Néablog

2007-10-22T20:02:00.000+02:00

Retract that kudos to Blogger from a few days ago. The old archived posts are broken again; the same posts as before they fixed it for me. Including the posts I fixed myself.

So I am out of here. You'll find Néaablog at neablog.wordpress.com at least for a while.

2007-10-21T14:09:00.000+02:00

I am not a big movie goer, but this week I've been to the cinema twice. (Which makes it four times this year, I think.)

On Thursday, we went to see Stardust. It is, as you hopefully know, an adaptation of the excellent book by Neil Gaiman, which is a kind of fairy tale for adults. It has received very mixed reviews in Swedish papers, but it seems as if a lot of the reviewers had no idea it was a book to begin with, and it's obvious they hadn't read it. Big surprise there. Not that I don't thin a movie should be able to stand on its own and be enjoyable to people who haven't read the book (which is one reason why I think most books shouldn't be adapted), but if you are going to get paid for reviewing a movie in a newspaper, it should be part of your job to find out the basic facts about it.

In any case, I love the book, and I also loved the movie. It was fun, and beautiful, and although they had changed the story around a lot I didn't feel they had ruined it; the actors were good, and as usual I didn't recognise any of them, even the ones I've probably seen in other movies. An added bonus - for all of us in the theatre if not for anybody else - was the fact that the cinema was virtually empty. There were very few people there, and no children, which meant no loud talking or running around or kicking my seat from behind or any of the other things that tend to make movie going an annoying rather than an enjoyable experience. This experience was very enjoyable indeed.

Yesterday, we went to an afternoon showing of Bergman's The Magic Flute. I have always loved the adaptation - we had it on four or five LP records in a large, square box when I grew up, and I read and re-read the libretto and listened to the records over and over. I thnk I'd seen the adaptation three times before, never on the big screen, and it's been any number of years. So it was a good reunion, with equal parts nostalgia and re-discovery. The story of the opera is a bit thin and silly, but the film is much more than that; I hadn't appreciated the meta parts of it before as much as I did this time. The film is about The Magic Flute being produced as an opera, with glimpses of the audience, the props and scenery very much belonging tto a theatre, and between the acts, we see the Queen of Night smoking a cigarette, Pamina and Tamino playing chess and one of Monostatos' slave boys reading Donald Duck. And of course I love the music. There is nothing difficult or challenging about it, a child can appreciate it (as indeed I did as a child), but I'm not afraid of saying I like it all the same. A few of the arias, such as Sarastro's In Diesen Heil'gen Hallen (I dessa helga salar) almost bring tears to my eyes, they are so beautiful (and Ulrik Cold's voice is just wonderful). The copy of the movie was old and rather scratched in places, occasionally, between scenes I even think there were a few seconds missing. Which made me wonder if I'm ever going to be able to see it again. I should get it on DVD before it's too late, perhaps.

2007-10-16T21:25:00.000+02:00

POOR CATS! This has been a thoroughly miserable day for them. No food since last night (well, I removed the bowls at midnight), not allowed to go out this morning, and then being shut into the cages which they hate, having to travel by car which they don't like much, either, and finally being pulled out of the cages (which by then seemed like havens of safety) by some unknown woman who listened to their hearts. They left damp footprints all over the vet's desk (cats sweat through their paws).

And then I had to leave them there and pick them up a couple of hours later. By then they had been anesthetised and woken up again, and lay in the cages like little uncomprehending balls of fur. Bonadea had quite a lot of tartar to remove, but no infections in the gums or anything - though it is possible that she might develop FORL, which there is no treatment against and no way to prevent or halt. On the other hand, she might not develop it at all. The vet and the nurse both admired the cats and said they were in great health as well as really cute; I soaked it all up, of course. They also told me to brush the cats' teeth - this could be a problem, we'll see. I bought a tube of cat toothpaste (with liver taste, yech).

And then back home again in the nasty car, but this time they were quiet, pushing their noses into my hands through the cage doors. "Let them rest somewhere warm and dark, where they can't fall down and hurt themselves", the vet said. Well, the cats didn't want any part of that. I shut them into the bathrooms, but after two minutes they were scratching the door for me to open. They almost couldn't walk, but they would not lie still; I put down blankets and towels by every radiator in the house, but they persisted in hobbling around, falling over every so often, trying to get on the window sills and failing, trying to get on the furniture and failing, throwing up a few times (not that they had anything to throw up), and just looking really, really miserable. It was rather pathetic and sort of scary, even though I knew it was transitory.

