteSeer site, the ACM digital library and Wikipedia. Once I translated all the words I did not understand, some things make more sense. For everything else I need to find other explanations.
This means basically that it is more time consuming to attend a course, which is taught in a language one did not master yet. However, it is possible!
Furthermore the assignments have to be done in teamwork. This makes lots of things easier. The first assignment of this course was to create a 3D world, with UV textured walls and borders. Further one should be able to fly through this scene. So this course follows the same paradigm as the computer graphics courses at my home university in the sense that one learns the theory in the lectures and in the assignments one has to apply the knowledge using the open source modelling application Blender. This makes a lot of sense, since it takes quite a while to implement a game engine by oneself.
