Riding Skåne

Today I woke up at 6:30 to do my work for Alfa.lt, have breakfast, have a shower and ride to university for the very first class of my master's degree.

When I woke up I checked the flag outside to see if there was any wind. It was limp against its pole and I rejoiced.

By the time I got going on the bike though it was another story with a decent gale of wind pushing me back with every turn of the pedal. I was already 10 minutes behind schedule due to a talkative house mate and thinking I had misplaced my keys. In fact I had already put my keys into my bag the day before in case I forgot them, but I forgot that I did this :)

Look at me go. Bat out of hell!

With just 45 minutes to belt it about 12 km against the wind from Lomma to the School of Economics and Management at the university in Lund, I started to worry that I wouldn't make it. I pedaled hard and eventually made it with a few minutes to spare at the lecture hall, albeit with jelly legs.

On my way home I started thinking about how many kilometres I will ride each day here in Sweden. On Sunday we went to Malmö and around and I rode over 30 km. Today I rode around 24 km or so. I suppose on a regular day I will be riding around 25 km. Its also a 2 km round trip on the bike to the supermarket where I go almost every day, so I can add that in too.

Soon I will be fit as a fiddle — I just hope that in winter the road doesn't get so slushy that I can't ride anymore.

Let there be bread

In my quest to live within my means in Sweden, I tried making my first batch of bread in the country.

At the shop I was surprised to see that a smallish loaf of bread costs between 20-30 kr (€2.00-3.00) and they don't have the bread that I like, which is nice and dark.

I tried to make it twisted, but the baking forms
cooked it into nice rectangles. Oh well. Its still bread.

So I bought a 2 kg pack of flour and Vik and I have been going nuts with it. We finished the packet  off with the bread, but we also made two apple cakes with apples from the neighbour's tree.

Yeast (or jäst in Swedish) is pretty cheap at 1.50 kr for 50 g and flour is cheap too at 7.89 kr for 2 kg. Add a bit of water, sugar and salt and you have four loaves of bread, which will last two or three days each for one person.

Each loaf then costs roughly 2 kr or €0.20. Plus it tastes good and its sort of fun. Torsten, my landlord has a mixing machine with an attachment that kneads the dough, so its really quick and easy to make it too.

The only thing missing that would make me really happy is dark, coarse flour, which is better for you than the super fine white flour. If I can manage that, I'll be laughing.

War on personal responsibility rages...

Governments are again trying to draw up rules and boundaries on the internet — a nation-less domain they clearly have no right to touch. The free market rules on the internet and people are free to use it or not use it as they see fit. That is of course unless you live in a country that censors the internet like China...or Australia.

Click to view the story. From the Wall Street Journal
(Europe edition) on Aug. 26, 2010. Page 5.

Now Germany is considering making laws that would ban employers from looking at a (potential) employee's social networking pages (Facebook, StudiVZ.de etc). [Click on the article to expand and read].

This makes me laugh like all of the other privacy rubbish that people harp on about with Facebook and other sites.

People want their privacy and thats understandable, but we know that Facebook shares our information and our photos (which become public domain when you upload them) with everyone and anyone, particularly those people that make apps and so on.

There is the pseudo-private option of blocking off your profile from public view. You go into your privacy settings and change them all so no one can see anything.

Or if you don't want people looking at your life, the simple and effective way to protect your privacy is not to upload your information.

So back to the newspaper article in the Wall Street Journal, if you don't want your employer or a company you apply to work for to see things like you necking vodka out of a plastic penis on a hens night, then don't upload it! No one is twisting your arm.

Also if you don't want people to know you are affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, you don't need to upload it.

I know, I know it sounds insane not to exist. I mean some people could not imagine the crazy and unthinkable anonymity of not validating your existence on the internet. If its not on the internet, it doesn't exist. Oh wait is that the point?

Microfinancing culture

While hunting around for an alternative for Facebook (which is getting a bit lame these days) I ran into the site called Kick Starter.

Look at all that money in those small hands!
It could be you or someone you know!

