I'm at a really crappy airport in Vienna right now! But at least we found a place with electricity and free WiFi! That's pretty sweet. Other than this little gem, the whole airport seems like it was built in 1992 and haven't been touched since. But we're on our way! Feels pretty good. Still feels sort of strange but yeah, good! In a couple of hours we board our flight to Tokyo and then it's time to check out our 5 sqm dorm rooms! Nice.

I'm hanging out with Emma and thought it would be nice to do a little comparison between using a SATA disk and a regular disk. We have identical computers except that one thing, so it's quite interesting. It's worth saying though that we did this test twice and the first time hers was very much more slower at starting up, but the second time we did the test, my computer was faster than the first time at starting Photoshop. But it does give a hint at what kind of improvements you get with an SSD. It would be fun comparing this computer to my iMac, but the test would run pretty long because it takes like 5 minutes to boot my iMac :P

I have to say again; I am very, very pleased with my new computer. It is sooooo much faster than my iMac. It's.. incomparable. So, In honor of my new computer I will post a print-screen of my desktop. I saw this wallpaper somewhere before but couldn't find it again, so I found the text and I found the image of the fridge separately and put it together. I find it quite funny.

I just woke up from a really strange dream. I've already forgotten much of it. But I was hanging out with my dad in some way, and we we're going to do something. I got it in my head however that I needed to check the grade I had gotten on a course (not a course I took in uni I think.. not sure..). I started going to school and to get there I started running, and it was in the middle of the night. I was running in just my socks and after a while it turned into a kind of swamp-land. When I got to the school there was a guard-dog, at first really intimidating and scary and barking and stuff, but when I got a bit closer I could see it waging it's tail and being happy. A huge black dog, like a wolf. When I was at the school I remembered that it was July (in my dream) and I knew I got all my grades in May/June so I decided to go back. On my way back I was paddling a canoe, because I was in a rapid stream all of a sudden. This is the weirdest thing: While paddling the canoe back I went passed other canoes with several people in each canoe, as I got closer to the other canoes I could see the faces of the people in them and it was former classmates, mostly from uni but some even from grade-school. I never see faces when I dream, not even of family members. But this one time right now I saw faces, clear as day too! Freaky. Anyhow, on my way home I stopped to buy some bbq for my sister or something, but they didn't have what she wanted. Then something happened and then I was in the canoe again going back to the store for no apparent reason. When at the store I saw some other bbq meat they sold so I called my mom and asked if she wanted any, but she didn't like that kind of meat. Apparently that kind of meat was "hard to get off the grill". Then I remember walking somewhere and suddenly every thought I had turned into random English words and nothing made any sense at all, and that's when I woke up.

I've gotten my new computer and I've put the SSD drive in it! It's blazing fast but right now I don't know if it's the drive or the fact that I now have 6gb free memory where I previously had 14mb free. It's very very nice. The computer is big as fuck, but I think I'll get used to it. It's pretty sweet to have a more "real" screen on a laptop. Now I'm gonna try installing Photoshop and such and see how that works. Update: It takes 20.5 seconds to start up Photoshop CS5 on my desktop computer (iMac) and it takes 2.9 seconds on my laptop!

I couldn't find a good free online application for practicing reading kana. I wanted something where I could practice reading fast, not just flash cards but I couldn't find anything useful; so I made one. In deploying the application to heroku as usual I needed to push my local database of words to the heroku server but got this error: [~/kod/kanarecog] heroku db:push Taps 0.3 Load Error: no such file to load -- taps/operation You may need to install or update the taps gem to use db commands. On most systems this will be: sudo gem install taps Which was completely ungoogleable! I spent like an hour trying to figure out what the hell was the error. I had taps installed properly, I had the latest version of the heroku gem and everything. Turns out... you need to run "sudo heroku db:push" to make it work, not just heroku db:push. I don't know why pushing a db required sudo access but.. well.. It works now. You can find the app at http://kanarecog.heroku.com. The design sucks, but I don't really care that much, it fills its function.

My name is Fredrik, which is easy to say in Swedish, but seemingly hard in every other language. It's pretty hard to say in English so my old english-teacher from high school used to call me Fred in class. Which I think is an acceptable nickname. As I'm moving to Japan now though I feel I need a Japanese nickname, Fredrik is obviously impossible to say so it would become something like "Furederiku" (フレデリク). Furederiku sound awful and is way to much to say. Furede or Furedo or something like that doesn't really make it better either. And my last name is pretty much impossible to say in Japanese as well. So.. I need a Japanese nickname. Suggestions anyone?

I got back from Stockholm a couple of days ago. I was up there to spend some time with a couple of friends before I went to Japan. A nice couple of days!

Yesterday I got my visa, finally. So now everything is 100% ready to for the trip!

I have also decided to buy the Macbook in Sweden. It turns out there are a number of advantages for me to buy it in Sweden. It has been sent from China now so I'm hoping it'll arrive some time next week! I might make a video of the unboxing and replacing of HDD.

That's a simple update of what's happening right now. Not really that much, which is nice. I wish I had someone to play Race for the Galaxy with though. It's a strategy card-game which you can see in the picture above. It's very fun yet causal to play.

The results are in and it is totally not worth to have AdSense ads on this blog.

Click the image to view the stats in full size. Basically I got 0.6 cents for 1000 page views. Since one can only cash out when you've gotten $100 together this would mean I could cash out in 958 years. So yeah. No more ads!