true to the name

i realized that i haven't mentioned webcomics in a while now, which is something that this blog claims to be about. time to make up for that: check out the perry bible fellowship for some well-drawn and really nifty stuff.

second time around

tonight i will go to mejeriet ("the dairy", you might be inclined to think that they make dairy products there, but no) here in lund and see the mountain goats IN CONCERT. the mountain goats are one of the best bands known to man, and i urge you to go as well. the line below "adventure" is a a quote from one of their songs, and there's more where that came from. this is one of my favorite segments, from their song woke up new:

the first time i made coffee for just myself
i made too much of it
but i drank it all just cause you hate it
when i let things go to waste

i won't tell you what you should think or anything but seriously, YOU HAVE TO THINK THIS IS AWESOME. their songs are full of imagery like this and many of them have lyrics that just blow me away. and for the well-read peter fan, it should come as no surprise that i saw them in sydney in january and it was possibly the best concert i have ever been to. granted, rachel also being there might have had something to with it, but the mountain goats certainly did their share of being awesome. i have tried to get all too many of my friends to go tonight, but they're all going away for easter. but seriously, is there any better way to spend the ol' good friday than seeing one of the world's finest and depressing bands?

this monday i quit playing internet scrabble. i've been addicted to it for a while now, and recently i've just been unable to stop myself from playing. a lot of saying "just one more game, it only takes fifteen minutes" to myself. and i've gone up a lot in the rankings. problem is, it's been seriously cutting into the rest of my life, both study- and friendwise and that's just not a good thing. and i tried cutting down to one game a day, but it just doesn't work for me, it has to be total cold turkey or i won't be able to stick to it. i discussed it with rachel, and she said it's because if you allow yourself to play one game, one more game isn't really that much more, but if you allow yourself no games, then playing just one will result in massive amounts of guilt, and so you won't play it. it's been working so far, no games this week. not that i've necessarily gotten that much more work done anyway, but i'm going to bed earlier and generally feeling better, which is definitely A Good Thing. i still get "the urge" sometimes, but i'd much racher play in real life; trouble is, there's no scrabble action going on in this region at the moment. i've tried to get it started, but it's been tough so far. but soon! there are lots of good players around, it's just a matter of getting them to try the real deal.

i'd love to stay and chat, but i have to go to school and learn a statistics program. yes, i know it's the ol' good friday, but i really feel like i have to do something thesis-related. this week has been a horrible one in that department, i've gotten almost nothing done at all. also, i have to take a photo of something which will most likely lead to a blog post, but that is all i'm going to tell you now. who's the master of cliffhangers? (i'm pointing at myself with my thumbs now.)

i made a lot of mistakes

i had the family over for dinner this afternoon, in celebration of my birthday on the friday two weeks earlier. (i refer you to the post below for a description of the events that occurred on said friday.) i made lasagnas and a simple yet delicious salad. my main claim to fame with these lasagnas is that one of them was made from a recipe by emeril, every old lady's favorit tv chef and pork fat connoisseur. if you are a fan of futurama but do not live in north america, you may be interested in knowing that emeril was the inspiration of elzar, and he loves to kick it up a notch. more often with pork fat than with the spice weasel, though. the lasagna was a four cheese lasagna with spinach and portobello mushrooms, quite extravagant if i may say so myself. it got smashing reviews from all the critics, which means that my family liked it, or at least that they said they did.

i miss the food network, which is where i discovered emeril's daytime tv show whilst i was living in vancouver. not that i'd be able to watch it even if it did exist here, as i don't own a tv. i've considered getting one, though, and were there a food network, that might tip the scale just enough to warrant a tv purchase. but alas, there is not, and the money stays in my pocket. probably a good thing.

for birthday gifts, i mainly got what i have craved for so long: very sharp knives. i'm going to have so much fun with my new very sharp knives.

i ordered myself some cd's as a birthday present to myself, and they arrived this friday. i mention this because one of them was "avalanche" by sufjan stevens and i'm having a big sufjan period right now. i discovered him a few years ago, when i came over the "michigan" album and instantly fell for the album in general and the song "for the widows in paradise, for the fatherless in ypsilanti" in particular. it was probably the first song i ever listened to on repeat, over and over. it made me cry. when i was in school, i felt i was wasting time doing useless things when i could be home listening to the song. it still might be the song that has affected me the most, although there are other songs aspiring for the title. "avalanche" is a cd of outtakes and extras from the "illinois" album and i'm now alternating between those two cd's. they're both over 70 minutes long so it's not as repetitive as it might sound. still, lots of sufjan stevens in my life. it took me a while to enjoy the illinois album, but now i've definitely fallen in love with it. at first it seemed a bit bland and long and too similar to the michigan album, but now it's a whole different world of brilliant songs. i discover new ones every time i listen to it. the avalanche album isn't quite as good, but it's got some smashing stuff on it and i have a feeling it will grow on me as well.

in short, if you haven't listened to sufjan stevens, you should give him a go and probably start with "michigan". i like to describe music with feelings, and sufjan's music has a way of grabbing me and making me care. the word i'm looking for here is engaging. sufjan stevens makes engaging music that warrants multiple listens and is musically complex. not that i'd really know, being a musical illiterate and all, but he plays a lot of instrument and there seems to be quite a bit of orchestration going on. crescendo this and scherzo that. (i don't know if scherzo is actually a word in english. i don't even know what it means, just that it's something about music. the only reason i know it is because it's a seven-letter word that has both c and z in it, and in swedish scrabble there is only one of each. but i'm sure sufjan is all about the scherzos.)

this week has been a good week for my thesis. i've done some serious coding in matlab and made a program that grabs all the data from a spreadsheet and calculates means and standard deviations and plots everything nicely and smoothly. i'm actually a bit impressed by myself, i'm glad i got it all to work in the end. tomorrow i'm printing it all out (32 graphs) and discussing things with my supervisor. it's good, because i've been wanting to learn how to write code that quickly gets out and organizes relevant data for a while now. and it's cool, because when i look at the program, it seems really complex and i feel smart. my thesis topic has also gotten more interesting this week; instead of just doing statistics on collected data, i'm going to build a model for mass balances for clear-cut forests, and we're also going to go up to the actual test areas to collect mineralogy samples, so that means there will also be a small field component in the thesis. these things are both very good, they make the thesis both more engineery and environmenty. also, i feel it is a good thing to actually get to see the areas that i'm devoting half a year of my life to.

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.