A long trek

Three days ago one of my colleague tell me about his trip from Zwardoń to Szczyrk in two days. As I saw the map I replied “Two days? I can do it within one”. Well it’s “only” a about 35 km through mountain terrain. According to the labels written on map it takes “only” 9.5 hours without breaks. And this values are calculated just for noobs.

The plan

Just because I like challenges I decided to do that trail as soon as possible. On the following day I convinced two of my friends to join in. We also decided to go to Zwardoń by train. On the map the trip look like:

Center of a map
map

The trek

Yesterday we did it. <thoughts type=”random”>Starting from the beginning, the train took us 2h. Than we walked for several hours (least than six with breaks). We were trying to rush as fast as we can. Although the weather was fantastic, it could be a little cooler. At first I was taking a lot of photos, but later I was just too tried to do so. We met some of the competitors from mountain bike race (Beskidy MTB Trophy). I would like to participate in a event like that. I should give it a try and test my cycling skills. I almost lost my digital camera. Luckily I found it a hour later on a tree roots.</thoughts>

The photos…

… are in the gallery.

IMG_4284

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Google Summer of Code 2007

I just have sent application to Google Summer of Code 2007. For those who doesn’t know what GSoC is, a short description.

Have you ever dreamed about a day when people will have opportunity to develop open source project and get paid for that? This day became reality three years a ago with GSoC. To keep long story short, students apply to open source organisations, organisations select best proposals, than students work for more than two months on a project, if their project meet goals, they get paid.

This year I applied to KDE with a project proposal “Web Interface for KDE Data Forms (KOffice/Kexi)”. I will post details after 24th March. Will see if I get accepted.

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Unpublished posts

Recently I have written a few posts, but I haven’t published them. Probably I would never do that. The reason why I decided not to post everything what I written is simple. I don’t want any posts on my site which are messy and/or don’t contain anything valuable. In other words, I don’t like what I have written. Anyway I try to summarize what I was wanting to express.

The first of unpublished article was about my driving exam. It was a kind of situation that I really hate. I need a driving license and the only way I can obtain that document is to take official exam. However the exam itself is testing mostly the knowledge of examiners tricks not a real driving skills. Also the form of exam is far from being fair. For example examinees wait for several hour in a tension that in every second their could be called for practice test. Each of that aspects could be easily solved. Sadly since it is the only organization allowed to make driving exams it is not interested in improving quality of their service. Despite of that, the driving exam centre have some “quality” certificates including well known ISO. Anyway, I passed the exam. The point of that article was that law and certificates is not all, sometimes a good will is also welcomed.

The second post was titled “Have a strategy”. It explains importance of having strategy in our life. It show how to organize work more effectively. Sometimes basic tools such as spreadsheet program could be enough to boost productivity. The main thesis was that being organized require only a little effort in compare to possible benefits.

The last one, unfinished, was about my science camp at ICM. I was doing there some researches about classifying articles using N-gram. It was a kind of workshop that require a lot of coding. It also showed that sometimes trivial formulas gave better results then complex methods. To sum up, it is a good idea to try to find simple solutions first, rather then dealing with special cases.

I hope that my further posts will be good enough to publish them.

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Additional classes in Informatics

Again my blog is a little unmaintained. That’s not because I’m lazy. In fact It’s completely different. Anyway I have some voluntary work right now. I teach C++ and algorithms in my high school.

Here is the script for first lesson. It covers basic C++ skills.

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