Unlike Google, at least they're not trying to get their customers to wear their nerd helmets in public. I've been trying to come up with a way it would be useful for me for the last week and I also keep coming up empty-handed. Worse for drafting as you've already pointed out. Almost all my design sketching today is done on paper and with physical models, to be able to easily manipulate real objects in space, sometimes in collaboration with other people who doesn't know AutoCAD/Rhino/Sketchup. Replacing it with virtual objects kind of defeats the purpose. Which leaves representation and presentation. I can see how "immersion" can help sell a project to a client, but I also see hundreds of roof goats that will have to be put down at later stages. Working with plan, section-elevation and perspectives (even a digital model fly-through) allows you to direct attention to what you think is the design's strengths while hand-waving away the things you haven't had time to think through or talk to an engineer about. Plus, who the hell has time or money for it.
Went to Stockholm last weekend and had a great time. I haven’t really realized how many friends I have who lives there now and I’m toying with the idea of moving there if the right job shows up. Although the housing market there scares me.
I don't really talk about my political activities on here since it's usually hyper-local or involves the kind of activities that you don't discuss in public if you want stay out of trouble and/or employable. That said, I feel like I'm burning out. Poet Athena Farrokhzad once said that "if Europe wasn't burning I would have wanted to talk to you about trees". Well, Europe haven't really stopped burning, and it doesn't look like it will for the foreseeable future. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I guess I'm tired and want to talk about trees?
It's been a minute but I missed you hubski. I picked up a temporary twitter ban back in July just as the most stupid, racist, reactionary election campaign of my life (so far) kicked off and decided to tap out of The Spectacle for a bit. Even though the goat burning doesn't seem to have helped the world at large it seems to have helped me. I'm in a much better place mentally and physically than a year ago. Looking forward to whatever comes next.
Kohl is horribly upset when he arrives. So he sits down, and then he kind of starts to... eat... butter. And he eats copious amounts of butter. First a plate, I imagine there's ten of those butter pieces, ten grams each lying there, he quickly consumes. And then he brings in another one, which is also eaten.
Someone should try to get on Fox News by calling this the Down To The Countryside Movement of the leftist Plandemic Cultural Revolution.
Looks like Sweden will be applying for NATO membership in June. No referendum and no party convention to let the grassroots have a say, the socdems once again insisting to be the ones in charge of implementing the right’s politics. I hate it.
The local Rojava solidarity network has temporarily switched over to supporting Ukraine resistance. Today, two ambulances are leaving for Ukraine with protective gear and equipment for ten comrades, 600 IFAKs and some other requested items that will be picked up on the way. Hopefully it will get there in time. The refugee support network that was started in 2015 is also getting ready to scale back up again, for when/if it's needed. Hoping for a quick peace.
Back in the day people in Sweden used klarskinn, dried fish skin from eel and burbot, when reusing coffee grounds, to clarify the liquid and make the coffee look fresh and clear. Emphasis on "look", pretty sure it tasted like fishy weak coffee but if fermented herring is a big part of your diet the fish smell probably won't bother you. Never heard of eggs being used in this way but it makes sense, similar to how you would clarify a consommé.
Last week most of the remaining restrictions were lifted. On Sunday I watched my home team play soccer in a sold out stadium for the first time in 583 days. It felt like magic, the whole neighborhood leaving the bars and marching with drums, flags and flares through the streets to the stadium. During the pandemic I've almost forgotten why I enjoy living here. Not anymore. For my birthday in February of 2020 my brother gave me tickets for the season premiere, which never happened. Since then he's moved away, but hopefully we can go together next year.
I thought I recognized him from somewhere, then realized it's the bean guy!
