Swedish
Street car festival – part 3
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Street car festival – part 2
Eighties
Street car festival – part 1
American muscle
On Sunday I went to Street Car Fest at Sollentuna Massan exhibition centre – I kept expecting to meet Vin Diesel living his life a quarter mile at a time. There was a lot of bass and a lot of people who thought their cars were really good. And to be fair some of them were. Its nice to hear that it is possible for those tricked out stereos to sound good, though there were also some that sounded awful.
Highlights were a purple MR2, ‘Unicorn’, an Alpine for sale (I couldn’t see a price) and a couple of really nice looking Audis.
Lowlights were a Opal Nova with too much bass and a suicide door (just the one) and a Volvo pickup.
I was also interested to see the demographics of the crowd, a lot of young lads who aspire to own cars like these, a number of families with boys who obviously love cars and a few older chaps who I would’ve thought more at home at a motorbike rally. I was a little unnerved by the models posing by cars entourage that was visiting each of the cars and draping underdressed and underinterested girls over them. It reminded me of the comet effect you got in the school playground where everyone is following the football without having any strategy or teamwork.
Akalla
Some pictures from around our flat in Akalla.
The roads here are said to be infested with “farmers farming concrete cows”, because many roadworks are barricaded off with blocks of concrete that look like cows, this is a variant on the same theme. I tried, but failed, to explain Milton Keynes….as an aside, “A Swedish Organization called The Militant Graffiti Artists of Stockholm has kidnapped and decapitated one of the cows of the Stockholm [cow parade] in protest of the publicly provisioned cows carrying advertisements.”
Gifts from mania
A colleague of mine shared a video with me, and it got me thinking. The video was an interview with Terry Davis, talking about his views on computer programming and his operating system, Temple OS. It is a recording of an interview live streamed from a McDonalds, which includes five minutes of camera phone setup and curious passers-by snooping at the phone screen. So this must have been recorded in the early times of camera phones.
What struck me, though, was the intensity of his lucid moments in the interview. Not all of the time is like that, he clearly has trouble with focus and often teeters off into indirect abuse of uneducated programmers or loses his thread altogether.
Those lucid moments have coalesced enough for him to have created an entire operating system – much more than the manic episodes of my own youth ever gifted me. The more I read about him, the more I wondered what could have become of his operating system if he hadn’t suffered so much from schizophrenia and instead had been able to create a community around his OS. It would have required him to consider how to break a system into parts that could interface to each other, he took comfort from his ability to hold the whole thing in his head during those manic phases, and that gave him agility within his small domain. Letting others in to that domain would have been very uncomfortable and would, I’m sure, have let out the wilder side of his mental condition.
Sadly he came to a tragic end of his own making while walking along a railway track, shortly after filming a slightly disjoint goodbye message, and having been homeless for a few years.
The things I have been thinking about are how he was right about Linux, and what happened to my own mania.
He was very critical of Linux, I was somewhat disappointed with this video, titled “Brutal Take Down of Linus Torvalds”, there was no brutality to it, as far as I could tell. It was merely a walkthrough of some of the poor design decisions Linux has made – there are many more that I am aware of. The kernel community seems to me to be a lot of very clever people who have no idea what they are doing, and doing it with such vigour that no-one in the outgroup could possibly understand. It is emblematic of the worst ‘software engineering’ practices I have seen.
What interested me, though, was considering the other options, what would happen if we built an operating system around opposites of the criticisms? Could that be viable? Is that what The Herd was trying to do? Whatever happened to that?
As for my own mania, where did it go? I never really thought of it like that at the time, there were streams of ideas, some implemented more than others, back in the times when the future was bright. I am now struggling under a significant weight, of tiredness, of responsibility, of age. I want to recapture some of the joy I felt in those days, but don’t know how.
I don’t kid myself, there is no way I could write an OS, not these days, there was a time when I would have considered it, back when I got the manual for the 386 instruction set. And anyway, whether I wanted it or not such an OS would end up being called Neilix, which would be terrible for all concerned.
Part of the aim of reviving this blog is to have a place to capture these episodes. Nowadays they are mere minutes long, I don’t have hours to get lost in projects, never mind continuity over a series of sessions. Blog posts themselves can be suitable sizes, and I want to learn how to write, to bend the language to my command, ten paragraphs at a time.
Djurgården – part 3
Miscellanea
Djurgården – part 2
Statues
Djurgården – part 1
Animal garden – this island is home of Skansen, among other things. A place reserved for cultural highlights of the city. We were there to visit the aquarium, but took a walk along the waterfront back to Kungstradgården T-bana. Find the aquarium was a bit of an adventure, most other things on the island are well signposted. Its hiding behind an arthouse, but we found it across the no-mans-land car park from Grona Lund.
The aquarium itself, although quite small, is nicely set up. With a number of sections, including a rainy rain forest and a (thankfully non-smelly) sewer. We had lunch looking out over the Baltic harbour, across to the cruise liner dock on Södermalm. Watching the Waxholms Bolaget ferries sailing back and forth. This is a wonderful location, worth the entrance cost on its own, never mind the fisk.
Part 1 – waterfront
Book review: Skandar and the Chaos Trials
[Hardcover, read aloud to Adelle and Nils]
This is the third book in the Skandar series, a series we have been enjoying so far. They are set in a fantasy world where unicorns are found to be real and have magical powers when teamed up with a rider. They are vicious animals quite unlike those you normally think of.
This third book covers Skandars third year at the Eyrie (the previous two covered his first and second years) – his sister joins him on the island, and there is an unexpected tension between them as Skandar tries to please everyone but manages to annoy everyone while he is doing it (sounds familiar). It turns out that their family is even more broken than we had thought in the previous two books.
Similarities with the magical world of Harry Potter are obvious, but this series is grittier, Skandar being more flawed than Harry but trying harder to get things right. I’m hoping the views of writer, AF Steadman, are more palatable than those of Rowling, but I haven’t found any comments either way.
Adelle and Nils both love this series, the first book was much better than we had expected from the cheesy looking cover, so we continued with the next book when that came out – there will be five books in the series, one for each magical element, earth, wind, fire, water and spirit. We have already started the next, Skandar and the Skeleton Curse. The final book in the series is not yet available but is due to be published in August.
Skansen open air museum – part 5
Misc
