Swedish version: "Det händer mycket i Kiruna nu."
English translation: "It happens a lot in Kiruna."

Mid-September should give a 50% chance of seeing the aurora. Might not be a bad way to spend my 30th birthday.

The tent has just been tested. It works.

I was filling up at the petrol station before going home just now, when I noticed a rather blonde-haired blue-eyed young lady wrestling with a Swedish motorbike. After some deliberation, I walked over and offered my services; as it turned out they weren't necessary, but we had a short conversation about motorcycles, insofar as was possible with me wearing a helmet and her trying to kickstart a wayward Husqvarna. I don't think I did or said anything embarassing.

I don't know what this feeling is, but I wish I could put it in a bottle and save it for when I need it.

I quote: "Our customer is complaining that of the last 160,000 messages marked as spam, 100 were false positives."

It's hard to know what to say, really.

I should know better by now than trying to get my cat to do anything she doesn't want to do, but ever since the great allergy mystery of '06 I've been looking rather closely for any signs of recurrence, and I thought I felt something odd on her chin, so I thought I'd better pick her up and try to get a look at it.

The funny thing about getting clawed across the eyeball is that it doesn't hurt much immediately, but the pain builds over several minutes afterwards, while you're trying to find something to put the ice cubes in.

I was sort of hoping I'd end up with a manly scar across my eye to make me look all windswept and interesting, but all I got is a red eye and the desire to sit in the dark for a while.

Level 49. And no, I haven't been clicking on it obsessively, I just idly wandered over to see if it was still there.

Edited later to add: Level 50, after an hour of frustrated clicking. (I was one click away, but I clicked on the wrong answer before reading all the options.)

Tags: w00t

I've heard American politicians say all sorts of stupid things over the last seven years, but here's one I really don't get, because it's so obviously internally inconsistent.

For some reason the same people who defend the use of torture in interrogations are falling over themselves to downplay its severity. In other words, what they're saying is, we've captured a highly dangerous terrorist, and we urgently need to extract information from him to defuse a ticking time bomb, so we will coerce him into cooperating by doing something to him that's about as unpleasant as dunking his head in a bucket of water.

If torture wouldn't be... well, torture, what the hell would be the point of doing it?

This embarrassing personal stuff seems to go down well with the readers, so here's some more.

It occurred to me that I've been writing software more or less continuously since I was ten years old, but I've got nothing to show for it. The stuff that is complete is not good, and the stuff that is good is not complete.

So, here are some late April resolutions:

• Know in advance what I'm going to do every night. I'm making a schedule which will more or less look like this:
  • Monday: programming (OpenGL, Wings3D, reading up on algorithms)
  • Tuesday: cleaning up the flat
  • Wednesday: foreign language learning
  • Thursday: write emails to people, update blog, that sort of thing
  • Friday: no idea yet
  Success will be deemed to have been achieved if I manage to spend twenty minutes on each of these (there is a reasoning behind this which this margin is too small to contain; basically the idea is that twenty minutes doesn't seem like much so it'll be easy to get started, and twenty minutes will automatically turn into more).
• Have breakfast. I managed to do so this morning. I hope it gets easier from here...
• Eat a bit more sensibly in general, without mentioning the word "weight" at any time.

Does this all sound horribly obvious and unambitious? Maybe, but as my psychiatrist said recently, if it was really that easy you wouldn't all be sitting here.

It's past midnight; I just came home from a dinner at a colleague's house.

So there she was, sitting across the table, framed by a pair of candles, surrounded by warmth, alcohol and laughter.

All I ever wanted to do was take her away from these Neanderthals, and show her my world, for just one evening.

Of course I normally don't do this. But one occasionally needs a distraction while one's code is compiling, and if one is a sucker for online map thingies, one could do worse than click on mapjack.com.

(Edited to add: I know the city where I live has these images too, because I've seen the car that makes them drive around a few times, and if you call to complain about a broken street light or something they can call them up. But they're not available online except for really low resolution pictures on a real-estate site, and right now I'm not sure if maybe that's not a good thing, privacy wise.)