So here's a shot from us trekking in September in Stora Sjöfallet. All the photos in the set are from Anders, Greg and Sonya as my camera broke on the 1st day, so many thanks go out to these guys for sharing!
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
Catching Up
This photo sums up everything that was wonderful about last weekend. I love the photo, but I love what it represents. 3 days just hanging with Steve and catching up over good food and a few drinks. What more could one ask for?
Life and DNS redirects
So, finally after much frigging about my new DNS seems to work. This is a small personal triumph against technology which has been challenging me, but as Sarah likes to remind me, I love it really!
There's a 5 month gap of posting where I wonder what happened, my xbox is STILL at the repair factory, and life's brought many strange things in between.
I've trekked through the Swedish mountains tied to a Reindeer, kayaked through the Stockholm archipelago, passed another tech interview and got a new job within Microsoft, watched Elk at night in the Forest, camped in and enjoyed the Swedish outdoors, watched palce beat Sheffield United in the flesh, met Barnaby for the first time and generally wondered what will come next.
Winter has arrived now, it snowed at the weekend and things are closing in. I love it! Seeing Steve was fantastic last week, and as everyone constantly reminds me, the weather in Barcelona is fantastic - which it is, but in fact the heat and sun just made me pine more for Sweden.
With Sarah being pregnant now, there are obvious changes to life afoot, but fuck me, I don't know what they are, and for the moment, well I just have to wait and see what happens. You can't say fairer than that.
There's a 5 month gap of posting where I wonder what happened, my xbox is STILL at the repair factory, and life's brought many strange things in between.
I've trekked through the Swedish mountains tied to a Reindeer, kayaked through the Stockholm archipelago, passed another tech interview and got a new job within Microsoft, watched Elk at night in the Forest, camped in and enjoyed the Swedish outdoors, watched palce beat Sheffield United in the flesh, met Barnaby for the first time and generally wondered what will come next.
Winter has arrived now, it snowed at the weekend and things are closing in. I love it! Seeing Steve was fantastic last week, and as everyone constantly reminds me, the weather in Barcelona is fantastic - which it is, but in fact the heat and sun just made me pine more for Sweden.
With Sarah being pregnant now, there are obvious changes to life afoot, but fuck me, I don't know what they are, and for the moment, well I just have to wait and see what happens. You can't say fairer than that.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
XBox games and features
We'll, carcassonne was good, catan was fantastic as well, but all in all, I've played very little recently as my xbox is one of the many needing to be repaired. I'd like to tell you that sending it to Microsoft for repair was simple, but it wasn't! On the 3rd attempt though it finally made it to the courier, and is sitting in the Q in Germany now awaiting its turn.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
New XBOX games and features
and I forgot to say that the other thing I've been loving this week is new games and features on the xbox 360. I'm just so mad for xbox right now, especially after they released catan on xbox live last week. It's just real catan, but available day and night, but of course you can still play with your friends as well, which is pretty cool for me when all my board game contacts are in other countries. And carcassonne is coming out next week as well...bring it on.
And MS have integrated messenger services into the dashboard as well now, which I think is quite cool.
And MS have integrated messenger services into the dashboard as well now, which I think is quite cool.
Notes from a grey corner of Sollentuna
Sollentuna is where I live for the un-initiated. It's currently a grey spring day, but the nights are short and the days are long right now as we approach mid-summer.
This week has been one of work, but with planning for my 5 week holiday / training period away from work, which starts next Thursday, and then I'm clear free until 25th June - nice!! I'm off to Munich in 10 days for some cool Windbg training, and then its outdoor activites all the way.
This week I've been enjoying playing with a new LastFM subscription, especially after pandora was turned off, but frankly it blows pandora away anyway in my opinion, and I'm completely mad for it. You can see the widget in the right hand bar here.
