Monthly Archives: June 2010
A day of sorrow in Hultsfred
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Posted on Wednesday June 30 2010, 8:02 pm in Yada Yada | Tags: , | Archive

Yesterday was a day of great sorrow in my home town and today isn’t much better. The Hultsfred festival that’s been arranged here for twenty-four years has been cancelled due to not enough tickets being sold this year. Three years ago this was the biggest rock festival in Sweden with more than 30 000 tickets sold but after two years of only around 20 000 tickets sold and this years only 5000 they cancel the festival. After loosing money for two years they found it impossible to arrange a festival that would mean loss of money for the third year in a row and yesterday declared their bankruptcy.

An era of music, fun and party in Hultsfred has come to a end. This is sad for everyone who visited the festival but especially for us who live here. Hultsfred is a small town with only 5000 inhabitants and the festival was pretty much the only thing going on here. This is what Hultsfred is known for. This was what was good about living in this town. This was the thing you looked forward to every year. But no more.

There’s a Facebook group called “Vi som åker till Hultsfred ändå!” (We who are going to Hultsfred anyway!) though. It’s a group for people who are planning to come here to camp and party anyway, even though there’s no festival. I’m obviously a member of the group and I’m looking forward to participating in some kind of party during this weekend and next week. Like I said, no festival is especially sad for us who live here so it’s wonderful that people are still coming here. It would have been horrible with a week of absolutely nothing going on when there was supposed to have been a big festival taking place. Of course this will be nothing like what the festival would have been but at least it’s something. A last hurrah.

To those who made the festival possible: Thank you for the five wonderful years of festival fun I was lucky to be a part of. I will miss it a lot.

Just read the damn subtitles
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Posted on Wednesday June 30 2010, 3:17 am in Yada Yada | Tags: , , , | Archive

On the IMBD forums I’ve seen a lot of people in favour or American re-makes because they think they’re easier to follow than subtitled movies in the original for them foreign language. There’s also many countries (Most of central and southern Europe) that dub just about everything in another language than their native one. For me as a Swede I have a hard time understanding what they find so difficult about subtitles. Sure in some less developed countries where a large percentage of the population can’t read it’s one thing but when Americans prefer re-makes and French and Germans dubbed movies it’s just silly. Personally my reading skills were good enough to follow subtitles when I was seven and it’s been working well for me ever since.

I think it’s especially silly when people (Americans, it’s always Americans) complain about how it’s hard to follow a movie in a language they don’t understand with subtitles they do understand. Personally I think it’s harder to follow a movie in a language you do understand with subtitles in another language you also understand.

The things is no matter how good the subtitles are not everything can be accurately translated. Take humorous puns like this for example: “What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing – but it let out a little whine”. Translated to Swedish the words “whine” and “wine” have no similarity to each other which means that directly translated the joke no longer makes sense. The usual solution to this is replacing the joke with a similar one. It works but when you understand the spoken English and get the joke it’s a bit annoying reading a completely different joke in the Swedish subtitles. That is what you could call hard to follow. Hearing one thing in one language and reading another in another language. Yet here in Sweden where almost everyone understand English we don’t complain because we’re used to this.

What do I want to say with this? That people who think subtitles makes movies hard to follow should think about how we do it in Sweden and how we manage well despite the fact that most of us understand both the spoken language and the subtitled one. Dubbing makes movies look weird and re-makes… well isn’t that just extremely unnecessary? Just read the damn subtitles.

My box of memories
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Posted on Saturday June 26 2010, 4:47 am in Photos | | Archive

I have something that I call my box of memories. It used to be one box but now it’s actually two. These boxes mostly contains knicknack most people would throw away. Those small things we come by, are given or find which we don’t pay much attention to. I’ve made a thing out of saving small things like that because they’re also memories with stories behind.

