It was weeks since I last wrote something – oh how time doth pass! But I have an excuse: I’ve been trying to drown myself in beer and loud music. Yes, once again I’ve attended Sweden Rock Festival and indulged in a week of hedonism. And I’ve also been ill after that, but I’ll just skip that little fact since it doesn’t sound as impressive; it doesn’t fit in with my imagined rock ‘n roll image.

The festival was quite pleasant although it lacked that certain…OOMPH; there weren’t many bands that I was dying to see. Aerosmith were surprisingly good, and it was great to see Blind Guardian. McQueen and Pretty Maids were pleasant surprises, as were REO Speedwagon and Axel Rudi Pell…but all in all most bands were “just” good. I’ll name a few more bands I saw; with some luck I just might make some of you jealous: Heaven & Hell, Scorpions, Meat Loaf, Quireboys, Motörhead, Dimmu Borgir, Udo, Tokyo Dragons, Quiet Riot, White Lion, Thin Lizzy, Falconer and many others.

But enough of that! Time to get to the real business… What do you do on a rock festival? Drink beer, yes. Listen to music, yes. Meet strange people, yes. But most importantly, you get people to pose with your Sword…of Doooooom! Let’s bring it on… First the naughtier pics:

Let’s move on to some other strange people…

Yes, that was Santa! I got Santa to pose for me! All clean-shaven at that, as well! Now, onto the rest of the sword pics:

“Why so small pictures,” I hear you cry. “You suck!” Well, yes, that I may do, but mostly it’s ’cause this blog’s theme doesn’t like large pictures and I wanted to be sure that the layout wouldn’t get screwed up. If you want to see the full pictures you’ll have to drop by for a visit, and we’ll watch all 350 pictures in high quality while we listen to some Dragonforce.

Finally, there’s one sword-posing pic that I haven’t shown yet. Yours truly, in all his Hawaii-like splendour:

So, I’ve been to France – a first for me. The week went by surprisingly fast; I hope and suspect that that’s a sign that I’ve had a very good time. What have I learned from this little trip?

• French people’s English skills are on par with Swedish people’s abilities to say no to alcohol. I.e. theoretically possible in a vague fashion
• 30+ hour bus trips are a pain in the ass unless you have a bunch of friends to annoy, and just barely decent even then
• French people simply can’t stand in line. They’re missing the queue gene or something, and constantly try to push ahead. I think we Swedes have a double serving in comparison. “Hey, why are you standing here?” “What? Isn’t this the line to the bar?” “Nooo…” “Oh, whatever. It’s a line; I feel comfortable here.”
• After a few days of intensive snowboarding I don’t suck as badly as I did before. Practice really does make perfect!
• The French like their crepes
• If you fall down from a dragging ski lift, don’t let your thumb be the first bodily appendage with which you meet the snow. It hurts
• French people smoke everywhere

From the comments above you might have gotten the impression that I’m not too impressed with the French mentality. It’s not very untrue to say that you’re wrong. (Can I make that sentence any more negative?!) My slight aversion probably comes from the fact that I was the only non-French person in my snowboard (or surf as they call it for some reason) group. I became just a tad bitter at never understanding a single word of the conversations; things didn’t improve when the guide had a dubious vocabulary as well.

“We’ll all go down and do U-turns!”
“Uh. What? Sorry? U-turns? We gather speed, go down, and then see how far we can go uphill after a turn?”
“No no, we do U-turns. On the way down.”
“…”
Shortly after this he drew a sinous pattern in the snow.
“Ah. Yes. The U and the S are pretty similar, I guess.”

Note: I’m not expecting everyone to speak perfect English - I sure as hell don’t do it myself. But placing a person in a position of authority of sorts makes me expect clearer instructions. Oh well, it was all fun either way! I got to race down my first black slopes, I learned a lot about snowboarding, and I saw some breathtaking views of mountains. Speaking of which, time for the panoramas:

Bigger: 1280×452 or 3800×1343

Bigger: 1280×561 or 3327×1459

Bigger: 1280×490 or 3413×1307

Sorry for my crap camera. My crappera. I’m thinking of getting a new one. Anyway, this was my first experiment with making panorama pictures, and I’m pleasantly surprised by the results. I really want to make more of these, and Autostitch offers seriously awesome results. Try it yourself! I left the black borders from the resulting pics just like they were, so that you’d get an idea of the output quality. Nerd as I am I got the urge to try to write my own stitching panorama program, but after finding Autostitch I just dropped that idea. The output from the program is simply too great to compete with, in my humble uneducated estimate.

