Chaos, confusion and me

This weekend I went out to visit my parents and siblings on the farm. My first encounter was with a nine week old Cocker Spaniel pup so I was off to a good start. It’s always great to come out to the farm and wind down with some country life and the company of animals. My version of country life is patting the dog and watching the wildlife through the window. My sisters version of country life is currently being an extremly busy midwife to 600+ ewes. So far just over 400 lambs have seen the light of day. I intend to go down and have a look at them as soon as I solved the constant problem of my family’s various ISPs, e-mail accounts and general computer problems.
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Life, Rant, Software | 2 Comments »

I finally got enough courage to update my Wordpress installation from 2.0.4 to 2.3.2 and although time consuming it worked almost out of the box. The pages didn’t render at all at first. After activating my plug-ins the pages rendered but included several messages begining with “Warning: preg_replace() [function.preg-replace]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 0 in …” The More Smilies plug-in is broken and there doesn’t seem to be a new version on the horizon. I deactivated the plug-in and all was back to normal. Woohoo!

If you should come across any other oddities please leave a comment and I’ll try to fix them.

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… often lead to unwanted experiences. Currently I have to take the Stockholm undergrounds blue line north out of Stockholm in order to get to my customer. This line forks of into two different directions a few stations before my station. As it is I should only take trains that go towards Akalla, never those that go to Hjulsta.

This morning as I came down to the platform the electrical sign said “Hjulsta 1 minute”. I said to myself: “This isn’t my train, let it go. It’s important to always verify that you get on right train. Make it a habit to always check the sign prior to boarding the train.” I found an abandoned newspaper and started reading it. A train came into the station. I steped aboard, sat down and proceeded to read my paper.
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Life | 1 Comment »

I boldly stole the concept from my friend Mika and his blog Mind Matters. The concept is to challenge one self into changing a bad habit or trying a new habit for a while.

As it is I don’t take particularly good care of myself. I eat too much, I exercise too little, I don’t sleep enough etc. Fairly common stuff as it is but now is the time to change that. This first 30-day trial is in two parts aiming to get me into bed earlier than usual.

Part 1: Not to watch any TV series or movies before 21:00 hours so I can get things done before that.

Part 2: Get ready for bed around 22:00 hours, lights out at 23:00 hours at the latest.

The trial started yesterday, Monday 21 January 2008, and will end on Wednesday 20 February. After one day I score 100% on part 1 but 0% on part 2.

Blog, Life | 3 Comments »

Well, there hasn’t been very much winter in Sweden this winter. Luckily for me my old job, or rather a bunch of enthusiast at my old job, planned our annual ski trip to the north and I hadn’t been spurned for changing my allegiance. This years trip went to Norway, specifically to Trysil where they had snow in abundance. Woohoo!
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Good thing I’m writing this today and not yesterday when I was out shopping, or at least trying to shop, or a lot of very very bad words would have been published on the Internet by yours truly.

I have previously tried to buy furniture for my kitchen at IKEA in Kungens Kurva but they where all sold out. Well, yesterday I made an other attempt. I actually checked on the web that they had things in store before going there. As it turns out everybody else in Stockholm had had the same idea. As it so happens there is a group on Facebook titled “I Secretly Want To Punch Slow Walking People In The Back Of The Head” and I’m a member. Imagine the torture of navigating through a overcrowded IKEA.
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Life, Rant | 3 Comments »

Since I have sold my bookcases, and most other furniture, in conjunction with this move from Linköping to Stockholm all my books live in cardboard boxes (as do most other things as well). This limits my access to the books some what at the moment. Add to this that the ride to work takes 10-15 minutes in a cramped subway making reading while traveling an unfeasible luxury. All this adds upp making it seem unlikely that I’ll finish this soon.

And instead of buying new shiny bookcases I have started oogling Science Fiction Bokhandeln (The Science Fiction Bookstore, a cheap, well stocked Swedish Sci-Fi & Fanstasy bookstore) again. Should I submit to this desire to replenish my selection of good fantasy books RAUBitB¹ will most definitely be delayed for a long, long while.

¹ The Read All Unread Books in the Bookcase project

Blog, Life, Litterature | No Comments »

Sometimes I am truly amazed by human stupidity, or rather lack of reasoning. Recently I sold some stuff on Tradera which is a Swedish branch of Ebay. Among the items sold where bookcases in various sizes. Today one of the buyers, or rather the buyers boyfriend, came by to pay for it and pick it up. The bookcase is a standard tall and wide IKEA Billy. It measures 202 cm in height, 80 cm in width and 28 cm in depth. And the guy had rented a compact car!?
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Life, Rant | 2 Comments »

It’ll be a gargantuan task to find the time but I must upgrade to a later version of Wordpress and Akismet. As it is my comments in moderation fill up in no time with useless spam. And I should probably do something about the theme as well. Oh well, …

And then there are those posts I want to write. The odd thing is when ever I get the urge to blog I don’t have a computer nearby or I’m busy working with/for a customer and it wouldn’t look too good if I started blogging. I wonder if it’s a pavlovian thing or just bad timing.

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What ever you do don’t let me near any of your critical systems. I break things just by being. In fact I don’t even need to be present as crash number 2 will show.

Crash 1: As I and my brother and some friends eat dinner the computer hick-ups and reboots. As I walk over I see that it is unable to boot, moaning about NTOSKernel.exe. I press a key on the keyboard and it reboots yet again never to awaken. No system disk is the next message shown to me. I cut power and the day after I remove the disk hook it up to my data retrieval kit which enables me to connect any ATA or SATA disk to a USB port and turn on the power. Swoosh, click, woosh, swoosh, click, woosh, … The disk spins up gives a loud click and spins down again [repeat ad inifitum]. No data retrival possible but luckily it’s still under warranty so I won’t have to buy a new disk. I request an RMA and eagerly await a mail reply.

Crash 2: Come monday morning I try to log into my webmail. No go. Checks the current status of the company hosting my mail; Hardware failure - work in progress. And guess what, a few hours later it’s says that they have had a disk failure and will be forced to restore a backup to another server. It’s now 24 hours later, my web is up but not my mail. Hope that RMA hasn’t gotten lost in the process.

Eagerly awaiting crash number 3. Where will it be? My laptop, my company’s servers, my customer’s servers, your computer (you shouldn’t have read this blog), ….?

Edit: My mail is back. Restored from a week old back up so I have no referens to mails from last week. There are no new mails with yesterdays date so I guess they got lost in the process.

Edit 2: And it is very obvious that no anti-spam software is running on the new server.

Blog, Hardware, Life | No Comments »