Just came back from a Rush concert in Stockholm. Excellent and funny show (dragons, balloons, pirate flags, three and a half hours of great music, what's not to like?) and right now there's no doubt in my mind that Neal Peart is the best drummer in the world. On a minus side, the mixing and the accoustics of the arena could have been better.
Red Sector A made a big impression, funny that since I never liked the studio recording all that much. It was kind of funny hearing Tom Sawyer, since it reminded me of the last time I heard it... in the toilet in The Mall. Oh, and they actually played Roll the Bones ^_^

Listening to: Rush - Red Sector A (giving the recording a second chance)
Feeling: lonely

I swear it was right there when I went to bed around one last night, but this morning when I woke up it was gone. I suppose this means they've started working on the bathroom and I'll have to go hiking to the other end of the house to go to the toilet and go home to my parents' to shower and do my laundry for the next week or two.
I'm sure it'll be very nice when they get done, it's just that I'm not particularly fond of living on a construction site where large men in paintstained clothes go clomping around at seven in the morning. I'm starting to believe they start early just to be annoying, I can't see any other reason.

Listening to: Death in Vegas - Broken Little Sister

It's Monday morning. As if you couldn't tell from the way my hair looks. It's not just a Monday morning, it's a cold, rainy, windy, miserable *Monday morning*... did you notice I don't seem very happy about this fact?
To make things a little better I heated one of my garlic burgers from yesterday lunch and had a glass of low fat yoghurt without added sugar... yes I can spell breakfast but it's shorter in greek.
And since all the small victories count, I once again won the battle for toothpaste. The tube has been telling me for days that it's empty, but we all know that one of the characterizing properties of toothpaste tubes is that they're never completely empty.

Listening to: Nick Drake - Saturday Sun

Just realized that two books that I absolutely need for my exams are still being shipped from Japan. That's what I get for packing without thinking.
Oh, and just to make it obvious I'm not studying every waking moment I'll mention that I'm rewatching Noir. Noted that a japanese potato peeler is being used in episode two, even though it is in Mireille's apartement in Paris. Now I'm curious if you can even find a peeler like that in France. Maybe Sweden has different peelers than the rest of Europe...

a time to study in peace.
I'm getting increasingly stressed as the finals are drawing closer and the amount of material I don't know seems to be growing. I'll manage somehow, but it won't be fun. And really, I'm not disciplined enough to study *all* the time. There has to be time for fun and games too... preferrably in roughly equal proportions.
Weather's been unstable this week, rainy, sunny, cloudy. At least it'll be awhile longer before we can expect snow.
I've no real plans for the weekend except to attempt digging myself out from under this pile of stuff I should know before my teachers add more to it next week.
In the end I'll probably do old exams for a solid week and then go get a good grade on the exam. It's not the best way to learn, but it's the best way to make it look like you've learned.
Oh, and I have to show this: Klingons for Kerry. It's the stupidest thing I've seen for awhile (probably hours).

I was replying to a post in Zoe's blog and kind of fell into ranting mode, so I decided to move most of the reply here instead. Some other stuff has also been tacked on.
Personally I'm somewhere in the grey zone between believing, not believing and not caring much. If I happen to be in a church I'll light a candle and spend a minute in thought/prayer... but I'll do the same thing (exchange the candle for the appropriate equivalent) at a synagogue, shinto shrine or buddhist temple so I couldn't call myself christian or, in all honesty, even religious since my prayers don't tend to be directed at any diety in particular. I don't have to be spiritual to wish somebody good luck, do I?
However some of the smartest and/or coolest people I know are believing christians (living in a (formerly) christian country I don't have all that much contact with serious believers of other faiths).
With all the uncertainty inherent in something untestable that has to be taken on faith (just how many religions and variants are there?) I never felt a need to formalize my beliefs. The'll stay something vague and formless that I can change when and as I wish. I'll also gladly argue for or against just about anything (usually against, since people with strong opinions are so fun to argue with) without any real ground for my standpoint. Not that I'm entirely uninformed (though far from knowledgeable), I've read most of the Bible, parts of the Buddhist Promoting Foundation's The Teaching of Buddha (a nice compilation with material from many texts, of which I have in a very nice Japanese-English bilingual edition :) ), bits and pieces of the Koran and various hindu texts as well as quite a bit of greek, roman and norse mythology... mostly because they contain a great many interesting (and really a whole lot of not so interesting ideas, but everything has to be read in context of course).
I always thought the supposed science-religion conflict was an odd invention. The whole thing with religion is, in my opinion at least, that it deals with those things that are impossible to answer (even in theory I'd say) through scientific study (*). This is why I've some trouble with people who insist on applying religion where science should be consulted or the other way around. No disrespect to literal creationists, but I think they're wrong.
Ooops, I'm ranting... ranting is fun. Or maybe it's even just rambling at this point.
Tomorrow I've agreed to talk for ten minutes about being an exchange student. I don't know how many will come to listen so I'm a little nervous... but I'll improvise anyway. I mean, after a year I should be able to fill ten minutes, right?

