Alex's Alliterative Adventures

As a self-professed gamer and windows-zealot, this is a big deal for me. My laptop certainly spends more time booted into Ubuntu than into Windows. While it gets the job done, I really, really miss my visual studio.

They’ll be hissing, honking pooping machines soon enough.

Go ahead, tell me that they don’t look like baby velociraptors.

Or maybe it’s a chipmunk. Whatever it is, I’m glad it grabbed my makeshift lifesaver.

Keep fighting the good fight, little guy.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not dead, I’ve just been going non-stop since I’ve been renationalized. I’ve moved into my new room in London (Ontario [Canada {Earth}]), and I’m living with an awesome new roomie. Why is he awesome? Well, he has kittens:

No, dammit, I said kittens:

Not only that, but he’s a man of character. Any man who starts watching 24 before I go to bed and is still watching it when I leave for work in the morning earns my respect. He also gets points for telling me about ask a ninja.

Work is also unimaginably awesome. I spend every day breaking my brain in the most satisfying way imaginable. I’m surrounded by people who are giants in their field, and I’m trying to soak up as much knowledge as my little brain can handle. Plus, they feed me tacos.

I’ve locked myself in my room for the past two weeks, and I’ve done almost no unpacking to show for it. To reward myself, I spent the weekend crashing in the loo. I definitely think that talking to good friends until the sun rises is my favourite thing ever. The only thing that makes it better is if a guitar somehow becomes involved.

First of all, I think that going for more than a full week without blogging earns me the title of Lazy Bastard.  That’s officially my longest hiatus ever, not counting the 20 some years I went without feeling the need to tell the world my current mood and song. (In case you were wondering: lethargic, and Sugarcult – Memory (Acoustic) from Punk Goes Acoustic.  Dear christ, that song is addictive.)

I was originally delaying this post until I had all of my pictures sorted and uploaded, but seeing as I just showed an impressive outburst of intellectual capacity by deleting every picture Mehrdad had given me, I figured I’d just upload them later and let you all browse the pics at your leisure. If you’re the picture enjoying sort, keep an eye on that them thar side bar over thar. When words fail me, the pictures may still fight the good internet fight.

Team Waterlund, consisting of Mehrdad, Farzan, and myself, started the weekend off by visiting the Absolute Ice Bar Stockholm, which was quite the experience. I’m mentally filing it in the same category as bungee jumping, which I generally refer to as “incredibly awesome shit which I will never do again until I learn how to exhale pure money.” The pictures I grabbed of this place were only mostly recoverable by Undelete Plus, but in the mean time you can enjoy the latest installment of the video blog:

After a brief reexposure with a nearly-Canadian climate, Farzan and I headed for the Iron Maiden concert. Since we arrived at the sold-out concert an hour and a half after it started, my hopes weren’t high, but Farzan’s black voodoo magic had us moshing on the stadium floor enjoying a band I thought was retired or dead with what must have been 30,000 other fans. This guy seriously knows his way around a concert.

Saturday was a day of business. It was a day of

anticipation,

preparation,

speculation,

Sunday was a day of abysmal failure. Team Waterlund didn’t provide too much honour to our families on that particular day. It was a great learning opportunity, though, and I’m so glad that I was given the chance to advance to the regionals with my teammates and compete with some of the finest minds I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Plus, Iron Maiden rocked hardcore.

Since last weekend, a few other events of note have occurred, such as student beatdowns, obfuscated political segmentations, the replacement of several doors with “fire-safety walls”, and a toga mosh pit.

The biggest scapegoat for my lack of blogging motivation this week was the prospect of sorting through pictures, movies, and files from the Stockholm weekend. I think that in the future, I’ll just continue to post other stuff in non-chronological order to prevent the tubes from getting clogged. As a random note, for those of you that have to deal with tons of photos or other media, what do you use to organize your files? How do you find duplicates, how do you sort and categorize them, and how do you post far too many details of your life to the content-absorbing void that is the internet?

A series of questionably influenced decisions led me to a weekend in Göteborg with some close friends. Rocky, Mika, Dougal and I hopped into Felix and Annina’s camper for two days of loosely planned awesome.