These are my boxes which of course like everything in them have their own stories. One used to be my mothers and the other I got as a present. Both are from my childhood.
box of memories

Here’s a photo of all the stuff in the boxes. Papers, photos, things given to me, things made by me, things I’ve won, tickets from places I’ve been and events I’ve gone to. Just a lot of random stuff.
content of box of memories

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Internet and computers during my teenage years
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Posted on Wednesday June 23 2010, 2:06 am in Computers & Internet | Tags: , | Archive

The first time I ever used the internet was at a computer class back in the fall of 1996. This was when it was starting to reach the mainstream and it was all very fascinating. Not that I did anything interesting with this new technology though. The teacher for computer class was really a home and consumer science (I think that’s what the subject is called, it’s the class where you mainly cook) teacher who knew nothing about computers. She taught us how to create a Hotmail, search for things on Altavista and how to use chat rooms. That meant that computer class mostly was spent chatting with random guys in the Aftonbladet.se chat. Chat rooms were very different back then. Now I’d never set my virtual foot in the Aftonbladet chat because for the past ten years or so it’s mainly been a place where people hook up for cyber sex. It wasn’t like that in 1996 though. During all those hours I spent there as a kid I never saw anything inappropriate. Weird to think of isn’t it?

For two years I only used the internet in school but then in the fall of 1998 this new technology finally made it to my home. My dad bought a new computer (A modern one with Windows 1998, WHOA!) and connected it to the internet. Oh the arguments we had over this wonderful thing. Because back then we used a 56K dial up phone modem which made surfing a lot rather expensive. I ended up being allowed to use the internet one hour a day but of course I broke that rule frequently. Problem was connecting to the internet without anyone noticing was rather tricky back then. First of all while online the phone didn’t work, a rather obvious giveaway that something wasn’t right. Then there was the noise… You must remember the god awful noise those old modems made while connecting. With that sound ringing through the house the only time breaking the one hour a day rule was possible was when my parents weren’t at home or while they were sleeping. Of course my dad figured out that I did just that so he started removing the wire to the modem and hid it. I remember one time when my family was away for the night and I was looking forward to surfing for hours, only to discover that the wire to the modem was nowhere to be seen! The disappointment! Of course the times I did manage to break the one hour rule it was always discovered in the end anyway, because of a ever higher phone bill.

When we got a faster and cheaper internet (yay broadband) there was another problem. We still had a computer from 1998 with Windows 1998 and a total hard drive space of 24 GB. Originally the computer had only one hard drive of 4 GB but we bought another one after a couple of years. Imagine six people using a computer with a total hard drive space of 24 GB. We weren’t allowed to download anything. Partly because of the lack of space and partly because my parents thought everything contained viruses back then. Of course we (mostly me) did anyway. Not that downloading a few songs mattered really because that computer filled up very quickly just because we were so many people using it. A few weeks after reformatting it, it was back to taking a good five minutes to start. Another problem was that using more than two programs at a time often made it crash from working over it’s capacity. Now imagine that’s the computer I used and shared with five other people (oh my, the fights over computer time we’ve had through the years!) until early 2005 when I bought my first very own computer. My family held on to the one they bought in 1998 until 2008. By then I referred to it as the “stone age machine”.

So guys, when did you first use the internet? Got any interesting anecdotes of the early days of the online world?

Rest in peace Bettsy 930625-100620
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Posted on Sunday June 20 2010, 8:59 pm in Photos | Tags: | Archive

My cat Bettsy passed away three hours ago. She passed away and I wasn’t there. You see she’s been living with my parents since I thought it would be mean of me to bring her along when I moved out of my parents house. She’s… she was used to a big house, a garden and liked my mum more than she liked me anyway. So I left her there when I moved to my own apartment and eventually got two other cats who I’ve had for a couple of years now. Still Bettsy was my first cat. I got her when I was only ten years old and she was supposed to turn seventeen in just a few days. Seventeen years she’s been part of my family and now she’s gone. She lived a long and happy life and died safe in my mothers arms but knowing all that doesn’t take any of the pain away. She’s gone, she’ll never come back and I wasn’t there when she died.

