The Unexpected Call

I got a weird phone call this morning. I'm not usually surprised when my phone rings, but when it's my Swedish phone, it's a bit of a surprised, because no one uses it.
No-one, that is, except the police.
Apparently there's this guy who has our house as his registered address, so the cops phoned me up just an hour ago asking me if I knew where they might find this man.
I wouldn't have though much of it, if it hadn't been for the fact that two ruffians had come to our house in the middle of summer, looking for this guy, making it abundantly clear that, even if they were holding some officially looking paper, they could quite possibly be in the bone breaking business.
I must say though, that this was a fairly comfortable conversation with the cops. They weren't insinuating that I might be an accomplice or anything, they simply wanted to "talk" to this guy.
Why they called me, on my cell phone, and not my dad on the land line, I will never know.

Oh well, I guess stranger things have happened...

Expect the Unexpected

There is snow outside the window today. Completely unexpected. I didn't think they got much snow down here.
Granted, it's not a lot, but it's snow none the less...

Katamari Damacy Ringtone

For a game that I've played very little of, I'm completely fascinated by Katamari Damacy. I got a chance to play a demo on a friends PS2 when I was in England last year, and I instantly fell in love with it. Now I've found the theme song to it online and have swiftly proceeded to make a ring tone out of it for my phone. I got the idea from re-reading Mac Hall a couple of weeks ago, but I never did anything about it until now. I don't know what the laws about posting short clips of things are, and even if I think it's legal, I'm not sure, so I'll refrain from posting it. Any mp3 cutter tool should allow you to slice up your favourite song to make it more suitable for your phone.

I Suck

And I don't mean lillipops...
I suck in the sense that I can't write exams. I can't study for them, I can't prepare for them, and I have every second from the two weeks before exams, until two weeks after, when I'm hopefully done lamenting my lack of skill, and I get a pass grade.
That is, of course, provided that I actually get a passing grade. The exams I wrote today was nothing short of a fucking disaster. I didn't feel stupid when I wrote it, I just felt unprepared.
I know that I could have just studied more, or harder or longer, but I just can't bring myself to study bullshit information. Information that I don't see any use for, like the specifics of some model in reference to something else, that's very hot for some tiny subject this year, I just can't be bothered. I hate exams and everything relating to exams. Even the ones I do really well at, I hate.
With a fucking passion.

Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hell

In the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow therell be hell to pay

People listen attentively
I mean about future calamity
I used to think the idea was obsolete
Until I heard the old man stamping his feet.

This is a place where eternally
Fire is applied to the body
Teeth are extruded and bones are ground
Then baked into cakes which are passed around.

Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement
Top skill and brain
But all the things you try to hide
Will be revealed on the other side.

Now the d and the a and the m
And the n and the a
And the t and the i-o-n
Lose your face, lose your name
Then get fitted for a suit of flame

My Day

So, I got the relatively harmless question "Have you had a good day" just now over icq, and, as I hadn't really had an especially good day, this is how I responded:

actually, up until about 2 hours ago, I've had a pretty crappy day =(
I got up early, had a small breakfast and went to school.
scheduled project work with one guy from 10-12, then from 12 to whenever with my other project.
then when we got done with that project, I call the first guy up, and we continued to work.
you will notice by now, that "lunch" didn't figure in to that description.
I get home around 18, nothing edible in the fridge, so I'm off to the grocery store, still burning my single sandwich that I had for breakfast.
at this time I'm pretty cranky, and quite sure that if anybody was going to give me any trouble, I'd tear their head of and shit down their exposed throat.
so I get to the store, get what I come for, and go home.
When I come home, there's a mountain of dishes. This is not unusual, and really not a problem, except for two things: a) my raging hunger is at the point where any setback seems like world war 3, and b) there is no dish soap in the house
Thus, back on my bike to the store.
I come home with the dish soap, do the mountain of dishes (about 45 minutes or so, I'd guess), make dinner, leave dirty dishes all over the place, and then, I simmer down and watch some tv, and now everything is good again.

how was your day? =)

So, after dinner (curry chicken), some CNN and some Mythbusters, I'm all happy again.

Ohh, and the game store called be about my pre-order for TBC. The store is going to open up at midnight tonight, and I'm most likely going to be there to score my copy of TBC, and then LAGG OUT in the blasted lands all night. Tomorrow's working day might suffer a bit, but I really don't care that much.

Right now I'm selecting courses for next quarter. Currently, it looks like:
- Performance evaluation (I suck at math and statistics, and this is heavy on both. Mandatory, unfortunately. Die Markov chains, die!)