What were the other highlights of the week? I really cannot post the most weird pics I took, so I’ll have to be content with showing a few nice (or less nice) sights:

The Swiss town of Something-Something where we had breakfast on the way down. Lovely little place!

My gorgeous slippers that I ran around with all the time, to everyone’s amusement. Thanks Anna – they’re great!

That ugly face I’m making is something I thought would be suitably metal; I think my judgement was a wee bit clouded by the whiskey and beer that I’d imbibed to a great extent that night. Oh wow, I’m pretty sunburned. Either way, Guitar Hero II rocked like a big stone. That night we ended up playing on Normal until we got to the last “stage.” We went from sucky beginners to guitar-slinging pros in just a few hours. At least the others did, while I remained decently-half-sucky.

Sorry for the dull pictures, but it seems like every other pic I took either feature something obscene, something even more dull, or people who probably wouldn’t want their faces on the net. Or a combination of a couple of the above.

Back in Sweden again, and I’ve had a day to watch movies and come back to life. Just in time for New Year’s Eve! Eeeexcellent…

Here’s a very brief summary of my brief visit to Dubai:

• The trip down there was a complete haze: I hadn’t slept at all, and mixed with free beer on the flight from Stockholm to Frankfurt I ended up having catnaps all the time. Luckily I was rested enough to stay awake on the second part of our trip: the business class flight from Frankfurt to Dubai. This was my first time in business class, and I never want to travel in another way. Flight stewardesses who were attentive and friendly, sparkling wine, lots of leg space, movies and TV series to select from. I almost didn’t want to arrive at our destination.
• But arrive we did, and what followed was a couple of intense days of 12+ hour work days trying to investigate Problems„¢. Here’s a pic of the broom closet we had to spend some of our time in. Since it’s just the backs of people, I don’t think they’ll mind that I post this pic.

• At late lunch one day we badgered one of the other guys down there to take us to the Burj al Arab hotel – Dubai’s seven star hotel. The hotel that we unfortunately couldn’t stay in. Basically because it’d cost more than we earn in ten years. Or something like that. Anyway, we got a few nice pictures of the place. Too bad that my camera sucks, and that the lighting wasn’t very advantageous.

I like this picture. It has so much colour:

• The weather in Dubai wasn’t overly hot, but it was an amazing difference from Sweden’s half-winter. I mean, going from around 0 degrees C to around 20 degrees was incredible. For fun I examined the scales in the first morning and then in the second: in one day I had lost 800 grams; most probably water due to the temperature difference. Oh, and the sea water was warm! Not to mention that the sand was warm and gorgeous and smooth:

• The architecture was very…flowing. They used curves at every possibility, and most buildings were amazing to look at. Unfortunately there were building sites everywhere as well, and that ruined the view. Here’s one of the few buildings that didn’t have cranes around it: a hotel next to the Burj al Arab:

• On the last day we decided to call it an early day, and prepared to drink ourselves senseless in some cool pub. You can imagine our surprise when we learned that it was a public holiday of some sorts, and that no alcohol was allowed to be served…anywhere! Panic! What do to?! Luckily my colleague had bought a large bottle of whiskey. To make it last a bit longer we bought some Coke from the minibar and did the ultimate herecy: we mixed whiskey and Coke in order to have a foul-tasting long drink.
• Of course, semi-drunkards as we are, we ended up downing the bottle and staying up all night. It’s a wonder that we got to the airport in time. Technically, we didn’t though: we were too late to check in, but with some drunken smiles and apologizes we managed to get on anyway. In the last minute before the flight left.
• If the trip down was a haze, our return was even worse. I guess things didn’t get better for the fact that we spent two hours having drinks in the lounge in Munich on the way. Ah well, we got back at least – and no flight personnel found us too drunk! It’s good to be a polite and stiff Swede sometimes.

Now: time for a wee New Year’s party!