Saturday ended up being more or less rained out, so we enjoyed the Universeum, one of Göteborg’s many museums. This one focused on poisonous, deadly, or otherwise exciting wildlife, so it was pretty cool.

I was kind of rushed when it was happening, but in retrospect, touching a stingray was pretty amazing. There’s just something that feels so natural about interacting with the beasts with which we share our planet. I mean, I hate cats. They’re naturally evil, they activate my immune system’s self-destruct sequence, and they’ve taken out chunks of my flesh and tried for my best friend’s eye. That being said, anyone who can control the urge to rub their face in the belly of an appropriately cute cat isn’t actually a person at all.

We saw lots of fish:

We decided to end the evening at Delirium Café, a house of over 2000 beers. They only had the shitty Canadian beers, but my readings tell me that this was true of the selections from most countries.

On Sunday we wandered about the city enjoying the sunlight and October winds. Some of us were warmer than others.

Our last official stop was the Göteborg Stadsmuseum (city museum), where I felt older than I ever felt before. The previous record was when two of my high school friends got engaged, but seeing a Dell with a CD-ROM drive in a display in a history museum made me clutch at my heart while I yelled for my pills.

Overall, I had a great weekend full of interesting sights and conversation more philosophically and intellectually stimulating than I’ve had the pleasure of in years. In other news, this cooking thing isn’t that bad. If only I wasn’t so lazy, and so unimaginably bankrupt…

Oh, and since I apparently didn’t make it clear before, I’m going to be working in London, Ontario in January, and I’m currently planning on returning to the house of pain in the summer.

“Maybe the churches huddle together to fend off the cold wind of athiesm” – Dougal

I had to take a break from studying to share this with all of you. This is my new office.

Conducting international, multi-hour phone interviews on a cell phone is not a fun experience. I’ve had a bunch of calls that just had terrible quality and an interview that died abruptly. To remedy this, I decided I’d ask Lund for some kind of small room with a phone in it. Nothing special, just a landline that I could receive calls on so that I could make a good impression on potential employers and avoid the hassle of a 1 second delay while speaking.

You know what they did? They helped me. They didn’t just say they’d think about helping me, they didn’t make me sign 26 forms in triplicate, and they didn’t refuse on the grounds that helping students would be unfair to all of the other students the university shafts (I’m looking at you, UW). I had a legitimate concern, and it was within the university’s power to help me, so they did. In fact, not only did they help me, but I have access to the room at all hours for as long as I need it and Lund doesn’t need the space, which is going to be awesome when scheduling calls between California or New Zealand. Waterloo, you should be taking notes here. Satisfied graduates = good recommendations & fewer losses due to property damage.

I was debating between “Ask and ye shall receive”, “God helps those who help themselves”, and “Waterloo’s a giant turd”, but I had to go with the title that best expressed my feelings.

In imitation of Mr. Kelso, I decided that I’d attempt a video blog.  I don’t think this is the sort of thing that I’m likely to do again, but who knows. You can download my flapping lips in wmv format, if you’d like.  The rest of this post is going to be a reasonably long one, so feel free to fall asleep here.

We boarded the train at around 23:15 on Friday night, where I surprised myself by actually falling asleep for a couple of hours before arriving in Stockholm at 6am.  When we finally awoke in the foreign and surprisingly chilly city, we dropped our bags at our floating hostel and started touring the streets.

We spent the day marching, riding, photographing, laughing, eating, and napping.

We saw the Vasa, a ship from 1628 that sunk on its maiden voyage and was recovered less than 50 years ago, primarily due to 3 years of effort from one man and his home made core sampler.

We also saw a museum devoted to the fictional Swedish character Pippi LÃ¥ngstrump (North Americans would better know her as Pippi Longstocking) and took a recorded tour through dozens of miniature models carved in excruciating detail.

Since we were all poor students, we decided that dinner was a dish best served cheap: pizza. If Colin had been with us, we would’ve been banned from the pizzeria for life.  Instead, I think we got away with a few months, maybe a year, tops.  We walked in at around 8:15 and ordered our 10 pizzas.  By 8:30, they had served us all but 3 of our pizzas.  We were understanding, though, they obviously weren’t used to serving such large groups. We should’ve taken the fact that they started turning customers away from their still-open store at 8:30 as some kind of warning, but we were stupid and engrossed with delicious pizza.  I thought I’d be able to resist pineapple, banana, and curry thrown on top of dough and sauce, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.