After a few hours they calmed down, Cassandra went to sleep on my lap and Bonadea on my feet on the floor. And at eight or so they started to eat a little again. By now they seem almost back to normal, just a little unsteady on their feet. And with gleaming white teeth.

2007-10-15T10:40:00.000+02:00

I spent the weekend singing, mostly. The choir travelled out in the semi-countryside on the outskirts of town, and practiced Rheinberger, Back, the Christmas programme and the hymns for the CD we're about to record, until we were basically blue in the face (and not only because the house was cold). It was fun, though. I needed to get away from thinking only about the thesis, and managed to keep the computer in its bag the entire time. The Rheinberger we sing is his Cantus Missae, which we'll sing on the All Hallows weekend; I know I've sung it before, probably nine or ten years ago. Beautiful music anyway, and fun to sing. Bach's Christmas Oratory is also fun. It has been performed in Uppsala Cathedral on the first Sunday in Advent for years and years. This choir has performed it once, two years ago; then we started preparing much too late due to a rather pressed schedule earlier in the term, although I think it went well in the end (I caught a cold that weekend, two years ago, and rehearsed in the morning of the performance but had to go home after - and missed all concerts in December, always a heavy month for singing. (This year we have four concerts in December, I think, and three at the end of November, including the Christmas Oratory.)

So that was not particularly interesting to anybody except myself, I guess - be grateful I don't start talking about the thesis. I just might, though I should really be writing it, not about it.

And tomorrow the cats have an appointment with the vet, to have their teeth cleaned from tartar. Poor fluffballs have no idea what's in store.

2007-10-14T22:51:00.000+02:00

And today is Rebecka's birthday - she is 2, and she is in Kingston, Ontario, so I won't even get to say happy birthday in person.

Grattis på födelsedagen, Becka.

2007-10-09T14:38:00.000+02:00

Happy Birthday, U!

2007-10-07T22:17:00.000+02:00

I'd like to promote something I rather believe in - the kiva.org website, which is all about microfinance, more specifically microloans. I won't try to sound as if I know the first thing about economics, but this is how it works: Person A lives in a developing country, and needs a largish sum of money to start or expand a business. "Largish sum" in this case means from the equivalent of US$ 200 up to US$ 1200 or so - let's say 300 dollars. Too little for a bank to be interested in lending it, and anyway with banks there's security, and possibly an exorbitant interest rate, and so on. Instead, Person A contacts a local microfinancing institution, where he is investigated to see that he actually seems to be able to repay a loan, and that the money would be used to good purpose. When the local microfinanciers are satisfied, A's details are relayed to Kiva.org. They publish the information about A on their site. Persons B, C, D, E, F and G visit the site and decide to lend $25 each to A. A takes the money, builds an extension to his shop or some extra stock or whateveer it was he needed the money for, and proceeds to pay back the loan over 10 or 12 months. B, C, D, E, F and G are not rich people and none of them would have been able to lend $300 very easily, but $25 each is no great sacrifice. I know it sounds like something out of Bamse but lending money through Kiva is quite satisfying. Because it isn't charity, nobody needs to be beholden to us for anything, there is no non-rectifiable debt of gratitude (which I have come to realise is a very fundamental concept for Swedes - but I won't sidetrack into discussing that here.)

For a lot more detail, see the Kiva website. I'll just mention, too, that when somebody lends money they must use Paypal - and Kiva is the only organization that Paypal doesn't charge a fee from for using their service.

The banner below is supposed to show a different "Person A" each time you reload the page. It's got Javascript, though, so I can't promise that it'll work.

2007-10-04T22:50:00.000+02:00

Kudos to the Google/Blogger people. A few hours ago I reported a problem with the archiving of Néablog, and now I suddenly notice that they've fixed it. I have been whinging about Blogger's various misbehaviours so much, I thought I'd mention some positive stuff as well :-)

2007-10-03T19:27:00.000+02:00

Here are some fun games I've discovered over the past couple of months or so. Most of them I found at the excellent site Jay is Games (or is it Jayisgames?).

In Bloons you get to throw a dart through a lot of balloons. It's as silly and satisfying as it sounds, and it gets very difficult after a while. (posted at MCiOS, I can't remember by whom)

Hoshi Saga is a Flash game where the object is to find a star that's hidden in each of the 25 levels. Sometimes easy, sometimes quite difficult.