Last week I met a very cool Syrian guy who owns a fruit and veg market down the road from here, well when I say met, I went to his market and got talking to him, because he had a great selection of interesting produce, and being from the middle east he understood the need to stock large bunches of just about every herb there is, and to naturally sell everything for half the price of a supermarket. I felt like practicing my Swedish as well, so we chatted for ages. I'm off there in a minute to go and buy a shed load of ingredients and hopefully spend the weekend cooking.
This week has been one of work, but with planning for my 5 week holiday / training period away from work, which starts next Thursday, and then I'm clear free until 25th June - nice!! I'm off to Munich in 10 days for some cool Windbg training, and then its outdoor activites all the way.
This week I've been enjoying playing with a new LastFM subscription, especially after pandora was turned off, but frankly it blows pandora away anyway in my opinion, and I'm completely mad for it. You can see the widget in the right hand bar here.
Last week I met a very cool Syrian guy who owns a fruit and veg market down the road from here, well when I say met, I went to his market and got talking to him, because he had a great selection of interesting produce, and being from the middle east he understood the need to stock large bunches of just about every herb there is, and to naturally sell everything for half the price of a supermarket. I felt like practicing my Swedish as well, so we chatted for ages. I'm off there in a minute to go and buy a shed load of ingredients and hopefully spend the weekend cooking.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Holiday Planning
Obviously bearing in mind the events of the previous week, it's been a fairly crappy and boring week. The penicillin has been doing its job and my hand appears to be much better, but its been taking its toll on me in other ways, so I've been off work all week.
In the last couple of days I've been able to use the computer again (a bit) with one hand, so I've been doing some holiday planning for June, both because it needs to be done and because it always cheers me up :-)
Currently I've got the following events planned:
Beaver Watching Trip (in canoes)
Moose Safari
both whilst living out in the woods a few hours west of Stockholm.
Then I've got a couple of kayaking trips planned, one one dayer and one two dayer, camping out in the northern archipeligo.
In addition to that I'm planning to take a 5 day trip island hopping in the southern archipeligo, hopefully with Sarah, although she's supposed to be working, so this is up for debate I guess.
Finally I'm planning to walk some of the Sormlandsleden which is a big national trail that starts south of Stockholm. In between I'll just chill in Stockholm and hopefully do lots of cycling and swimming.
Bring it on!
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Kipper's Story
This is not exactly a pleasant story to say the least, but I kinda feel the need to write it all down.
At about 6pm on Saturday, I was sitting in the computer room laying out loads of paper on the floor, preparing to do my swedish tax return for the first time. Kipper strolled into the room in his normal fashion and sat down on the papers like any good cat should. I pulled them from under him and had a chat with him like you do with your cats and then noticed that he was making a really funny sounds from his throat and that he was breathing really heavily, but with his mouth open. He sounded like he was in real difficultly. I looked it up in the ever reliable "catopedia" and it didn't sound good. Removal to vets immediately seemed to be the overall summary. I spoke to sarah downstairs and came back up 5 minutes later. He still looked the same, but then as we came into the room he coughed up some blood. Definately time to go to the vets.
I put him in the cat box, left Sarah at home and headed for the emergency room of the Djursjukhus (Animal Hospital) which is about 20 minutes drive away. He sounded the same in the car all the way, very gravelly breathing.
When I arrived they did a quick interview at reception and then I saw a vet about 30 minutes later. I spoke some fairly bad swedish to her, but I'd looked up most of the key words before leaving home (breathing, coughing etc). She looked at me and spoke some english and said along the lines of "Are you prepared that this is probably not a good diagnosis". Unfortunatley I already was.
She checked him out and then we took him for some xrays. He'd coughed up more blood by this time and was having a harder and harder time breathing. Giving a non sedated cat an xray is not exactly an easy or pleasant thing to do, but I put on my lead apron and held him down so we could get it done immediately. I was getting increasingly emotional down as I had a real bad feeling about what was coming.
