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こわい。。。Among other things

Sunday, March 13th, 2005

I am going to Japan in just 5 days!

I am a bit scared, since I’ve never really travelled alone before.
Well I did come to Sweden when I was 13 all alone, and lived alone for 2 years or so.
But that was different, things were more arranged back then.

This time, it’s like I am going into the Unknown. Besides, Japan isn’t USA, I still know very little Japanese and while I know a ton of people who actually live in Japan and speak very little Japanese, I am still a bit nervous.

Gotta prepare, do stuff. Buut, things get put off. Well, I am sure I’ll be packing my backpack at the last minute as always, or not, maybe I’ll change my habits.
Heck, its only midnight and I am on my way to bed. Surely, something must be amiss.

We shall see.
Gonna buy new shoes tomorrow. Asked my cousin to help me, cause I couldn’t decide for myself.

In other news, I have once again rekindled my interest in working on my game. Or maybe its simply because I am just about wrapping up my Macoteket project, and feel alive again. For the first time in some time. Next time I decide to take on a big project on my own, to rebuild something that already exists (and was built by me a few years ago), to someone else’s specifications, to interface with another system; someone should slap me with a large trout.

I gotta sell some things to get money. I hear Japan is expensive. (although everyone who’s visited from Japan keeps telling me Sweden is expensive… tch, can somebody decide already?)

Well anywhoo, I plan on taking lots of pictures. Hopefully I can even put them up on the Internets while I am there, but I am not taking my comp with me, so we’ll see.

For now… //yo!

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日本に行きます!

Thursday, March 3rd, 2005

Now that you’ve grown tired of reading my monologue of Hate, I present this happy tidbit:
After all these years of pain and suffering, I am finally going to the land of the rising sun, Japan.

I actually knew about this a while ago, but didn’t wanna say anything until I was sure.

My trip will take me to Japan for 2 weeks starting on the 18th of this very month. So I now have the painful 2 weeks of waiting.

The purpose of the trip is to enjoy myself in Japan. I plan on staying in Tokyo a few days first, then just getting on the train and traveling around.
There are a few destinations which are obvious, like Kyoto and Osaka. I’ve also gotten recommendations for Nara, Nagoya, Hiroshima and Hokkaido.
I still have a bit of planning to do. So far all I’ve done is bought a backpack, and been working on some hardcore Kanji training.

There are two alternatives to this trip. One is to hang around and not bother too much with tourism and such, just try to experience people. The other is the same as the previous one, but even more relaxed.
Both involve a little tourism, but I am not really that much into Art museums and such, so we’ll see how it goes. I’d just like to think that I can make this a trip where the only thing I have to worry about is where to spend the night or to eat my ramen, rather then trying to visit every temple in Kyoto and see as many Kabuki plays as I can.

If anyone actually reads this blog, and has any tips, please do post them.

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A hatred so deep, it penetrates space-time…

Wednesday, February 9th, 2005

What does one hate the most?

I suppose that is a philosophical question that has many different answers depending on the time in your life, or your current mood, or who your boss is etc.

A few minutes ago I was thinking about the subject that I believe I have hated since the dawn of time, or at least for as long as I can remember.

The thing in question is the process of waking up and getting out of bed. Now, I think this is something that is dreaded by many people, so I am far from alone, but having studied different hatreds towards getting this procedure, I have come to the conclusion that my hatred is unique, at least within a circle of the people I know enough to know their habits.

This topic merits some background. I shall begin by saying that at the current time, I am not working a day job, nor do I have to go to school at 8 every morning. Thus my wake up time varies between 7am, on rare 8am lab days in University, to 2pm, on days when I have nothing to do (or so I tell myself).
However, no matter the time, one variable remains constant. I hate getting up. The fact is, the previous statement applies to about 99.99% of the cases. There have been occasional days when I opened my eyes and greeted the sunlight with a smile. However, unfortunately those days are as rare as finding money on the sidewalk.

You are probably thinking.. “So what? I hate getting up too, why the fuck are you so special?”. Well the answer is that I am not special, but my hatred is. At last I come to it. I hate getting up because I am freezing. That’s right. When I wake up every morning, I am freezing my ass off. In order to picture my situation, you need only consider being outside on a humid cold day of about -10 degrees celsius, and having to take off your clothes, and then being attacked with patches of ice and snow.
Note that this applies even to summer time, although the effects are much less profound and the frequency of happy awakenings due to warmth are increased greatly.