(*): There is a piece of text here from The Teaching of Buddha which I think describes the religious approach: In the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal? Are there limits or not to the universe? In what way is this human society put together? What is the ideal form of organization for human society? If a man were to postpone his searching and practicing for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.
Note that many of those questions are ones being studied in science.
It works the other way around too. In science there is not much reason to ask why there is a wave-particle duality. If the calculations give good predictions that is enough (To me science is more or less synonymous with natural science and natural science should be predictive rather than merely descriptive, feel free to disagree).

Listening to: A Camp - Algebra

Of course it won't fit on a 1024x768 screen since I made it exactly 1024x768, not thinking that the browser window naturally doesn't take up the entire screen. Thanks for your comments, I've updated it a bit. The preview can still be found here. Though I've shrunk it a bit I've kept the content window the same size so that it now takes up a bit more of the whole page. Also decided to not scale down the sliders as this would involve reanimating them to get them to look nice (stupidly I didn't keep the original renders after I'd put them together to animated gifs). I will change the font, but I'm not sure what serifless font would be good. Any suggestions? What would everyone be able to display?

Listening to: Chrono Cross soundtrack

I've been doodling around with a new design for Das Bandts web site. So far I've got this. Markus isn't too fond of the background, "too clean". So eventually it'll get dirtied up a bit. The most important thing for me when making this was to make modifications easy. That's the reason for the full background image (sure, it's a bit of a load, but band sites should be pretty, not functional) and the iframe. Right now my biggest concerns are a) resolution, is it too big for most people? (again, pretty is more important than functional, but it shouldn't get too annoying) and b) the animated sliders file size, does the preloader work? I also get a little bit of ugly white around them.
Would appreciate some input before I hand it over to my little brother to put in the actual content.

Listening to: Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack - Jack's Lament

a couple of hours later:

I'm jittery from eating too much chocolate, I've also come to the conclusion that even though the goodness of a good blue cheese is opposite the goodness of chocolate, green cheese is not anti chocolate. A chunk of blue cheese will not neutralize the effects of chocolate. So I'm still jumpy. But at least I've got that good aftertaste in the back of my mouth. It's almost like the acid taste after you throw up. The almost being that it's not quite strong enough to burn.
It doesn't help that I just watched most of The Matrix. I started watching "28 Days Later" but I could only stand a few minutes before I switched channel. And what do you know, they're showing The Matrix on channel one. And since it's a public srvice channel, no commercials :D. Even though I still don't like the story, I can enjoy the effects, camera work and action choreography.

Today I went and cooked dinner with Kana, pickled herring with potatoes and sourcream, meatballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberry jam and to top it off rhubarb pie and custard. Even though I do say so myself it was all fairly good and the company was pleasant, so I ended up eating too much (always the case when I end a meal with pie). I really needed the half hour walk home afterwards.
In other good news, the dentist couldn't find any holes in my teeth yesterday. Of course he told me I needed to brush them better and floss more often, which is probably true and I will try to follow his instructions, but it's also what a dentist would say to any and all patients.

Listening to: My brother playing the piano

Going this afternoon and as always when I have an appointment I get fanatic about dental hygiene a couple of days in advance. Not that it helps my teeth much, but at least it should give the poor soul a somewhat more pleasant environment to work in.
Even though i don't have the outspoken fear of dentists that I had when I was little there are still not many people that I want invading my mouth and never with sharp metal hooks.
Today has gone from sunny, to cloudy, to thunderstorm and back to cloudy and it looks like the clouds may blow past before much longer. Gotta love unpredictable weather.
edit: sun's shining again.

If dogs bark when they go "woof"
what do cats do when they go "meow"?

Listening to: Franz Shcubert - Impromptu in F minor Allegro moderato

I was in a book shop yesterday. They had dictionaries of course, glanced over the backs of the various pocket sized ones: Swedish-French, Swedish-English, Swedish-American, Swedish-German... *looks back* Yes! They have a Swedish-American dictionary. Finally somebody has realized that Americans don't speak English ^_^ What I would love to see is an English-American dictionary.

Going out for dinner with a bunch of old classmates tonight. At first I was worried that I wouldn't be able to go since I didn't have a swedish student union id (required to get into the student nations), but this has since (though not without complications) been rectified. I am now a member of the same nation as my little brother which feels a little odd, especially since he's been a member for three days longer than I.

Weather's been clear but steadily colder lately, I wouldn't be surprised if we've had frost at night already. Which means it should be about time to pick sloe berries. I should make time for that this weekend, but now that I finally have the QM book there's so much catching up to do. Studying much and sleeping little... well I'm sure all who read this know the state.

