An outing

The gang were going down to the Air Force Museum in Linköping and I brought along the Nephew, so as to properly indoctrinate him. Well, clearly the Lego pit was much more interesting than old aircraft, but climbing in and out and in and out and in and out of the old Draken cockpit was fun too.

The rest of us were treated to a very detailed description of how to actually fly a mission in the Draken by a museum guard who turned out to be a former control and elint officer. In response to a tricky question he said: “I'll hand that over to a weapons technician.” and turned to another museum employee hovering nearby who then went into a deeper explanation of the properties of first-generation Sidewinder missiles. Museums seldom keep with knowledgeable staff, but this seems to be the rule at the Air Force Museum. Kudos!

The museum shop is also to be commended in that they are not afraid of procuring rare model kits in order to be able to have as many Swedish Air Force Aircraft as possible available for purchase.

(However, I was a bit annoyed that in spite of promises, the museum had not updated the sign that claimed the 57 mm cannon on the SAAB T-18B was the largest-calibre gun ever carried on an aircraft. In Sweden, to be sure, but not in the world, where at the time several 75 mm monsters were lugged around and in later days even 105 mm howitzers have been used onboard aircraft.)

Veckans ord: genrepar

Hjälten och hans sidekick, ett klassiskt genrepar.

Double feature

The Vasa museum and the Maritime museum had joint inaugurations of model exhibitions today:
The 1:10 Vasa model placed next to the original has gotten all its sculptures painted according to what has been found about the original colouring. It is quite surprising to see the ship that traditionally has been rendered in blue and gold as in fact having had a red background with sculptures coloured like candy with illegal additives.



At the Maritime museum Göran Forss's 1:50 model of the destroyer Halland has finally been finished after almost 40 years in making. Listening to people talking, I gathered a sizable part of the audience had done their military service on board at some time or other and were very pleased to see the detailed model.

Counting my blessings

The setting sun is shining in through the French windows of my sitting room, the pair of tits that live in the crack in the wall by the window take breaks on the railing outside it, beaks full of…whatever, before they squeeze themselves through the crack. My dinner noodles were particularly tasty (mental note: stick to that brand) and I'm feeling quite pleased with life.

I got a glowing performance review at work (Improvement goal: to always remember to say “Best regards” in email to customers), successfully chased up a persistent bug and when I got home I found present packets in the mail from friends: exotic teas and Clas Svahn's brand new book Stora boken om naturfenomen featuring photography by me (and some hundreds of other people :-). And the latest Scientific American.

Every now and then, life is good.

Shameless speculation

There's a new “lifestyle” magazine out. It's about travel to faraway countries, expensive cars, fancy clothes and whatever other luxury items you can imagine (or not). But, since they tack on the wordlet eco every few sentences it means they are “environmentally conscious without boring pointers”. I think I should bring my own boring pointer and give the editor a good hiding! How can encouraging luxury consumption ever be environmentally responsible!? But of course, it's all about appealing to a customer base that feels vaguely uneasy about this climate thing and thinks they should probably do something, as long as it does not mean sacrificing anything.

I'm not faultless, but at least I feel guilty about it…

With this in our past, where is our future?

The Only-Begotten Daughter's theatre class gave a play again: Animal Farm.
They might have benefitted from a few more rehearsals, but overall they acquitted themselves well, with sterling performances by “Boxer” and “Benjamin”.
Watching the animals starve and rebuild their windmill again and again I wondered what lies ahead for these bright kids, if they can look forward to a reasonably privileged life or if they will have to struggle for their lives through upheaval and famine—certainly even Sweden was a much harsher place to live just a hundred years ago. Hasse Alfredsson has expressed it so much better than I.

This is what flying was meant to be like!

“Fusion Man” Yves Rossy straps on his jetpowered wings, steps out of an aircraft and flies off.

A very good video is made available by The Guardian.

I want this so bad!