I'm tempted to call Trapped a point-and-click game, because that's what you do in it, but the author says it isn't. It is an escape-the-room type of game, with some rather difficult puzzles; I found it very intriguing and fun to play. It's my favourite kind of game, I think, the kind with a lot of clicking, puzzling and pondering with no time limit or shooting. Part one is available, out of three. I've signed up to be told when parts two and three are finished.

Remember the GROW! games? I've linked to several different ones over the years. Here is GROW! Tribute, not created by the original GROW! creator, but managing to be very similar. Not as fun, I didn't think, partly because the music is more annoying. Still worth playing for a few minutes' entertainment, though. There is a new GROW! game, too: GROW Nano. Which is... less challenging :-)

Bodilies is another solve-the-story point-and-click puzzle game, and a very beautiful one too, with great music. It's a while since I played it now, but I really loved it.

I can't remember if I've already linked to Ring Pass Not; I played it all the time a few months ago when it was posted at MCiOS. Beautiful and hooking solitaire-type game.

2007-09-27T20:32:00.000+02:00

Time to link to another post in Language Log: "The "happiness gap" and the rhetoric of statistics". It's more to do with general scientific method than with linguistics, but it expresses really well something that always annoys me no end. Mark Liberman writes: "Most people think in essentialist and non-statistical terms, as if all the members of a category were uniform copies of an invariant prototype." Yes! That is exactly it. Of course it can be questioned whether actually most people do it - it is certainly the case that it seems that most people do, and that enough people do it for it to be what the doctors call Very Annoying Indeed.

Which is not to say that I would like everybody to walk around thinking in statistical terms. I don't. I don't want to think in statistical terms myself, it hurts my brain when I have to. But the point remains: "More women than men like to do X, so she'll like to do X cos she's a woman" (or teenager, or any other more-or-less random grouping of people.) It doesn't actually take any knowledge of statistics or scientific methods to see the basic flaw in that type of reasoning - and yet we see examples of it every day.

So read that post, even though it's longish and contains statistical diagrams. It's worth it.

2007-09-27T20:05:00.000+02:00

There is a Facebook application called "Compare" where you get to compare your contacts (all right, your friends) within a number of different categories - you get the names of two random people in your friends list, and choose which one of them is the more famous, more talented, cuter, a better singer, a harder worker, or whatever. This can get rather amusing, such as when I was asked to choose which one of two bald friends has the better hair, or whether person A (male) or person B (female) would be a better father (though I think the latter was actually a bug.) In any case, it makes me wonder if my friends know me at all. At the moment, I'm ranked as the most organised person in my network - eleven people think I'm more organised than some other friend of theirs. Well, maybe they just have very disorganised friends, what do I know.

Looking at the bottom of the table, I find that nobody thinks I'm more outgoing or more talkative than anybody else. (Well, nor do I!) And almost nobody thinks my smile or my taste in music are better than their random friend's. Hmph! I'll just stick to the top of the table, where people would rather have dinner with me. Not to mention that 11 out of 18 people would rather get stuck in handcuffs with me than with their other friend - which probably means they think I know how to pick locks.

2007-09-24T22:14:00.000+02:00

The children came back later: I was outside trying to get Bonadea to agree to come in, and they were sitting on our fence so I went out there to chat with them. The girls are 5 and 7, and the boy is 7, and they are not siblings but live in the houses next to each other (and next to our house). They told me this and many other things, and I got Cassandra and held her for them so they could stroke her until she tired of it - then I took her inside and gave her some cat milk to appease her. The younger of the girls wanted to hold Cass, but I didn't let her for there could have been some blood-shed, and I'd certainly have had to go Cassandra-hunting for quite some time. Bonadea, clever cat that she is, stayed away until they had left.

It felt very... familiar but opposite, to be the neighbour lady you come over to chat with. I mean, when I was a kid, the grownups in my street were kind people who did their incomprehensible grownup things, but were generally happy to see you and usually up for a few minutes' chat.

So we'll see if these become general hangers-around and fans of our cats, or if this was a passing interest of theirs and they will keep doing their incomprehensible kid things further down the street. It's good to have some social contact with the neighbours in any case.

2007-09-24T17:36:00.000+02:00

Three kids just rang my doorbell. I heard them talking all the way up the driveway (all of seven metres or so) and was prepared to say "No thanks, I don't want to buy jultidningar" as I opened the door. But no, they were not selling anything (they must have been too young for that, actually) - they wanted to give me a glass marble. They had a basket full of them, and asked with toothless grins if I wanted one. How could I have refused? So I got a marble, and gave them each an apple from our tree, and we were all quite pleased. As they left, they gave me another marble. "My cats will like these!" I said. "I have SEEN your cats! They are really cute!" said one of the girls. Excellent kids, those three. They will go far.

