Mind matters

Sometimes the internet can still surprise me, as was the case with these wonderful short movies I got recommended:

Rare Exports Inc 1
Rare Exports Inc 2

They’re made by people in Finland. I promise, you will see Father Christmas in a totally new light once you’ve seen these movies!

The first really good finnish home made movie I saw was Star Wreck - In the Pirkinning, a wonderful full length movie, which features Star Trek meeting Babylon 5! With comments like “Syö valopalloa”, “Taktisesta puuttuu edelleen tuoli!”, it quickly made a place for itself in my heart.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend to download it from their official site. It’s also totally free to download, and if you wish to support their good work, you can also buy it on DVD, which I’m strongly considering. It also has astounding special effects, and if you understand finnish, it’s even better And if you don’t, no need to worry, it’s subtitled.

Not long ago, movies was the new black. Everyone watched movies. Movies were shown on TV and in the cinemas. Even more not so long ago, people started downloading movies from the internet, and thus more and more people watched movies.

Movies started to get boring thought. To watch a movie where you might get attached to the characters, and then they suddenly drop out of your scope when the movie ends. And if the director was even slightly wrong in the head, you didn’t actually connect with the characters at all in the timeframe of the movie.

Enter TV-series! Today many people are downloading TV-series instead. I know I am. In TV-series you can take your time developing the characters and introducing a story arch. There’s plenty of time to twist the plot around until your head spins and you ache to know how it all ends!

There are drawbacks of course, with TV-series. First one is the lack of finishing off story archs and essentially leave us hanging. This is the case with Lost, which I stopped watching right at the beginning of season 2, and am waiting for it to finish and see if they managed to tie up all the lose ends in a satisfactory way.

Second one is that the TV-networks may decide to cancel the show before we get to know how the story ends! As was the case with Surface and Threshold. Extremely annoying!

Nevertheless, I’ve watched many TV-series, and currently I’m following these (the links below lead to www.tv.com and I recommend using Adblock with Firefox if you want to start using the site, many ads they do have):

• Supernatural - Into it’s second season, and unfortunately getting worse. Two brothers battle ghosts and other evil creatures.
• Veronica Mars - Into it’s third season, and fortunately only gets better! A school girl as detective. Very smart show.
• Heroes - First season now running, it’s one of the best shows out there today! Ordinary people around the world wake up with super powers.
• Battlestar Galactica - Third season running right now, one of the other best shows out there. Really dark science fiction! I love it! Remake of the old TV-series; humans on the run from Cylons, robots they themselves once created.
• Torchwood - First season just started, a spin off of the new Dr Who series - has potential. Secret undercover agency in UK, created centuries ago, seeks to protect earth from alien threats.
• Ghost Hunters - Third season just finished, I like this show a lot! Documentary with soap like qualities about TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) searching for ghosts, but they go into a place trying to debunk there’s a haunting. It has almost turned me into a believer. No actors in this show.

Yep, now it’s official. I’ve got a cold. Running nose, sore throath and my temperature is rising again!

I always see a cold as a failure, a failure at taking good care of myself. When I’m rested, eat well and exercise regularly, my immune system is at it’s top on handling things like common cold viruses. As far as I understand we have them in our bodies at all times. No getting rid of them. It’s when our immune system drops it’s shields, goes over to backup generators with only life support left, there’s no dilithium mine in the vicinity and it has to try to power up the deflector array to attempt to break the space time… Uh, perhaps too many Star Trek references there! Can there be too many?

When the immune system weakens for some reason, that’s when a cold can get a real good foothold. Now remember, I’m not an educated physicist, I’m only using what I’ve gathered from the Internet and by exercising my intelligence on what I’ve learned. This has many times proven a good approach for me, since my hunches on how things should work have later been proven by scientific methods

Long before people started talking about ‘a too clean environment is perhaps a reason for more allergies’, I already had formulated that theory and tried to impart it to my grandmother, who shrugged it off and continuted to meticulously clean her appartment. Long ago I also thought that it wouldn’t be good to go on a diet for a long time, because then perhaps the body adapted to the low intake of food, which would lead to a lesser effectiveness of the diet, if your goal is to lose weight that is.