Veckans ord: orkidé

Jag har känt mig lite trött och orkeslös. Det beror säkert på att jag motionerar för lite. Jag ska ta fram cykeln ur källaren och trampa runt, det verkar som en utmärkt orkidé.

Quarneval

I proclaim today to be the first day of summer: almost 300 K, few scattered cumulus clouds and Quarneval! As usual I sat on the wall outside Stockholm City Library and dangled my feet above Sveavägen. There will be better quality images on the Quarneval website, but here are some of my own snaps:

The Quarneval princess, with bodyguards.

The Pipes and Drums of the First Royal Engineers.

Not quite as disciplined: Osquar Mutter.

From the School of Computer Science and Engineering: Mother Fokker with Baby Fokker. (Uncle Fokker is tailing behind, out of view.) Note the guy carrying the tailplane that apparently fell off at an early stage.

Sushi con Quarne with Japanese whale hunters.

Love Hero.

Gislaved Drum & Drill Corps. A quite unique sound with lots of cow bell.

Sometimes you just have to split up.

Last in the parade as always: Mosquito, followed by dancing, swaying, walking Stockholmers.

A most unusual perspective: walking in the middle of Sveavägen. It's really very beautiful this way.

Veckans ord: markanden

Blott de tama fåglarna har en längtan, de vilda flyger.

Och på backen sitter markanden och styr.

Go shop!

This afternoon I was invited to a sneak preview of the new Fair Trade Shop on Tegnérgatan 8 that will open on Saturday. Now, those of you who are familiar with this part of town will recognise this as the house of the Mission Covenant Church of Sweden and indeed the shop turns out to share premises with Gummessons bookstore and all of the staff seemed to have ties to the church. To my disbelief(!) there was even a speech made by a mission pastor who then prayed over us and surprisingly many in the audience bowed their heads. I didn't quite expect such things to happen in Sweden, but then again, I live a sheltered life.

Still, the shop has nice stuff, in particular Fair Trade clothes, which have been difficult to get hold of in Stockholm, so I'll just sigh deeply and shop there anyway.

Tea, toast, and typesetting

A quiet evening at home.

Squarely in the uncanny zone

While a technological masterpiece, I find the Boston Dynamics Big Dog rather creepy.



It seems the developers Pantless Knights also have noted the weird feeling the opposing legs give and made an alternate version of the video.

Planing out

Veckans ord: farhinder

Gatukontoret lägger gupp i vägen. Cyklar man för fort över dem kan man råka mosa kronjuvelerna, då har guppen blivit farhinder.

Better than Ubuntu cola

I'm really more of a Lisp hacker than Linux user anyway.

Maligned mathematics

Statistics is for me the archetype of science, to work with incomplete data and decide what conclusions we are justified to draw from them. Doing statistics properly is non-trivial, requiring both knowledge and skill, but misused statistics are all too common. Accordingly many tend to treat statistics as if they were just an issue of making up arguments for pre-determined conclusions.

Red Top once quipped:

Statistics is the science that says that if a person has one foot in the freezer and the other on a hob, he will on average be fairly comfortable.

Now this is an example of misusing statistics. Consider: If the example refers to temperature, a freezer would have a temperature of approx 250 K, a hob plate up to approx 600 K. Averaging the two temperatures would give 425 K, tissue-damagingly hot, so the conclusion is false.
(We do not know the heat content of the freezer and hob, respectively, but we can assume that if they are plugged in, the heat-conduction of the feet can be ignored.)

So, is the example to be taken as averaging “too cold” and “too hot”? Since these are (fuzzy) categories, they can't be averaged, so the conclusion is meaningless.

More meaningful for our wide-legged test person would perhaps be measurements of comfort level. The validity and repeatability of these measures can be questioned, but in principle we can get numeric values to work with, so-and-so much for one foot and such-and-such for the other. However, as both are on the “discomfort” side of the scale (per the problem statement), thus averaging out to discomfort, the conclusion is false again.

Remember kids: Always do your stats carefully and do not assume that you can use tests for normal distributed data on any data.