- Mobile and Wireless Networking (Might be interesting. One of my current courses have touched on the subject, and it's mighty interesting.)

- Aspect Oriented Programming. (With my favourite teacher Mehmet Aksit. This guy is the shit, quite possibly one of the best teachers I have had in my entire life. He was on the ballot for the teacher of the year here at twente. I voted for him, but I don't know how it turned out.)

They tell me that performance evaluation is going to be VERY difficult, so I'm going to play it safe and stick to the normal 3 courses per quarter, having done 3½ the last two. Luckily, I have a PhD student in mathematics living in my house, so I'm sure he'll be able to explain things to me if I get stuck.

Royale With Cheese

Vincent: And you know what they call a... a... a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese?
Vincent: No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.
Jules: Then what do they call it?
Vincent: They call it a Royale with cheese.


See, we're just a little bit better than you in this side of the pond!
There was a post on slashdot today about how it's really difficult to get the Americans to move over to the beloved metric system, and I think I have the answer.

Observe:

The biggest reason is the number of syllables in the equivalent measurements:

yard (1) = meter (2)
foot (1) = well, meter I guess. (2)
inch (1) = centimeter (4)
mile (1) = kilometer (4)
pound (1) = kilo (2) or kilogram (3)

It's pure LAZINESS that is preventing the large mass of the population of converting.

Thus, if Americans were willing to give it some effort and actually get in to the spirit of things, they might actually change. I will admit that when speaking with Americans (and Canadians for that matter) I will convert into feet/inches for the sake of their understanding, as I am also lazy sometimes, but it would be better if I didn't have to.
My English is, after all, from new york, so you'll forgive me if the metric system doesn't exactly roll off my tongue. It's all about practise. In Swedish, I use the metric system at all times.
If people got into the thing with using the metric system when speaking English, I'm sure it would seem less alien after a while.

Informatie Beheer Groep

Today is a day of joy. The lord Jesus our god appeared before me and he told me that...
Well, no, he didn't. I'm lying. But what did happen felt something like like the second coming of christ for a student like myself on a rather tight budget. The dutch government is going to refund me part of my tuition fee, and all I had to do was to be from an EU country (and fill out a form or two). The system works, and I get money, yay socialism!
Ehumm, no, wait, not yay socialism, that's wrong, but yay me getting some extra money!
It will go towards me eating everyday and other little things that bring joy into my life.

Also, due to meeting someone in wow named "millford cubicle", I re-discovered salad fingers. If you haven't watched, you should.

Labels

I just realized that I use labels for these blog posts like keywords. That might not be what's intended, but it's damn handy.
It dawned on me when I looked at my label list, and it was huge and there weren't more than maybe 5-10 labels that were connected to more than one post. It's not like I categorize my posts anyway, so we'll see where it leads. Who knows, maybe when I have 10k posts, then the list will look a lot different. How do you use your labels?

Haircut

I both like and dislike the fact that I can just walk in to my hairdresser and get an appointment at any time. She's great, and she's good with my hair, but if people are cutting their hair elsewhere (ohh, rhymes), then there might be something to the story that I don't know.
Sure, they have several hairdressers in the salon, and it's in a clothing store, but still.
I have no plans to seek out a new hairdresser though. At least not until this one fucks up my hair.
Anyway, starting this afternoon, I look pretty again. I like getting my hair cut. Especially the razor she uses on my neck, that's the way it's supposed to be done!

Nooo

Say it ain't so!

German scientists say putting milk on tea drastically reduces the cardiovascular advantages of the tea.

Not that I think I'm going to have any cardiovascular problems in the near future, but I absolutely love tea, and I'm not about to give up on having milk in it unless I can find a pretty damn good reason! Tea without milk just tastes harsh and burnt. tea without milk is barely indistinguishable from regular boiled water. I've only had good tea without milk once, and that was at a small hole-in-the-wall thai restaurant in Amsterdam with my very good friend Julia. The Jasmine tea, as it was, was delicious, but every time I try it after that time, it just takes like shit. Maybe I'm going to have to go back to that place and ask them for the recipe.

