Then there’s the hate. The hate is because of one reason and one reason only: too much school work. Lack of time. No matter how fun a subject may be, when you’re working on three different assignments in three different subjects at the same time and there’s not enough time, things aren’t peachy keen any longer.

Lately there’s been a lot of hate and a lot of stress. Because of that stress I haven’t been able to begin with what I think will be the best school assignment ever, and I do mean that as in EVER, as in during my one year at kindergarten, my entire nine years of elementary school, three years of high school, 6 months of re-taking high school maths and almost a year at uni. Yes, this assignment is that cool. I’m designing a house in my 3D modelling class. That doesn’t sound so cool you might think but I assure you it is because it’s not just any house. It’s the house of my dreams and rest assured my dreams are elaborate. Think the Addams Family minus the spider webs and filth plus Victorian upper class plus contemporary Gothic influences. That’s the house I’m designing, or rather, will design once I find the time to start the project.

That’s my main problem right now. I don’t have the time to start this amazing project because I have smaller – still fun – but not that fun assignments to take care of. That brings more hate to the situation.

All in all, my life isn’t ideal right now. But I have a solution. When you lack time there’s one thing which is only making it worse and that is… the Internet. The Internet is this great time stealing evil which since I do 90% of my studing in front of a computer (kind of hard not to when you study things like 3D graphics and Graphic design for the web) is distracting me a lot. I mean come on, it’s there, right in front of me, all the time! How can I not find an excuse to check DeviantART, Twitter, Facebook, my E-mail and all the other sites I regularly visit?

Well no more of that. Since I’m very busy I can’t have any distractions so I’m doing something very drastic. Something radical. Something I’ve never voluntarily done before in my life. I’m… taking a break from the Internet. Only until Monday but this is the first time in my life I have set a goal not to use the Internet for a set period of time. Not using it because I don’t feel like it is something else entirely. I will feel like checking my DeviantART fifty times a day, but I won’t. There will be one exception but only one. I need to announce the winners of a contest and give the prizes (premium memberships) in one of my groups on DeviantART on Saturday. That’s not for me but for the group and contestants and I swear to god I will not do anything but that. Other than that, no Internet for anything but school related things.

Whether I succeed or not will be easy to find out. See me on Twitter, DA, Facebook or any other of those places I frequent on the great world wide web, well that obviously means I’ve failed. If not, well then it’s a discipline so rare so please applaud. That last thing might have been a Manics quote but I would appreciate virtual applauds.

And with that my friends I bid you adieu. See you Monday!

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?

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.

Guess who’s back? That’s right, the most fabulous, the extremely amazing, the one and only… ME!

If you’re following me on Twitter you already know the reason to my absence but for the rest of you, one word: school. Yes, unfortunately I haven’t been absent because of amazing adventures but rather because I’ve been studying, studying and then studying some more. I’m now done with my two very first university courses ever. Yay for that! I made a (ugly) site for my CSS class which you can look at here and a really god damn crappy movie for my Flash class which you can view here. I will keep the site I made for my CSS class but I will change the layout. The current one sucks so bad but this assignment was about code and not design so I just focused on incorporating all the codes my teacher wanted us to use and then some more just to shine. So, code-wise it’s excellent. My first semantically correct layout ever. That’s what I’ll try to do with Whirlwind next, make it semantically correct because right now semantically it’s a complete mess. The list of my books on the site isn’t complete yet by the way. There’s some fifty more to be listed. Most of my antique (19th and early 20th century) books that is.

Anyway, moving on! I got some great news the other day. I got a job at this years Hultsfred festival! If you don’t know what that is, it’s one of Sweden’s biggest rock festivals with 20 000 – 30 000 visitors every year which, that’s right, takes place in my home town. Living here sucks big time but once a year it’s really great! So, I got a job as a stagehand at the Hawaii stage. That’s the biggest stage (where obviously the biggest bands play) and I’ll work backstage! Can you say absolutely fucking amazing?! This is the job I wanted and this is the job I got! Talk about unbelievably good luck considering there’s many different jobs at the festival. I think I got it because of the fact that I’ve worked backstage at the Hawaii stage before, back in 2008. I loved that job so that’s why I wanted to do it again and now I get to!

To even things out and make sure my life isn’t too good of course something bad had to happen to balance things out. So, my external hard drive crashed. Actually it didn’t just crash, I think it short circuit or something because there was a spark, a poof and then my apartment went pitch black. The worst thing is that since the HDD was connected to my (brand new) laptop it damaged that one as well. The DVI socket to be exact, which means that I now can’t connect my external screen to the laptop. I hope the warranty covers this because I need to be able to use my 20″ screen. That’s what I’m used to so the 15″ one on the laptop really isn’t enough. I wouldn’t even have bought a laptop if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s possible to connect a external monitor to it.

