February 2008 Archives

It's been awhile since I've posted much about what I'm up to. Life has been busy. After returning from my little trip to the US I started back into class right away. Currently I am taking courses in parallel computing, numerical differential equations (that one is mostly about finite volume methods for hyperbolic PDEs), and astrophysics. I'll be finished with astrophysics next month and in late March will be starting an advanced numerical analysis course. For the first couple of weeks of the semester I was slacking off a bit, but no time for that anymore. School is seriously kicking my ass now.

Next month during our spring/Easter break from classes I will be taking a trip with some folks up to Kiruna. I'm hoping to see some aurora borealis, an ice hotel, real snow (we had hardly any in Stockholm this winter), sitting in a sauna then jumping into that snow, cross country skiing, and perhaps going for some rides on a dog sled and/or snowmobile. I am really looking forward to this trip.

Other even more exciting news is that I now have a girlfriend! For the past few weeks I've been seeing a nice Swedish girl named Emma. She is awesome. I am quite happy.

Non-Americans, non-Washingtonians, and Republicans can safely ignore this post.

When I left San Francisco I decided to be a resident of Washington state again, so I'm voting with you Washingtonians out there in this primary. However, I didn't really know that voting in the Democratic primary in Washington is meaningless (correct me if I'm wrong about that) until today. I've already voted absentee. I wonder why they even send Democratic absentee ballots to people overseas if our votes don't mean anything. I wasted 10kr. on postage!

Anyway, please please go caucus today. I wish I could be there. And if you want my opinion on the matter, I think you ought to support Senator Obama.

I found this cool Berlin subway map for iPhone/iPod Touch that Randy Reddig made. It was inspired by an NYC subway map by Khoi Vinh, and in turn inspired me to make one for SL's tunnelbana (metro/subway), lokalbanor (local train), and pendeltåg (commuter train) map of Stockholm. Download it here, unzip, and take a look at the readme.txt file to see how to put it on your iPod or iPhone.

I'd like to make one of these for SL's bus system too, but have not yet found a suitable map to chop up. The best Stockholm city bus map I've found doesn't have night busses on it. Most of the time when I'm taking the bus it's only because the t-bana is closed for the night, so having the night bus routes would be really useful!

I have given in. I am on Facebook now. I can't seem to figure out how to find many people to add as friends, and I don't want to give them my whole address book. So I guess look at my profile and me as a friend on there if you want.