Veckans ord: fisklåda

Jag har en massa födoämnesallergier—äter jag fisklåda så får jag det.

Getting high on the West Coast

Late in the evening this past Monday I arrived in Gothenburg, just as jubilant and not-so-jubilant fans were moving towards the station from Ullevi football stadium. AIK had lost. Darn! I also saw the tram I should have been on pull away from the tram stop, fifteen minutes to the next. I spent those studying a, presumably, inebriated harmonica player courting a girl, who took this in good humour. I also found that Gothenburg too has introduced SMS tickets for public transport. Very convenient. I will have to run a test soon and see if I can get through a month without any cash at all. The tram trundled noisily through the slightly chilly night city and we soon ended up at my target traffic nexus. Hotel Gothia Towers was not difficult to locate, the twin towers rising high above me. Check-in was smooth in spite of a new and inventive misspelling of my name and soon I found myself on the 19th floor, looking out over famous Gothenburg landmarks. After having admired the skyline for a while I went to sleep.

Breakfast was served in a restaurant with a little bit too much of canteen feeling for my tastes, but nothing wrong with the buffet. Sponge cake for breakfast, yum! Then I set off for the conference I had been invited to. It turned out to be be very well-organised with lots of demos, presentations in parallel sessions and I chatted with people I hadn't seen for too long. I realised I have missed going to scientific conferences. I enjoyed myself greatly.

The social event in the evening took place at Peacock Dinner Club. I walked there with some colleagues and reflected that Stockholm is much more cramped than Gothenburg where the avenues are wide and bordered by wide pavements with proper bicycle paths and often even little lawns in front of the houses. It makes for a very pedestrian-friendly city. The dinner club turned out to be a very classy joint—when I asked for guanabana juice the bartender didn't bat an eye, just reached out for a bottle and poured me a glass, just like that. They didn't have banana juice, but they offered lychee instead, which was OK by me. However, I couldn't stay too long, as I had a presentation to prepare, so eventually I went back to my room and worked till late with the view to inspire me.

My presentation went over quite well, with a Q&A session lasting almost half an hour. Some of the questions I thought were rather tenuously connected to what I had spoken about, but that just let me take a “wider perspective” in my response, i e blab on. During the coffee break, a man came up and asked: “So what was your presentation about? This technical English is really hard to follow.” Ungh! I squirmed inwards but politely gave a condensed version in Swedish. For a moment I was confused by the statement that technical English was difficult to follow—I can make do in several languages as long as the discourse is constrained to technical matters, but then I realised that that is true as long as you remain within a familiar area of technology, where the terminology is shared and known. Nevertheless, I was still a bit disappointed that I hadn't managed to get my point across, I certainly don't consciously attempt to be abstruse and I'm always upset when I've failed to explain the work which is so dear to me.

In the afternoon I decided to skip the last workshop session and instead went walking in springy Gothenburg—the sun was shining, the Emilias were pretty, and the pollen count was high. My eyes and nose ran like fountains and I sought shelter in the railway station.

On the train back I found I had no WLAN in my car. The conductor did not quite understand what the problem was, but was eager to help and let me change seat to another car where I soon was connected again. It has happened to me before that car 6 (the end car) has bad (non-existent) WLAN coverage, maybe I should take that up with the SJ network people.

Instant psychedelia

Among the OS X widgets is a language translator from Systran. The quality of translation varies quite a bit among the available languages and for some reason Italian seems to have a subpar translation engine. To amuse myself I fed in the lyrics for Irene Grandi's Bruci la città and translated into English. The result was not quite “A whiter shade of pale”, but still fairly surrealistic. Note also the out-and-out bug that occasionally inserts full stops between words:

Caterpillars the city
and landslides the skyscraper
you alone remain
knot on my bed.

Caterpillars the city
or lives in the terror
nel.giro.di two hours
vanishes all how much
svanica all the rest.