We finished the xrays and I took him back to the little vets room we were assigned to. Then it all kicked off. He was starting to make some really bad noises and look really distressed and he was rolling around from side to side. I was trying to calm him but it wasn't going to happen. The he shit himself and started to cough up loads of blood. He got out of my grasp and ran to the corner of the room and started rolling around there. Then he pissed on the floor as well and I ran to get the vet. They sent a nurse in to clean him up whilst I spoke to the vet, we were looking at the xrays and she explaining to me that he had loads of fluid in the chest and all sorts of other unexplained things, such an enlarged heart and that it was basically not good at all.
All this had happened in about 2 minutes and we'd swiched to some english at this point to talk about medical stuff. Then we heard some anguished screams from both nurse and cat and I said to the vet "Are you trying to tell me that you have to put him down, but you're breaking it to me slowly?" and she confirmed what I already really knew. I said to her that we should just do it straight away because he was by this time obviously in so much distress and he just seemed to be dying there and then anyway as his body gave up completely, but he was doing it in a shed load of pain. So we rushed back to the room where he was and there was a bad bad scene of blood and bodily fluids everywhere. We grabbed him and it took all 3 of us to hold him down, as he was fighting so much for air at this point, and 30 seconds later it was over, relief to all, but especially to kipper.
It goes without saying that by this time I was more than a little upset and they left me alone to cry for a few minutes and decide what to do next. Obviously I needed to tell Sarah, but there was one final twist of the knife before that. In his last throws of distress Kipper had sunk his teeth into my hand quite badly, a double sided bite, which the vet informed me meant I had to go to casulty immediately to get penicillin for as it would definately become infected.
So I had to ring Sarah and tell her all of this, and explain everything, and then we had to go a sit in casulty, which I can assure you was not where I wanted to be right then, until about 3am.
Since then I've been taking the penicillin and sitting at home feeling rather blue. We'll never actually know what caused it, but the most likely thing appears to be some form of cancer or virus that cats get, which just goes un-noticed. He'd been happy and jolly in the weeks and days leading up to this, and we really had no idea. Subsequently I learnt that he had been sitting differently and the fashion that he had been sitting in meant that he was potentially having trouble breathing, but it just goes to show, as beyond that he was just his normal self. Then one night in the space of 3 hours he died.
It's amazing how much you become attached to your pets, and hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it, as some people just say, "well you can buy another one", or "it's only a cat", but suffice to say I don't think of it like that. A pet like a cat or a dog is something that you share your house and your life with on a day to day basis, and of course the thing about any such pet is that they give you unconditional love.
Obviously I'm trying to remember him as pictured above, as this is how it should be. He brought great joy to my life.
At about 6pm on Saturday, I was sitting in the computer room laying out loads of paper on the floor, preparing to do my swedish tax return for the first time. Kipper strolled into the room in his normal fashion and sat down on the papers like any good cat should. I pulled them from under him and had a chat with him like you do with your cats and then noticed that he was making a really funny sounds from his throat and that he was breathing really heavily, but with his mouth open. He sounded like he was in real difficultly. I looked it up in the ever reliable "catopedia" and it didn't sound good. Removal to vets immediately seemed to be the overall summary. I spoke to sarah downstairs and came back up 5 minutes later. He still looked the same, but then as we came into the room he coughed up some blood. Definately time to go to the vets.
I put him in the cat box, left Sarah at home and headed for the emergency room of the Djursjukhus (Animal Hospital) which is about 20 minutes drive away. He sounded the same in the car all the way, very gravelly breathing.
When I arrived they did a quick interview at reception and then I saw a vet about 30 minutes later. I spoke some fairly bad swedish to her, but I'd looked up most of the key words before leaving home (breathing, coughing etc). She looked at me and spoke some english and said along the lines of "Are you prepared that this is probably not a good diagnosis". Unfortunatley I already was.
She checked him out and then we took him for some xrays. He'd coughed up more blood by this time and was having a harder and harder time breathing. Giving a non sedated cat an xray is not exactly an easy or pleasant thing to do, but I put on my lead apron and held him down so we could get it done immediately. I was getting increasingly emotional down as I had a real bad feeling about what was coming.
