Stuff you need to know as new (foreign) employee at UiT
Stuff you need to know as new (foreign) employee at University of Tromsø
Even more than a year after moving to the best city on earth, Tromsø, and beginning to work at the best university in the country, the University of Tromsø, I stumble across new stuff that I wish I would have known earlier. Some of it is probably most interesting to foreigners, but most of it might be of interest to you, the Norwegian, as well :-)
I will use this blog post to keep an updated list of these things (so check back for new entries):
How to find your lecture room?
This used to be a big problem for me. What the hell does MH AUDS6 mean? There used to be no reference whatsoever on the net what this means. Slowly, with time, I found out that MH is the health-faculty building and that AUDS6 is one of the auditoria. But at various occasions, I had a really hard time actually getting to the room indicated on my schedule.
This has finally changed! I just found out that there is an awesome map of all university buildings on all levels showing every room and a lot of details. And what's better: The same platform has maps for NTNU, UiB and other places.
Here is the link: http://use.mazemap.com/
A good, Norwegian dictionary
Yes, there is heinzelnisse for germans and dict.cc for many other languages but these dictionaries are far from good. If you are advanced, you can try the very comprehensive Bokmålsordboka (or the Nynorskordboka if you are into that sort of thing) but I often fail to understand the gist of the short explanations offered (it's norsk-norsk only). There is also something called ordnett which is available through the university's subscription but I found it frustratingly bad (unusable interface and funny search results).
But today, I found the perfect solution: Clue.
- free for employees (instructions for access)
- many languages
- most complete I have seen so far
- usable from: the web, mobile phone and desktop
Data-sharing with other people around the globe
This is really cool: UiT has an unlimited-usage account with box.com. This is a service that works pretty much like Dropbox or Google Drive but has much cooler collaboration/sharing/download options and unlimited (say that again?) space! Here are UiT's instructions on how to set up your computer to use it.
There is excellent for data-sharing with people from all over the world, for data-archiving (unlimited, remember?!) and even for keeping your home and work computer in sync.
Letter template for university letters
Ok, this is a bit more nerdy as I write everything that I ever write in LaTeX. I wanted to have a template for writing official letters (including university's logo etc). I ony found this clearly outdated template for MS Word and used some letters I received to come up with a nice LaTeX template myself. Here is a link to the templates (english and norwegian versions) and this is what it looks like.
Here is how to access the git-repo for you who is from nerd-land:
git clone git@source.uit.no:matthias.mittner/letter_templates.gitBIG computation
Ok, another entry for nerd-people. UiT has a really good HPC cluster, stallo, that is readily accessible for UiT employees. You will have to fill out an online-application (takes 5 minutes) and you will quickly get access by the very helpful administrators. You will be using stallo's queuing system, which may need some getting used to (read the docs!).