This site is made for people who have an idea and want to get it going, but don't have the cash. There are so many projects that would be great except they aren't big enough to invest in, but too big to finance on your own. Perhaps they don't fit in with any grants on offer or perhaps you just don't want to be involved in the bureaucracy that grants come along with.

Anyway Kick Starter (Beta) is a site where you can put your project up and ask people to fund it. People with a cool idea will attract people who are sick to death of boring old crap. They will give you money, like in this example.

Its the perfect way to fund culture and its proof that people will actually give money to things they think are worth paying for.

With the new micro-possibilities that are open to more or less everyone on the internet, Kick Starter is going to be one of many sites where people can get some dough together to make the world that little bit richer with culture and ideas. God knows we all need some in this media-syndicated world.

Oh by the way, its only available in America, so people reading at home in Australia, you can't use it. Don't worry though, it will only take an Australian about four years to invent the same thing, going by the rate of technological advances in the country. Oh but by that time the internet will be censored anyway. Tough luck.

Words of the day

Three words that I have easily been able to remember are "meatballs", "chicane" and "end". Thats because they sounds sort of funny in English.

Meatballs is köttbullar, which looks like it should have a k sound at the beginning. However in Swedish, when k is followed by a soft vowel, such as "ö" it becomes "sh". So it sounds almost like "shitbullar" or shit balls. Easy to remember.

Chicane is farthinder. Its easy to remember because hinder, means to slow down in English and fart is like fahrt (n. drive/ride) in German, which means to drive. Drive-slowerer. Got it.

End is slut. The u is nice and long like all Swedish vowel sounds, so it sounds a bit like sloooot. At the end of a film, where you would normally see "the end," you see "slut."

A few other words I've learned are smör (butter) and ägg (egg).

Centralised vacuum cleaner

Today I had the pleasure of vacuuming the house. It was easy because the house where I live has a centralized vacuum system, something I'd not seen before. Getting rid of the dust and crumbs was as easy as plugging in the hose into a special socket in the wall.

The vacuum turns on, you do the cleaning and the simply take the pipe with you to the next room. No worrying about electric cords or lugging aroung the heavy bastard or worrying about if the bag is full.

Makes it easy to keep clean.

It's a nice coincidence that I enjoy this luxury technology, but in the last post I was talking about how it's nice to struggle. Life is strange isn't it?

Rolling the stone

I just finished reading the book "The Age of Absurdity: Why modern life makes it hard to be happy"

The book covers a lot of different subjects from consumerism and unbridled desire for everything (and then the disappointment once you have it) to poignant subjects such as the rejection of responsibility. The book also covers modern interpretations on love, work and death.

Following a terrifying chapter about death, I finished it with the summary of the book. More or less, the author's message is that happiness is derived from struggle: that if you are always striving towards something, you will be happiest then. Throughout the book the example of Sisyphus and his eternal struggle to push the stone up the hill is referenced as a metaphor for the happy life.

I won't summarize the whole book here, but finishing reading it at the point when I moved from Lithuania back to the west was perfect timing. While going through it, I started to be able to qualify the feelings of happiness and contentment I had in Lithuania.

The country is quite basic, for lack of a better word. Everything is as it was many years ago, except for technological advancements. In Lithuania they do not suffer from many of the ills that the western world does such as the habit of shirking personal responsibility (for example no one would EVER claim there that they are fat because of a genetic disorder. They would take full personal responsibility and say they ate too much and did too little exercise).

They also have enough to do in their everyday lives to keep them occupied. Doing mundane things like walking to the shops instead of driving and washing the dishes by hand keep you occupied and you don't get bored.

In Sweden I have already noticed that I have too much time on my hands. I cook and then all I have to do with the dishes is throw them into the machine and when its full press the button. Not exactly new technology I know, but I haven't lived with this luxury before.

I guess the thing is that Lithuania is a good place to live because there is always a bit of struggle. You don't have time to sit around and wonder about things because you are always busy just trying to keep up.

Its a very hard subject to write about — to fully explain what I'm trying to say would take two or three books and then some — so I'll just leave it at that for now. Read the book, maybe you will get what I mean...

The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy