Espanola muchos muchos puppy

Hey kids, quick update.

Vegas was absolutely awesome, in San Diego now, wedding is tomorrow.

Everyone is canning on, big time.

If I can get cheap flights, I might head down to Guatemala for a few days with Jo and Pete (Steve's bro and sis) and maybe Paul.

Much more later

Viva Las Vague-Arse

So named for the vague recollections of arse that people stumble away from it with.

I fly to the states tomoz morning, likely won't be interacting much with the internets until I get back in September. Seeyas then.. literally for Mum and Dad, and Jo and Jeremy, who are all coming to Umeå in September. Yay, visitors!

Gonna hit Norway again with J&J, and hopefully go for a flight over the fjords in the plane Guro's dad made (after seeing his work with the viking helmet, I'll trust his plane).

In preparation the arrival of my visitors, I toiled for hours and brought my apartment its cleanest state since I moved in: mopped the floors, spray'n'wiped the wallpaper, finally got the cheese stains off the kettle (don't ask). It's a beautiful sight!

So, laterz. For now I'll leave y'all with this question: why don't they make the white lines on a tennis court out of velcro? Surely it would mean the end of "line-ball-call" disputes. Is the powerful linesman union deliberately holding these developments back, electric-car style? There are so many unanswered questions here.

Gör det möjligt

This is a shout out to Sanna and Jenny Kallur, Swedish twins, who are both good at sports, and good looking, thus making them fundamentally good people.

Pictured here with some guy, possibly an athlete:




Sanna (lighter hair) won Gold just yesterday in the 100m hurdles at the European Championships. Jenny had a bit of a dud run and came 7th, but in the European Indoor Championships last year they got gold and silver:





Further shout outs to Father Ted, which is playing on Swedish tv these days, and is hilari-arse.

Fr. Dougal: We were just talking about that fella, err, Kurt Cobain. He was from America. Imagine blowing your head off with a shotgun. God, how'd he manage to survive that?

N-e-way, that's all I really have to say at the mo. Now I must go and purchase some goods and/or services.

Update: One of the products I purchased:



I think "adhesive knob" is a pretty good distillation of a certain personality type, closely related to the "drain" type in the "radiator/drain" model [1].

References:
[1] K. Thomas, "Introductory Lectures on the Radiator/Drain Personality Model", Proceedings of the Inaugural England-Sweden Conference on Procrastination, MSN Chat Log, Aug 2006.

Education is the key to cleaning up this apartment

Update: Happy Birthday Chia!
I'm wearing my Chia hat in celebration.

If I make it to October with no major logistical fuckups, I think I'll deserve a PhD in some kind science related to optimal planning strategies. Oh wait, I already have one.... umm, I should be given a jetski.

In just over a week, I head to Vegas and San Diego for LB+Jess's wedding.

• On the same day I arrive back in Sweden (1st Sept), my parents arrive to visit me, their flight in is about 3 hours after mine. So I gots to have everything worked out for them (like a clean apartment, car rental, purchase extra bedding, borrow extra mattresses) before I leave.

• The week after that (7th-14th-ish of Sept), Jo and Jeremy are visiting, and we will prolly be heading over to Norway and doing some sightseeing for a few days, probably renting an automobile - gots to organise all that before I go, and get in touch with my various potential visitees there. Most of this week, J&J are out of contact in Edinburgh, and most of the Norwegians seem to still be on holiday.
  

• Gotta find a drycleaner and get my suit cleaned. Do I have any black shoes? better check. Do I have any black socks? I know for a fact that I do not.
  

• 1st of Oct is the deadline for paper submissions to the European Control Conference, which I wanna go to coz its on a Greek Island in the Dodecanese. Got to figure out a set of experiments this week, so my underlings can perform them while I'm away.
  

• 1st of Oct is also the deadline for applications for a massive "high risk medical research" grant, which we are going to apply for... gotta find a way to make what we do look riskier (e.g. all experiments are to be performed inside an ambulance driving at high speed on the wrong side of the road).

• I found a 2nd-hand underwater camera setup, to replace my dearly-beloved which flooded on the reef trip. I'm negotiating payment (ok pal, pay him like paypal) and shipment from a dude in the states, in amongst both of our numerous travels. Gotta arrange for my pares to bring over certain bits of my old kit so I can test it.
  

So that's my next 8 days.

Meanwhile, spoke to LB today, and things are coming together nicely, kinda like a video of something falling apart played in reverse. In Vegas we are staying just down the road from the hotel where Paris Hilton filmed her most famous piece of work (sorry lb, got confused, that was the Bellagio). But we agreed that Paris has set a precedent, set the par, so to speak, and we're quietly confident of hitting well below par, which would be good in golf, but rather more ugly in this context.

Sadly, but not 100% surprisingly, Matt S. has pulled a homo and piked out of the trip. Apparently due to a mishap with a spell-checker, he booked flights to Lismore instead of Las Vegas, or so the story goes.

Is this what passes for a witty title these days?

Update: last.fm now lets you make little "recently played" charts that you can add to your blog ----->

I'm quite enjoying their "neighbour radio" thingy. Actually seems to stream very smoothly for me now.

Forza Barca! I took this photo in a little square in the Barri Gotic quarter of Barcelona, quite like how it came out.

On Tuesday night I went to see a soccer game here in Sweden, regional comp, one of my Swedish mates was playing. Exciting game, his team won 2-1, but I didn't see the matchwinning goal because I was temporarily blinded by a plump middle-aged man who walked by, walking his dog, wearing a pair of bike pants. Like a lava lamp... shudder

Had the old post-holiday back-at-work-boredoms a bit, so thinking about next moves.

• August: Just 2 weeks til USA for Steve & Jess's nuptuals in San Diego and/or piss-up in Vegas and Tijuana.
  
• September: Pare's visit Sweden right after that, followed more or less closely by Jo and Jeremy. Tis nice here in Autumn (much more so than winter), so any other visitors, twould be a good time! Also, try to figure out what could constitute a paper for this.
• October: No solid plans yet.
  
• November: I'm Almost certainly going to Korea, possibly Japan too. Also, I now have two weddings I'd love to attend in Sydney, but also have almost no money left. So unless some sportswear or energy drink manufacturer decides to sponser me, it'll be tough.
• December: I will be here. Another free trip to the states, and where is it? San Diego! (Steve, any chance to delay wedding???).
  
• January: Hopefully my old supervisor will decide to fly me out to oz again in January, since I've already put down a deposit on the next reef trip, and I can't afford the airfares myself.
  

Also thinking more long-term, where after Sweden? Academic or not? I have to say Mat's move into quant finance has me thinking, and brushing up on stochastic calculus a bit, just in case. At certain times under certain circumstances, I get to thinking academics in engineering basically end up doing cheap product development for big companies. If all I'm doing is working for some company, then why not admit it, and get paid arseloads? Of course, that's when I'm doing robotics, the cerebrospinal fluid dynamics stuff is different.

Anyways, I've got some time to think about it, I'll be here for more than a year yet.