The Phantom Post

Where did it go! I definately posted on Monday. It was about Alex fixing my Fedora installation. Hmmm, I'll track it down if it's the last thing I do... today.

Annie, I really hope the weather cools down a little over the next few days, because at the minute it snows by night and it melts by day. Slush is not as pretty as snow. Maybe we'll just stay up all night making snowmen and then sleep during the day time. Wouldn't be too far from my normal circadian rhythm anyways :)

Also, in my quest to have a computer quiet enough to sleep by, I have invested 30 more euros in a fan-less cooling system for my graphics card. Needless to say that it's completely silent. What must be said, however, is that it is a thing of geeky wonder. It's got a heat-pipe for Christ's sake :D So tonight I plan to get covered in toxic, toxic, oh-so-toxic, heatsink paste, and fit that mother-puppy.

Now if you'll excuse me, myself and Alex are discovering if our powers combined can defeat an evil half-kilogram Bag-Of-Sweets-Nemisis-Er-...-Thingie! Watch this space...

Slush Puppy

*Found it - although it seems some transmission error has edited out all the genius bits :p Honestly...*
Last night it was -3 and snowing. This morning it's +1 and melting.
These conditions have conspired to produce a deep carpet of slush,
difficult to walk on, and near impossible (but oh so entertaining) to
cycle on. If you've ever tried cycling on someone's gravel drive
you'll know what it feels like.

Ah, cycling, which brings me to my bike. There is something cool
about having metal spikes in your tyres. It's the same kind of cool
you get with mud-splattered jeeps, power-tools, and heavy plant
machinery - a rugged, manly (possibly compensatory) cool, but a cool
nonetheless. On Saturday (when it was still freezing) I managed what
felt like 20mph upon two inches of solid ice, with the back wheel
kicking out a little every now and again to keep things interesting.

In other news, after two abortive attempts at installing Fedora (it
hates my RAID), last night I sat down in front of the damn thing for
about seven hours, and watched Alex coax it to life. It still can't
read my RAID (when Knoppix can, strange), so the only way to boot
windows is to engage in BIOS trickery, but that's a problem for
another day.

Apart from that I'm still vaguely peeved at club Mecca in town, for
their over-24s policy, which prematurely ended my night out with the
Nokia International Club on Friday, and thanks to said club and their
Christmas party, I have my very first Christmas decoration - a little
snowman :)

Oh yeah, and thanks Sean, now I've got tea stains all over my monitor :D

Helsinki: Snowiest Place in Finland

Maybe it was a bit of a blizzard after all: we've more snow than Lapland!

In any case, at the minute Helsinki looks like this


The snow is about ankle height in most places, but there are piles gathered from clearing the paths scattered around. It seems they locate these with wild and giddy abandon.


Apart from wandering around looking like a child at Christmas time (or a drunk, depending on your views on 22 year olds jumping into snow-drifts, giggling), I spent some time at the weekend making survival purchases. The main weapons in my anti-snow arsenal are now a sturdy (and oh-so-comfortable) pair of Ecco boots

and this ingeniously simple piece of material, that's fast becoming my favourite piece of clothing, I give you: The Polar Buff (seriously)


Beyond conjuring images of suicidally frigid nudity, the buff, which I've ineffectually described over the phone as being "a bit like a giant sock, only... only not, you see?" is a metre-long tube made of two materials, the lighter, polyester like colouredy bit, and the fleecy solid green part. I've had endless fun exploring its possibilities, from the simple "scarf" and "mask" to the more complicated "pirate" and the advanced "beanie hat". It's great fun, but what's more, I can cover my mouth, nose, and ears whilst cycling, and still wear my helmet (and breath, which is important). It's safe to say that if I'm outdoors, I'm in the buff (sorry, sorry...)

Fingers crossed for my beloved bike, who had to overnight in the bikeshop last night. Public transport is just not as fun as sliding around on the snow on two wheels...

Blizzard!

Ok, well maybe not a blizzard exactly, but there's more snow swirling around outside at the mintute than I've ever seen! There's already a couple of inches on the ground and it's only been like this for a few hours.

It's really captivating, I've spent the last hour just staring out the window. It's nature's tv-static...

Apart from the weather, all is quiet. I'm getting through the Da Vinci Code at a rate of knots. I find the facts themselves very interesting, but the narrative is pretty tedious, forced, and at times depressingly predictable:

Incidental Policeman #1 "Did you dig up anything on the Butler"
Incidental Policeman #2 "Not really. Oh Oh wait! He's fatally allergic to peanuts"
Reader 'Why would you tell me that, excpet so that you can kill him later with peanut infested seltzer or some such'
*later*
"And the drank the cognac, which tasted aslty..."
Reader: *sigh*

I've also migrated over to my new phone - Nokia's first proper 3G phone, the 6630. Of course, I don't have a 3G simcard yet, so I'm stuck with pedestrian GPRS rates rather than the full 400kbps data onslaught. I have to say (no, I have to say) to it's a great phone. Excellent 1.3 megapixel camera, with a nice "burst" feature that takes 2 photos a second for three seconds, and a clear screen. I'm using it to check my gmail thanks to their new POP service. Ah, gadgets rock :)

Hmmm, the light is fading, and the mist of snow is starting to look ominous with it's new sodium glow...

Anywhoo, I'm off to IKEA to buy stuff... the days of the computer and I sitting on the floor till our asses go numb are over!

Take it easy

Wohoo... Zzzzz

Squished many bugs! Victory is mine! Shattered... Slept badly... Must go... To bed! Charge!

