Hm. A bit of a silence for some time I shall say. I had tons of things to do and some unexpected accidents prevented me from updating my website for quite a long time.
First when I moved to Budapest I left the password for the ftp access at home, and no one could retrieve it for me. And when I got home came the shock. I switched the computer on and the Windows Xp started to whine about some file that is corrupted and that I should use the CD to repair it. Well, I found a .sav version of the file and exchenged it hoping that the problem is sloved. Well to my greatest surprise Windows started to reinstall (!) itself on its own... no comment.
Anyway the password of the ftp access was on my computer as well, and - yes you guessed it right - I have lost it during the windows reinstall. Ack. But cheer up, let the sun shine, etc. as I have the password now. (The support of the service provider sent it to me. :) ) So from now on, I am trying to update somehow regularly. (Note that this is not my first later supposedly unfulfilled promise! ;) )
Yehaw, almost forgot the astonishing news: I got a reader mail! (Well not *that* astonishing as my cousin wrote it... ;) The original letter was in Hungarian, the translation is mine.)
'I am just browsing sesam.hu and I am shocked how cool, it is... really, it is very much like you. Congratulations!!!
I like the second picture from above in your bio and the picture took in Greece is cute too. Show them to girls, they will surely be impressed.... ;)'
Errr... thanks really! :) Happy to hear that my site is liked. Homework for you, readers: send as many girls as you know to check my site out! :)
I am having a very bad day. I started to play AO in the afternoon, but I soon abandoned it. I don't know what caused that - the servers or my computer - but AO was unplayable. I had mostly 1-2 FPS (!) not only in BS but everywhere, it lagged unbearably. Needless to mention I have lost a fair amount of XP because of this...
From that time on I had a sad, lonely feeling clouding my brain all the rest of the day. Call it a deperession or anything, but I seemed to lack the enthusiasm to do anything at all.
Finally just a few hours ago I watched TV where a Hungarian romantic comedy was broadcasted. The main character - a teacher - fell in love with one of his students. Natuarally this love had to remain unfulfilled. Being so the teacher said the following: "Why to live when there is no-one whose hand i could hold ... or who would hold my hand..." As this was a movie, it had a happy end, but is this true for real life as well? I am not sure... sadly...
Anyway the only thing I am satisfied with today is the rewritten version of my bio. I decided to rewrite it as I didn't like the previous version. I wrote it only because the pictures were ready and I wanted the site to be online. Now it reflects my life better I think. I started to add a timestamp to the posts too. Well done me. :)
Today I watched {A.I.} again with my brother. For the second time I noticed some more little elements that were kept hidden when I first saw the film. This is why I decided to write about it now. (The following part may contain spoilers, I recommend to read after seeing the movie.)
A.I. is set in the near future when the ecological disasters predicted became true. The ice-caps on the poles melted and the population of the Earth radically increased. This created a need for robots with artificial intelligence. Robots that don't eat, never sleep, all in all far more potent than real men. The artificial intelligence driving these robots improved through the times as well. But robots don't have feelings, they respond to stimuli as programmed, but without emotions.
This changes when Cybertronics introduces David on the market. David is a unique Mecha, a boy-age robot who is programmed to love her 'mother'. However creating a robot that can love raises the question what responsibility the person who has this love holds? Will there be a person who loves the robot back?
Anyway, imagine when we can build a robot that can feel. what if we could accurately simulate the neuron chain with electronic devices? What if we can build a brain that is exactly like ours with a body exactly like ours, too? Who can tell robots and humans apart? what is the boundary between organic life and robotic life?
In a world where cloning became a part of everyday life, in a wolrd where genetics and electronics improves day by day at an unbeliveable speed these questions are not that far-fetched as they seem to be.
We have always searched for the 'spark of life', the thing that makes someone alive and disappears when we die. what makes someone living at all? The ability of reproduction? At some level of technology we will be able to make robots that reproduce themsleves I think... And like real living beings there can be errors during the reproduction. And this fact enables evolution. So would these bots live?
Ethical, philosophical and technical questions. No matter how fast our development in any field is there always be questions, this process is endless. I just hope the right answers will be found.
I am at home again after the 'zeroth' week of the university. My first impressions are quite good, it seems I will have a good time in Budapest. :)
These 5 days are called 'zeroth' week as no teaching took place, no lectures or seminars were held. All we had to do is register ourselves for the first year, look around, visit the library and familiarise ourselves with the life at the uni. Of course the instructors of the groups were of great help in this.