Thus my natural response every morning is to NOT get out of bed, since I do so enjoy the warmth of my blanket shield. I believe that my coldness actually has to do with a lowered body temperature. While I have never actually measured my temp in the morning, I have experienced similar cold-attacks in other instances, and in all instances the cause or effect was a lowered body temperature, namely somewhere around 35.8.

I have done my best to fight this morning coldness with warm cups of tea, warm showers (which do nothing but make things worse once you are done with it!), and even by placing a robe next to the bed. None have helped since each action actually requires placing body-parts outside the blanket shield.
And so I go forth, hitting snooze until it is hittable no more.

Now you know why I hate waking up. Probably quite a useless bit of info, but I just felt I needed to write it down somewhere since I was seriously pondering it. And now my plan of getting to bed at 1am has been completely shattered by 1 hour and 40 minutes.

See ya.
Fields of gold from the album “Fields of gold” by Sting

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Peaceful

Friday, February 4th, 2005

Image(126)Quiet peaceful music in the background, a few candles lighting the dark room. I feel completely relaxed, this kind of feeling does not come to me often, since I like to worry about useless things, and useful things. At this point I feel like I could just leave it all behind and go off on a crazy adventure. Or maybe just continue sitting with a cup of nice tea and absolute peace.

I can just close my eyes and think of nothing but peace and quiet. I feel a sadness to this condition, but it is a nice sadness, the kind that gives you that feeling of euphoria deep inside, a warm, fuzzy feeling in your belly.

Soon I shall get to bed, but until then I shall go back to my relaxation. Peace out.

Everything from the album “Smallville Talon Mix OST” by Lifehouse

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Discussions by the table

Saturday, January 22nd, 2005

Johnjohn and Bowie are now staying at my place again. JJ arrived today and we celebrated by going to Hard Rock café and grabbing some burgers. I snapped a few pics. Then we stayed at home and chilled. Although the idea was presented to the committee that we should go out, nothing ever happened due to inaction on the part of the members.

Note that all these pics were taken without prior warning.

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Explosions from the Sky

Sunday, January 2nd, 2005

Well, I decided to scrap the idea of cutting the new year movies together into one clip for now, instead I present them to you in unabridged form.

The movies can not really convey the amazingness of the experience, but I hope that they provide at least some indication as to what we experienced up there, while everyone else was getting drunk and permanently damaging life and limb with dangerous explosives.

The best part of this New Year was probably the fact that aside from the air traffic controller, no one within sensor range wished anyone a happy new year. I find nothing more annoying then endless repetition of this near-useless phrase.

Without further ado, here are the movies. They are about 15mb each and are 30 seconds in length.

Slow but reliable:
Movie 1 | Movie 2 | Movie 3 | Movie 4 | Movie 5 | Movie 6

Posted in Diary, Rare sights, Videos | 2 Comments »

The New Year

Saturday, January 1st, 2005

I had the pleasure of spending the coming of the new year with my closest friends. The evening started with a visit to the parents for some food and mingling, both areas in which my skill levels are low. I quickly ducked out and proceeded with JohnJohn, as planned over to Bigmac’s place. There, we ate tacos and then watched Star Wars Episode IV. DVD Edition. On a projector.

Halfway through the movie we realised that the time had come for the thing that we were planning, and so we set off in the car to the place of the event.

The “thing” was a flight over Stockholm during the moment of New Year, to observe the fireworks from high up in the sky.

The sight was extraordinary and even JohnJohn, who is NOT easilly impressed, expressed awe and wonder at what he had seen. This is something that happens less then once a year.

I did some films for your enjoyment, but I have not yet cut them together into a presentable movie, nor have I had time to upload the uncut versions. I will do at least one of the aforementioned actions tomorrow. For now, enjoy these pictures taken with my mobile, because the battery on bigmac’s camera, ran out before I had a chance to snap good photos.

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update: movies posted

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Snow

Sunday, December 26th, 2004

I spent xmas at my uncle’s house where it is sort of a family tradition to spend christmas. However this year the family tradition seems to have evaporated and every different unit has decided to celebrate xmas by itself. Family stupidity aside, I had a very nice xmas. I generally have more fun giving presents then receiving them, and this year was no different. I had prepared nice presents for everyone, including really neat printed photobooks that I ordered from Apple through iPhoto. I’ll post pics of those later. Although the idea was that we were supposed to be all together and that the photobooks were more of a family thing then a specific person thing.

I got a nice present from my mother. A day of education at a Formula 3 race track. The season for racing starts in March here, so I await with slight trepidation, the moment of truth. Those things are not Formula 1, but they can still do 0-100 km/h in 4 sec.

Well, enough of that, now I shall relax one more day before going home. The day after christmas, snow finally came and while it is a day too late, I guess in the end it does not make any difference. It’s still beautiful. Unfortunately I forgot my camera, so I had to use the camera on my new phone.

So enjoy the view…

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I went to New York.

Friday, November 12th, 2004

And you had no idea. (*waves to his 1 reader*)
So anyway, in all the stress before my journey to the Amerikan country, I neglected to blog. I thought I would blog from there, but an update to my server made execution of perl scripts impossible. Then after I came back, it took me another 4 days before I got around to blogging this.

The trip was great fun. New York was only one of the destinations. We landed in Chicago on November 1st, Monday. At this point we rented a car and went into the city of Chicago. We were on a tight clock. In 6 days, we had to travel around a few different states in the northern US and also make a grand journey to New York, where I wanted to spend a few days. For the most part our plan worked, and it even exceeded my expectations.

The trip took us from Chicago, to Minneapolis to Detroit to Niagara Falls and then to New York. We arrived in New York on Thursday evening and after grabbing some food from our gracious hosts, we pretty much went to bed. We had been driving almost non stop (except nightly 6 hours at motels) since monday and just that day we drove for about 10 hours with a one hour break at the Niagara Falls ;)
Our mission in Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit was to deliver some cash to some dudes from whom bigmac bought some stuff. All those guys were crazy weird guys (my kind of people). One was a fan of huge trucks, another loved racing cars and had quite a few in his garage, and the third liked strip clubs. Especially in canada. He also liked four-wheelers.

Vlad (my cousin) was with me on the trip, and this was his first time in the states. His own adventure would require another entry, needless to say, it was memorable.

We spent a great friday in New York. I met Bowie who now lives there. He has made a big name for himself in his community and tooks me and Vlad out on the town, in Brooklyn.
We went to a few bars and clubs, and it was great fun. Unlike in Sweden, the bars were not filled to capacity and you could actually sit at the bar if you so desired. Even on a friday night.

The day after, we set a course for Chicago, and spent the next 24 hours driving (with a 5 hour nap at a pretty seedy motel hehe).

We had lots of fun, spent a ton of cash, ate junk food like crazy and drove like we’ve never Driven before. In the end, we covered exactly 4400km (2750 miles) during our travel. A good trip.

There were fun things that happened, and I will post about them in time.
Right now I can just say that I was an idiot and managed to forget most of our pictures on the computer of our hosts. Right now I am franticly trying to get them to install an FTP server so I can download that shit. Buh.

Posted in Diary, travel | 4 Comments »

MechGolfer 2 メックゴルファ２

Tuesday, October 19th, 2004

Read the previous article here.
Update: here is a video of the robot in action

Well despite my foolishness being dead-set on defeating us, we prevailed. The project can most likely be deemed a success, and this Thursday we are having our last meeting with our group-hand-holder who will hear our final reports etc.

The robot fair went great, and so did the final presentation. I got no sleep on that fateful night, and instead went straight to bed when I got home at 6pm on Thursday. I then proceeded to sleep 16 hours and basically spent the the entire weekend recuperating.

Here are some pictures from the fair.

Now I am up and running again, and it feels good to have for the first time in my life — a hyperbole, but not by much — secured good grades in school!
Back in my days in real school and high school, the best I could get were 4s (max 5) or 6s (max 7) at BEST. Usually things ended up with the dreaded “satisfactory” 3.
Well no more of that!

It would seem that I have gotten the taste for education. Well, at least it seems so now.

Nighty.

Call On Me (Filterheadz Remix) from the album Call On Me by Eric Prydz

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