As kleinbl00 said, akvavit is best served ice cold. These days it's usually served at christmas, easter and midsummer, paired with different kinds of pickled herring, where it acts as a palette cleanser. And you can give us sill But you will still be erring Unless you also will Give us a glass of Akvavit That sure smells sweet To Swedes in heat It gives the fish its feet It makes the dish completeYou can give us herring
The dark secret of my profession is that 90% of landscape architects knows very little about trees. This square was built ten years ago and I doubt those trees have grown more than an inch or two since then. Common beech has the scientific name Fagus sylvatica, "sylvatica" meaning "of the forest", meaning the complete opposite of a windy, barren granite hellscape. But beech trees are "iconic" of the south and the competition entry promised beech and won because of beech, so beech it is. They have a really shallow root system so the whole sub terrain of that plaza is an artificial vegetation bed kept together with pumice, charcoal and prayers that nobody drives a truck over it. The runoff has to be kept separate and not allowed to infiltrate the bed since the salting of the roads during the winter would kill the trees in a year. A real marvel of engineering, but the landscape architect should be ashamed.
One of my regular drinking establishments in Oslo (now permanently closed) always played Dire Straits' "Walk Of Life" right before closing. This was before The "Walk Of Life" Project was a thing. Hypothesis: "Walk Of Life" by Dire Straits is the perfect song to end anything.
Nice, I translated the article that later became this book last year.
Had a mix-up with my meds this morning, starting the day with a sleeping pill, so it's been a coffee-fueled struggle kind of day. I'm really tempted to buy a Yamaha FS1 moped to joy-ride around the island this summer, but they cost about the same (or more) as a veteran-classified and tax-exempt car like a Saab 900 or a Volvo 240.
I was expecting performance art.
The criticism of this strategy is getting harsher every day. Last week a group of 22 scientists called on the government to take charge and stop relying on the "talentless officials" of the Public Health Agency (Folkhälsomyndigheten). What has been happening in the background is new laws has been put into place to give the government greater abilities to put emergency measures in place, such as closing schools and instituting curfews, without having to take it through parliament. My brother who may or may not be doing "essential work" was asked a few weeks back by his boss if he would be affected if schools and daycare were to close, so a partial closing of schools and daycare for all but the children of essential workers is definitely being prepared for. (Data source) It's interesting how concentrated the outbreak is to Stockholm and the neighboring regions where many people commute to Stockholm. The "sport holiday" when people went to the Alps on ski trips occur on different weeks in different parts of the country, Skåne were I live had its holiday a week before Stockholm, so maybe the spread in the ski resort in Austria and Italy hadn't really skyrocketed by then. Another difference between Malmö and Stockholm is that a) Malmö stopped visitors to retirement homes earlier than Stockholm and b) ran information campaigns in multiple languages.So Sweden has based its policies on two premises: (1) The coronavirus can only be managed, not suppressed. Short of going full Wuhan on the entire planet, we’ll have to live with it. (2) People won’t tolerate severe lockdown for more than a month or two, since boredom, isolation, and economic desperation will get overwhelming.
You reminded me of this video of Emmylou crying next to the king of Sweden.
Quarantine goal: learn the whole dance.
I'd say all forms of baking counts as long as you post pics!
Portugal is doing better than us, even though we have about the same number of hospital beds and IC units. Something I learned yesterday is that six of the fifteen deaths in Stockholm was in the Somali community in one of the suburbs. Information in languages other than Swedish and English was apparently sparse/non-existent in the beginning, which turned out to be a deadly mistake.
Thank you all for your suggestions on how to live with Windows, my Microsoft-controlled existence feels a lot easier now. I managed to move my Linux virtual machine over from VMWare Fusion on my Macbook Pro and after whispering soothing words into its ear it now lives happily under Windows. For when I don't need the whole Linux desktop experience I've now got a Ubuntu terminal in my start menu, which is now located at the top of the screen. Rainmeter is really nice, I used to run GeekTools back in the day but for some silly reason stopped. I haven't dared to run those de-bloater scripts yet, but hopefully will get around to it this weekend. Still trying to find a native RSS reader that doesn't suck, but I'm leaning more and more towards going with a web solution. My only problem right now is ironically that I can't get my printer to work which is connected to the network through an Airport Express. Trying to get it to work with Bonjour only makes the installer crash. Thanks, Apple!