:heart: Bettsy 930625-100620. I love you. Rest in peace baby. You will be missed. :heart:
bettsy

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It’s back!
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Posted on Wednesday June 16 2010, 9:33 pm in Computers & Internet, Yada Yada | Tags: | Archive

Once again I’m sorry about the fact that I once again have neglected my blog, once again not because I’ve been busy but once again because I just haven’t felt like blogging. Once again I promise I’ll try to blog more often but once again it’s very likely that won’t happen. So, with all that said, hello friends, foes, stalkers and random unfortunate who somehow ended up here after googleing something odd, did you miss me?! :D

After not blogging for weeks I should probably start this with an update on what I’ve been doing. I’ll summarize it for you: fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments, angst about money, web design, a bit of shopping, taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days and being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days. I’ll now explain everything in detail.

1. Fear of cancer and too many doctor’s appointments
Like two months ago I discovered a lump above the knee on my right leg. I googled the problem and read that basically either it wasn’t dangerous at all or cancer. Being someone who’s not easily scared of course I assumed what I had wasn’t dangerous at all. Hahaha yeah right… I immediately assumed I had cancer which led to the conclusion that I was dying. Knowing that I was dying I imagined saying my farewells to my family, cried and then started imagining (planning) my funeral. After deciding on the ceremony, music and type of flowers to lay on my casket I cried myself to sleep that night. Eventually I went to see a nurse who sent me to a doctor who sent me to another doctor at the county hospital. Turns out it’s just fatty tissue, one of those nice tumours that does no harm. Obviously this was great news and I immediately stopped planning my funeral.

2. Angst about money
I’ve been a university student since January. It’s a well known fact that it’s now June. That means school is over for this term and so is my student loan for this term. This leaves me without a income and that means I’ll live on government welfare money this summer. I’m not sure exactly how much (little) I’ll get but it will be a few hundreds of dollars less than what I’m used to. I’m trying hard to focus on the bright side of this which is that at least I get welfare money which means I get to keep my apartment and don’t have to sell my computer, body or left kidney to feed myself. Alright I wouldn’t have to sell my left kidney if I didn’t get these money but I would have had to move back to my family’s house. That would be traumatic for both me and my family. Traumatic for me because I’m almost 27 years old and have lived on my own for four years and traumatic for them because I’m almost 27 years old and they thought they got rid of me for good when I moved out of their house four years ago. Anyway, that was the bright side of this situation; I get to keep my apartment. Unfortunately focusing on it is hard when there’s also a not so bright side which is the fact that I won’t be able to afford a vacation this summer. Bye bye bike vacation on Öland! T_T

3. Web design
Since I’m being witty about things that I in reality find no humour in it’s only logic that I’ll be dead serious about things that I’m happy about. So here we go, here’s me not being witty but serious. I recently finished a web design commission I’ve been working on for a while. It’s a site for the town’s karate club. I got the job because two of my siblings are active within the club but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pride in it. This is the first time I’m doing a web design job for people I don’t know because obviously there are more people in the club than my siblings. They liked it and I feel very accomplished. Take a look at it here: www.whirlwind.nu/1 As you can see the layout is still located on my domain since I want to finish a few small changes before I upload it to theirs.

4. A bit shopping
You know what, I’ll leave this to another blog post. Partly because I don’t have the energy to edit photos right now but mostly because that means I’ll have something to write about in my next blog post.

5. Taking long walks on beautiful summer’s days
Say what you want about Hultsfred but during summer several areas of town are quite beautiful.

6. Being depressed inside on rainy summer days when all I want is to take long walks on beautiful summer’s days
And say what you want about Hultsfred but on rainy summer days most areas of town are quite depressing since grey skies and rain makes an alredy depressing excuse of a town look even more like a depressing excuse of a town.