Gotta post every month

Writing the thesis and finishing off the astrophysics course.

Programming every now and then, terrain texturing now based on Wang-like corner tiles, currently updating the FRM code for models.

Got interested in Gibson SG:s again, pretty little things. Too bad they're so inexpensive, I may waste money on one really soon.

And Fender now has American Standard Strats with lipsticks. *sigh*

Yamaha THR amps look like fun.

Trying to improvise the "solo bits" on "Mary had a little lamb" by SRV, great fun.

Still doing some Japanese, not trivial all on my own, but I'm progressing, slowly.

Not far from mastering Mill's mess with three balls.

I love the IT crowd. Moss would be an amazing friend, Sheldon's an ass.

Been looking at porting the iwlwifi 2230 driver to FreeBSD, wanna use that so bad (so I can wear the BSD horns, lookup at the FreeBSD mall. Btw that is a joke.).

Razer Abyssus is brilliant, light-weight and simple, especially on the Artisan Shiden mid. I thought the edges would hurt, but they hardly do. Lack of side-buttons is not a problem, people who give negative reviews for that on this mouse are idiots (like giving the best orange jam in the world a bad review because it's a bit sweet for potatoes). Tried a bit of CS 1.6 to try it out for real, first time for ages, popped a bunch more headshots than I did back in the day. So a good review from me on that pointer setup.

I feel like I'm flat-lining. It's the only way to keep myself in working condition I guess, 'cause I've figured my issues came to stay, forever.

In any case, I made an entry for March \../ >_< \../

Gearing up for the showdown

Writing, doing coursework and not much else, must mean I'm close to having my fifth academic degree. In Sweden we have Bachelor, Master, Civilingenjör, Licentiat and Doctor. Working slowly on upgrading the light organ artwork in the Chalmers physics building, need to look up some atmospheric muon shower simulations before I go much further with that. Started with a course in interstellar matter, I had forgotten how amazing space is. Too big for me though, I prefer to dream about it. And the Beta-NMR has been moved out of the way for the HIE-ISOLDE upgrade.

I finally bought protection and a new (expensive!) saddle for my bike, ready to trek the Swedish freeride routes. Can't wait to take it out for a new spin. Should've bought a new saddle for the Juras.

Tuned down my acoustic for some Busted Bicycle and playing around with Foggy Mountain Breakdown on the NCST.

Other than that I have surprisingly little to say. Well, I'm learning a little Japanese almost every day.

Let's hope February will be a tad bit more spectacular, eh?

Let's make 2013 a good year!

In some parts of the world, some people are already getting hammered and doing stupid things they'll regret in a couple of hours, while I'm trying to work out a good way to composite my unique terrain textures. And thinking I should probably do something else, other than waiting for my parents to start with dinner so I can have a look and learn for once how they do those delicious oven baked lobsters. Biological diversity.

Anyway, it's been a weird year in many ways, mainly it's been pretty bloody horrible to me. Some things were bound to happen at some point in my life anyway, good to know how badly they can cut you.

Still, besides all the depression and painful self-revelations, I had a lot of good experiences. For example, I have my licentiate degree (halfway Ph.D. here in Sweden), I finally visited my good friend Jonathan in the US and I had a beautiful trip to Japan to meet my relatives and realize I MUST learn the language and, if I can, actually move there. I've also learnt that I have a decent initial impression on people, but I'm too scared of letting people in. I feel sorry for a few people because of that, and I feel really sorry for one person in particular...

The world is a big place and I'm not sure where to go. And what to do there. That's the inevitable and wonderful thing with life I guess, one must accept that, use common sense and try to be happy. Can be bloody difficult, not a good idea for the resolutions.

Never forget, but never dwell, and aim your eyes at the horizon and smile with the sun in your face,
Happy 2013 everybody!

Gosh, this post = mush x 1000, huh? :p

Buncha' trips and some self-revelations

Been traveling about and been "unavailable" for 6 weekends in a row, it's getting ridiculous. I hope next year will be a bit calmer, but I'll be dying from coursework and writing my Ph.D. thesis instead.

