money in the bank

last thursday me and david went up to karlstad to arrange a table hockey tournament for an it company and some of their clients. we've done it a couple of times before so it's fairly run-of-the-mill by this point, a lot of pleasant and very little nervous. everything went smooth and the people there seemed to have lots of fun and were very appreciative of us. included in the deal for us were hotel room, free food, free travel to and from karlstad, a bit of money and free tickets to the hockey game that evening, färjestad-mora. it's a fair bit of travel for me for the money i get, but i still really like the fact that i'm earning money just by being good at table hockey. and every year, we talk about designing a package for companies for kick-off events and company promotion events and the like, how much money we could earn and how much everybody would like it, and then nothing happens. of course we've realized this, so now we also talk about how nothing happens. perhaps this is the year it all will happen, but i seriously doubt it. i suppose we get one step closer to saying "this is ridiculous! let's just put this package together, it'll take an hour!" every year, but it might still be a few years away from happening. then we'll be millionaires.

millionaires!

(sorry, black adder III moment there)

moving on, i had the trip back to lund all planned out in my head: leave karlstad early, spend the day in gothenburg sauntering around, have some coffee and possibly buy myself something nice because it was my birthday. alas, it was not to be. on the morning in karlstad, i felt nauseous, but thought it would pass once i had some breakfast. alas, it did not. instead experienced increased nausea and threw up several times on the train down. the gag reflex is one mighty reflex, that breakfast came back up at a remarkable velocity. i can't help but be a little bit impressed. needless to say, of my chillaxin' day in gothenburg became naught, instead replaced by a vomitin' day at a bookshop, where i alternated between a wooden bench and the toilet. a supremely badly timed case of getting sick, although i supposed it would have been even worse if it had happened on the train up. still, getting sick far away from home when you have two three-hour train trips ahead of you, with a six-hour sauntering stop in the middle, has got to count as bad timing. also, on my birthday! hand over the martyr points! i'm still not feeling great, but a lot better. i might get my ass to school tomorrow and continue the data structuring and graph generating.

rachel told me yesterday that there is a studio ghibli museum. a quick web search later and i located it to mitaka, a tokyo suburb that i haven't heard of before (hey - we can't all be harajuku and get our name printed on hoodies from a swedish clothing chain). i believe this might be the ULTIMATE museum. if you don't believe me just look at some of the pictures on this page. a totoro dvd player! totoro in the ticket booth! a cat bus that you can play with! a damn sweet entrance! and more! it just seems to capture the spirit and feeling of the ghibli movies so well. and since pretty much all of the movies are really, really good, by extension the museum is as well. if you are not familiar with hayao miyazaki or studio ghibli, i suggest you watch the following movies: princess mononoke, my neighbor totoro and spirited away. actually, you could go with any movie they have released, i can't think of a single one that i don't like. they are japanese anime movies and very different from 'conventional' animated movies like the ones from disney, but that doesn't mean they're difficult, pretentious or inaccessible. just that they tell very different stories and sometimes in a different way. they're not crammed with stereotypes, the only funny character is not the weird sidekick and the main character is often a young girl. i could go on, but really, you should watch a movie or two. they're extremely likable.

je t'aime the valley

after a month of slackin' around, things are finally starting to happen. i am now officially down with thesis writing. the subject is solid but unexciting: nutrient leakage from clear-cut forests. let's just say it doesn't make people jump up and down in excitement when i mention it, but it also doesn't make them fall asleep. so i've now officially entered the realms of lund university again, it's been a while now. close to two years, actually. some people are gone, most of them are still here. some of them are done with school, most are not. all in all, it's the good old student in lund life all over again. could be worse.

lars presented his thesis last friday and it gave me serious performance anxiety. i will have to find some way to accomplish really difficult things and incorporate way too advanced statistics if i'm going to match him. well, to be fair it also inspired me to do something more than just basic stuff i'm already comfortable with.

