Our new flat is a good deal closer to the Kista Galleria, this is the view from our window. Coincidentally it also snowed on the night before I took these pictures – the first snow of the year.
View from the new flat
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
Edsberg slott
At the very northern point of the Edsviken lake is Edsbergs Slott, what appears to be a fortified manor or castle looking down the length of the lake. Some of the formal gardens are still maintained although it appears that the castle itself is no longer used as such – I didn’t investigate too closely but there was no sign of it being used either as a home or a tourist attraction, more like a council office.
In the grounds, though, there is a new-ish art centre perched upon a nearby rock outcrop.
On my way back to Akalla from the Slott I found yet another part to Sollentuna, a large out-of-town style shopping centre with plenty of access and parking for cars but somewhat pedestrian unfriendly (not as bad as some examples I’ve found in the UK, we seem particularly good at unfriendly). The centre contains a really large food (plus home etc things, think Tesco but Swedish) shop, and a number of high street shops. Nothing spectacular on its own but combined with the other two centres of Sollentuna makes it quite a well served place, in a retail sense at least.
Hägerstalund
If instead of heading toward my office from the flat in Akalla I were to head the other way, I would find myself in Hägerstalund and Barkaby Flygfält, a small airfield with a suprisingly sloping runway.
Hägerstalund appears to be a small fairly traditional farmstead, with an emphasis on horses although not quite like a stable we would get back home. (not that I really know anything about stables, mind). It is on the edge of the Hansta nature reserve, followed the path around the edge of the nature reserve and was surprised to find a collection of small aircraft hangers.
Further around my circuit I found a motocross course (MC-bana on the map, which makes sense if you know what it is), but by the time I was there it was getting dark so no pictures of it.
One of the oldest known roads in the area, believed to be over 1000 years old (if my reading of the explanatory notice is correct) – something about this road felt really friendly, but I don’t know what
Kista sunset
Some shots of the Kista & Akalla area at sunfall.
Husby rune stone
While exploring Akalla Park I found another rune stone. It is now standing by the junction between three paths near the grave grounds.
“… had the stone raised … Rysja(?), his brother. He … east. Balli …”
Akalla park
Running along behind Kista, Husby and Akalla there is a valley containing a large park. This was a bit of a surprise – I’d found a bit of it before when I was exploring out from Kista but had thought it was just a childrens play area so didn’t wander around much. Approaching from Akalla station it is obvious it is a large park. There are a number of attractions including Pony Riding and Minigolf. Both closed at this time of year.
As I was taking this picture I was approached by an old man who asked if I was going to send the picture to Stockholms Stadmuseum (the owners of the park) – he explained that there is a big problem of stolen cars being abandoned like this and cluttering up the park, he would like to see them be cleared more quickly. Indeed, there do seem to be quite a disproportionate amount of abandoned stolen cars around this whole area, its not just in the park. I explained that I was going to put the photo up on the net and that I would explain what it was.
Sollentuna again
After returning from our previous explorations of Sollentuna I took a look at the map and noticed that beyond the centre we found there is a lake. So I set off to find it.
Dealing with my fragile hosting
My hosting provider started complaining that I was faulting. Which seemed a bit weird because I was fundamentally the only person using my server, and it isn’t like I was pushing very hard. I figured this was more about upselling me to a service I don’t really need than actual problems.
So I started down a path of migrating this blog to AWS. I’ve been playing with cloud services at work for the last few years, polishing up the Terraform skills wasn’t going to be difficult. Indeed, I forked Janus to leverage some of the self-hosting joy of the Spacelift. In times passed I spent months scripting the automatic launching of a bootstrap Jenkins machine to reliably and repeatably run Terraform deployments. No more. Spacelift takes your Terraform and manages the deployments and statefiles for you, and it can manage its own resources, to allow you to deploy changes to your own stacks. Janus then takes that ability and gives you deployments of itself too.
Of course, while I have been through the bootstrap process for Janus before, my memory is full of holes and my second attempt, with my own infrastructure, failed to import its own stack. And now I cannot remember how to do it (Jaremy is a genius, but documentation is not his strong point). But I can still use the stack deployment and dependency abilities, to get myself deploying automatically. GitOops ftw. GitOps. Whatever.
Because my memory is full of holes my ECS deployment could either have a load balancer or download its container, but not both, so I went with the upsell for a year, while I tinker with Terraform to build from first principals what my memory won’t let me have. Migration is the only constant.
Now that I have some horsepower behind my service again I accidentally imported my livejournal into the beginning of this blog. Which seems to have gone fairly well and all my LJ friends are still there and their comments are still there and I now have a two decade history of blogging only a few clicks away. It isn’t the same without everyone elses journals, of course, but at least I’ve brought mine into a state where I don’t have to worry about the Russians.
And now I start tagging those posts, because the tags were lost in the move and who knows how much sense those tags would have made now anyway. There are a surprising number of ‘culture shock’ moments early in those posts – the LJ started by documenting my move to Tokyo. My grammar was terrible in those days, even worse than now, spelling likewise. Never mind, I’m going to leave it in its raw goodness for you to enjoy at your leisure, and will highlight anything I find worthy of sharing.
Street car festival – part 8
Misc
Street car festival – part 7
Gamer car