The trip to Örebro was real nice, my friend and his wife there are really good people and I enjoyed the stay. I forced them up the "mushroom" water tower, a well-known landmark of Örebro.

I started my travel to Japan early morning on the 1st of December, and after various flight and bus trips, on the afternoon the next day I ended up in Matsue for EMIS 2012, the largest conference I've been to yet. I'm glad I didn't have to hold a presentation there, the lecture hall in Kunibiki-messe is enormous. The poster sessions were nice, I learnt about really exotic ways of polarizing the nuclear spin of things, but they were all at low energies. Lots of technical and overview talks were a nice change from the usual 50/50 theory/experiment conferences I normally attend.
In the evenings, my supervisors and I picked restaurants not on the distributed map of restaurants (we were in Japan, the people there are great and you should avoid the "easy" places), including a shabu-shabu+sukiyaki place and a super-small amazing sushi-place where the chef prepared the pieces right in front of us. There was also a trip to a lighthouse in Izumo and a big shrine, and an evening in the beautiful Vogel park with an amazing buffet and a Kabuki-show. After the conference, I took the train down south, with a panicked 8-min change from a regional train to Shinkanzen in Okoyama, to Hakata station in Fukuoka, where my uncle picked me up and we went to Iizuka where most of my Japanese relatives live. I haven't seen my Japanese relatives for 5 years and their English (and my Japanese) hadn't improved one bit. Immense communication troubles was worth seeing them again though, and since the first evening after my return, I've spent 1+ h every day studying Japanese. I have to learn to speak, listen, read and write, no matter what and if I can find work, I will move there. The food and the people feel so much more like home to me than anything else.

Writing this from the CERN hostel in Geneva, had my talk today on the tilted foils experiment from July. Had to make a 20 min talk fit into a 5 min slot, managed to cut it down to 15 min and make the listeners happy about a slightly saved coffee break.

Working on removing the texture flickering on the FoF terrain, texture-magnification case solved, need to implement FBOs nicely to solve the on-GPU texture-compositing case.

Digging the heavy pure nickel Pyramid strings I put on my guitar, but I'd love to try even thicker strings so that I can let it rip even harder.

And oh, apparently I've had strong social anxiety and a mild form of AS, of which the latter will be dropped and included in the whole range of autism. I've had these since I was a kid (~4-6 years old) which explains a whole lot of things. I'm not gonna change who I am though, I've lived with these conditions all my life and this is the person my family and friends know and appreciate, and I don't feel a need to become "one of the pack" anyway. I just hope it won't be a growing problem.

Getting better

I had one bad weekend a few weeks ago, and decided to see a therapist. There's a company which allows three free visits, and it seems that was enough, I feel a lot better these days. I don't spend nowhere near as much brain activity on useless junk and I can actually find long sessions to work and play around without being interrupted by darkness. Feel almost great! Fixed a bunch of terrain bugs and I'm now trying to reduce the flickering and to further develop the texture synthesis. Went to GSI for a bit, helped out where I could. Got new data for LAND, woho! Other than that... Things are just rolling on and I don't worry about things so much. Need to finish my poster for EMIS 2012 real soon though. At friend's place, gonna hold four presentations tomorrow, for a bunch of high school physics nerds. I'll show them what a real nerd is. And then we'll have a tour through Örebro I guess, first time for me! Short post, at least that means my mind is on more important, selfless things.

Settling in, for a while

Moved into my new apartment, my parents and my older brother helped me move in and get things together. It's an ok apartment (two rooms, 54m2, and a proper kitchen) in a not so wonderful neighbourhood, but I shouldn't complain too much. At least I can cook and bake without having to worry about puncturing the kitchen walls with my skinny elbows, like in the kitchenette in my apartment in Ferney. However, if I get an opportunity to move to another apartment, I most probably will...

Working at Chalmers these days and seeing some friends. Starting to feel better, but my head is forever damaged. Work is going really slow, but I'm trying...

Just tried to record some guitar fiddling-about, but it seems I need to get a much, much better mic to be able to record anything remotely reasonable. The acoustic guitar sounded like a shoebox strung with cooking string, I have no idea what the electric would sound like with my crappy amp through my current mics. I already have an M-Audio USB interface somewhere...