Well, actually I’m not. But 5:30 this morning we’re going on a business trip to Dubai. Instead of finding an Internet cafe and a few minutes to spare like I did in London this summer I thought I’d actually post the obligatory travel blog post now already. I love spontaneous trips, but this one was quite rushed: last week was full of discussions concerning whom to send down there, which company should do what, should we send one or two people, if I were to go how the hell should I get a new passport instead of the one I lost in Cyprus, how should I get remote access to my development enviroments, why did the installation of the remote access software corrupt my Windows installation, and so on. It was late December 22nd when I gave up on trying to see whether or not I should go and had a few cold ones instead. A quick trip to Stockholm and further north resulted in a nice Christmas celebration…only interrupted early December 25th.

‘”Yeah, well, I guess we might as well go down there.” That little response made me look up trains to Stockholm and back here. (Here is Linköping. Pearl of Sweden; majestic flower of the North; heart-warming sight for weary travellers. Nah, not really. It’s dull as crap.) The clock is now 4:30 and I have been packing, washing up, had a long bath, watched The Simpsons (hey, I had episodes I hadn’t seen) and doing all kinds of important preparation-y thingies. 4:30? Bloody hell – no use going to sleep!

I’m pretty unusure what to expect from Dubai. I’ve read up a bit on Wikipedia and travel information sites, but it’s still rather vague to me. I didn’t even know that it was part of the United Arab Emirates – I just had an idea that it was somewhere around the Persian Gulf. If there’s something I’ve learned from my casual browsing, it’s that I’d better find some nice gold trinkets or electronics while I’m down there. Good thing that I’ve been planning on getting an iPod Nano anyway. Here’s to wishing that I get some time off for shopping. With my luck they’ll just keep me busy with work.

I had planned on writing a final paragraph here, where I mentioned how we’ll be greeted by unhappy Arabs out for blood. This would have branched off into a rant about how it’d be hard to do some coding with my hands chopped off, and all other kinds of stereotypicial almost-racist non-politically correct comments. While this is something I have no trouble writing, it felt instinctively wrong. It sounds too much like what a narrow-minded American would say. (Here’s a quick test for you: Are you American? Did you get annoyed by the previous sentence? Read it again and read “narrow-minded” as a qualifier; not as a generalization. If you did get annoyed, chances are reasonably high that you fit in with the narrow-minded group, though.)

Countries 2006: (Sweden) England, Cyprus, Dubai. Not great, but not bad. A decent year all in all I suppose.

For some time now I’ve felt that I’ve lost my adventurous touch; I get up in the mornings, go to work, get home, watch movies, get drunk now and then, work on hobby projects, spend some time with friends occasionally - and so on. Nothing may be static per se, but everything still felt a bit stagnant right now. So I took some of my vacation days and went on a spontaneous trip to Cyprus – the lovely divided island where Europe and the Middle East meets. I booked a flight but refused to look for hotels beforehand; instead I relied on Lonely Planet’s excellent guidebook. My trip can be summarized like this:

• Seven nights, four locations. I grew restless pretty quickly.
• Countless beers.
• Countless miles traversed in buses, taxis, by bike or by walking.
• 213 photos taken.
• Only one person in all of Cyprus knows how to make a good White Russian.
• A dozen ancient sites ranging from medieval forts to Roman and Ancient Greek excavation sites.
• I’ve learned that cute bartenders from Belarus who wear skirts short enough to leave nothing to the imagination are impossible to drink under the table. And she even got me to pay for the drinks. Bitch. This was probably the first time I saw a girl with tattooed eyebrows.
• Stray cats everywhere.
• I got stuck on a cold and misty mountain at nightfall in the middle of a pouring rain, and the police searched for six hours before they found me. I left the hotel at 11 AM thinking that I’d be back before evening; the police located me around midnight. Thank the gods that I had a fully loaded cell phone and that the Lonely Planet book had the emergency number listed.

But since a picture says more than a thousand words, I might as well offer over 38000 words instead of writing a novel about all of this:

Yay, I’m going to Cyprus! And I got the crappiest seat ever!

After I arrived in Larnaca I decided to go check out Ayia Napa for a while. What do I do in the city of decadence; the city of debauchery; the city of sin? I rent a bike, pack my bag full with beer and go exploring.

  
It may not be the yellow brick road of Oz, but it sure leads me somewhere strange. Hey, that cape out there looks interesting! I’ll go check it out.

What the hell happened to this path? Things got much worse before I found a decent road again.

 
The other side of the cape! I found this gorgeous beach with Caribbean-like water. Go me! I wonder just how far I’d biked.

  
This monastary in Ayia Napa was gorgeous! I’m not sure if I liked it better in the dark or in daylight. It looked pretty mysterous at night.

Time to go to the next city. Limassol (Lemessos) here I come! A lovely seaside place with a medieval fort, archaeological sites nearby, a few meh-like beaches, lots of shops and many many bars.

  
The fort was dead close to the old harbour, and the cafes nearby took full advantage of the fact. Cheesy, but nice suit of armour. I think I’m the only one ever interested in the old olive press reconstruction they’d set up next to the fort.

   
   
Outside of Limassol there are three interesting archaeological sites. First there’s a generic medieval fort (the first pic). Then comes a wonderful site filled with finds from different periods: an old amphitheatre (reconstructed above), a Roman agora, a Roman villa, a gladiator training house, old Christian structures and on and on. All right next to a marvellous seascape; my louse pics don’t do this place justice at all! Almost as an afterthought there’s also an old religious site nearby, where a cult dedicated to Apollon started hanging around. It was built on top of the site of an even older religious cult. Religion was thick in the air. But I’m not pondering theological questions in the pic on the lower right; the shadow shows me wondering just how these pillars were constructed. Why are there holes in the middle? Is it from the excavation? Is it some natural tendency of this stone? Was it deliberately done by the builders – did they use a center of a harder stone for stability? I have no idea.

I eventually got bored with this as well and went to Platres instead – a village up in the Troödos mountains. I felt like I needed a day away from alcohol, and wanted to stretch my legs.

Here’s the village in all its…pride. The Romanian woman working at the hotel was not very impressed with neither the place nor Cyprus; she advised me to go to Spain on my next vacation.

  
A lovely nature trail led me up to the Caledonian Falls. God damn, it was cold. I only wore a thin shirt since I wanted to spare my jacket for when the rain stopped; I figured I’d need something dry by then. After the waterfall I continued upward along one of the few roads available. Man, I don’t know if that’s mist or clouds. Long way down either way.

  
Eventually I found myself walking a misty mountain trail trailing trailingly off into the endless trails in the Troödos mountains. I thought I was taking a scenic route back to Platres, but oh no. Note the picture on the right. This is all the information present on these trails. Bloody Cypriots. By now it was raining hard, I had lost my wet shirt and only wore my now wet thin jacket, and I was laughing out loud at the ambiguous signs everywhere. “Yeah, you can go…this way! Or that way! What, you want to know what lies in what direction? Screw you! It’s all going in a loop anyway.” I was not laughing about an hour after this when I was tired and cold and it was getting dark and I had walked for I don’t know how many hours.

I’m actually extremely grateful for the helpful police; many people worked together to find me, and they told me how lucky I was that I had a mobile phone. I still think that I could have found my way to a road eventually, and that it would have led me somewhere. Eventually. But after they found me it was still half an hour’s brisk walk with flashlight to get to the very closest dirt road, so I shudder at thinking of how many more hours I could’ve walked around in the mountains, embraced by darkness and thick mist that didn’t let me see more than 20 meters ahead. Oh, and did I mention that I lost my passport up there as well, somehow? It’s a wonder that I got back to Sweden at all – the customs officers watched me veeeery suspiciously.

After this little adventure, I just spent the rest of the time in Larnaca.

   
Larnaca is pretty nice; beautiful buildings, weird tavernas, beaches and submarine trips. I really ought to have taken a trip in that sub! By the last day I realized that I’d forgotten to take the obligatory see-how-much-fun-I’m-having-on-my-vacation pics where I posed against things, so I took a sombre and pretentious pic of myself in the hotel room instead.

All in all, it was a wonderful trip! The weather was pretty nice for November, and lots of cool things happened. Yay! But I felt really sorry for some of the stray cats – there were cats everywhere!