The vi input model

I prefer vi over Emacs. Always have, always will. This, however, it's about Emacs, it's about vim.
What vi has over Emacs, and most other editors for that matter, is simplicity. Simplicity, always to the edge of being painful. Everything is so damn simple to do, but you need to learn how to do it, otherwise you are liable to fuck up all that text you've been working so hard to type.
The beauty of vi is that your fingers virtually never leave the home row. Other than Esc, your fingers stay in the same position all the time. (Shift and Enter being reachable while still on the home row).
This guy has a pretty interesting piece about re-discovering the joys of vi. He does make a lot of sense, and while I know the vi model fairly well, I can't say I ever use it, except on Unix systems that I fall over every now and then. It really is quite ingenious, but as I have a proper and wonderful keyboard (whereas the author of the piece did not), I don't see a need for me to migrate to the vi input model in my other applications, even though it is quite spectacular.

Also, vi is guaranteed to exist on every Unix system you ever come across, not matter how old or small, so it helps if you know how to use it.

The article also provides two links to learning how to use vi, that I'll re-link here, lest they disappear for unknown reasons.

I remember hanging out in #OpenBSD on EFNet (irc) a while back (years), and someone was circulating this file called learnvi.tgz. As the name implies, it was guide to learning vi, using vi. It was awesome, it guided you through everything you need to know, and it wouldn't let you get to the next step unless you have completed the previous one flawlessly.
I could probably have learned about vi in another way, but it was just so damn good that I've saved it, and whenever someone asks me about editing on Unix, I just send them this file and tell them it's going to change their life.

Macworld 2007

A minute-by-minute report on Steve Job's Keynote speech as Macworld 2007.
Not to spoil the fun, but the iPhone is going to be the best things since sliced bread. I can't wait to get my hands on one (if I only had the money, and I didn't already have a contract, and it was out in europe anytime soon, and that they weren't going to tax it heavily, etc)

In other news: my internet connection sucks!
I don't know if it's related to any downloading of porn but it's been acting all funky all day today.

Legendary Thread

This has got to be epic, if not legendary: http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j195/drkieros/LegendaryThread.jpg

Naxxramas: The Movie

I found this today over at Ming's site. It's a movie made by a French guild about the various boss encounters and wings in the Naxxramas instance in World of Warcraft.
Like he says, much like the BWL movie of about a year ago, this is more of an artistic vision of the encounters in Naxxramas, than a "look at my interface and my big crits"-kind of thing. It is, dare I say, the best WoW movie I have ever seen. The BWL movie was pretty damn awesome, but the quality and production value of this is just so much better. Also, the stuff pictured in this looks much more interesting. If you're a WoW-fan and you like good movies, then check this out. A full, high-quality download is recommended, this movie has earned it!

Edit: You can find the rest of Jack's movies here.

New Shoes

With my best Forrest Gump accent, look at my new shoes!

This is what I've been wearing for the better part of christmas break, and I look absolutely stunning in them, not so say viciously bearish!

I think everyone should own at least one pair of slippers with claws on it. How else can you comfortably loaf around the house with feet to match the animal inside you?

Back to Life

So, I guess school starts again tomorrow. Granted, I don't have class on Mondays, but it's officially on again. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as we will later see) I've been too busy playing World Of Warcraft these past weeks to a) do something productive and b) write new posts.
The good thing about playing wow is that I've grown tired of it again, so now my only hope is that TBC (not tuberculosis) will bring some new joy into the game. If not, then I'm screwed.
It's especially good that this happens now, as I have exam weeks coming up, and I don't want to be preoccupied with slaying foul demons and whatnot.

Three of my roommates arrived home yesterday with eerie timing. I was expecting only one of them, but they all arrived within one hour of each other, so now the house is full of joy and merriment again! It was really great to have the house to myself for these last two weeks, but I can't say that I haven't missed having them around. The remaining two are due sometime this week, and sometime next week. One of which has been to the eternal darkness or Norway for two weeks. It's going to be interesting to hear what she has to say.

I also got a link from my brother yesterday about a new blog I should check out. It's at http://indexed.blogspot.com, and it's full of truths and laughs.

Other than that, very little has happened. I've become very tuned in to CNN, as it's what I watch for breakfast, lunch and dinner when I'm downstairs, so I now know in detail what's going on around the world. Not that I didn't before, but my knowledge isn't normally accompanied by moving pictures.

Me and one of my roommates spent an inordinate amount of time on youtube today. We started watching some SNL skit, which quickly got followed by some nudity (of course, it's what the internet is for, is it not?), a bit of Chad Vader (hilarious stuff), and then I showed him the wonder that is LonelyGirl15. He had not seen this before, and was not familiar with the concept of vlogging (terrible word for video blogging, I know).

All in all a good, fun, and completely useless day.
Now we're all having a delicious dinner together. Fried chicken, potatoes and vegetables. Gotta run!