And all those boys as you
they do not have nothing as you
I cannot that to admire
I cannot not scream
that I tighten to you on my heart
for protegerti from the evil
that I would want to be able to rock
your pain your pain.

It dies more under a tram
or less all the world explodes
stars explodes all this.
It dies what
it is other from we
at least two for little
at least for error.

And all those boys
as you they do not have nothing
as you I would want
give to make to me
to perhaps be better
make shield you
with my heart from catastrophes and fears
I do not have
nothing to make
this I am
what I know to make
I cannot that to adore
I cannot that to leccare
this your deep love
this your deep one
I cannot that to adore
this your deep one.

Falling asleep

Earlier this week as I went to bed, it broke beneath me. In the morning I examined the bed a bit closer and was surprised at the common-sense-defying design. The mattress, a Sultan Sturefors has a series of boards underneath, supporting the springs. These boards are simply attached with two large staples at each end. The staples have nothing in the way of barbs, grooves, or anything, they are just smooth strips of metal, parallel with the forces when someone lies in the bed. Clearly it is just a question of time before they work themselves out of the wood, and the time was now.

I requisitioned transport and brought the mattress back to IKEA, where a person in the complaints department stared at it incredulously and really didn't seem to take to heart my proposition that this was an accident just waiting to happen. There was however no question that I wouldn't get credited the price, so I went back in to retrieve instead a Sultan Storfors, which has a more sensible construction with the boards resting on a frame and thus unlikely to just drop out the bottom.

I will now proceed to test the new mattress.

Veckans ord: tentakel

Tentavakterna på KTH tenderade att vara pensionärer som, med få undantag, övervakade salarna med örnblick. Men även om de för ett ögonblick hade tittat bort så inte hade man haft tid med nåt tentakel med Osqulda där man skrev med svetten lackande.

Veckans ord: slumpartikel

När jag bodde i USA en period reflekterade jag över att amerikanska hus syntes finnas i två varianter: sprillans nybyggda och väldigt nedgångna. Min hypotes är att berggrunden där strålar ut slumpartiklar som nöter ned husen.

Shake the box, rattle and roll

We laughed a bit when the favourite hobby store got model kits of pop bands and instruments, but appparently they're more clever than you'd expect:


H/t Sten Sundelin.

Veckans ord: obligatorisk

Ett obligato är ett avsnitt i ett musikstycke som kompositören markerat inte får utelämnas vid omarrangemang eller improvisationer. Man misstänker att ju högre kompositörens tankar om sin egen förträfflighet, desto större obligatorisk.

Communicado again

It seems I can send and receive email again, touch wood, inshallah and all that. I've felt like Joe Bonham the last few days.

A bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes

Yesterday morning I found my email didn't work. I wasn't terribly surprised, it was fairly obvious that Comhem had screwed up the transfers of accounts due to my recent move, and I even had a fairly good guess about what the precise problem was.

So I call customer support. “Right now many are calling us, call back later.” Lather, rinse, repeat.

Eventually I get “You are placed in queue. You are now … number 43. For speeding up processing, please enter your customer number and press #.” I enter my customer number and press #. Then I fiddle with stuff for fifteen minutes while the queue is processed.

Finally a human voice responds. I explain my problem and what I want done about it. “Uhm, err, OK. What's your customer number?” The one I just entered for you, so processing could be speeded up by you not having to ask for it? I give my customer number. Possibly I do this through gritted teeth, because I have to repeat it a couple of times before it gets across properly.

Of course the person I speak to is unable to solve my problem but has to escalate it to someone who actually knows how to operate a computer, but they'll call back! “Do you have a number we can reach you at?” Yes, and it's in my customer records that would be in front of you if you hadn't been abandoned by your management and forced to use quill and papyrus as working tools. I give my number, with the mandatory repetitions.

