Moving

Moving sucks.

After several weeks of packing, discarding, and countless trips to the post office, I'm tired, stressed out, and, as far as I can tell, only marginally closer to being out of here than I was a month ago. It's an unimaginable pain in the ass. And I realized recently that I'd lived in this old place – the one I'm leaving to come to Stockholm – longer than in any other dwelling I've occupied in my whole life. So it's not surprising that I've accumulated so much stuff over the years. That realization doesn't make it any easier, though. It's too bad bzip doesn't work in meatspace.

Moving is also interesting because it shows you who your true friends are. If you're lucky, you may have a handful of people in your life who will drop everything to offer an extra set of hands or a ride to storage, because maybe they know that the only people helping you currently are a bit gimpy in one way or another; or an invitation to dinner because they are thoughtful enough to realize you're probably exhausted and have no food in the fridge. Unfortunately, those folks are in the minority; most people, even those you would normally consider friends, don't give a rat's ass when it comes down to it. Rather, they say they do – profess their undying devotion to you, dear friend of friends – but if something even vaguely pressing comes up on their end, they won't think twice about saying, "sorry – can't help you today." Whereas you'd move heaven and earth to bail them out, and have, on multiple occasions.

Of course, you would never "keep score," except to yourself, and you'd only do that to make sure you weren't abusing anyone else's generosity. And it's not the kind of thing you would ask for, or expect, but... somehow I was raised differently than this.

If there's a better justification for being cynical, I don't know what it is.

Scenes of Unimaginable Destruction

I went for a walk tonight. We'd had a sudden brief downpour in the afternoon, which dropped the temperature about ten degrees and left the air cool, crisp, and autumnal. As I looked up at the sky, clear now that the rain had passed, I suddenly got to thinking (again) about the devastation caused by the hurricane last week. Oh, how the sky must have looked over New Orleans when the storm hit. What do you do, right then? Where do you go? What if you can't go anywhere? What do you do the next day, when you realize the water's coming, and it's rising?

Fortunately, I've never lived through anything like this – never had to. The closest I ever came was during my freshman year in college, when the largest hurricane to make landfall that season dropped a 25-meter-tall tree on our house. Fortunately, the tree fell on the garage, producing only a gaping hole in the roof; no one in the house was hurt. Still, not being able to get through to my family – all the phone lines were down, of course – and having to watch on CNN as the eye of the storm passed directly over my home town was incredibly nerve-wracking.

I can't even begin to imagine what the residents of New Orleans and the Gulf coast are going through. As I watch the coverage on the news here – which has been plentiful, despite the fact that New Orleans is a quarter-world away – the exact same thoughts keep coming to mind, over and over again: This looks like another news report from some third-world country. How can this be happening in America? Most of last week the news keept coming, each dispatch sadder than the last. This story made me shake my head; this one made me cry. (Yes, I realize these are both from mainstream, US media. I also realize there is other coverage out there. But this hurricane didn't hit any of those places.)

Fortunately, it appears the initial reports of lives lost may have been somewhat pessimistic. Still, the casualties and damage are unquestionably catastrophic; as I watch the news reports, I cannot even begin to comprehend what I see. I feel essentially helpless – there's so little I can do from here, although I will definitely be donating to the American Red Cross. It seems like such an insignificant gesture, given that people have lost their loved ones, homes, and so on. I'll just have to resign myself to faith in the law of large numbers and hope for the best.

My heart goes out to you all.

Not All Wirelesses Are Created Equal

I should have known. The day after I got a cable modem installed in my apartment, I learned that I would not have the place to myself for very long. It's my employer's apartment, you see, and said employer will be lodging one other new employee here starting at the end of the month. Oh perrrrfect.

Oh, well, no big deal, I think – I'll just go get a router so we can share the connection. And since the difference between wired and wireless models is quite small these days, I might as well get a wireless model so we don't have to run cat-5 cable all over the apartment. Plus I can work lying down, or standing up, which will be easier on my back than sitting all day at a desk in the corner.

So I head over to Ye Olde Computer Shoppe (or, as we say in Swedish, "Je Ölde Kåmpytr Skjöp") and pick up a D-Link DI-624. It's not what I would have preferred, but it's there, and I figure, how bad can it be?

Some fifteen hours of futzing later, I have my answer: it can be very bad. Not quite crossing-the-streams-bad, but bad enough. Oh, the simple stuff works fine, of course, and as long as I connect my computer to the router with a cable there's no problem. But I really do need to be able to work on the couch (or the floor), and that's where the fun starts. (Well, actually, that would be the bed, but that's a topic for another blog.)

The problem is that it's considered bad form to leave a wireless connection wide open. Unless you're in the business of providing public Internet access (and I'm not), it is generally a good idea to turn on some sort of access control to whatever wireless setup you have, and to encrypt the traffic between your computer(s) and the wireless access point. And the moment I try to turn on encryption in this particular device – so that every neighbor within a 50-meter radius can't get on my connection and surf for porn on my employer's dime, not to mention that I need to be careful about making sure the confidential work-related stuff on my computer stays that way – everything stops working. No web access, no ssh, no nothing. Not even so much as a ping.

Cold. Kaput. Nada. Zilch.

Encryption off? No problem. Encryption on? No soup for you. (Or me.) At one point, I think – and I'm not entirely certain about this – I actually saw flames coming out of the back of the router. Fortunately, I was able to turn off the encryption before it torched my whole living room.