I finally made a somewhat working LUA-plugin for VIM to toggle GDB breakpoints. Rather than having to deal with integrating GDB, I write the breakpoints to a file and give them to the debugger from a terminal. I use TMUX a lot and I find it pretty easy to navigate my source code anyways.

Other than that... Went to a theatre yesterday with some acquaintances. I now know that theatre is not my thing. It was a fun act at times, but the whole theatre-thing is too dull for me, there's too much talking with an unnatural rhythm and it takes way too long to evoke my thought processes.

Time to cook tomorrow's lunch and have supper!

EDIT(2012-10-26): Fun tidbit, I now finally have two sourdough starters, one on wheat and one on rye. I've only baked bread on the wheat starter so far, which tasted much more different (in a good way) than I thought it would, but a rye-based bread is coming up for this weekend I believe. Tip for the newbie: using too much flour for a normal dough is a common error (work the dough a bit longer and harder instead), but it's the other way around with sourdough bread, the dough gets really sticky after rising for a night. So no more fresh yeast that I always have to throw away! And dry yeast is just boring, just like using a cartridge or electrical razor :p Pics!

From First sourdough bread!

Back home

Finally back home in Sweden, been here almost two weeks now.
Friends have been forcing me out to run recently. I remember 5 km was a real pain back in high school, so I was a bit worried. Smoked 10800 m in under an hour last Saturday without stopping, kinda proud over myself :) I'm getting better with age, just like cheese... Ran again two days, only 5.2 km and at a friendly pace for 3-4 km, but then took off but only got in at a measly ~28.40. Today I did 7.2 km by myself in 16+17 min which, if I may say so myself, is pretty impressive for a sludge like me :D

Been going nuts on the guitar, it's feeling my rage fueled by my summer pains. Trying to hammer the thing like SRV did back in the day.

Trying out unique textures in a terrain engine, pretty good stuff. I see now why Rage was so darn quick, the terrain shader/s is/are really simple. The texture composition required a worker thread, so now we have that to do detached heavy processing. Now to figure out how to do the transitions, possibly by keeping parent textures. This code is gonna be massively complicated. Also added some extra fractal detail, since we have ~20 cm/vertex for the finest patches.

I'm sure I'm missing something, but there's always the edit button...

EDIT (09-14): Found some pics on my camera, thought I'd upload for people just browsing around looking for anything to fill their heads with. Origami figures I left at CERN, a seafood evening with my parents in Ferney (seafood in Ferney? wat) and all my stuff packed in my Ferney apt, the day before we left:


From Scrapbook Photos

Going alone to the US tomorrow!

Two more nutty things to add:
Just learnt, from John Carmack's Twitter of all places, that Neil Armstrong is dead. From that same Twitter feed, I learnt about how Dennis Ritchie had died. I saw _nothing_ of Neil Armstrong when I browsed through DN.se. I wanna utter the most powerful and devastating sigh in the history of mankind, but what's the point... :p

Also, read an old post of mine, mentioning how I would stay away from shredding. Didn't work for long to be honest. But I am trying a whole lot of other things still, but there's always a little shredding in every song I do. Wouldn't be me playing otherwise.

EDIT (09-16): In Nortville, just outside Detroit, in my friend's family house which is impressive to say the least. Had a typical american breakfast (toast, peanut butter and jelly...), now back on my laptop to put slackware64-current on a USB stick. Wireless thingie too new for 13.37...

I've figured it's not about "forgetting", like some people have tried to convince me of. You cannot forget. I don't want to forget. The memories are wonderful, they are not the problem. You have to give up something that can keep you going through hell and succeed, or that can make you go through hell and then leave you there: hope. Whenever I give up, I feel 'fine' (lonely as always ofc, but at least I can work). When for the weirdest reasons hope does return briefly, my chest cavity springs open like on a cuckoo clock. Time won't make me forget, time will make all hope wither away, I hope. Maybe that'll be a good lesson for me, in many ways.