My employer is having me come over to the states for six weeks starting next month to do some extra work while I have time off from classes. I'll be in San Francisco from the 16th of May until the 28th of June. Get in touch with me if you want to hang out!
My Google Summer of Code Project has been approved! I am excited that I will be supported by Google to work on FreeBSD. It should be a fun time.
I've reworked my site once again. This time I'm using Movable Type to power everything. I've imported old entries I used to have on a now-defunct Typo powered blog, as well as more recent posts from my LiveJournal.
Emma and I spent the last week in northern Sweden. We took the train (which was on time, comfortable, and from an easy-to-reach station, all unlike flying) to Härnösand, where she is from. From there we also took a day trip by car to Umeå. I had a nice time. I met her parents and some more of her friends. It was Easter so we used that as an excuse to eat lots of candy. Sadly the mild winter has affected norrland too, so there wasn't a lot of snow in Härnösand and Umeå, but there was certainly more than I've seen in Stockholm. It also got rather cold at times. I believe down to -14°C one night, which seems quite cold considering it is now spring. I took quite a few photos. Here are some of the ones I've uploaded to Flickr:
Well, I'm not in Kiruna. Thursday night my friends and I made our way to Arlanda airport to catch a quick flight to Kiruna. The flight was delayed, and some time after our supposed new departure time, someone who worked for the airline came and told us that there was a problem with radar or the radio in Kiruna, so no planes could land. She gave no estimate on when we'd get to leave. Several hours passed. Someone else finally came out around midnight or so and told us that they would not be able to fly tonight, and there would be another plane that could take us at 6 o'clock the following morning. After some deliberation, Emma and I decided that sleeping in the airport and having our time in Kiruna cut down quite a bit was a bunch of bullshit, and we were going to go home. Heydar, Lisa, and Antoine all decided they'd stick it out and take the morning flight. Emma and I got the airline to remove our luggage from the plane, collected it, bid our friends farewell as they looked for some nice benches to sleep on for a few hours, and took a rather expensive taxi ride back home.
I am not at all fond of flying anymore. Being on planes itself can occasionally be fun despite the cramped conditions and unpleasant airplane air, but all the crap about getting to inconveniently located airports, going through check-in and security queues, waiting for delayed flights, etc. has become so old. I am thinking I should try to only resort to air travel when I'm going to other continents. Short flights are quick and usually cheaper than trains, but I don't think all this cheap air travel we have nowadays is really worth the other costs it brings about. The cost to passengers in the rather low quality of service airlines can afford to provide makes the experience of flying not fun, and with what must be very low profit margins I don't see how airlines can afford to properly pay their employees. The environmental impact of so much air travel can't be good, either.
I am disappointed that I am missing out on cross country skiing, riding a snowmobile to the ice hotel, and going for a little trip by dog sled. I wanted to see some real snow and aurora borealis and sit in a sauna. I guess this will all have to wait for next winter now. But, in a couple of days Emma and I are going to take another trip. We're going to be visiting Härnösand for about a week, the town she is from, and possibly taking a little day trip up to Umeå as well. These places are in norrland so there will probably be a little snow up there too, but not the huge amounts that there likely still is in Kiruna.
On an unrelated note, I am currently experimenting with growing a beard. It is very strange.
It's been awhile since I've posted much about what I'm up to. Life has been busy. After returning from my little trip to the US I started back into class right away. Currently I am taking courses in parallel computing, numerical differential equations (that one is mostly about finite volume methods for hyperbolic PDEs), and astrophysics. I'll be finished with astrophysics next month and in late March will be starting an advanced numerical analysis course. For the first couple of weeks of the semester I was slacking off a bit, but no time for that anymore. School is seriously kicking my ass now.
Next month during our spring/Easter break from classes I will be taking a trip with some folks up to Kiruna. I'm hoping to see some aurora borealis, an ice hotel, real snow (we had hardly any in Stockholm this winter), sitting in a sauna then jumping into that snow, cross country skiing, and perhaps going for some rides on a dog sled and/or snowmobile. I am really looking forward to this trip.
Other even more exciting news is that I now have a girlfriend! For the past few weeks I've been seeing a nice Swedish girl named Emma. She is awesome. I am quite happy.
Non-Americans, non-Washingtonians, and Republicans can safely ignore this post.
When I left San Francisco I decided to be a resident of Washington state again, so I'm voting with you Washingtonians out there in this primary. However, I didn't really know that voting in the Democratic primary in Washington is meaningless (correct me if I'm wrong about that) until today. I've already voted absentee. I wonder why they even send Democratic absentee ballots to people overseas if our votes don't mean anything. I wasted 10kr. on postage!
Anyway, please please go caucus today. I wish I could be there. And if you want my opinion on the matter, I think you ought to support Senator Obama.
I found this cool Berlin subway map for iPhone/iPod Touch that Randy Reddig made. It was inspired by an NYC subway map by Khoi Vinh, and in turn inspired me to make one for SL's tunnelbana (metro/subway), lokalbanor (local train), and pendeltåg (commuter train) map of Stockholm. Download it here, unzip, and take a look at the readme.txt file to see how to put it on your iPod or iPhone.
I'd like to make one of these for SL's bus system too, but have not yet found a suitable map to chop up. The best Stockholm city bus map I've found doesn't have night busses on it. Most of the time when I'm taking the bus it's only because the t-bana is closed for the night, so having the night bus routes would be really useful!
I have given in. I am on Facebook now. I can't seem to figure out how to find many people to add as friends, and I don't want to give them my whole address book. So I guess look at my profile and me as a friend on there if you want.
One of my photos of Stockholm was found on Flickr and now has been added to the most recent version of the Schmap Stockholm Guide. See it here by mousing over the entry for Norrmalm in the list of neighborhoods.