Speaking of computer stuff, I bought two new domains. www.whirlwind.se and a domain with my full name, which I’m not going to write here since I don’t want people who google my full name to find my site. Doesn’t make that big a difference really since I’m not exactly hard to find but still, at least it’s a little harder to find me now than it would be if my full name was written somewhere on the site. I don’t mind people I know visiting my site nor strangers. It’s those people I don’t know, that don’t know me but know of me that I don’t want here. Basically people who aren’t my friends or acquaintances but know who I am who just visit to snoop around.

I got a interesting mail by the way, from a company that wanted to take over whirlwind.se. I said thanks, but no thanks, only if you pay me a couple of hundred dollars. They weren’t interested which didn’t surprise me. I kind of expected them not wanting to pay that much for it but that’s fine because I don’t really want to sell it. I would never let go of it for less than a couple of hundred dollars. I now own whirlwind.nu and whirlwind.se, which besides .com are the most common top domains in Sweden. That’s great. Now I only need .com as well but that one’s taken.

Last but not least I want to show you my new lamps. After buying the lamp I posted a photo of a few entries back I became obsessed with the idea of replacing all the lamps in my living room. There’s nothing wrong with my old lamps but I wanted something more elegant looking for the living room. My old lamp for the ceiling was moved to the hallway and the desk lamp and lamps for the window are now retired. I got all of those when I was thirteen or fourteen so it was about time. So here’s the lamps I bought. The first one is for the ceiling (obviously) and the second one will hang on the wall above my couch bed.

link

link

Like I stated in my previous blog post the reason to my absence has been school. I’ve done an extreme amount of studying. I wish I could say I now don’t have to think that much about school for a while but unfortunately I still have tons of school work to do. I need to start working on two final project works and be done with them this month. I have to create a site for my CSS class and make a movie for my Flash class.

This week I made my very first Flash movie ever. Have a look at it here and then praise my excellent movie making skills. I’m expecting an Oscar and worldwide recognition for this work. It’s safe to say this will grant me my own star on Hollywood Walk of Fame. What did you say? You don’t think I’m serious? HELLO did you not watch the movie?! Don’t come here and tell me this isn’t better than Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and every movie Quention Tarantino ever made combined! XD

Oh well, moving on.

I’ve set up a new computer desk setup. I connected my new laptop to a external keyboard, screen, mouse and speakers. This was always the plan since there’s nothing wrong with the accessories from my old computer. Besides, I couldn’t possibly go from using a 20″ screen to a 15″ one.

Speaking of computers. I’ve bought a Wacom tablet. I decided that I needed one not just for fun but also for school. I plan on continuing with computer studies so a Wacom tablet will come in handy. Not to mention how many possibilities this opens up for what I now can do with my site. I’m not good at creating computer graphics. Actually I’ve never really created digital graphics from scratch before I made my Flash movie. Drawing I’m good at though and now I can make drawings on the computer. Awesome! Unfortunately it turned out to be slightly (a lot) harder than I thought it would be. It will take a lot of practice to get the hang of it. The tablet costed me 1700 SEK + 100 SEK shipping (€ 175 + 10) ($ 238 + 14). It was available in two Swedish online shops. In one of them it costed 2000 SEK (€205) ($ 280) and in the other 2100 (€ 216) ($ 294). The last store had discounts for students though so I got it cheaper. You gotta love student discounts. <3

Here’s my desk with the new setup and the Wacom tablet. .

My desk with the Wacom tablet in the front.

Today I decided to do a EFIT which is a photo project in which you take one photo an hour during one day. I haven’t been a member of the project for years but after seeing Maria do a EFIT I felt like doing one as well. So here it is. This is what I did today (yesterday really since it’s 2 AM here right now).

11 AM – Woke up 10:30 AM, started doing the dishes almost immediately.

12 AM – Went shopping with my mum and sisters. At the toy store I saw something that upset me.
So the box for this cleaning wagon is pink with a photo of a girl on it and on top of that the text on the box states “4-Girlz”. I doubt it’s possible to make it more gender specific than this. Good thing teaching girls that household work is their choir from a young age. Cement it into their minds so that one day they’ll make good wives. Allow me to puke. This is not cool. Not cool at all.

