Day 13

Stockholm tommorrow! That sez it all, I'm ready to see the big city and meet friends I haven't seen ever. It should be loads of fun! Plus work, of course.

Speaking of which, here are some photos of me doing my thing. All professional and stuff, hahaha.

Day 12 (i think)

it's late at night, so you'll have to interpolate the day's happenings from these statements. They are in order of time (from morning to evening).

Ice skating, near leg-breaking.

Long lectures, not too too interesting.

Decent lunch, disgusting avocados.

Group exercise, missing trams.

Chinese food and Isolation Years in Concert, very good group! Kinda like Tom Petty in their sound.

Disappointment in trying to watch latest episode of Lost, because it's all junked up with some password foolishness. I'll have to re-download it and watch it tommorrow.

Growing anticiption of Stockholm visit.

Phone call from Alecia in Paris, much enjoyed :)

Shout out to Debbie in Tampa (not Orlando)!

Bed.

Photos forthcoming again.

interlude.

i just realized that this past weekend is my one-year anniversary of working at the WRA (and here I am in Sweden thanks to them). I wouldn't have gotten that working at that job in the USA, that's for sure.

so, yay! Tnanks be to God :)

Day 5;

Today was a very interesting day at the lectures. The executive director of S.E.I. gave a lecture that informed us about no-tillage crops and how plowing actually DECREASES land yield in tropical regions...he also told us about the use of urine as fertilizers and the separation of urine and fecal matter to use as composts.

After you've stopped grossing out, you should check it out. It actually looks quite feasible, and I see great potential in what he was talking about (among other things)...

I managed to find a place to practice, though I'll only get to go there 4 times while I'm here. Better than none, i suppose.

This hotel doesn't have a laundromat, and it costs an arm and a leg to ship out stuff! I guess I'll have to go down to the wire before I send my stuffs to get washed.

Other than that, just another slow day in Norrkoping. Check out some photos down below...the first is the view outside my old room (I switched rooms today because I had no good internet access in that old room). The second is me on the first day of lectures...the third photo is our main lecture room and some of my fellow participants, the fourth is the welcome dinner last night at the hotel, and the final is me at the welcome dinner letting my inner Viking loose :D

Day 3:

Much easier than day 2, in that we actually got more breaks and got to leave earlier. I need to leave earlier in the mornings to get the tram though, we got in about 5 minutes late and our supervisor was PISSED! Well, not like yelling at us, but you could tell she was upset. It wasn't our fault though...not really :) I guess Swedes really take punctuality seriously. I won't mess up next time.

Today after class, I went browsing/shopping. Lots of stuff here in town, but it's all kinda pricey. All i got thus far was a hat and a keychain light. I was looking at cell phones and iPods, but I'll get the Pod from the USA and the cellphone from the net at the right time.

Not much else happened today. I took some pics, will post 'em soon.

Day 2:

Man, these people aim to get their money's worth out of US...not that i'm complaining. Today was the first day of the course, and we were all at SMHI from 8:30 am to 6 pm. Lecture upon lecture, with lunch and social interludes...They were pretty educational though. It was mostly introductions to climate change and various issues like health, investigating models of parameters, etc.

I think I'm the youngest person on the course, and the only one from an English-speaking country. It's a very diverse crowd, with about 22 countries represented. The entire setup is very professional, and I am impressed.

I'm also TIRED. Tommorrow after classes, I'll go check out the shopping in town if it's not too cold. Tonight, I sleep and vegetate.

more later

Day 1: Welcome to Norrkoping!

I'm here!

And it's COLD!

Right now, i'm in my room at the Scandic Hotel in Norrkoping, Sweden. I flew in at 12 noon and came straight here with one fellow course participant from the Phillipines. I haven't met anyone else yet, and I think a good number of people haven't reached yet...I'm sure I'll meet more tommorrow.

Travelling down here was a long haul. The trip to Newark was uneventful, except that I saw an old classmate from 5th form on the plane. I had a long wait before the flight to Copenhagen took off, and that was a long trip. My legs still ache from it. Scandanavian Air is a good airline though, I likede how they have individual TVs in the headets.

Denmark was an interesting stay. Too bad the image I'll take from it is a really disgusting toilet. You don't expect to see that in a First-world airport toilet.

Right now i am jet-lagged, but I can't go sleep until nightfall. I'll write more tommorrow, along with pics.

off to Sweden

I'll be heading to Sweden early tommorrow morning for a course on Climate change. This means that I'll be blogging more often, even if it kills me:)

Check this out as well...

Love of money, the root of all evil

http://www.getipm.com/personal/cancer-racket.htm

http://www.ralphmoss.com/

I don't think that chemotherapy is the way to go. If you have to roll the dice, better to roll it towards the natural, not towards that which kills you in order to save you...

I have some thoughts on the power of "science" as practiced by today's scientists. They'll be forthcoming.

Don't mess with fruitcake.

It will kick your ass everytime.

To the Tuna lady

don't throw down no gauntlets to me, I'll pick 'em up :D

Rachmaninoff's Prelude in B-flat Major

baaaaad piece of piano-work in this tune.

this is what I want, what I really really want

I need some generous soul to purchase me one of these babies right here :) and I mean the black one. Any takers? hehehehe

post relocation

I moved my year in review blog to a more hidden part of the site, since I had a lot of info therein. If you really want to be nosy and read it, good luck hunting.

The best national security plan any president can have is 4 words: "Get me Jack Bauer."