I’m not happy with seeing it as a failure, that’s kinda harsh on myself. Perhaps I would be better off regarding it as a sign of fatigue, of me needing to look over how I’ve been taking care of myself, and try to improve on the places where my effort has been lacking.

Now that I look back on the past weeks I see that I’ve been drinking too many weekends, eating way too much sugar on the weekends and have not met my need for sleep! The usual stuff, that is!

Yesterday, that is friday, we (me and a lot of people I know from my last workplace) got together for a traditional DFBS - Dålig Film Bra Sprit, which translates to: Bad Movies Fine Spirits - BMFS

We watch really bad movies and drink a lot of alcohol, and in the process of watching them, we constantly taunt the movies! It’s like “Oooh, she speeks with a french accent, oh no, now she speeks in a russian accent!” or “Look! It can be killed with guns!”.

Yesterday we watched these three brilliant movies:

Shadowchaser 3000
House of the Dead II
Poseidon

Shadowchaser 3000 it said on the front of the DVD we had, but the movie seems to be actually called Project Shadowchaser III. Very confusing. But not as confusing as the movie itself! I mean, a new type of android, affected by a strange new metal discovered on planet Juno V, who turns a killer and slaughters everyone on board. 25 years later the mining ship craches into a satellite orbiting Mars, and the killing starts again. And the people on the ship just watch the android (or “The German Androgyn, with gunpowder in his pockets” we started calling him)! They don’t shoot it! Not until the very end! It’s like “Oh, look! It can get hurt by bullets!” or as if the director saved that bit to the last with “We can’t have them shoot him so early in the movie, we have to have some kind of leverage to the end scene!”. Eugh.

House of the Dead II was a very strange DFBS movie! It was really bad, but in such a strange way that it was hard to make good comments about it! We had to resort to simple bashing: “You stupid soldier! DO NOT GO IN THERE!”.

And I’ve got a hungover. Not a bad one, but my head feels really heavy! I slept from 4 am to 1.30 pm! Wuhuu! THAT’S good! Now I think I’m going to order myself some kebab. Time for breakfast!

20 days ago Wordpress 2.0.5 was announced and today I found some free time and took the time to make the upgrade. Here’s how I did it:

cd $HOME/public_html
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
rm -r wordpress.backup
cp -a wordpress wordpress.backup
mysqldump -u root wordpress > wordpress.backup/wordpress.db

Verified that the wordpress.db looked ok, by taking a quick glance at the file with less.

cd wordpress
rm -r wp-admin
rm -r wp-includes

There’s a new default theme, so only delete this if you wish to insert the new default theme.
rm -r wp-content/themes/default

The instructions said to backup any files that you had modified yourself. And I didn’t have any of those
rm *.php
cp ../wordpress.backup/wp-config.php .
cd ..
tar zxvf latest.tar.gz

I went to my admin-panel in my blog and there was a link there waiting to be clicked that said it was going to upgrade the database. So I clicked it. The page following it had yet another link for the actual upgrade. I clicked that one too. And then it said I was done. Simple as that. Doesn’t seem like there is anything missing.

No posts? Oh no! Horrible! It’s a nightmare! Or is it…? No… or? Could be? Is it possible that I’ve just been to lazy to write any new posts? Yes, that is the truth… but is it all of it? No. It could be thought. Or?

I don’t think I’ve written extensively about what is going on in my life for a while now. About 9 weeks ago I started to attend a course run by of the Swedish Unemployment Service (Arbetsförmedlingen). It’s part of the swedish system for trying to activate people who’ve been unemployed more than a year, and it’s mandatory. This course is about being coached in writing my CV, personal letters, communication and some other skills.

First I thought it would be like a kindergarten, except for adults. Adultgarten? What’s the german word for adult? Ah, erwachsen. Yes, I thought it would be erwachsengarten. Probably not a word that really exists, I hope there won’t be any german attacks to my site for making up words… But I was proven wrong! It was actually a very good course with excellent coaches and I learned a lot.