Of course I do not receive a tracking number for my case, so now when I still have not been called back and still don't have working email, I'll have to explain it all from the beginning for the next customer support droid who will have no idea of any previous call from me…

Veckans ord: höjdarbeten

Allehanda spionorganisationer har med varierande framgång använt sig av vackra kvinnor som höjdarbeten i hopp om att locka eller pressa hemligheter ur höjdarna. Ibland har det gått alldeles väldigt bra, som för Betty Pack, som lär ska ha skrämt franska ambassadens säkerhetsvakt på flykten genom att sexa på golvet med dennes överordnade och när kusten var klar lagt beslag på flottans chifferböcker.

For Bev

If he wasn't such an awful player, they would still be recording

Stop-motion photography recreates computer games using human pixels



Space Invaders
Pong
Pole Position

In the top 4%

They don't do them like that anymore

When I was a kid, ”Mamma är lik sin mamma”, sung by Siw Malmkvist, was a big hit in Sweden and the Finnish version, ”Äiti kuin äidinäiti”, sung by Katri Helena, in Finland. The song is a bitter complaint about how women cannot look forward to anything but drudgery in the home. Certainly my mother used to hum it quite often at the time.

Recently I had reason to quote from the song and decided to research its origins a bit. (Oh, Google, how seductive thou art!) To my surprise I found that the Swedish lyrics had been written by Stikkan Anderson, not necessarily the first name that comes to mind as a feminist advocate, but perhaps unfairly so. However, the music was not by Stikkan and a bit more searching revealed that it originally had been a hit in Australia, sung by a young heart throb by name of John Farnham and with the title “Sadie, the cleaning lady”, with approximately the same sentiments as in the Nordic versions, though restricted to a single woman, the eponymous Sadie. I note that even though the Finnish lyrics are a fairly straight-forward translation of Anderson's Swedish version, a reference to ”saamaton haisunäätä”—no-good stinker—hints that lyricist Lasse Liemola knew the English original lyrics.

Then of course, it is available at YouTube and my goodness! they don't do choreography like that any more…

Veckans ord: riskexponering

När jag nu flyttat så hittar jag inte riktigt i den nya matbutiken, så hur skulle jag få tag på de riskex som jag uppskattar så? Ponera att de sorteras som knäckebröd, då borde de finnas i den hyllan. Min riskexponering visade sig vara fullt korrekt och jag hittade mina kex.

Använd rakblad istället!

Veckans ord: paradontologi

Ett ämne som är sorgligt försummat på Försvarshögskolan är paradontologi. Finns parader, och i så fall varför? Vaktavlösningen vid kungliga slottet gör sitt bästa men når inte riktigt upp till de mest sublima höjderna av militär fjollighet.



Tack till Martin R för uppslaget.

Telepresent flying

A head-mounted display, a swivelling video camera and a radio-controlled aircraft—fly away with both feet firmly on the ground.

Video

It must be all the fish they eat

Mafalda once noted that you hardly ever hear about Norway in world news as dried fish isn't as newsworthy as wars. Now the Global Peace Index has shown that, indeed, Norway is the most peaceful country on Earth. (And Iraq is the least peaceful, surprise, surprise.)

Well, having strolled around in Oslo, even late at night, I can well believe that and certainly the Norwegians deserve the distinction, but I can't help but think a bit more about how the measurement has been made. It is scientific in the sense that the scoring is presented and the motivations for the choices of parameters given. The authors note that there is a certain level of arbitrariness in assigning scores.

I'd like to pick on a few of these arbitrarities.

Neither the Vatican, San Marino, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Monaco nor Andorra have been included, nor are Niau, Tuvalu, Cocos Islands or Surinam. Maybe they were considered to be too small to count, but if so, that does say something about reasons for peacefulness. (And Afghanistan, Belarus, and Eritrea have not been included either.)

Much of the ranking depends on the nations' scores on various 5-level scales. Having a discretised scale introduces various quantification errors. Ideally I should now have done a perturbation analysis to see if changing a score by a single unit would change the ordering between, say, Norway and New Zealand (the current number two on the peacefulness list), but I have not been able to find the exact weighting formula that has been used. (Possibly it is given somewhere on the site, but not sufficiently obviously to me.) The methodology section indicates that various numbers have been “banded” into these discretised scores. It's not obvious why one would want to do that, as retaining continuous data would give higher data quality, in that we would not be throwing information away. Furthermore, if any of these variables are assessments, rather than quantised continuous data, then we are abusing the numbers.