2007-09-20T22:04:00.000+02:00

I have grumbled about Blogger, repeatedly, in the five years and a bit that Néablog has (intermittently) existed, but I believe I am approaching the point where I'll do something about moving to another platform. I'm tired of having all non-English characters in my older postings mangled, I'm tired of the archiving system only sort of working, and above all I'm tired of the time it takes to do the simplest update. One of the defining characteristics of a weblog is that it's a rapid medium; slower than chat but much faster than offline writing. And ever since Google bought Blogger, posting to the blog, updating the template, adding tags to postings and everything else that involves writing to the blog takes at least several minutes every time. One of my recent posts took over a quarter of an hour to publish. In the olden days before Google, it was possible to publish just the index page of the blog; now, however, the entire blog is re-published, all 630-something posts each time I do an update, however small. Which means, of course, that the non-English chars in my older posts stay mangled, for I don't have the hours it would take to update the posts (and in any case there is no guarantee they won't be mangled again, even though I use ASCII codes these days.) Of course one is not supposed to publish to another domain than blogspot, and we who do so are punished for it. It just isn't funny any longer.

Besides, I am tired of the washed-out look of this thing, but there is no way I'd start playing around with templates given how long an update takes.

So. Wordpress, I think. It is possible to install it on the server - I'd have to check with Walter if it's possible - or I could just import this whole blog to wordpress.com. I have already registered an account there.

2007-09-19T17:18:00.000+02:00

The wedding was really fun. The weather was perfect, the bride and groom were lovely and radiant, and we suffered not at all from our halting German - though as always, I decided that I will try and improve it, I really will...

German weddings are not that different from Swedish ones, except that the church wedding is not sufficient on its own - the legally binding ceremony is civil, and can take place before or after the church wedding (which is not obligatory). In Sweden, couples can choose a civil or a religious wedding, but if they go for the religious version they don't need a civil one as well. Anyway, in this case the happy couple had been legally wed for a month already, not that that detracted any from the ceremony in the church! I admit that I did not quite understand all of the priest's speech, but to sing hymns in German felt quite natural.

The wedding cake was magnificent and very yummy - and quite rich. Fortunately, we got a few hours to get hungry again, before the dinner which was excellent. I don't think I'd had Sauerkraut before, it's definitely a taste I would have remembered. I wonder where I can get it in Sweden.

According to a couple of the other guests, and the bride, many German weddings include a lot of games for the guests. (Well, so do Swedish weddings, come to think of it.) This one didn't, which gave us lots of time to talk to the other people, those we knew and those we didn't. The entertainment was splendid, too.

Our pictures are here. (There will be more of them soon, I believe - I managed to hide some of the best photos so Johan couldn't upload them to flickr.)

2007-09-14T21:06:00.001+02:00

Tomorrow morning we're off to Germany to attend a wedding: that makes three weddings this year, in three different countries. (The first one was in Finland in February, the second in Old Uppsala in August.) It should be fun; I leave too many unfinished things behind but hopefully I'll be able to relax anyway. I'm not bringing the computer which may or may not help with relaxation. I very much look forward to meeting some friends I've never before seen in real life (you know, Internet friends as oppsed to real friends) as well as the happy couple and a few other people I've met before - it will be a lot of fun, I'm sure of that.

I just hope I won't have to speak too much German, or that if I do, I won't make a total fool of myself. I understand the language pretty well, but when speaking I tend to get lost. Perhaps I'd better practice a bit. An auf hinter in neben über unter vor zwischen. Aus außer bei gegenüber mit nach seit von zu. Think the other guests will think I'm odd if I respond to them with a string of prepositions?

2007-09-14T15:52:00.000+02:00

A Swedish daily newspaper (which I will not link to for reasons I might go into in another post) had an article a couple of days ago about a research report showing that people who spend a lot of time on the Internet don't have more friends. Now, newspapers often misunderstand things and write about them from weird angles - I've been misquoted in that very paper myself - but I thought the way they reported the research was rather absurd. The researchers had looked at online communities such as Facebook and Myspace. Now, one of the features of those sites, as with LiveJournal which I think I wrote about some years ago, is that "contacts" are called "friends". So from the article it looked as if the researchers believed that the users considered all their Facebook contacts friends. It doesn't really take a research project to figure out that every person a user has "friended" at Facebook is not actually a "friend" -- users add former colleagues, ex-boy/girlfriends, people they have met once at a conference but the application's nomenclature only allows the designation "friend". The same with LiveJournal, but even more so there: if you want to keep track of a person's blog, you add them to your "friends", even if it is somebody you cordially dislike, whose words you want to read to distort them in your own blog posts.

