Alex Smollett

Die Mauer

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:42:18 GMT

I was eleven going on twelwe when the wall came down. The Iron Curtain and whatever was hiding behind it had been a constant shadow on my eastern horizon forever. The summer before, my family had taken a road trip down to Italy through Denmark, West Germany and Austria. We reached 200 km/h on the Autobahn - I hadn't been in any car accidents then, and seeing the needle pass that amazing speed was totally awesome. The second bit of German I ever learned was the word "Ausfahrt", from context obviously.
The road signs by the Autobahn are huge by the way, you have to see them to believe how ridiculously oversized they are. But at 200 km/h, you need to have huge signs if you want to be able to read them in time.
The first bit of German I learned was the phrase "Ich spreche nicht Deutsch!" which Dad made me and my brother learn by rote the minute our wheels touched German soil, in case we'd get lost and cross into East Germany by mistake. "When the soldiers point their guns at you and scream at you, just keep your hands in the air and say 'Ich spreche nicht Deutsch!'". He was joking, of course, and we knew it, but we still stared at the eastern horizon, wondering how far away the Iron Curtain was, and if the clouds we saw were over the East or the West.

And then came the day when we were all Berliners. Twenty years ago today. Man, I feel old.

Annals of Probability

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:03:11 GMT

Possibly the awesomest journal title evah. Just saying.

Liberian Girl

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:58:15 GMT

The first ever music album I ever owned was "Bad", on tape, not vinyl, because I was like ten years old and not really allowed to use the record player. But I had a Sony Walkman which dad had bought me on a business trip to the great country across the ocean, and it was through the Walkman headphones I first heard "Liberian Girl". There's a hissing beat in it that, when heard through headphones, seem to start in your right ear and hiss along the inside of your cranium across to the left ear. It gave me shivers of delight when I heard it the first time as a ten-year-old. Still does.

Thank you for the music, Michael, and rest in peace.

Nervous? Me?

Wed, 06 May 2009 13:23:21 GMT

We've been (tentatively) assigned opponents to our Magister's theses. I'm going to defend against a Doctor of Divinity. Eep!

Update

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 12:08:52 GMT

I'm on the second semester of a two-years Masters in Translation (English to Swedish) and in the middle of my final project this year, a longer commented translation of my own choice. Due to scheduling and work and stuff like that I haven't done any actual translations for a while, and I just discovered it's not anything like riding a bicycle.

I have four semesters of English, two of Swedish and a bunch of engineering under my belt and yet I cannot find a way to render the Swedish equivalent to seemingly simple utterances. I'm probably thinking too much at this point, I know I'm fairly good at this... once I get the ball rolling.

Tomorrow: November

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:37:27 GMT

I'm probably not going to stay up and wait for midnight and NaNoWriMo because I'm working all weekend and I'm seriously lagging on school assignments. But godspeed to those of you who do.

(Also: first snow this afternoon!)

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:35:42 GMT

I've been to Kalmar. I said Hi! to the castle.

It's probably the third time I've visited this particular castle. I like the Vasa castles, there's something about their sturdy warlike proportions paired with the theatrics going on inside. Of which I have no pictures because photographing the interior is prohibited.

It gets Better!

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:12:02 GMT

Apparently I have good authorities-fu today, 'cause I just got the schedule for this autumn semester e-mailed to me, just like that, out of the blue, in June! (I'm used to schedules either being posted at a remote back-alley of the Internet in August or handed to me on paper in early September.) I haven't been able to plan ahead as well as this since the nineties.

Huzzah for Phones

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:34:41 GMT

I just finished testifying in a fraud trial at the district court - from home. I was supposed to be there at 13:00 today, but apparently they were ahead of schedule so they called and questioned me over speaker phone instead. The police questioned me over phone as well, so I've had no physical contact with the authorities and no need to commute for a freaking hour or wait in some desolate room for ages in order to answer questions for like five minutes or whatever it took. Which is awesome on so many levels. Mine is the joy of the unexpected mini-holiday!

Camphone Picspam of Randomness

Thu, 15 May 2008 19:50:26 GMT

It's really neat to have a camera in the celphone. It's so easy to take pictures of random interesting stuff I come across.

View from a seminar room at Stockholm University. The maple tree has grown up a bit too close to the wall, so the crown intersects with a window, offering this bird's eye view.

I went to the Östermalmstorg subway station a few days ago. I've not been there for a while, so I was a bit confused when one of the two south exits (the one I wanted to take!) had completely vanished. When I got up on ground level I found out why. They've torn down a quarter of a block, including an old theatre hall that's been boarded up for decades. The other exit used to be in one of those houses.