International...

I'm currently in Stockholm Arlanda airport. Again. It didn't strike me in any way as I passed through on Thursday, but now, feeling a bit hungry, and very tired, my vibe-ometer is starting to sway towards "Whoa, Bummer".

It got off to a bad start - a tiresome warren of corridors and stairs led to the passport control, which in turn led to more stairs. The door marked "Transfers" was locked, and you needed to call a security guard on an intercom to let you in. In better spirits this might have seemed quaint, rather than parochial.

Then I tried to purchase some food, thinking how nice it would be to while an hour in the corner of a cafe, reading whilst sipping a hot chocolate. As I queued it struck me that I've never actually happily sat in a cafe reading a book. I tend to gulp the coffee then feel obliged to leave, or, get absorbed in the book and let the coffee go cold. Damn advertisers and their manufactured cosy sentiments! Well to cut an increasingly lengthening story short, I got to the till, to find that they won't accept euros. In an international airport. Insular Bastards. So they... they took my coffee and cookie away... I... It's to early to talk about it.

So I sit here, wallowing in my bad vibe. I'm not going to post yet about my fantastic weekend - to do that justice I'd have to be in a good mood. I really need to get hydrated though, I'll see if they'll exchange my crazy currency for a coke at the bar or something.

Late night...

Well, I'm sitting here in front of the machine at 3:20am, feeling that delicious, detached, semi-sleep feeling you used to get during night-time car journeys as a child.

About an hour ago I arrived back from Gilles place, where he and Catherine, who's sort of his fiance, hosted myself and Agathe. Lots of real French produce, all very tasty :) The general tastyness was accompanied by excellent conversation, and followed by Alien, watched in complete darkness :) It made me pedal just that little bit faster on the lonely parts of my cycle home. So my carbonara ingredients live to see another day. I'm beginning to feel like a bit of a sponge - I've consumed quite a lot of rather good food courtesy of mes amis, and haven't really reciprocated...

The intervening time has been spent playing Ian at virtual pool. I'm nicely full, nicely sleepy, and nicely mooded, so I might just head to bed soon. I'd better explain the "sort of fiance" bit. As far as I understand, they've participated in a legal arrangement that makes them officially partners, but they're not married.

It sounds like a drunken coven are having a hen party outside my window. This is either a strange sample in my music coming from the rear speaker (I recommend The Avalanches), or I need to pay attention :)

Oh, and a big big thanks to John, who has rescued my matrix account from the attentions of the BOFH :) Thank you sir, you are a gem :)

Either the coven are musical, or it is in fact my speaker. Dear Lord I'm spaced. It's not helping any that the Arena down the road is shining spot-lights into the sky above my block. I think I'm going to hit the hay before everything degenerates into some kind of weird sleep-deprivation induced bad trip. Good night all :)

Hope the weekend is good :)

I didn't make it in to work until 2pm today, which is simply scandalous... I swear my morning energy levels are somewhere between "near death" and "corpse". I've been doing a little reading, and I've concluded that my recent unhealthy eating habits are contributing to a lower metabolism, and hence less energy. Anyway, I have to fix it, because a 2pm - 10pm working day is a real killer.

Eating. I had to rush out and buy food today, after Agathe helpfully reminded me that all stores and restaurants will be closed tomorrow. [Did I say "stores"? Shops damnit! I've already called sweets "candies" today. Dah!] It's all Saints Day. I always thought that All Saints Day was the day after All Souls, but apparantly it's the first Saturday afterwards. To juxtopose: all shops will start opening again on Sundays to facilitate Christmas shopping. I'm sick to death of penny pinching, and I'm not going to make it to the 20th without racking up a little debt, so I bought authentic ingredients for a really good carbonara :)

I've been very dissatisfied with the lack of cartoons available via RSS, so I've decided to figure out how to make my own feed - the feed part is quite easy - it's the writing a script to assemble the feed that's a little daunting. Any successes will be hosted from Matrix, and written in python :)

Not a lot else. I'll have graduated by this time next week, and will no doubt be in a crowded bar somewhere with a bunch of rowdy engineers. Make that moneyed Rowdy Engineers... Awesome thought.

I've also been a bit lazy on adding pictures to the blog, so here's a rather gratuitous picture of my R.E.M. ticket. Cheers Alex :)

Alive, alive-oh

Yes, still here.

I did almost post twice since last week, but ran out of steam at about this stage, and so went over to penny-arcade to see if there was a new cartoon instead.

The only major event in my life lately has been the most serendipitous and excellent discovery of extensive trails throught the woods close to my apartment. The journey to work in the morning is much more enjoyable - there's something about narrow paths and trees that makes you pedal faster!

They were uncovered whilst trying to locate a tennis centre, and replace Agathe's ailing tennis partner. Imagine a very big inflatable bath-tub (no, go on, I'm going somewhere with this). Now imagine two tennis courts, end to end. Cover the tennis courts with the inflatable bath tub. This is what the centre was like. If you've seen the X-Files movie, it was disturbingly reminiscent of the place where they kept the bees. Oh, and the giant inflatable spider stuck in there gave me the creeps too.

Apart from that I've finally encapsulated my interrail photos in a gallery, and I'm thinking of running a post on the strange and wonderful phrases people have googled for, only to end up here.

Oh, and I'd better mention I'm getting a couple of hits from Annie's fresh new site . Now I must go, before the temptation to bitch with reckless abandon about my technical woes overrides my fear of NDAs.