i've got my own room at the department of chemical engineering now, which is pretty cool. i'm technically sharing with a ph.d. student, but she's presenting her doctoral thesis in two weeks and is not there at all. instead of her, there are boxes with her thesis in them. and i've stolen her flat screen monitor. it will be a semester of flat screen goodness. my room is situated right next door to the fermentation lab. i feel that this is an important spatial property to point out. the are crazy about making bioethanol at the department and i will be sitting mere inches away from where the yeast is doing its thing. thankfully, there is a wall between us.

my supervisor seems like a nice and competent guy. easy to talk to and very helpful. also, he had two bandaged fingers this wednesday, and said they were from a "sledge accident". definitely a good sign. the swedish word for sledge is "pulka" and it might be one of my favorite words. i like words that have a childish good vibe to them.

on the music note, i have recently discovered xiu xiu. i remember pitchfork marking them as a future top indie act a few years back, i downloaded a few songs when i saw that but didn't like them much and that was the end of that. but then alanna put their song "i luv the valley, oh!" on the mix cd she sent me and it blew my socks off. you must check out that song, for it is the song of songs. if i had some more money, i would rush out and buy all the xiu xiu cd:s. well, i would order them online, since there isn't a single record store nearby worth jack, but you get the general idea.

trouble; invite

ok, since i currently have no phone (the bastard stopped working yesterday) i'm throwing this out here. would anyone like to go and see ratatat at inkonst in malmö this thursday? they're instrumental and hiphop-ish and electro-ish and playful and fun. links for the inquisitive: inkonst, record review #1, record review #2, a song!, another song!

also, did i mention my phone doesn't work right now? so the best way to find me is e-mail, icq or msn.

pretty much nothing

instead of working on my inner qualities, i work on my blog. i've tried to find a nice design over at wordpress because all the people who seem to know anything say it's so much better there, but it's oh so slow. i don't want to wait 5 seconds for a page to load even if it has so many more features in it. well, i could stand waiting once, but getting a blog entry in involves several clicks and therefore way too many dead seconds. maybe one day when it's faster. instead, i opted for this semi-slick design out of ol' blogger. i hope you approve. also i'm aware that it's hard to make out what's actually in the new picture, but...i got nothing. it's cool in full size!

that's all i have for the moment. my life is extremely unexciting right now, tasks for the immediate future include: applying for subsidized rent, paying rent, paying union fees, applying for student loans...it's pretty much the opposite of the title of that ani difranco album, "so much shouting, so much laughter". maybe next week, when my thesis starts, my life will be more like this ani difranco album title.

oh, and i can't go out without music and web comics. so my current favorite album is "what the sea wants, the sea will have" by sarah blasko. she's one of those aussie gems i found whilst hanging out "down under". i don't know if you can find it here at all, but if you ask me really nicely, i'll lend it to you. for webcomics, let's visit some classic xkcd on nachos. for real life comics, i've recently made a trip to the library and borrowed a whole bunch. will set me on to this path of acquiring comics and it's a brilliant idea. right now i'm reading "chicken with plums" by marjane satrapi, of persepolis fame. it's about an iranian musician whose tar breaks and how he doesn't deal with that very well. it's very good. satrapi is very good.

ooh, labels! i'm now going to begin a life of labelling.

vicious challenge, random rant

first, i'd like to address the fact that i'm in a vicious blog challenge with my ol' pal kuma-dude. he is currently in the lead by 1-0, but i'm looking to even things out with this very post. i don't know if i can match his awesome blog skills though, this is a quote stolen from a recent post of his and if you ask me, it is beyond hilarious:

"Leonardo DiCaprio was just on TV, in an ad for some random property development. This was followed by a program where celebrities learn how to re-use a paper cup in various, wondrous ways. Yup, I'm in Japan again."

but maye that's just me. hopefully, it's everyone. how can i match this? i don't think i can! all i have planned for the day is a rant about cheese slicers. yes, cheese slicers.

about three and a half years ago, i Went Vegan. like the creation of the universe, this is widely regarded as a Bad Move. or maybe not, but it's not easy and for a please-everyone type like me, it's hard to say no to so many good things people want to share with me. i still reckon it's the ethical thing to do, but socially it's really hard, since there is pretty much no dish that "normal" people eat that you as a vegan can eat. this forces you to either look like some kind of weirdo who just eats lettuce and mashed potatoes, or to just hang out with vegan copies of yourself all the time, neither of which is very appealing. while there are plenty of mega-delicious vegan dishes, they are not that easy to come by unless you cook them for yourself, forcing you to go diy to a very large extent. this means that living the sweet life as a vegan requires time, planning and love of cooking. and not being lazy. i love cooking, but i don't always have the time, i'm horrible at planning and i'm lazy. 1 out of 4 = does not cut it. also the whole issue of looking like a weirdo at restaurants equally does not cut it. after a year and a half or so of strictly vegan, i once again succumbed to the joys of cheese and eggs. but i digress, severely. the whole point of getting into this subject was that when i went vegan, i demonstratively threw out my cheese slicer to make sure there was no going back. i felt it was an important characteristic of my home as a vegan to not contain a cheese slicer. this was another Bad Move, as there are perfectly delicious and overpriced non-dairy cheeses that would love a taste of the cheese slicer. but out it went.

and so, when i got home a few weeks ago, again living the life of a cheese eater, i found myself unable to consistently make long and thin slices of cheese. so i bought a cheese slicer, the first one i saw, at lagerhaus for 19:-. it is a useless piece of kitchen equipment. it is essentially unable to slice the simplest of cheeses. it makes a very thin slice, is weak and unevenly sharpened. and the sharpest bit is not very sharp. this, my friends, is a useless item. it could not slice a cheese on the sliciest day of the year if it had an electric slicing machine. and it is NEW! i just bought it! why would you make a product like this? have you no pride for what you do? lagerhaus, i'm looking in your general direction. and this is in the country that is supposed to be at the leading edge of technology for cheese slicers! i have gone on and on about the awesomeness of the cheese slicer during my trips around the world, and then i get THIS? me and will made scones at his house a few days ago, and naturally he had cheese to use as a topping, and to slice it he had an obviously leading edge-tech cheese slicer that was rippled. this means that the cheese slice gets less contact area against the slicer, which in turn means that situations where the slice sticks to the slicer and then rips into several pieces when you try and get it off, are avoided. people, this is the stuff we should be concentrating on, not cheese slicers that can't even slice when they're brand new! 19:- down the drain and back to square one.

i'm disappointed and embarrassed.

also, check out dinosaur comics today. it just doesn't disappoint. or embarrass. also, my current favorite song is "i'll believe in anything" by wolf parade. my friend alanna sent me a mix cd a while ago and it had both a live version and an album version and i was absolutely stunned. i still am. funny thing is i have the wolf parade album, i think i bought it in vancouver, but i never really took a big liking to it and i certainly missed the awesomeness that is "i'll believe in anything". luckily, i can make up for it now and listen to it over and over again. perhaps you should too?

the qc

now i know you're all positively dying to read about exciting australian adventures...but not today and possibly not another day either, because i'm quite lazy.

no, this post is all about a webcomic.

those of you who know me may have noticed my rambling about dinosaur comics and xkcd. (they're both awesome!). well, from today i think i'll be rambling about another one.

right, right, the name and link.

questionable content.

also, my luggage got lost on they way from sydney to copenhagen. but they found it and delivered it today! huzzah! also, there are few things more boring than sitting in a chair on an airplane for 24 hours. i'm sure you could figure out that on your own, though.

i feel like recommending a song. so i will. the song i recommend is "john wayne gacy, jr." by sufjan stevens. you should listen to it and the whole illinois album. it rocks as much as any album that ever rocked, possibly more.

wayfaring stranger

contrary to popular belief, i did not perish during my christmas adventures; i am, in fact, still alive. and kicking.

many cool things have happened, but i am in quite the hurry right now, for my australia journey has only a day and a half left to it, and there are lots of things that i have postponed during the course of the year, that i would like to do before i go. and time is running out. hopefully, i will still remember most of the things when i'm home, so i can write about them then.

but corals are cool. and the rainforest is cool. and weird tropical fruits are cool. and woodford was cool. ditto the blue mountains.

exciting times on a plane ahead. sometimes i think the earth is a little too big.