Gee, have I been busy! Movies, programming, computer game & Formula 1. And work ofcourse. That’s why it took me so long to upload the new pictures that can be found here. Enjoy!
And so I’m finally back here in lovely, warm & sunny Sweden! Man have I missed it! It took us about 23 hours from checking in at the airport to checking out at Arlanda. 15 of those was spent sitting in one little chair with severely limited space. I even tried sleeping pills, no luck there. But that just made coming home more enjoyable. So enjoyable I went right out to buy some new toys for my computers at home! And now I’m using wireless shit here, so I can actually sit in my bed and surf the web, checks mails and everything! Ofcourse I could do that before as well, with a long cable. The schedule over the weekend is very relaxed, only real “have to!” is doing my laundry. And I began it with sleeping 14 straight hours!
And then I checked my kristoffer.com mail account today for the first time in almost two weeks. It contained about 1350 messages! That’s about 100 messages per day! And maybe 10 of them was worth reading, the rest was just junk & spam mail. It doesn’t seem to matter how many proposals are on the table to stop spam mail and shit like it, it just keeps on coming 🙁 This has as another bad side-effect that when I go through my mail I spend about 2 seconds per mail to determine if it’s worth reading or not. And when I get 1350 messages hopefully you’ll understand why – 45 minutes to go through mail only to find the 10 I actually wanted to read!
Woke up today to the news that the USA military had killed Saddam’s two sons. And both the White House and 10 Downing Street were ecstatic. Without really knowing the exact nature of the operation I can only deduce this from what I hear on CNN and read about it on the net – but what gives the US the right to off people in foreign countries? They’ve probably been doing it for years, but this was kinda public and they’re even bragging about it? When they execute their own citizens in the name of justice they atleast give them a trial. But oh yeah, that’s right, the US don’t wanna go along with this international war tribunal until US soldiers are immune to being prosecuted for anything!
Over the past week, the media has once again shown its lack of good journalism when it comes to reporting about stuff on the web! A 31 year old ex. marine web-dated a person. It got serious, he told his family he was going to Britain to meet this 19 year old girl and off he went. They then travelled together to Germany through Paris, her stopping by a pay-phone to call her parents to say everything was ok. Oh, and the girl in this case was really 12 years young. And that’s as far as the facts takes us and speculation begins. CNN tried to keep an open mind about it, but when he was arrested they started the “predators on the internet” talks. And “Aftonbladet” in sweden didn’t even tell the facts but told the story so it sounded like a straight up kidnapping. And without knowing exactly what happened I can’t really defend the guy, but I gotta make some pointers here. Did he really know she was 12? I’m pretty sure young people today do what we did which was to lie about our age to seem more mature. And especially on the ‘Net, it’s really easy to get away with it too! I can very well imagine them two in a chat room with her saying she was 19 or something! And when they finally did meet IRL, he must’ve gotten the point she wasn’t that old, but so? What 12 year old hasn’t wanted to run away from home but doesn’t have a good alternative plan? This girl got one served up, what’s to suggest she didn’t leave on her own will? I can’t see any way that a person can be unwillingly dragged through three airports, with all the security they have today, without being able to call for help in any form. And is there a law out there against 12 year old people running away from home and travelling abroad?
But the dude was arrested right away in Germany, and he has a prior for sexual assault, so he might have done something wrong somewhere along the line, but I’m atleast giving him the benefit of a doubt and I’m really interested to see what he’s charged with, cause as far as I know, nothing he did was illegal. And for all the “what tha hell was he thinking!?” people out there, go see “Léon”, I’m pretty sure this guy had.
Remember that little link I posted a while back when they tried to change the name of French fries to Freedom fries in the states? Well, it looks like the French are returning fire as they try to ban the word “e-mail”! Seriously! What would the world be without politicians, huh? It would be a much more dull place to live in, that’s for sure!