To wit: Using the numbers, say, 1–5 to grade something introduces an ordinal scale: we can say that “1” is better than “2”, but we cannot really tell if the difference between “1” and “2” is equal to the difference between “3” and “4”. That's why computing grade point averages really is bogus, it's not a well-defined operation. For that you would need at least an interval scale, where we are guaranteed the each step is the same size as any other step.

So the moral is: if Flight of the Conchords are more peaceful than KLM then you may not have been qualified for university.

Rude, sexist and sophomoric, what more could you ask for?

The British medical duo Amateur Transplants play and sing, mostly on key, the most hilarious lyrics to well-known tunes. If you don't want to shell out for their CD or DVD, many of their numbers are up on YouTube:
You're a pædophile
Lion King
Titanic
Drugs

(There's more…)

H/t Of Two Minds

Actually, I think we will end up in the future regardless of what I do

You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future. Scientific Atheist 100% Spiritual Atheist 75% Apathetic Atheist 67% Militant Atheist 50% Agnostic 50% Angry Atheist 42% Theist 17% What kind of atheist are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Outside eyes

It is an interesting phenomenon that while Martin R and I both blog in English, we seem to be at heart Swedish patriots, convinced that only in Sweden are things as they ought to be—or at least that Swedes know how things ought to be, even if we have not gotten around to fixing everything just right yet.

So, it is good to be reminded every now and then, that others see Sweden, that is, the world, somewhat differently. Probably the readers of this blog already read Paddy K, so today I wanted to highlight How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons. (And what is it with these Americans that never get around to learning Swedish properly, hmm?)

Speculative fiction

The term “speculative fiction” was introduced some time in the 1960s by younger authors that considered “science fiction” to be too restrictive. Fair enough, the genre is certainly fuzzy enough around the edges. However, it never really caught on; possibly it sounded a bit too academically precise. A web magazine that still carries the banner of speculative fiction is Strange Horizons. Fiction, to be sure, but also columns, analyses, art and poetry and with sometimes rather oblique connections to speculative fiction per se, i e it is rather eclectic. So am I, so I certainly don't mind. Go read!

Veckans ord: kooperation

Här är en grupp veterinärer som utför en kooperation.

Traffic sign spotting

The good news are that no matter what your hobby, there will always be someone with an even pottier obsession. Today we'll have a look at the people who collect, categorise and analyse traffic signs. Did you know that the number of stones on “Beware of falling rocks” signs varies from 2 to 45 depending on the country of origin?

Hat tip to Haba.

Dioder!

Squeee! I'm a hoppity-happy IKEA customer! I found Dioder LED strips—four 250 mm segments with nine white LEDs in each, with the included connectors they can be connected in series or in parallel, straight or at various angles, screwed or glued to any flat surface. They seem to be a bit of an experiment, you have to ask a shop assistant to bring them out from their secret store. (And they are a bit expensive at 400 SEK. On the other hand I suspect they will never burn out.)

The Only-begotten Son and I played around with them in various configurations but finally ended up with a quite straight-forward linear strip in the ceiling lighting up the bookcases. Wooh, they are so cool!

Not to say biolo-chic

Good show

So I went to the hominid exhibition and on the whole I was quite pleased with it. I was a bit annoyed by all the early hominids being depicted with half-open mouths—it made them look like halfwits (and maybe that was the intention, but still) but they were all nicely done. (The Neandertal woman looked very sweet, reminding me of a friend of mine. :-) The people who had done these reconstructions are obviously very skilled (as a modeller I can attest that making life-like humans is non-trivial) and frankly, the locally produced reconstructions of other animals, such as the Diatryma, rather paled in comparison.

But, what really pleased me was that the texts surrounding the exhibits were very clear and managed to present a lot of information in a very compact space on what had driven the evolution of the different species of hominids and really present the branching bush with multiple, co-existing species. Furthermore, noise-producing exhibits were kept down to a minimum, which however didn't make so much of a difference as it seemed every toddler parent in Stockholm had brought along their kids for me to stumble over. (I've lost my reflexes as my own kids these days are taller than me.) Most kids seemed very happy and excited by all these strange-looking people that now were dead. (“Why did they die, Mommy?” “I don't know, maybe they got sick or something.” This is of course true for the individuals, if not for the species as such, one had better keep track of what is meant—these reconstructions being both based on individuals, but also being representatives of all their contemporaries.)

Veckans ord: ströget

Uppe i Klippiga Bergen är det ensligt, man ser bara en och annan ströget.

V is for Victory

This probably only makes sense in full resolution, click the picture.

Better this way?

I have upgraded to a fancy new Layouts-based template. Some things seem to have not transitioned exactly the same. Is it an improvement, or should I tinker a bit more with the details?

I did exactly this as late as yesterday

I'm still sticking to Dr Pepper

This would be the perfect drink for Linux people, unfortunately I don't like the taste.

Think of little Gandalf soiling his diapers

The kids were discussing unsuitable names.

“It should be possible to give a child a name that doesn't become visible until they're thirty or so.”

Excursion to see stuffed people

Next Saturday, 2008-03-01, I intend to go visit the National Museum of Natural History and see their exhibition of reconstructed hominids. Anyone else prehistorically interested is invited to tag along. I will be hanging around the entrance around 11:00. I'm the guy with the embarrassingly shaped crocheted red hat.

Getting screwed by a Woody,or,The single man and his tool

Late Friday evening I unpacked the last moving box. There is still work to be done, but gradually the flat turns from a construction site into a home. This hasn't been an entirely straight-forward process. Some highlights for your delectation:

Getting unhooked
The previous tenant was apparently a man with a deep need for beauty, the flat had been filled with decorative art and the ceilings bristled with hooks for hanging lamps, flower pots, stuffed animals and whatnot. My tastes are somewhat more austere, so these would have to go, with the concomitant spackling and repainting. In passing I note that every screw and hook used is a different dimension from all the others. This annoys my sense of orderliness, so I spend a lot of time at John Wall to buy matching screws.

The mauve-coloured bathroom is in urgent need of renovation, but after having gotten an offer from a contractor I realise I will have to save for a while before I can afford it.

Victorinox rules
My Swiss army knife turns out to be surprisingly useful for many tasks in flat renovation as well. For slashing down structure wallpaper it's just fabulous. Some of the uses it gets put to even bend the blades, but they eventually unbend.

Not burned, yet
Before repainting the ceiling I remove the smoke detector—it actually drops into my hand as I tug on it, it was not very well attached to the ceiling. My forensic eyes note additional marks in the ceiling indicating that it has already been reattached twice before. Just out of reflex I press the “Test” button. No reaction. Oh, has the battery run flat without anyone noticing? I check. No, the problem is that the battery is still in its transport wrapping, some six years after the indicated production date. Somebody has apparently dutifully just mounted the detector without ever activating it. (Or perhaps worse: purposefully never activated it because it might make a noise.) Well, I plug it in and now testing makes the desired screech.

Sanding the floor
I decided the living room parquet needed sanding. I called a couple of companies and then decided I could probably save a bit of money doing it by myself. So, soon I stand there, with a big floor sander, prepared to attack the floor. The first round over the floor is a disaster and I think: “Damn, this is difficult, I should have gotten a pro to do this!” But then I suddenly realise how all the levers are supposed to be operated, the machine starts to behave much better and I glide along thinking: “Wow, this is easy, good idea to do it myself!” By the tenth or so round over the floor I'm thinking: “Damn, this is boring, I should have gotten a pro to do this!”

