Today was a crazy day.
It started with my last exam at the ETH. As of now, I’m officially an alumnus of that school where Einstein worked and taught ;)
The exam was a wild experience. It was 20 minutes that went by in the blink of an eye, condensing what at least felt like a hundred hours of study.
I chowed oatmeal, took the bus to the Hongg, walked around rehearsing a last couple of QIT arguments, then went up to Prof. Renes’ office. We shook hands and it began. I was basically writing or calculating the whole time, and before I knew it it was over. I might have spent too much time on some of the calculations, but I’d say altogether it was good. I didn’t choke on anything–all the important details were burned into my head.
Then I went back to Culmann, went downstairs and worked on logistics. It occurred to me it would be relaxing to watch a movie with Muriel so I checked if I could come over to her place–she was just watching the dogs and chilling, so I took the next train to Spreitenbach.
We met up at the bus station near her house and walked back. It was beautiful in that sleepy town, the roof tiles bright with patterns of snow. We made ourselves some pizza and chatted. Then we took Bonnie on a walk. On the way back Muriel showed me the oldest house in Spreitenbach. I think it was from the 1500s :0–and their family owned it.
Then we goofed around, played a little chess :D, sang along to some songs. The whole time Bonnie was so excited to play and I was tugging with her with one hand.
Finally we settled in to watch the classic Tarantino “True Romance”. It was pretty entertaining. It was a long movie, and near the end Muriel’s folks came back and invited me for dinner :P (I checked with Muriel before to make sure I wasn’t imposing.) It was a really nice dinner, simple pasta but with more of Muriel’s dad’s delicious wine. And it was fun chatting with her folks–for some reason I got into some very animated conversations with them.
After dinner we finished the movie and Muriel’s dad drove me to the station. (It’s so hard to get a driver’s license here that Muriel still doesn’t have one!)
I stopped at the Altstetten coop to get some beer because all the stores in Zurich were closed, and met up with Martin, Aleks, Jenda and his visiting sister Mya at the VIS lounge. We played pool and goofed off. The others had to leave and Martin came back to my house. We finished off my bottle of bourbon–with lemon and sugar it was quite delicious–had some eggs and bacon, and got into some deep discussions. Martin had broken up with Kristin recently, and then gotten into fights with his friends back home about them being too friendly with an ex of his. It sounded like a rough time. He talked about how little arguments with Kristin would turn existential, reminded me of a few of my experiences. One of the few places where I’m naturally a satisficer and not an optimizer (with friends and girlfriends etc, I try to get past the little things and not let them bug me), but other people are optimizers (presumably because they have the narrative of looking for the perfect other person). We also talked about his idea to incorporate robustness of a neural network into the training objective :D By the time we were done it was 3am and I was totally exhausted. Crashed like a log.