After 6 weeks, when I finally had started getting somewhere with my coach in planning what I wanted to do with my future, she dropped a bomb and said she was going to start a similar course in Motala (a small town that lies about 45 km from here). I was devastaded, and felt abandoned! Then she raised the Holy Curtain of Hope and said she wanted me to follow her to Motala and do some practical training as a coach together with her.

At first I was hesitant. I would have to give up my sweet life of getting up at 08.30 and being able to go home for lunch, since the place where the course was (Studiefrämjandet) is only a 3 min bicycle ride from where I live. Finally I decided to go with it, to see how I would react to coaching and commuting.

Now I’ve been with this new course in Motala for 2.5 weeks, and I do enjoy it! I have to get up at 6.45 am, and I’m usually back home at 5.15 pm, and the ride to Motala takes about 1 hour by bus. I like commuting, with these hours anyway. I use the time to sleep, to read, to plan future events and to daydream. It’s perfect

Today I got to plan all the activities for the whole day. I instructed in Qigong, Yoga, Meditation, Relaxation- and Breathing techniques. It was much fun! And I felt so energized afterwards. To teach these things to others is something I can see myself doing even in the future.

Not so sure about the coaching thing, atleast not in this environment where people feel they’re forced to participate in the course. Not an ideal situation when trying to coach someone. It’s more coaxing than coaching. I feel a little hesitant about coaching people, but I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t generally like coaching, or if it’s because of this particular situation, or if it’s me feeling insecure when I think about my lack of experience in coaching.

Oh, well, time will tell. So these days I commute to Motala 4 days of the week. Fridays I spend on the course that runs here in Linköping. Both of these things have taken a lot of energy, so I have not had so much time to spend updating the blog and such. I’ll try to do better though

21-22 of October there was an aikido camp in Norrköping, a town near to where I live, with Ulf Evenås. Ulf is a 7:th dan, that is 7:th degree of black belt, and has been training aikido for nearly 40 years. He’s pretty good. I would say he’s excellent actually, and fun to hang around

This weekend was special since four people from our club were going to test for black belt. We’ve been encouraging and supporting them for quite some months now, before their test. Until the last weeks before the papers had to be sent in, two of the people were still not sure if they were going to take the test or not.

On saturday there were three trainings before the actual testing, and since I was short of money, I chose to skip the first two trainings and attend the third one. It was quite fun to watch people sweat and train! And also to observe how the testees were doing. It also gave me an opportunity to connect with Lars-Göran Andersson, a 5:th dan who has held many seminars in our dojo, who arrived a little too late for the first training due to have been geografically challenged by the location of the dojo!

All went well, and then it was time for testing. I was uke to Traian, and it felt like it went very well. I didn’t see how the others were doing since I concentrated very hard to blend alot with the mat. And I’m quite good at that! There were 6 people testing for shodan (1:st degree black belt).

After the 6 people had finished testing, there were 2 more people who were going to test for 4:th dan! They kept at it for a long while, and when it finally seemed to be over, the committee said it was time for kokyo nage (breath throws, that is: throwing people around, preferrably effortlessly). One of them was assigned to begin, but after three throws they stopped it, deliberated some, and then something weird happened, atleast from my own perspective. Ulf looked up from the deliberation and said: “Mika, wheres Mika?”. I was so confused that at first I didn’t respond, and then I raised up my hand. Ulf called me forward and I made my way onto the mat and then he instructed me too to attack. People afterwards told me that the yell of happiness that escaped from me was hard to miss!

So I went in with all I had, attacking and was thrown this way and that way for some time, until the testing ended. Afterwards I asked Lasse (the committe was composed of Lasse, Ulf and Leif; our head instructor) why they chose me and he said: “Because you always have so much stamina left after a training!” and Leif said: “Mika, it’s because you take a beating so gracefully”. The swedish words he used were: “Mika, det är för att du tar stryk så snyggt!”.

Oh, and everyone passed, so now our club has 4 shining, new blackbelts! :pom: :pom: