The first snow and "peace-keeping"

It's winter in Sweden. The first snow fell only a couple of days ago. It's already raining away, only small areas of the roads and sidewalks are still covered by ice. But still. Snow is an ultimate sign of winter.

If I needed more signs I could just look in the general direction of Liseberg, the biggest amusement park in Gothenburg and Sweden. There, a tall christmas tree is enlightning the view. The tree is around 116 metres high, and when I first saw it I was amazed. Where did they find that tree? And how did they transport it to the park? In my curiousity I asked some neighbours about it. They looked at me as if I had two heads. "Are you joking, or do you really not know that it's the Liseberg Tower they have dressed up in lamps?!" Oops. At least I could hide behind the fact that I'm new to the city. This is my first christmas here, after all.


Yesterday night there was thunder and lightning. Thunder in November? I wouldn't think so. Together with the unusual warmth of the first weeks of the month it seems to be evidence enough of a climate change. I hope it's a change to the better. Come to think of it, most changes to the swedish weather would have to be to the better. What could possibly be worse? Swedish weather stinks.


And as if there wasn't enough reasons to hate Sweden, here is another one. Despite all nice talk about neutralism and 200 years of peace: We are actually sending military troops to another country. The first "KIA" came home two days ago. So what are we doing in Afghanistan, one might ask. "Helping out with reconstruction", our media reports. How come we are sending commandos then? Shouldn't we be sending engineers? Construction workers? "Well, it's reconstruction and peace-keeping", they say. Right. Peace-keeping in an occupied country. Why are we on the occupants side, then?

By the way, the swedish armed forces are called Försvaret. That means "The Defense". I thought defense was something you were doing on home ground.

Windows killed my sleep

As I wrote about earlier, I was stupid enough to install XP as a dual-booting system on my computer. Since I don't feel like getting dirty with wine or cedega everytime I want to relax with a fine game, I thought: "What the heck, launching Windows once in a while can't hurt, can it?"

Well, it can. And it did. I had to reboot with a a live-cd a couple of times before I got it right. If I (against all reason) decided to keep Windows and to actually start it now and then, it would rewrite my mbr every time. So what to do? Apparently I had to add Linux as a menu item in the NTLDR ("NT Loader", the Windows boot manager), make it the default choice and set the timeout to a low value (most of the work is outlined here). Then my Grub installation would be called and I would have my normal boot menu back, with a "WinXP" menu item added.

Any problems with this approach, more than that it had to be done at all? Yes, unfortunately. Since I started to use NTLDR, I can no longer hibernate my computer. When I click "Log out" in the Gnome "System" menu and choose "Hibernate", it goes down for a few seconds and then back on again. I don't know if I will have time to look more seriously into this. Sad because I recently started to use and enjoy the hibernation ("sleep") function. It's wonderful to be able to shutdown the computer with a lot of documents open, and restart it the day after with everything in the same place I left it.

Oh, and the weather is cold and wet. I hate it.

No surprise

Guess what? The weather in Sweden really stinks. I hate it.

I don't understand what made me write the last post. Who could possibly enjoy the weather here?! I must have been drunk. Or out of my mind somehow. Maybe it was the shock of actually not freezing for some days. Anyway, I'm better now, thank you. I'm back to my old self.

So, when riding my bike down to the tram station I felt my ears almost fall off. Or I would have, if I had had any kind of sensation left in them. But no, they were numb. The cold air frooze them immediately, when I took the first step out through the door.

Enough about the weather? Ok, I'll stop whining for now. But I really need this valve to let out some of the steam, or else there would be someone exploding over here.

Oh, I installed Windows XP (SP2) yesterday. But what the fsck is this?! The stupid software overwrote my mbr with it's own boot loader. OK, I knew that used to happen in my old days with Windows, but hey. It's 2005 now, you might think the fine engineers over at Microsoft would have been able to understand there is something called "dual booting". Microsoft Windows is not the OS. It just happens to be something you have to start up when you want to enjoy a few hours game play. And that's just until the Linux user group has become big enough for the game producers to start releasing their products directly for us. Oh, wait. That's already happening.

Anyway. I fired up the linux system again via a live-cd and re-installed grub after adding a menu item for XP. Rebooting, and yep it worked. After a 3 sec waiting, Linux started up as default OS again. Everything were OK again. Or were it?

Apparently, the stupid motherfsckers at stupid motherfscking Microsoft once got an idea. "Hey, what if we should overwrite the mbr every fscking time our fscking OS is starting? That would be awesome." Yea. Really. You know what would be awesome? If I had the motherfscker who's responsible for that decision, right here, right now. I might even be happy for a while.

Surprise, surprise...

Damn. I never thought I would enjoy the weather in Sweden, but the last weeks have been really wonderful for a late autumn up north. I had expected snow, ice and cold by now, but you can still walk the streets without more than a medium thick sweater. Swedish meteorologists talk about the warmest November in modern history. Obviously things won't stay good for ever, I bet december will come with snow storms and ice age.

Still, if Sweden were like this all the year around, I would actually consider staying here the rest of my life.

On a completely different matter. Tonight is going out-night. Let's see if Gothenburg nightlife has anything to offer. At least with this weather we all have something to talk about.