Listening to: The Vines - Autumn Shade
Feeling: Bleary

I haven't used my pda for a couple of weeks because I didn't have the little converter thingy to plug it into my swedish outlet. When I plugged it in today everything had gotten erased, no trace remained of my word cards or anything. Luckily I have most of the word cards stored on my computer, but I will still have to reinstall the programs (something I've never done since everything vital was installed already when I got it from Norm). Also the calendar stuff was permanently lost as my computer and pda never got along well enough to copy it. Let's hope active sync will work better when I reinstall it now that I've cleared out the computer.
Is this something I can expect whenever the battery runs out on the pda? If it is I can't say much except that it sucks. Even makes it completely useless in any situation where I won't have a chance to charge it for some time. Blah.

Read in the paper this morning that the forest industry wants the hunting to increase because of damages done to young trees costs them alot. Not unreasonable I thought, but reading a bit further it seems they want to reduce the elk (in America it's moose, in Europe it's elk. much closer to the proper name for the animal which is älg) population to a fifth. Considering how important an event the hunt is, especially in northern Sweden where many rank it right up alongside christmas and midsummer, I don't think they'll get very positive reactions to this proposition. Each year almost 100,000 elks are shot out of a population that is around 350,000 before the hunt starts (in northern Sweden it's the first Monday in September and in southern Sweden the second Monday in October). This sounds like alot, but apparently roughly 100,000 are also born each year. Quite a few are killed in traffic accidents and only 4,500 die of natural causes. So the population should be quite stable.
200,000 something (I don't remember the exact number) hunters have gotten hunting passes this year. Out of those only 13,000 something were women, however there was an increase by 800 since last year... I said "only", but that's quite a few heavily armd girls out in the forest ^_^ and I think the numbers will even out more with the new generations of hunters.
Personally I've never hunted, or even wanted to. It would just seem wrong to kill these beautiful animals. I do however see the need for it as we've killed off all the elk's natural enemies and the forest industry *is* important for Sweden.

Oh, by the way. Does anybody else have trouble scrolling on this page? I don't know if it's got something to do with my making the scrollbar transparent (probably only visible in IE).

Hehe, I saw this quiz on Meghan's blog and just couldn't resist... even though I don't really go for guys. And what do you know:

You Should Date A Swede! You're a romantic, albeit an understated and practical one. It's more about a steady partnership for you, not unrestrained falling Your Swede will give you the unwavering love you crave While making up some mean pancakes and meatballs on the side! Which Foreign Guy Should You Date? Take This Quiz :-) Find the Love of Your Life (and More Love Quizzes) at Your New Romance.

Doesn't that sound good? That's me right there. I think it's telling me to date myself...
Been spending much time today in IKEA with a japanese girl though ^_^ I promised to show Kana how to get there and we ended up walking around for over an hour. In the end we bought stuff for less than 50 kr though. Also promised to help her get her computer online through the university network. Brilliantly enough the manual for doing so is only available in Swedish, and get this: It's only available online!

Another of the high points of the day was when the teacher in Dynamic Systems and Chaos tried to explain how an inner phase could adapt to an outer phase. The example he used was a dancing student. This in itself wasn't more than mildly amusing, until he said "And the reason we have a triangle wave here instead of just a straight line is because a dancing student doesn't know what bar he's in." It took him awhile to get his own inadvertent joke and understand why everybody was laughing.

No lectures today! Wheee!
So I've been working a bit on a redesign for Das Bandt's (my little brother's band) website. Not because Markus asked me to, but because I'm at least partly to blame for the current design (though Markus has made lots of strange changes since I made it a few years ago). As usual when working with any fun design, I want to put in images with transparent parts and as usual I am stopped by IE's lack of support for PNG transparency (GIFs suck, just look at the poor jellyfish in the upper left corner). Just about every other browser supports it by now, but MS keeps making life difficult. There are workarounds, but they require scripts and all kinds of annoyances, so I've never gotten around to using them. If you've also run into this problem do sign this petition.
If I was designing for myself I'd feel tempted to just ignore the IE users out there and go ahead with using the PNGs anyway. It's not good webdesign of course, but if good webdesign means my pages have to run on a dinosaur "good web design" can go hide in the same hole as IE. I'm not a webdesigner.
Ah, a good rant makes me feel better. I'll just take my pretty ideas down a few notches, it's just a website after all.

Yesterday night, when I finally went to bed around two am I noticed very clearly the well known fact that darkvision is much better in the periferal vision. I've an actual size ceramic skull on my bookshelf, got it from dad when I was about eight I think. It's painted with fluorescent paint so it glows after I turn out the lights and I've often used it as a beacon to find my bed in the dark. But now the paint is getting old (or maybe it's my eyes that are getting old) so I can't actually see it if I'm looking straight at it. It's a pretty neat effect to have this disembodied glowing skull that can only be seen at the edges of your vision.
This has nothing to do with anything, but I wanted to mention it anyway.