OK, so I'm kidding about the pyrotechnics. But it really did stop working altogether... making this purchase totally useless for me, and chewing up a good part of my weekend in the process. I spent enough time reading the docs, hunting around newsgroups, and trying (with little success) to call the manufacturer's tech support line, to convince myself that the problem really was with the device, and not anything I was doing. (I finally gave up and sent a long email to the support address, listing the bugs I'd found in exhaustive detail; the next day I got an email reply agreeing the thing was defective.) The strange thing is that the issues don't seem to be indicative of a broken unit, but rather a fundamental flaw in the firmware – which means that many, many people are likely out there having the same problems. And if that is indeed the case, how is it possible that a company would release a product that sucks so much ass?

Yesterday, I returned the flamethrower router to its place of purchase, and instead spent a couple of hours parambulating about town looking for the model I'd originally wanted, a Linksys WRT54G (which is an elegant, reliable box even if you're not brave and/or stupid enough to let it be all it can be). I finally found a store that had them in stock, brought one home, and had it up and running in under 15 minutes. Done. Encryption and everything. Reliable signal in every corner of the apartment, including the balcony. (And no flames.) I will probably draw the wrath of Edsel Murphy upon my head for saying this, but it has been working flawlessly from the moment I installed it and shows no sign of doing otherwise. And now, thanks to my newfound wirelessness, I can write this entry sitting outside, watching the last rays of the setting sun light up the buildings across the street.

So, the object lessons for the day are these: 1) Fire: good for s'mores, not so good for computer equipment; 2) I'm sure the people at D-Link are hardworking and decent, but the DI-624 can suck a donkey through twenty feet of garden hose; and 3) No one likes a broken unit.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Wandering the 'hood

Roughly speaking, Södermalm is Stockholm's equivalent of Greenwich Village, or of SoMa in San Francisco. It's also my home for at least the next six months. The neighborhood is a quirky mish-mash of old sailors' quarters and luthiers' shops, galleries and salons, open-air cafés, and music stores. Some of the cobblestone streets date back to the eighteenth century or before. Walking around tonight, my instinct to explore rewarded me with the discovery of a few places I will probably revisit many times while I'm here.

The sunset from Katarinahissen involves no hissen or booen whatsoever. In fact, it's quite lovely:


Dinner was a big bowl of asparagus and crayfish soup, with excellent black bread, at a tiny cafe high above Stadsgårdsleden, looking out across the harbor and the city. It turns out my phone has a fairly decent panorama mode, even if the user interface leaves rather much to be desired; here's the view from my table:



Dessert was a slice of choklad tårta and a cup of hot tea, at a small restaurant hidden away in the basement of a building a few hundred meters down Fjällgatan from the first place. It also gave me another chance to play with the panorama mode:


From there I walked south and then west, past cafés and shops and apartment buildings, the pale glow from a television set illuminating the occasional window. I wonder what they were watching...

Along the way, I found a single block containing what must have been half a dozen Irish Pubs, one of them displaying its motto ("Guiness is good for you") proudly in foot-high letters in the front window. Apparently Söder has a highly industrious, if localized, Irish population.

It's a very small part of the city, but it seems like a good place to be, and I'll definitely be doing more exploring as time permits.

Besides, I need to walk off that dessert somehow.

Kickin' Cat Food and Other Culinary Curiosities

Went grocery shopping here for the first time this evening. After much reflection, I've decided that the coolest word in the Swedish language, by far, has got to be kyckling. It makes even a can of chicken soup sound exciting. Kickin' indeed.

Also, it turns out you can get pussi in a can:


You can even buy it by the case. (I suppose that makes it pussi galore.)

What a country.

No Accounting For Taste

I think the previous owner of this apartment, or at least whatever interior decorator he chose to employ, might have been in cahoots with the designer of my cell phone. The handful of art decorating the walls is pretty weird and, though unoffensive, definitely not what I would have chosen.

I'll start in the kitchen. Looking out over the dining table, we have a little girl, apparently on enormous quantities of growth hormone (either that, or very radioactive), looking like she is about to lay waste to a section of some unsuspecting town. Of course, she is humming Bobby McFerrin.


Then we have the triptych of portraits in my bedroom. The guy in the leftmost picture sort of looks like Marc Almond, but I have no idea who the rest of these people are, nor what they are doing gazing out at me from the wall. It's a little bit creepy to wake up to this every morning.


Finally, we come to the "spare" bedroom, a space that sets new Swedish, European, and World records for fugliness. It looks as if someone went in there after eating several gallons of peas and then exploded.


Oh, yeah, there are roses on the wall, too. I'm keeping this door locked.

Hälsningar från Stockholm

Inspired by my friend Garth, I've decided to start a blog. The title seems only appropriate given my current situation, not to mention being a lyric in one of my favorite Robbie Robertson songs (as well as the title of a famous Robert Heinlein novel I'll have to get around to reading someday). So we'll see how it goes. Probably nowhere, but it's cheaper than therapy.

On my first day here I got set up with a delightful Sony Ericsson K600i cell phone, which will allow me to pepper this blog with a few pictures in addition to my rants. And by "delightful," I mean that its user interface appears to have been designed as part of some insane collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Eugène Ionesco after an all-night bender involving vast quantities of LSD and wood alcohol. This tiny, cosmetically elegant device has a truly amazing amount of functionality—phone, organizer, camera, bluetooth, MP3 player, lawnmower... but holy crap, is the UI bad. It's as if the designers actively set out to make the phone as unintuitive to use as they could, and to frustrate the user as much as humanly possible at every turn. Every time I use this phone, I want to claw my eyes out with a fork.

Well, OK, maybe that's just the jetlag talking. Anyway, the built-in camera's picture quality is crap, but at least I'll have a way to break up the logorrhea—a thousand words and all that. I'm disabling comments for now, because I don't want a bunch of wackos filling up the blog with obscenity-laced tirades, marriage proposals, and the like. As for those of you who already know how to get a hold of me, well, I'd love to hear from you.

Especially if it's an obscene marriage proposal.