1 PM – Standing outside my friends shop waiting for it to open.

2 PM – This is what I bought today: a scarf and shoelaces.

3 PM – Sunshine through my window.

4 PM – Sarah + my not too exciting view.

5 PM – Outside my house waiting for my dad to drop off some stuff. The snow has melted a lot in the past few days.

6 PM – Cleaning.

7 PM – Cooking.

8 PM – The box for my new Wacom tablet.

9 PM – Latte Macchiato with whipped cream.

10 PM – Looking at a video tutorial about my Wacom tablet. It was awful. The instructions were read slooowly and told in such a way it seemed the video was aimed at kids or mentally disabled.

I spent the last two hours of the day browsing E-bay so there’s no photos from the rest of the night. And that’s all folks!

CSN is short for Centrala studienämnden which translates to National Board of Student Aid. Basically it’s a governmental board which handles student benefits and student loans. I go to college and get money from CSN. Most of the money is a student loan but some of it is student benefits which I don’t have to pay back.

Anyway, I’ve had major problems with my student loan. First I wasn’t getting any money at all, then I got money but would have to pay back part of it and then all of a sudden I find out I get to keep all the extra money I got. I’m not going to go into details about how and why since it’s all very complicated but basically CSN made a mistake and paid me more money than I should have and since the mistake was theirs and not mine I get to keep the money. Of course most of it is loan money which I still have to pay back one day when I’m finished with college but it’s still great since there’s a limit on how much money you can get from them each month and this means that I got a double income for January. It was quite a turn of events after all the trouble I’ve had with them these past months. So, that’s why I love CSN today.

I’m going to save part of my extra money for summer and with the rest I bought a laptop. This one to be exact. Lovely!

I’m kind of obsessed with having my entire site validate correctly but why shouldn’t I be? Valid code is like correct spelling. Sure you can read a text that’s badly spelled but it’s probably harder to understand. It’s the same with browsers. Sure they can display invalid code but often it looks kinda funny and not at all how you intended it to look.

What I hate even more than invalid code is code that’s valid but works differently in different browsers. This layout should work fine in all browsers besides maybe the most unusual ones but I think that has more to do with those browsers not being that good than my code. Still, it’s annoying. I remember back in the days when you coded for one browser and put up a disclaimer stating which browser (and resolution) your site should be viewed in. Not very user friendly, but still, easy.

It’s interesting to think about how coding has evolved in the past ten years. When I built my first web page back in 1999 I coded in HTML and didn’t use any CSS whatsoever. My first site was basically two frames. One with a text link menu and one main window for the content. The menu frame had a black and white background with tree branches (a photo I scanned) and the main frame was black. It didn’t look too bad considering what many other sites back then looked like. I’m proud to say that Whirlwind never have contained ugly clipart, dolls or annoying moving GIF images. Besides my celebrity blend phase I’ve always kept it pretty simple, not using too many colours or too much graphics.

I wish I still had my first layout saved but every layout I made up until 2001 were lost years ago. There wasn’t that many of them but still, it would have been cool to be able to look at them.

When did you start web designing and what did your first layout look like?

My blog is pretty much out in the open so to speak. My friends read it, my family knows about it and I’ve got it linked on pretty much every social network site I’m a member of. Even if I prefer that some people stay away from my site I make no attempt of hiding my identity here. In the end no matter how hard you try to be private and secretive the truth is that everything on the internet can be found by anyone.

Since my site is no secret that of course limits what I feel comfortable blogging about. I go after the motto “If you can’t say it to their face don’t say it online”. That means I don’t trash talk people online unless I’m in a open conflict with them. The most important thing with this policy is that I keep parts of my life private. You wouldn’t tell anyone just anything about yourself would you? And you sure as hell wouldn’t want someone you dislike to know private things about you? Still lots of people blog about just about everything going on in their lives even though with luck or determination anyone can find it. One last thing I don’t blog about is what’s going on with people I know because that’s just rude. Who am I to expose their lives?

How private are you on Facebook? Are you one of those who keep their profile private?

My Facebook profile can be viewed by anyone. I figure everything that can be found on my Facebook can be found on my site so what’s the use keeping it private?

With all this said I still prefer that some people never find my site or my Facebook profile. Just like I prefer some people to stay as far as way from me as possible in real life I prefer some people to stay as far as way as possible from me online.

Another funny thing happened when I was watching the TV-show Jericho. Three people were hiding in a barn while a fourth was sneaking around outside. The people inside the barn stood there quietly to avoid discovery. Then my Anti-virus program made a sound to announce that the software had been updated. I immediately thought “Oh no! I hope he didn’t hear that!”. Yes. For a split second I feared that the sound from my anti-virus program might have compromised the safety of three guys hiding inside a barn, on a TV-show I was watching on my computer. Obviously a second later I felt kinda silly for thinking that.

Have you experienced anything like this? I’m sure you have so tell me all about it!