We finished the xrays and I took him back to the little vets room we were assigned to. Then it all kicked off. He was starting to make some really bad noises and look really distressed and he was rolling around from side to side. I was trying to calm him but it wasn't going to happen. The he shit himself and started to cough up loads of blood. He got out of my grasp and ran to the corner of the room and started rolling around there. Then he pissed on the floor as well and I ran to get the vet. They sent a nurse in to clean him up whilst I spoke to the vet, we were looking at the xrays and she explaining to me that he had loads of fluid in the chest and all sorts of other unexplained things, such an enlarged heart and that it was basically not good at all.
All this had happened in about 2 minutes and we'd swiched to some english at this point to talk about medical stuff. Then we heard some anguished screams from both nurse and cat and I said to the vet "Are you trying to tell me that you have to put him down, but you're breaking it to me slowly?" and she confirmed what I already really knew. I said to her that we should just do it straight away because he was by this time obviously in so much distress and he just seemed to be dying there and then anyway as his body gave up completely, but he was doing it in a shed load of pain. So we rushed back to the room where he was and there was a bad bad scene of blood and bodily fluids everywhere. We grabbed him and it took all 3 of us to hold him down, as he was fighting so much for air at this point, and 30 seconds later it was over, relief to all, but especially to kipper.
It goes without saying that by this time I was more than a little upset and they left me alone to cry for a few minutes and decide what to do next. Obviously I needed to tell Sarah, but there was one final twist of the knife before that. In his last throws of distress Kipper had sunk his teeth into my hand quite badly, a double sided bite, which the vet informed me meant I had to go to casulty immediately to get penicillin for as it would definately become infected.
So I had to ring Sarah and tell her all of this, and explain everything, and then we had to go a sit in casulty, which I can assure you was not where I wanted to be right then, until about 3am.
Since then I've been taking the penicillin and sitting at home feeling rather blue. We'll never actually know what caused it, but the most likely thing appears to be some form of cancer or virus that cats get, which just goes un-noticed. He'd been happy and jolly in the weeks and days leading up to this, and we really had no idea. Subsequently I learnt that he had been sitting differently and the fashion that he had been sitting in meant that he was potentially having trouble breathing, but it just goes to show, as beyond that he was just his normal self. Then one night in the space of 3 hours he died.
It's amazing how much you become attached to your pets, and hard to explain to someone who hasn't done it, as some people just say, "well you can buy another one", or "it's only a cat", but suffice to say I don't think of it like that. A pet like a cat or a dog is something that you share your house and your life with on a day to day basis, and of course the thing about any such pet is that they give you unconditional love.
Obviously I'm trying to remember him as pictured above, as this is how it should be. He brought great joy to my life.
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Woodpecker
Here's the local woodpecker who' often knocking around the garden. I've been trying to take some bird photos from the bedroom window, but even with a tripod to stop blurring, my little point and click camera in maximum zoom and maximum resolution isn't quite up to the job of getting a sharp photo. You can see from the others on flickr that they're nearly there, but after cropping and touching, they're still a little small and not that crisp. An interesting experiement though. it's the only time I've ever noticed that my camera is not quite up to the job, but that's cos the majority of the time I do just point and click, so I won't be rushing out to buy another one soon. I like the new features on flickr though that allow you to look at statistics of who did what with which camera when.
Dual Boot Ubuntu Linux installation
Hey - don't tell my employer but I've just installed the latest Ubuntu distro, which so far has been very simple and interesting, but I haven;t been able to use it yet. When I say simple, it's actually taken me nearly 2 days and 15 attempts, but this was entirely not the fault of the linux side of things, but the fact that i was trying to repartition my desktop to keep the windows side of it running and create a proper dual boot image. In the end I had to defrag the windows drive about 5 times to move all the space to the front of the drive and then run a couple fo chkdsk passes to fix some minor errors, but after that the install went smooth as silk. It'll be interesting to compare the 2 in the coming weeks.
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