I was pleasantly surprised by these origami penguins in a chestnut tree on the Stockholm University campus, promoting the student party Envoys A.L.V.V. I think I'm going to vote for them just because of this.

And this is the state of my apartment right now. Look, I gots wallpaper! I actually have a scan of the wallpaper as a wallpaper on my PC.

B-essay Ventilation

Mon, 05 May 2008 20:28:42 GMT

My colleague who is studying to be a teacher is taking a sabbatical this semester. The only thing academical he'll be doing is a B-essay. When I heard this, I laughed and told him a B-essay is written in a weekend.

It's true. Sort of. I got this smashing revelation about my Swedish B-essay a scant few days before the seminar version was due and rewrote the whole damn thing. With a fever. I was uncertain whether it was good or utter shite even after I had turned it in, because I know my judgment is somewhat impaired when I have a fever.

Anyways, I defended it today and it got glowing praise for being a solid, well-crafted piece of writing. I had obviously researched the material thoroughly and methodically, and it was reflected in my clear and precise prose. Upon hearing this I actually said "I've fooled you all! Bwahaha!" and they thought I was joking.

Unskilled and Unaware of It

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:49:51 GMT

I think this paper is a future classic.

http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf

Basically, it shows empirically that the worse you are in a subject, the worse your self-assessment ability in that same subject is. Generally, poor achievers tend to over-estimate their ability.

So, if you think you are pretty good at something, either you are pretty good at it or you only think you are pretty good at it because in reality you suck and your ability to properly judge your ability in it suck as well.

Comforting, no?

Maybe I'll do a report on this paper as my oral presentation.

Goshawk!

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:41:31 GMT

At the mall where I work there's a bus terminal jammed between the mall, a parking house and the railway. Mostly concrete with some slim trees and a mass of unidentifiable thorny shrubberies planted in big boxes, to liven the place up. The shrubberies shelter the local mall rats between garbage bin raids. If you look carefully you can see the little tunnels they have made through the tangles.
Just as my bus home pulled out tonight I saw a goshawk dive at one of the shrubberies, probably in chase of a rat. Which is, quite frankly, not a sight you see everyday.

Return of the Speaker Ghost

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:06:33 GMT

Today the speaker ghost appeared at the university. In the middle of the seminar a droning voice came out of the speakers all of a sudden. The only way to get rid of it was to dismantle the speakers and turn off the volume with some screw inside of it. Apparently we were lucky - some classrooms had recieved the Riksdag (Swedish parliament) debate both in sound and picture.

At least it wasn't in Russian this time.

Извините?

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:09:53 GMT

Okay, that was creepy.

My PC speaker just started speaking Russian (or a similar language) for a few seconds, then it faded away.

A Decade of Hotmail!

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:35:30 GMT

It was exactly ten years ago that I registred the hotmail address I still use today. My, how time flies. I got my first e-mail address back in '94 and my oldest still functional one is from '96.

Bored meetings...

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 22:07:41 GMT

So the English department celebrated its 75th anniversary yesterday with some very interesting guest speakers and then dinner for the staff and pub for the students and alumni. Good times. However, some bright person scheduled a department board meeting today, at ten a.m. as usual. And daaaamn but it was tedious. I was ever so slightly hung over (I blame the wine) but I, being the youngest person there, was determined to spitefully be the perkiest there. Except for Erik of course. It's impossible to be perkier than him, especially in a board room. Kingsley was really off his game though. I was severely handicapped by the topics which were very engaging for everyone but me. And engaged them for almost two hours. And Harald wasn't even there, much to the relief of Paul. There was drama enough...

We scrapped the vocabulary exam for the English III course just like that at the end of the meeting. Unlike in English I and II it doesn't give any credits but it's mandatory for a final grade, which is actually illegal these days. Good riddance.

Focus

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 21:53:34 GMT

I'm taking a course in Creative Writing this semester. Originally my intention was solely to use the course to improve my literary analysis skills, because honestly, my fiction writing skills are beyond any help. What we've done so far is poetry. I'll try to refrain from sharing any of my poems. The teacher insists that developing our poetry writing will help with our prose writing as well, and I think it might.

A poem, being as short as it (usually) is, needs to stick to one specific "scene" or emotion. I've had to keep my tendency to launch into long explanations of background or post-Newtonian spiels about alternative developments well in check. I actually wrote one poem about a really complicated part of my past that, because I had to cut away a lot of explanations and what-ifs, became pretty interesting and open for interpretation. My normal mode of fiction writing leaves no room for ambiguity. It's a good quality in academic writing, but sucks for prose.