Oh! And this must be the fattest, laziest pigeon I’ve ever seen. He couldn’t even be arsed to move away when I came closer. Beachlife is way too good for the birdies.

So, I’m no longer in London, but I still haven’t written something for a while. Time to rectify that! First, I’ll mention an interesting DDJ article concerning ACOs – Ant Colony Algorithms.

The main idea is to combine a greedy short-time search with an evenhanded one, and in combination these two will cancel out each others’ flaws. As an example, the article tests a simple algorithm on the Travelling Salesman Problem, and the results are pretty good: within 100 iterations, a close-to-optimal-as-far-as-we-know-it-solution is found! 100 iterations? Yes, the algorithm depends on using ant-like behaviour, and knowledge from the previous iteration is used in the next one. An ant selects a path based on distance and the amount of pheromones placed on the path by previous ants, and afterwards places an amount of pheromones inversely proportional to the distance of the traversed paths; the pheromones also evaporate with time. Apparently, all this creates a positive feedback loop without the risk of landing at a local maximum.

Somehow I get the feeling that I’ve heard of this algorithm before, but I really can’t put my finger on it. It might simply be the fact that it combines search strategies and machine learning ideas, all of which are commonplace and well-known. Or, it might be the fact that it’s derived from some routing algorithm I’ve read about. Or, it might be the fact that I’ve read about it in some AI book – the author of the article makes no claims to have been overly original. Either way, I get a sudden urge to see this in action – I want to implement a graphical representation of flock behaviour in combination with an ant colony algorithm that doesn’t work in iterations, but continuously instead!

…

Back to the topic of London. In my last update I had had a very haphazard view of the city: pubs, an office, the hotel bar, Trafalgar Square, and so on. I had been a busy little tourist, taking pictures of statues and architecture and arches and whatnot. This continued later that day, when we went to Westminster to watch Big Ben and the lovely lions in front of whatever-that-house-was, and strolled over to the Tower and the Tower Bridge. That’s when disaster struck: one single picture of the Tower caused my digital camera to cough and wheeze, complaining that the memory card was being naughty. All my photos were gone.

This is a serious shame, as London is one of the most beautiful cities I have seen. The streets tell tales of long ago; roads and streets twine in insane ways, showing that the city can’t really have been planned – it must have grown from the old London Town. Beside that, the city is riddled with architectural delights everywhere. I kid you not when I say that there’s something worth watching in every street of the inner city: a statue placed here; magnificent Neoclassicistic pillars there; wonderful churches all over the place. As I walked around, I recalled that Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of many dozens of London’s churches, but to my dismay I couldn’t tell for sure when I actually saw them. “Wren spires” was a term that flowed through my mind, but the only Wren church (well, cathedral) that I could recall with certainity was St Paul’s Cathedral – which certainly didn’t have a spire.

Anyway, after that final day of rest, things got a bit blurred. I was supposed to be in London for a few days, but it turned into 10 days or so. And these days were filled with work from morning to late evening, and then a frantic search for pubs. Thank you God for this liver of steel!

After my last blog entry I got recommended the Oxo Tower restaurant, but since things got so frantic we really didn’t have time to go looking for it. That’s a damn shame. Also, Dan Marshall of Gibbage fame and fortune kindly gave me a nice list of pubs that I ought to visit. (Which I of course forgot to reply to, lazy bastard that I am, so I’ll link to his site instead as a thank-you.) Again, since we were pretty swamped, we only ended up visiting a single one of those: The Pillars of Hercules on Greek Street. Very nice indeed! Still, I think our favourite pub was The Marlborough Head. It had a horror theme, and was located pretty close to our hotel.

Finally, I have to mention something awesome: London is a city of musicals, and I seriously would have killed myself if I hadn’t gone to a single one. I wanted to see Phantom of the Opera, but the tickets were rather pricey. Instead I found a great surprise: Avenue Q has a London show as well as a Broadway one! You know, the show where the Internet is for Porn song comes from. It may not be the highest form of culture, and the jokes may be a bit crude at times, but I seriously loved it. Make sure you watch it as well, given an opportunity!

I’m noting that a few people are actually reading this blog, so I might as well post a little update. Why haven’t I written something for several days now? Am I sick? Am I taking a short vacation? Have I run out of topics? Yes and no to all of the above, sort of.