Why can’t spanish be spanish everywhere? Why do they have to have different versions of it? I’m not sure the use of “dialect” is appropriate, cause it’s not a matter of dialects, even words are different. I still haven’t seen any place selling bocadillos, but plenty of sandwich-places! And then double “L” is pronounced differently as well. It’s annoying as hell when you’re trying to learn a language.
Have you ever seen “She Spies”? It’s one of those rediculous TV shows that doesn’t do much seriously what so ever, and if it wasn’t for Ms. Henstridge I wouldn’t watch it all. But it’s got some good moments like “Hey, this isn’t a movie!” – “No it’s not, if it was we’d have bigger sets”. Anyway, we’ve done some tourist stuff today. But there’s not much of that to do when you come here totally off-season
And yesterday we were invited to dinner at one of the guys working here which turned out … great! Really great actually. Two of the women from the office joined us for nice little get-together in his loft (and color me jealous, that was an amazing loft!). And then things went a bit wrong when the attention was tuned to my interests and it kinda slipped out (one of these days I’m gonna have to learn how to lie to women!) that I had this place with a diary so I better watch what I write in the future. But it’s below me to change what I wrote in the past – “know what I mean, nudge nudge!?”.
Work-wise everything has gone according to plan. Some small hickups but nothing I can’t handle.
Another thing that’s great about south america – they have lots of good TV stations here. Sony Entertainment with all sit-com’s, Fox, Warner channel, AXN and so on. Yesterday I was flipping over and happened to see an american show called “The Dead Zone” (yes, based on Stephen King’s work). Pretty damn good and lots of Star Trek references too. But what do you expect when Michael Piller is involved. Although I’ve only seen one episode, it showed alot of promise. Just the way the end scene of the episode (“Precipitate”) I caught was filmed like, slow-mo, silent, just amazing!!
One of the small little pleasures when I’m out travelling – tuning in to CNN to hear the latest news delivered by Daljit Dhaliwal! She’s like Tone Beckestad on TV4 in sweden – they can give you the worst news or weather report and you still sit there smiling.
I had a pretty good feeling about this trip even before we left Stockholm. Don’t know why, I just did. And now that I’m here, now that I’ve met the people here… I’m having an even better feeling about it! The staff here is great. Not only “great” as in “hey, how ya’ doin’?”- great but as in “I can relate”-great, which there hasn’t been much of during the other trips. And the hotel is great too, but no internet so I’m not sure when this is coming online.
One thing that isn’t great is the weather! It’s between 8-15 degrees down here now. That’s not what you’d expect going south of the equator!
Puh, that was a long flight! 2+12+3 hours! Don’t recommend it! And ofcourse people pissed me off. This time it wasn’t the passengers but the airline crew trying to help. After doing this for a while I think I’ve gotten the hang of it. And at Arlanda they try to force you to use the self-service thing, even though you’ve already tried it once. And then at Frankfurt they wanna make sure you’re going to the right gate all the time. Then at the plane they wanna make sure you know where you’re sitting and everything. And so on, annoying as hell.
I’ve been home for 6 days straight now. That’s more than I’ve been in the past 2 months. And I’ve had stuff to do all the time. Sometimes a bit too much. The normal Borg-efficiency have taken over and I’ve found myself doing three things at once. And as the old saying goes – “you end up doing neither very well!”.
Considering I’m on vacation I’ve actually been surprisingly busy, everything from cleaning, washing, stopping by my parents place, catching up with some friends and stuff. And this sunday I’m off to go south of the equator again and I’ve done everything I can to get a good seat on the 15 hour flight from Frankfurt but that seems to be impossible! Lufthansa doesn’t allow you to reserve the seats at the emergency exit until you’re actually there! So I’ll probably end up somewhere not so great with no leg-space what so ever not being able to sleep. Fortunately my MP3 player can play for 17 hours without re-charging it! But I guess I shouldn’t complain, I mean how many people get to go to Argentina for 10 days for free!?
