Stories of an erasmus student in Lisboa
If you are using FlickrAPI and you are storing the photo id’s in a MySQL database, make sure the column is a bigint 
Flickr reached the integer limit (2147483647) today with this photo.
We’ve been bitten by this. We are using the Flickr API on the What’s Cookin’ website and we were using signed MySQL integers, which overflowed today.
5 days ago in a post named the meaning of life I set a goal to learn something new every week.
Yesterday I read a well written blogpost about a programmer who moved into management, and back. He comes up with a thought provoking theory about why some people are better managers and others better programmers:
Managers must work shallow and wide, while programmers must work narrow and deep. People who are naturally tuned to one particular method of work will not only enjoy their jobs a lot more, but be better at them. I didn’t say it was a particularly insightful theory.
Read the complete post even if you’re not interested in management. He makes some good points.
Here’s my dilemma: I hope I can be both deep and wide. It would be a pity to have studied 5 year of management just to realize that I’m not that kind of guy… 
There are still a lot of things I wanted to blog about, but I didn’t have the time to do so. Here’s a quick summary of everything that has happened since then:
First there was Beatrice’s party at our apartment. It was her birthday and we invited a lot of people. I think about 50 in our apartment in total. It was really fun and later that evening there was a gala from the economics faculty of Nova university. (that’s were Alec and me are studying)
A week later there was a party in the apartment of some other erasmus people, but this really beat all records. I think about 200 people were there that night. Really amazing. An open area with stairs going from one side to the other. (I hope I can get a hold off some pictures) . 4 floors of party people. The name of the street of this apartment was “Rua de 1° Decembro” so they had to give a party there on the first of december. We met some belgian people who study in Ghent there.
On 6th december, we had a christmas party with the people living in my flat. We bought gifts for each other and had a 6 course dinner. Everyone had to cook a dish. Ana made guacamole, Monika made a lovely polish soup, Bali and Andy prepared an amazing slovakian dish, Anne served us a nice tartiflette, Alec and me stuffed everyone with cheese fondue and Lena finished everyone off with a delicious tiramisou. One thing did go wrong though: A full glass of white wine got spilled on my MacBook. (It was playing the music) . Luckily my MacBook survived after letting it dry for 3 days.
That week we had our final presentation for the product innovation course. The idea of João and me finished second out of 7 groups. (This is fine, don’t you think?). Alec’s idea finished first of course I can post the presentation if you want, it’s about rPACS: a system for transferring medical images (X-rays) to doctors.
That night we had a goodbye cheese fondue at our place. Most people are leaving to be home for the holidays , so it was a nice opportunity to get everybody together.
They day after the final 5 minute presentation I left back to belgium for the What’s Cookin’? website launch party. The pictures of the party are online on the new website. The place was packed, everyone had a great time and we had the chance to tell people about our next great gig: 1st February, we are organising a whicked what’s cookin’ party in the Vooruit in Ghent. You might want to keep on eye on the what’s cookin’ blog because I think Jan will announce the headliner soon.
I stayed in Belgium for a week. It was nice to see my family back. But damn, It’s cold in Belgium (-3°C). Last Thursday, we had kind of a christmas dinner with the family. Really nice. I enjoyed spending time with my brother, sister, Rossella and my parents, and playing with the Wii
So I got back to Lisbon yesterday. I came home to an empty apartment 
Luckily the Dutch girls Daphne and Claire are staying here for the holidays, so I wasn’t completely alone. And Nathalie is coming tomorrow to spend christmas here. That will be nice Argh crap, I should be studying now for the exams coming up in 2 weeks.
So, I hope I brought you guys back up to speed on what’s been happening here.
The old description of this blog used to be “About Ruby, Lisboa and the meaning of life”. Well I’ve come to the conclusion that to understand the meaning of life, we have to understand the things around us. So I have set myself a new goal: try to learn something new, every day. Or at least every week. And I want to remember it.
That’s where this blog comes in. I will try to make a blog post about the things I learn, so that I won’t forget it. (I tend to forget my thoughts pretty quickly)
So to kick off the new venture: What did I learn today?
Well, I learned about colors. More specifically about digital colors. I read an amazing blog post by Jeffrey Friedl on color spaces: how computers store and interpret colors.
I bumped into this issue because I was having color problems with photos I shoot. I ended up reading a lot more than I planned, but it was very interesting. You should seriously consider reading it if you are interested in photography. If you ever wondered why pictures you take don’t look the same as the real thing, this article gives a partial explanation.
On Saturday 15th december we are organizing a special What’s Cookin’? edition. We are celebrating the launch of the new logo and website (I’m working overtime on the this!).
I’ll be back in Belgium for the weekend, so if you want to join me for this crazy party, leave a comment or send me an email. I can arrange tickets
The location of the party will be announced on the new website next week, 13 december. That day we will launch the new website.
I’ve been working hard on the website and I hope it will be a welcome change from the boring and clumsy old site we’ve all been coping with until now.
See you next week!
UPDATE: We launched the website today. Read my blog post on the new site.