I was going to have three weeks of vacation, but that ended up becoming three days instead. Hey, a rolling stone gathers no rest, right? Thursday I was sent off to London to sort out some network issues and be of service to our customers over here. However, said customers aren’t really prepared for us; we’re pretty much examining different locations and having a stop at pubs in between those. So, in a strange way I am having a vacation even though I’m working. And the aforementioned pubs is where sickness comes into the picture. Also, since we’re walking around London all the time, I don’t feel that I have the time nor the inclination for writing anything. Thus, I have temporarily run out of topics as well.

But to write something, here are a few things I’ve learned about London:

• Taxi is bloody expensive
• The underground is bloody expensive
• Food and drink is bloody expensive
• London is bloody expensive
• The extra cold Guinness is pretty good
• Trafalgar Square is not a nice place for those who worry about bird flu
• Regent Street and Oxford Street are quite long
• Neo-Classisistic architecture is everywhere
• Virgin Megastore has a nice price for the Nightmare on Elm Street DVD box
• I like wireless Internet access

Oh well, back to work!

What does one do a Saturday when the sun is shining and summer’s finally arrived in Sweden? Drink beer on the lawn? Party away at a festival? Start an Irish cover band? Stay indoors watching movies and slaving away at hobby applications or game projects? Well, those are all viable options but not true this particular Saturday. Instead, I tagged along with some friends to the KolmÃ¥rden Zoo!

I get childishly giddy at zoos. I love watching animals, and prior to this I hadn’t been to KolmÃ¥rden since I was a wee kiddo. Imagine my surprise when all animals were either
a) sleeping, or
b) hiding someplace, sleeping.
Click the images for larger versions. Sorry, but I don’t have zoom on my camera; you’ll have to do with barely decent pics.

Does this look like a pack of wolves to you? Okay, at least the waterfall’s rather gorgeous.

Can you see any snow leopards? In hindsight I can tell you that the lazy buggers are sleeping in the little shed at the back.

Have you ever seen such a stoned ram? Or whatever it is…

Bloody slackers! Sleeping on the job! To illustrate my point further, I put together a little collage.

I call this piece See What I Can Do with Cut ‘n Paste and Emboss. Here you can notice a slacky vulture, a bunch of slacky prairie dogs, a donkey that stood like that for 15 minutes without moving an inch – and other animals too lazy to even move about.

But okay. It wasn’t all dull and motionless animals. The dolphins rocked, and after a brief shower we did see some of the cool animals:

   
For the city-dwellers: what we see above is a pair of playful kitties, a large kitty, some teddies and…um. A comic book character with adamantium claws. Damn, I wish I hadn’t skipped my biology classes.

And we saw a very friendly antelope thingie as well.

“Hey, what’s that over there?”

“Maybe they have food?”

You ought to be happy that I didn’t go for a bad ant-elope joke…

“Give me food, or I’ll come up there and bite your legs off!” Well, frankly my deer, I don’t give a damn. (I bet you wish I had gone for the ant-elope joke instead, huh?)

All in all, that was a great visit to the zoo, even if I just got the briefest glimpse of a wolf.

Last week I attended Sweden Rock Festival - a place filled with excellent hard rock bands and drunken debauchery. Now, why should you care? That’s what I asked myself: “Sure I have a blog, but I can’t just fill it with incoherent ramblings about Deep Purple and Alice Cooper and other great bands; there has to be some substance as well or people will just get bored.”

That’s when it struck me: there was one topic that span throughout the entire festival; one topic that could bind everything together.

The power of steel, and the might of our ever-present Sword…of Doom! 

Just look at how happy I made everyone who got to pose with the Sword…of Doom!

Sorry, but I had to censor a few of the pics.

I know that I’ve probably screwed up the layout of this page with all these pics, but I hope you feel the power of the Sword…of Doom anyway. Unfortunately I can’t show all the wonderful pics of people posing with the Sword…of Doom; these are just pics of unknown people who can’t complain that I’m showing the world lousy pictures of them.

Oh, and since http://www.tshirthell.com/ is all out of the t-shirt below, I just had to make one myself. I rock like a big stone.

And pink is cool, dammit!