So it looks as if the researchers got blinded by the terminology. And the terminology is a problem, I agree with that, but I don't believe that Facebook users have a problem realising that all the people they add as "friends" are not really their friends. The research included surveys which showed that 90% of people's "friends" were people they had met in real life - well, of course. Sites like that are built around the ability to link to people you already know; there are other sites that are much more conducive to meeting new people. If that was discussed in the report, the article in the paper didn't bother mentioning it.

And of course the paper couldn't resist opening the article with the line "Real friends are not the same as Internet friends". Which is a ridiculous thing to say, of course (and doesn't really have anything to do with the article).

2007-09-10T22:27:00.000+02:00

Lemming-like, I have joined Facebook and find it entertaining. Somebody asked recently in another blog: "But what do you do with Facebook?" and it's a good question, I guess. I see two different functions with it: one is pure amusement value, find old friends (yesterday I added a link to somebody I haven't seen for 20 years, and there was much rejoicing), play Scrabble, send virtual mugs of tea and growing seeds, post your status to let people know what you are doing at that moment, join groups with like-minded people, and generally play around with shiny toys. So it's fun, and that's the main reason. The other thing is that I feel vaguely guilty about not knowing much about current Internet trends - after all I am supposed to be some kind of expert. Myspace is pretty much a whitespace on my personal Internet map, for instance - I know very little about it. I do hang out at LiveJournal, and I read a (very small) assortment of blogs, but not the ones that I read in the papers that "everybody is talking about". So Facebook is also a window into the current trends of the Internets.

But mostly it's just a shiny toy. The groups function, and also the networks, are not particularly interesting I think; it's the individual interaction that makes it something I come back to. (That, and Scrabble.)

2007-09-07T17:32:00.001+02:00

I'm thinking of moving this here blog to wordpress.com. Is that a good or a bad idea? Am not too bothered about changing the URL (and obviously there will be links and redirects and things), but is Wordpress as good as it looks? Comments welcome.

2007-09-02T17:19:00.000+02:00

The Chronological Donald was fun, I'd seen it before but it's the kind of thing that bears re-watching many times. I'd forgotten how annoying Leonard Maltin's commentary was, though: he pops up before some of the movies to tell the audience that the movies are very, very old, and so we should not be offended by the contents. Instead, we get offended by his assumption that we're too simple-minded to understand that a movie from 1935 will reflect a different time than our own.

Or, no, I shan't be unfair: I'm sure it's not Maltin personally who makes the assumption - he's just hired to do the job. That the Disney corporation doesn't think much of its audience is something we already knew. But they did make good short films back when.

2007-09-01T19:01:00.000+02:00

I'm not going to work any more today, so there. I've just joined NAFS(K), and so I'm entitled to watch the chronological Donald.

And again I say "so there".

2007-08-27T15:31:00.000+02:00

Not dead. Nor am I a PhD. The latter will hopefully happen before the former.

Yes, I will start writing here again :-)

2007-03-02T17:46:00.000+01:00

And here is another game, Flash based, with very nice drawings and an excellent game idea. (Unlike the one from the other day, this is a puzzle-type game which you need to solve. A little like the GROW! games. Kicki, I think you might like this one. (I miss you.)

2007-03-01T19:08:00.000+01:00

Does anybody else see a bit of a contradictory argumentation in this article? Sweden's anti-spam laws are proclaimed to be useless, in the first paragraph. There have been no successful prosecution of a spammer in the three years thew law has been in effect. But in the second-to-last paragraph, the Consumer Agency's spokesman says that "Swedish companies contacted by the agency after sending unsolicited email usually agree to stop sending". So clearly there is an effect. It's likely, surely, that one reason companies stop doing it when they are thwapped by the CA is that the practice is in fact illegal. It is also likely that the CA wouldn't have the resources and powers to thwap spamming companies, if there wasn't a law that needed to be enforced.

So it seems to me that the law has, in fact, worked. Of course it doesn't work against foreign spam, but we knew that before the law was ever drafted.

2007-02-24T21:21:00.000+01:00

Brilliant, just what I need. A rather habit-forming, Flash based online card game in the tradition of Magic the Gathering and other "role playing card games" (which I have never actually played but I know how they work in theory).