By 8:40, we got a bit impatient, and pointed out that 3 of our battalion were going hungry. They apologized and quickly rushed 2 pizzas to our seats. They started getting pissy at 8:45, trying to explain to us in broken English that since they closed at 9pm, we clearly had to leave as soon as possible.  Preferably now. We kindly explained to them that we weren’t going anywhere until they gave our friend the pizza she’d already fucking paid for. With a grumble and a chip on his shoulder, the guy did his god damn job and finished the last pizza by 8:50. He took the water and salad away and started yelling “Slut!  Slut!” (Closed! Closed!).  We put our best diplomatic hats on and pointed out that since he forgot our food, we were going to stay here as long as it took for everyone to finish their dinners, especially since the store didn’t close for another 10 minutes. At 8:55, he shut the front door and started stacking chairs on the tables, muttering “slut!” the whole time. We were out the door by around 8:59, and I swear he was going to spend the night scribbling “DON’T SERVE THESE INGRATES” signs with our pictures on them and taping them to lamp-posts around town.  We drank our unpleasant encounter away at a little Irish number described as feeling “more like a medieval dungeon than a pub”, and headed back to our hostel to remember what beds felt like.

One of the things I like the most about this whole travelling thing is the reminders it brings you of what’s really important in life. I’ve had access to closets bigger than the hostel room shared between 4 of us, but it was a place to rest our weary heads, and that’s all that any of us wanted or needed.  We woke and ate our breakfast in near silence, rendered speechless by the majestic view from our cabin windows and our half-chewed mouthfuls of banana.

Being served scrambled eggs in a bed swimming enough duvets to coat a small country is nice and all, but there’s something that just feels right about rolling up your sleeping bag and using a pocket knife to slice the cheese and bread you packed two days ago and combining them into the ever-so-delicious cheese on bread while trying to narrow in on what amazing experiences life will bring you today.

Our second day was spent touring the city’s attractions and cafes.  The Kaknäs tower was only 155m tall, so the CN-Tower virgins were a little more impressed than I was. Aquaria and Skansen were a lot more entertaining, especially Skansen’s zoo. Apparently Swedish people consider elk, bison, foxes, otters, squirrels, and bears to be exotic animals.  I almost bought a few postcards to show all you North American types their silly ways, but then I realized that a Canadian would be pretty underwhelmed if they received a postcard with a moose on it from Sweden.

We met the most interesting Hungarian while resting at a local cafe.  He was insistent that Einstein’s theory of relativity was complete bunk, and he gave us copies of pages and pages of equations which, if I understood them correctly, were a proof of how the speed of light could be broken. Well, they were a proof in the sense that I hand in proofs to my professors all the time, and they hand them back and point out that proofs are generally expected to be correct, and they have a friend who runs a burger joint, at that I should feel no shame in devoting the rest of my life to “an honest day’s work”. The Hungarian obviously had some mental issues, and he spoke with an eagerness and intensity that was all I understood from his German explanations of the Doppler effect. My German speaking physics major friend told me that she couldn’t translate what he was saying because it simply didn’t make sense.  She was saddened that a man could be so disconnected from the world and yet Sweden, the welfare state, wasn’t doing a thing about it.  Sadder yet was the thought that perhaps there was nothing that could be done. Most curious of all was the thought of yourself being in that same position: when convinced that everyone else is crazy, would you be willing to consider that obvious, self-evident things were simply wrong because the rest of the world disagrees?  Does your answer make you a coward that lacks principles, or a mature and wisened individual who can learn from and admit to your own mistakes?

A number of us wanted to end the evening at the Absolute Ice Bar, a permanent bar that’s made entirely of ice and kept at a cool -5°C, but it was full by the time we tried to make reservations. That’ll just be something to expect pictures of the next time I return from Stockholm. As a replacement, we went to McDonalds. They served me Tropicana.

If you answered Swedish Berries, then you were wrong.  I have no idea of what they actually are, but it’s sure not Swedish Berries, that’s for sure.

I’m sorry, Adrian.