And now comes apologising: The cause of not adding any content to this site is that I left the password for the ftp server on my home computer, so I couldn't access the site at all. Sorry about this.
Tomorrow I am moving to my room at the uni. I am curious about my roomies (there will be 4 of us). And I have tons of things to do, pack my things etc...
Back at home. The freshmen camp was great! :) I had the time of my life there. My group is full of very friendly people and at the end of the five days we became a real team. However we had much help doing this as this university has a very special inner 'organisation' which was set up to assist the first-years' integration to the community of the university. These students are the instructors. (We called them dementors... :) ) Every student group at the uni has two or three of them, to help them in any way. This feature is unique at the Budapest University of Economics for - as far as I know - no other uni has anything like this.
I guess this is it for now, I am very tired (last night party was exhausting, and I haven't slept nearly enough). More is supposed to come later. Tomorrow.
I visited Rubi-Ka for a quarter of an hour, and it made me feel really sad. Actually not sad but sorry for myself. My friends there gained lots of levels, I can't even team with some of them anymore. This is not fair, that I have no chance to be online just because I live elsewhere. Well, whole life is unfair... I am just sad that things will never be the same again on Rubi-Ka for me.
Anyway I am going to freshmen camp tomorrow. It will end on 30 August. I don't know if any foreign schools have such 'camps'. Mainly the whole thing is about playing tricks on the freshmen, and it is a sort of an initiation ceremony. This is why I have some uncertain bad feeling about the whole event.
My horoscope said any travel I am making next week will be pleasant and sucessful. Pity I don't believe in horoscopes.
I feel like a smoker who tries to abandon smoking. I hate this lack of net. I miss my friends, too. And what bothers me most is that I cannot do anything to change this. No chance.
Well, I will be away from home for the next week so maybe I can put up with this situation until I arrive. Next week there will be a sort of 'camp' for freshmen at my university. I hope it will be good, although there are signs of warning. One of my friends came back from his freshmen camp earlier as he felt himself terrible...
Anyway I am supposed to get to know with my fellow students there and gather some info about the uni itself, as well as about the life in it. If everything will go like I described above, it will make a good time I am sure. :)
Hm... I am starting to be very very lazy. As you see I used some phrasal verbs in this post. But: I am not at all sure that those phrasal verbs mean what I think they mean. And: I am toooo lazy to look them up (hehe, this phrase I know...) in a dictionary. It resembles school times that i want to forget for the following one week, until it starts again... Forgive me. :)
Post again. In the afternoon I searched for some links I can use for my journal entries. I wanted a link to the real John Nash for the Beautiful Mind entry, so I visited the {official Nobel Prize site}. To my greatest surprise - how could I forget it - in 1994 John Nash got a separated prize "for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games" with the Hungarian John Harsanyi! :) I know about Harsanyi, because of the {website} I made (with my friends) about the Hungarian Nobel Prize winners. Sadly Harsanyi got to flee from Hungary at the second world war this is why he got the prize as a US citizen.
*Yawns* I am sleepy. Yesterday night I spent my last hours online on AO. Early in the morning - oh, well, not that early, 9 o'clolck - I was woken up by my father, operating a metal cutter right under my window. (He is assembling a shelf for the pantry.) The problem is, that tomorrow I will need to get up at the crack of dawn as the whole family is going to {Zánka (Hungarian)} to the annual dancing competiton held there. As my brother is a dancer. (He dances with a partner, you know, cha-cha, tango, etc.) This is one of the largest dancing competitons held in Hungary, and this is good because in dancing people need points to advance to a higher level, and you get as many points as the number of pairs you overtook. So more competitors, more possible points. :)
All above sounds a good trip however we don't have a car. This means we have to go by train, which is slow and exhausting. I pretty much hate trains.
And for those who don't know, tomorrow (20th August) is a national holiday in Hungary. This is the day of St. Stephen I, the king who made Hungarians settle and who converted us to Christianity. 20 August means a whole-day celebration with the recall of historical events and a huge fireworks at night. Sadly due to the massive flood we have on the Danube, the fireworks was cancelled in Budapest (capital). And we will travel all the day. :(
This flood thing though causes lots of damage and problems by the Danube. In Germany and Austria the situation is even worse than here. Whole cities are in danger. I don't know why but the nuber of catastrophies connected to the nature seem to increase. Almost every year the river flowing about 300 meters far from our house floods as well due to the massive forest-destructions in Romania. (If they cut the trees down, the snow melts at once not slowly and the rivers cannot deal with that much water.) It's very frightening to see that the water is almost as high as the dam that protects the houses... I hope next spring we won't have floods again.