Daniella Cicarelli

I hear that she's Ronaldo's ex-girlfriend. Just goes to show what football skills can do for ya :) Anyways, there's this big hub-bub about this video of her having sex with her current bf that was making the rounds on Youtube, and how the Brazilian government was trying to get tha Tube to take off all those videos or be blocked in Brazil ad infinitum.

I saw the video (search for her on google and you'll find it. YouTube is the least of her worries) and my impression is that she and her guy have none but themselves to blame. Sure, whoever shot the video is a sleazy jerk, but my opinion is that she and the bf started to exhibit PDA's and then got turned on from that and decided "what the heck, let's go all the way." People were around them the whole time that they were kissing, and when they started to kiss in a way that you should never do in public...that's where I lost sympathy for them. At least they had the presence of mind to go into the water when they decided to actually have sex.

So, the lesson of this experience is: Get a room, you horny buggers!

The music of Alkan

Here's a story about how I made a spur of the moment purchase which led to various things happening.

I went down to Liguanea yesterday to go cash a check. Before heading to the bank, I went to this pharmacy in the plaza across from the bank, and discovered that they were having a sidewalk sale. In this sale, they had two thriller-type novels going for less than $10 US a pop. I haven't read a good story in a while, and they both seemed interesting so I picked 'em up for the heck of it. I started one of them last night called "The Book of the Dead" by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and am currently just past the halfway mark. While the story has engaged me thus far, I freely admit that it is a totally weird story. It's taking a while for the connections between 4 seemingly disparate plot lines to come together (right now I can see circumstantial connection but I'm still reading on to the grand reveal) and it seems that this novel builds upon events in previous novels which I never knew about. Lack of knowledge about these events isn't crippling me TOO much, but the characters are currently acting in a vacuum to me. I have an idea of WHAT the previous events are from dialogue, but I don't know WHY the events happened. Still, I've gone too far to turn around. I'll look it up on Amazon after I finish it.

However, the point of this blog post comes from a throwaway reference by the tale's chief villain. Think of a twisted cross between Frasier Crane and American Psycho, and that's him. In the book, he is full of high class tastes, drinking absinthe, reading all manners of books and authors I've never heard of because they'd be "out of my class and intellectual level". Snob to the MAX. I took a pause when he mentioned this composer called Alkan, the "forgotten musical genius of the 19th century" and said "few pianists are up to the challenge" of playing his pieces. I've never heard of the man, and if I hear "forgotten musical genius", i'm all over that. So I took a gander at Youtube (:drops on knees: "Oh Lord, thank you so much for inspiring whoever it was that created Youtube. May they truly enjoy the money they get from selling out to Google, because they've damned sure earned it." :rises from knees:) and searched to see what clips I could find.

I've heard Chopin's Revolutionary, and while it's difficult, I could play that with a whoooooole lot of practice. I did Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# minor on my own time, and did it pretty fairly. I can get back up to speed and finish it to performance level if I include it in my new practice routine, which I will probably do. I plan to try Rachmaninoff's Prelude in B flat in the near future; while it's just as hard as (or harder than) the Revolutionary, I like it more and that's enough motivation to keep me working at it when I get the score. But there is NO WAY, no way at all, that I could ever hope to play this fellow's work. A wise man knows his limits, and I believe I just met mine. Take a look at this, y'all.




I'm going to see what else I can find from the composer (and maybe the artist) on tha tube and on Amazon/iTunes. I suppose it's not surprising I never heard of him, since it's not everyone who'd be able to play this. You can't write music that no one can play, 'cause who will listen to it? On the other hand, we all should aim for the stars, eh :) Here's to Alkan, that forgotten virtuoso.

Fortunate Son

Creedence Clearwater Revival. One of the best anti-war songs from the Vietnam Era.

Bill Evans

I really really like this arrangement of this song.

Fantasy Basketball time, baby!!

yeah, it's time for me to lay a smackdown on some suckas!! Of course, I haven't yet won a league, but my time will come :)

I started playing fantasy bball on Yahoo's free leagues about 3 years ago, and I was immediately hooked. It took me a while to get the hang of it, and I am still working out certain things but I did pretty well for my first year. I came in second in one league (rotissiere), and while I missed out on the playoffs for my other two leagues, I did win the consolation league playoffs in both. My second year wasn't as good, because I made the mistake of having 6 teams on two Yahoo IDs, and trying to pay equal attention to all of them. Yeah, that wasn't a smart move...I placed no higher than 7th in all of them. This year, I determined to focus only on 4 teams on my main yahoo ID, and I wasn't going to get any more teams.

Then I said "bugger that, I wanna play."

Thing is, I've gone overboard. Right now, in addition to my main 3 leagues (the 4th league doesn't seem to be taking off), I've set up 4 teams on my secondary Yahoo ID, and I'm about to add an additional 4 on another ID for the heck of it. Yeah, 12 fantasy Bball teams. How will I manage it???

I won't :)

I'll just focus day-to-day on the main yahoo ID leagues, which are all head-to-head. The secondary leagues are all rotissiere, and as far as I can tell, those mostly need regular checking to make sure that the guys on the team are all playing up to par. The last ID leagues, well I'll probably just draft 'em and leave 'em. See if I can actually win without doing anything. That worked for me the one time I tried fantasy football; I came in second for that league and I didn't have a CLUE what I was doing.

So for next season, let me know if you want to take me on in fantasy bball. I promise I won't hurt you. Too much.