MAFUKA

I was wondering a bit during the last days if roles and (stereo)types can really describe the identity of a person ...

My Austrian visitor Albert told me last weekend that I really behave like a big sister. He hopefully meant that I'm reasonable and taking care of others. But maybe he meant that I try that even too hard and am too dogmatic.

Hm, anyway except that I'm a big sister, what other categories I'm "matching" in?
cat-lover, linux-user, blur-instead-of-oasis, indie, German, vegetarian, female, likes to live in a city, ...
i'm not so sure though if i still would prefer vanilla over chocolate ...

Well, does this give you really a proper impression of me???

My friend Christophe is concerned to help me improving my Swedish so he recently send me the link to an e-mail service called "om ett ord". If you subscribe to this then they send you every day a bit of linguistics and history about one swedish word. Cool! If Mischa spoke Swedish, he'd definately love it ;)

Anyway, yesterday I was sent the explanation of "bra", the Swedish word for "good". I knew quite from the beginnings of my Swedish studies that there must be something special about this word. It's definately one of the most used words and from a grammatical perspective it's special because it's never inflected: en bra tjej, ett bra hus, några bra skämt. (A good girl, a good house, some good jokes.) But why? Well, now I know. It is another remaining of the thirty years' war when Swedish soldiers marched towards central Europe and imported the German word "brav" (brave, good, honest) into their own language. Weil nur ein braver Soldat ein guter Soldat ist ;) (Because only a brave soldier is a good soldier!)

Well, to be honest I think it's pretty interesting to see how many tracks in every day culture are still left from that war in the 17th century. In Vienna there are still some streetnames that (should) remind us of that. And how about the expression "Alter Schwede!"? Not that we actively think about it when we use this expression, but hm, I wonder if this will be the same for all the horrible stuff that happened during the last 60 years ...

The april show of my radioprogram modul modal is ready to be broadcasted now. Listen to it tomorrow at 3 PM on Orange 94.0! ... Or here!

my head is full of trigonomerical equations and other mathematical stuff after i sat all day long in front of the computer and modified the bresenham algorithm to get a "sexy" line printed out on the canvas of an java application. i feel kinda proud :) and it feels kinda good to be so productive after a VERY lame sunday. the most exciting things i can tell about that day were that i woke up at my friends erik, aron and ploff's place after their moving out party and that i watched some hollywood lovecomedy with kate hudson on tv.

jag fick stryk. direkt i knäet. au!
i was hit. directly into the knee. ouch!

After a weekend like that it's nice to have a monday like this:
Sun shine, no appointments, time to think and get the head clear.

I had breakfast in the kitchen and talked a lot with my neighbour Bernd. It was a conversation about everything. Starting from love and heartache, going over to language learning problems and identification with a more and more globally working society and ending with the power of the internet and political stuff. When one is sad about something, the best way to get better is talking with friends and see the small, nice things about everyday 's life :)

• rock club vs black club ~ parties
• fighting vs comforting ~ friends
• stockholm vs göteborg ~ my thoughts and my body | guests
• opening vs closing ~ bit of heartache
• drugs vs no drugs ~ bloody party culture

it was a hard weekend. as extreme as it always uses to be here in stockholm. and after 3 glad weekends it was the first one "in pain" again. it's not as tragic as it might sound like but how should i feel after 2 days where i had to comfort a poor friend, had my first fight with another one, organized the nicest preparty ever in stockholm (even though somebody abused my bathroom for sniffing something), faced sudden indifference by someone i just started to feel more and saw the spanish version of mullvads kungen on the subway???

Hm.

I just come out from a guest lecture by Joe Armstrong.

No not Greenday Billie Joe Armstrong:


This one is the right Joe Armstrong:


About 21 years ago he invented the programming language Erlang and now writes a book about it which will be published at the Pragmatic Programmers in early June. He told us a lot of stories about computer industry millionaires ... Maybe he is even one as well :)

Anyway, besides the thrill of getting to hear a presentation by one of the "BIG people" it was kind of fun to listen to him. Joe Armstrong knows how to keep the attention and mixes many anecdotes into his technical focuses discurs. I liked that ... and the same time I felt a bit bad about not being able to share his affection for processors and other (in my opinion) boring technical details. Well, I understand them because I have to deal with them here in my studies - but I just don't like them :/

This made me think of what I read yesterday in my Hackers & Painters book. It was the chapter where Paul Graham actually compares hackers and painters. He calls them makers and sees a lot of things that those groups have in common. They both want to create beautiful things. I guess this was exactly the reason why I started to study media technology - I loved the aesthetics of digital media and wanted to do all this cool stuff - then the private college thing turned out to be the wrong system for me to learn it. Interestingly enough Graham criticizes also the system at computer science colleges and blames them for not letting hackers do what they actually want to do - Well, this sounds familiar to me who kinda ended up in such a department.

When I started to study computer science at university I still had the intention to create beautiful stuff. But as a matter of fact my enthusiasm just got so broken down that I can't arse myself to see the "beauty" of code or software .... Well, I definitely believe to be a maker. In some kind of sense. I like to see the results of my work and I goddamn like to create something. It's the best kind of productivity and makes me see sense in what I'm doing. The problem is just the big variety of media which you can use for creating. I like to draw. I like to combine sounds. (Like for modul modal or when I DJ). I like to write (more or less) clever stuff. And I like a lot of other things. Sure also using technology - BUT CODE??? No, not really! I probably just found out that programming code is not my medium at all. (Education) Experiment failed! But doing mistakes is the best way to learn, isn't it? So let's see what will be the next step to find out what kind of creator I really want to be ;)

I had lunch at the university restaurant and when I picked up my yummy filled eggplant with rice, the cook was saying to me "Du vet att du är snygg, eller?" (You know that you are pretty, don't you?). Haha, it's really amazing what happens when Swedish people get in touch with a bit sunshine after the winter :)

HAHAHAHAHA!
I'm reading right now the first book that I HAVE TO read for university AND makes me laugh!! Yes, really! This can even happen to a nerd like me at a technical orientated university. This can even happen at a course about dynamic programming languages :)



That's the book I'm talking about. Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham (That's a guy who's been programming for ages in the old-school language LISP and sold his Viaweb company to Yahoo! - but still has a good sense of humour!!!).

Well, even though the title might sound a bit scary and most people get scared when they hear that it has soemthing to do with computers, Hackers & Painters is probably fun to read for everyone. At least it faces more general problems of the computer age society than coding and the quest for the ultimate programming language. Instead, it's about how to get rich for example. Or about why nerds are unpopular - which was the first chapter that I just finished to read.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I really like Graham's writing style. Not only that he uses humorous as well as very neat (art/philosophy) historical metaphors/references (For example: Did you know that Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully?), he expresses his thoughts in a provocative way. Yes, it really makes you think.

For example:
Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity.
Well, isn't that reminding you a lot of MySpace somehow? I started at least wondering about if this is maybe one of the major resaons for the huge success of that plattform...

Anyway, this my book recommendation for you. If you don't want to buy the book (even though it has the wonderful Bruegel painting Tower of Babel on its cover which I recognized at once to be part of the big Bruegel collection in Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum by the way - yeah, arthistorian me!!), feel free to read one or the other essay by Graham on his website ;)