And that was the funniest flight ever! From Vienna to Stockholm I boarded a little Focker, one of those that only takes 70 people. And 69 of them were Japanese tourists, maybe flying for the first time, I really have no idea but MAN it was hilarious listening to them during takeoff and the flyby of Stockholm! And that wasn’t it, the stewardess’ (who were as hot as they come!) turned that safety briefing into a comedy! The one at the front and the one in the middle did the usual “here are the exits” thing, but I was checking out the third one at the back who were doing all kinds of faces and things to distract the other two. And she was doing a pretty good job of it. And then, just as they were putting the lifevests over their heads the pilot decided to have some fun and hit the brakes so they both lost their balance, and that was it, you couldn’t take this crew seriously. And I didn’t. And not knowing were they were from I spoke english to them during the entire flight. Only to be greated by a swedish “hej då!” as I disembarked!
You’ve heard that the record industry is now going after people like you and me, people who download and share our music over the internet, right? And here I am, in a former eastern state, looking for a CD but by god, over one week later and I still haven’t found it – the original CD anyway! I’ve found plenty of copies! Plenty of homemade versions with printed out covers, but I haven’t found the original CD. And in Singapore it was even worse – I went into a DVD store and found like 10 retail DVD’s, rest of the store was THOUSANDS of homemade VCD of movies (the VCD’s were homemade, not the movies!). And all this for profit. But I’m the bad guy, sitting at home downloading a track or two for personal, non-profit use?
Going home to Sweden today. Not a day too soon either! Although the staff here have been nice, as well as my two travelling companions, I can’t wait to crash in my soffa enjoying a couple of new DVD’s, eating a bag of OLW chips, drinking some SWEDISH Cola and be guaranteed I’ll get to see the new F1 race!
I usually don’t dream alot in my sleep. Atleast not that I can remember. But since I started on this project I’ve started to dream alot more and remembering them. Atleast for a while. And I don’t like it. I don’t like having my sleep disrupted at all! Most recently I had a weird dream that we were taking off from Arlanda in a Lufthansa Jumbojet but not having enough power to get off the ground so the pilot ditched the airplane in a field. And I, after insulting a stewardess (!?), ran back to the terminal to make sure I got on the next flight because otherwise I wouldn’t make the deadline for the new computer installation I was going to!? I don’t know if that is my subcionscious dealing with all the problems I’ve had at work or what. I do know it’s definitely telling me I’m taking my job a bit too seriously. And I’d never insult a stewardess (or whatever they wanna be called)! If it wasn’t for them I wouldn’t get my sleep interrupted every 30 minutes with “do you want something to drink”, I wouldn’t get my knee hit all the time by a very robust cart, I wouldn’t have to listen to the satefy tips (let’s face it – noone knows what they’d do in an airplane free-falling 10 000 meters into the ocean! And would it matter if I knew where they lifevest was!?)… But other than that, I like stewardess’!
Wanna hear something frightening though? In about two weeks time, I’m actually boarding a Lufthansa Jumbojet flying to South America. But we’re not taking off from Arlanda so I’m not worried. I think…
This is a quote from the tourist guide we got, written by women : “March is generally known as the woman’s month because the weather is said to be as moody as a woman’s mood swings (cold harsh winter/warm and pleasant spring)”. I’m not making it up! And speaking of women, the women here are really nice, above expectations! And it’s mostly the “good looking? Who, me? Nooo!” or “I may be hot but I have no need to show it off” attitudes which is still much better then the “I’m so hot, you can even see my ribs, that’s how thin I am!”.
Remember when I was talking about the old swedish tradition of honking your horn at the trucks with students celebrating their graduation? Well they seem to have a similar tradition here in eastern Europe – honking your horn at newly weds and their entourage! Seen (and heard) it in two eastern countries.
There doesn’t seem to be much to do in this town. And I’m not only talking work-wise, we’ve tried to go out but there just doesn’t seem to be anywhere to go. But I’ll give Sofia this – plenty off taxis! Seriously, just go out to any corner and within 2 minutes you’ll have a cab! This weekend the girls I’m going with on this trip are gonna go off on some tourist-thing but I’ll probably be working…