Anyways, I signed up for another round of NaNoWriMo and this time I'll cut the crap. I think the stuff I used to put in to make my stories more complex actually were the very things that made them flat.

Thank you Olof

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 20:30:14 GMT

I get some flack from both sides for changing teams but I also get some nice old-fashioned curiosity. I was asked some very good questions today by one of my old engineering friends about not why I switched but why I waited so long before switching. He believed it was at least partially because I had got so involved with extracurricular stuff at KTH and had pretty much my entire life tied to KTH and the engineering "scene". Yeah. I think he's right. Granted, giving up engineering was the hardest decision of my life so it had to take some time, but I do think I've allowed my 100% engineering social network to hold me back, first from taking the plunge to study at SU, then from fully accepting that I am studying the humanities. It's only the last two years that I've been a humanities student "for real", before that I was officially just passing the time until I got my shit together.

He also asked what the point was with sitting in Sweden studying English literature, what I could possibly hope to do better than an Englishman. Having done opposition work on an essay based on Jauss' reception theory recently, I felt well qualified to answer that. :)

Apartment Hunting: Victory!

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 14:01:09 GMT

Hah!

I got one! 33 m² way out on the end of the train line. I'm signing the contract tomorrow and can move in pretty much at once. It needs a bit of fixing up though, but ohmygod I got an apartment!

Apartment Hunting

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 13:02:21 GMT

I've resurrected an old project: apartment hunting. Poked the bank about the "loan promise" thingy (no reply yet) and has looked at three apartments so far. The first one was light, airy and with an excellent view, which I was the last but one bidding on. The second one was a worn down ground-level dungeon and I haven't bid on that because I really don't fancy grinding down the floor which must be done in that one. Third one, very nice kitchen and lots of storage space, decent layout. Bidding hasn't started yet and I think this one may end up too expensive for me. If I manage to trade off my job hours tomorrow I'll go looking at a fourth place which I can afford to bid high on and looks promising. It's also far better located from a public transport pov than the one I looked at today. It's got the local train, 24-h buses and also three major chain grocery stores within 500 meters.
The market isn't quite as hot and busy as in Stockholm proper, but still, the prices are ridiculous sometimes. I can only afford the tiniest apartments. X(

Bachelor of Arts

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 20:01:31 GMT

I got a Bachelor's Diploma in the mail today! It took me 11 (eleven) years to gather up enough completed courses and it shows. My BA includes among other things Linear Algebra, Compressive Boundary Layer Flows, Business Law, and of course English, which is my major.

Summer yay!

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 18:04:45 GMT

I'm finally done with all the tweaks to the D-essay so it's almost officially summer for me. I haven't received the summer work schedule yet and there's a final extra board meeting on Monday, but it's raining and I have a tasty pile of summer reading lined up.

Yay!

Defended!

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 11:46:10 GMT

I defended my D-essay yesterday. It took a bit over one hour. Whew. The only "big" issue is that I need to make a proper introduction and decent topic sentences for the beginnings of my paragraphs. I still don't quite like the redundant anglo-saxon style of writing with first telling the reader what I'm about to do, then doing it, then telling the reader what I've just done. It's like you trust neither the reader to understand what you're doing nor your own writing to convey your intended meaning. I actually enjoy the smoke-and-mirrors style of French academic writing better. Pity I only know a few dirty words in French.
My supervisor said that the essay is worth reworking to submit for publishing. :)

Off to the Rebus Rally

Fri, 25 May 2007 07:36:03 GMT

In a few hours I'll be off to the vast plains of Östergötland to arrange a rally. I've been looking for my shades ever since the sun started to become annoying and I've been forced to go through two sunny recon runs of the rally track without them. (You try paying extreme attention to the terrain for ten hours straight on a sunny day without getting a headache!) Tomorrow it looks like it's going to be cloudy and even rain so I won't need the shades. Which is probably why I just found them, tucked into my rally folder which I haven't touched since the previous rally. Irony.

Anyways, I am to turn in the opposition version of my essay on Monday. Granted, my supervisor says it just needs a few minor tweaks but it's still a crapload of other things that needs to be done, and the University library is foiling all my attempts at obtaining decent paginated not-from-databases copies of my secondary literature. Day before yesterday I caved in and got a library card at the Royal Library. I think it's my fifth or sixth library card. Why can't all libraries cooperate and issue a universal or at least national library card?

Um. Rally. Yay!