After sanding and cleaning it's time to lacquer the parquet. I have purchased a huge can of horribly expensive lacquer at Woody. I spread the required two layers of lacquer and note I still have half the can left. So, the git of a shop assistant was not aware that the recommended amount per m² already assumed two layers and made me buy twice as much as needed. Argh!

If anyone needs five litres of parquet lacquer they can get it from me for cheap.

Mein goye mame
My mother is overjoyed that I've left that horrible woman that stole her darling boy away (“Moom!”) and takes enthusiastic part in the renovation work. In particular she and a couple of her friends spend two days putting in a new wood laminate floor over all linoleum floors. (Or “linonium” as it was consistently spelled in the prospect.) Thanks ever so much, Mom, but keep that tongue sheathed.

The drill
The walls in the flat are two kinds: drywall and concrete. My two least favourite wall materials, they both suck each in their way as soon as you want to attach anything to the wall. At one point, while drilling in concrete, I hit something hard. The drill is strong enough that the bit actually unwound.

Shopping
If IKEA makes a record profit this year, I may be to blame. But then again, they're both cheap and good. When putting up my bed I decide to reuse a set of legs I have lying around. Unfortunately the screws have gone missing, so I call IKEA and ask for the screw dimensions. 5/16", what, inch screws!? (Which of course becomes ”tumskruvar” in Swedish, very funny.) These are not usually carried by hardware stores, but I locate a store on Kammakargatan that has them. 71 SEK for four screws! Checking the IKEA catalogue I find I could have gotten screws and new legs for 69… Well, at least I saved on not having to go out to Kungens Kurva right then.

All hail mein Kamprad! I go on a shopping spree and buy bookshelves, beds and various bits and pieces. I find that home delivery of an arbitrary amount of stuff is less than 500 SEK.

The unreading classes
The Ivar bookcases just look like lumber when unconstructed (and smell good of fresh wood). The delivery guy, having hauled them into the lift looks curiously at them:
“What are these?”
“Bookshelves.”
“What are they for?”
“Uh, books.”
[pause] “So many..?”

Yup, so many. But as I start putting the shelves up I find Ivar is a monster—it swallows row after row of books without even blinking. Finally I have put up all my books in just four cases with room to spare. I have to double-check, yup, 20 shelf metres goes into four Ivar, no problem. Apparently I will have plenty of storage space available.

Networking
As usual, I have problems with Comhem, so currently I have no Internet connection of my own but instead sneak out through a neighbour's unprotected wireless network. Thanks and apologies, whoever you are! On the other hand reception is a bit flaky most of the time.

Out in the woods
Having moved out to the suburbs I have ended up in an area where ethnic diversity means more than just speaking a non-Stockholm dialect. I feel my street cred increasing greatly. Still, I'm really just a paleskin inner city middle class yuppie who is a bit shocked to notice that about half of the tube passengers pass the gates not with an SL card, but using a well-trained leg swing to make the gate open the other way and then squeeze through.

I aten't dead

Renovating the flat currently takes all my time outside work, but have patience, in a week or so I should be back blogging again.

Getting moved, being moved

My moving house is proceeding apace. Today, with the help of half a dozen burly friends and a rented lorry my things were moved to the new flat. In the end, the collected stuff of twenty years weren't all that much, the boxes barely covering the floor of the lorry, lifting it down from the flat taking barely half an hour. It was with fairly mixed feelings I looked at the pile of cardboard boxes. Or would have, if I'd had the time to think very much during the actual move; this is more retrospective emotion.

Hauling the stuff into the new flat was also quite quickly done and then I was subjected to a torrent of good advice on how to renovate the flat and what ludicrous objects that the prior owner had left behind would absolutely, no excuses, have to go. And I listened, yet again amazed at how many friends will come to my help when I need it, fearfully standing at the edge of the diving-board, looking into the abyss.

Tomorrow I'll continue spackling walls, then cover up the floor and start painting.

Veckans ord: friskola

Ola joggar och håller sig i trim, han är en riktig friskola.

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