Bought a new bike today as you can see on my photos.

I also started to make wine. We'll see how that turns out. It should be done in a week. It cost about 20SEK/litre (=2.4USD), but then all the equipment was included. The actual wine is about half the price.

I'll try to make some beer and more fun stuff later on. I wanted to try out some wheat beer with Roman chocolate taste and some non-distilled vodka (sugar with yeast made to make quite pure alcohol up to 24%, but that might not be legal... I guess I should check that before I try it), but at least the first is kind of easy to fail with, so I start slow with the classic wine.

Then I have no idea what to do with all the wine... Well, that's another problem. It's still a cheap hobby.

I've been playing KhanWars for a while now, but I'll quit now. I've figured out how to build the perfect army, I'm ready to get my maximum 10 castles and spend time on fighting others. But it simply takes way more time than I have and it isn't that fun anymore.

I should make a funnier and more interesting strategic game. Something that one can play less than an hour per day and that is always evolving into new interesting patterns.

Well, well... I have stuff to do to Elftown first. And another totally mad project that probably never will happen, but it's worth spending some design time on, I think. It's a secret so far though.

Damn I'm slow. I better watch some lectures or something lazy...

This was a pretty fun and interesting speech about how to innovation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amt3ag2BaKc

It basically says:
1) You have to work hard.
2) You have to explore other possibilities and do things no one else does.
3) You will fail.
4) Some people will try to stop you because any innovation brings change.
5) If you don't allow your employees or children to do what they really want a part of their time, your business will not grow and they will be hurt in the process.

IB2009-07-14

Cats, Space, Lithuania, WoW!

ib2009-07-12

Weekend edition! Even crappier than usual!

Beer diet

International Byhålenytt

A test to see how well I can run a daily or almost daily news site. I'll try to combine interesting facts, real news, irony and incompetence of local newspapers combined with international news.

I think the style will change after a while, and I'll try to keep it quite short, but released it as close to once per day as possible.

Get your typing skills up to speed...

http://www.powertyping.com/qwerty/lessonsq.html

Damn I have never been this slow! After trying to type correctly in that test, I simply can't type well anymore.

That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0

And when Krill was almost done with its repairs, it died again! Not so much problems, because it just could restart and then continue almost where it was in its repairs.

Then a few minutes later it seemed like the thunder had stopped and I started the sites. I was about to post some news about the crash, and while doing that, there was another power problem and Krill died again!

And this time I had to start all over with repairing all tables. I really really don't like MySQL-tables! Repairing indexes is no fun when it takes hours!

Damn! Krill died with Elfpack, Fake and the other sites!

But Elftown somehow survived thanks to it's great (and quite expensive) power-supply. But there are still heavy thunderstorms here and the damn shit doesn't seem to want to stop!

The UPS should be here in the afternoon... If these thunderstorms continue, I better turn Elftown off at once and connect it. But it takes 8 hours to charge the battery so I guess I'll just do that first as it isn't that much use without the battery loaded. Well... Maybe some use. The power-failures are mostly only half a second or so, which a pretty empty battery should be able to handle.

Start practicing and learn how to use your sonar!

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/01/spanish_sonar_superpowers/
Basically: Click with your tongue and listen to the difference in the sound depending on if there is an object in from of you.

I find it the hardest to make those damn sounds sound the same all the time.

A world wide ant empire:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8127000/8127519.stm

There are some power-problems here... Elftown survived though, but my UPS was screaming and Krill (www.elfpack.com) died.

http://writersco.heddate.com/

Beer wars

I just saw the pretty nice documentary Beer Wars. Mostly interesting to [Viking], I guess. But it do have quite a few general issues that is interesting (The woman making it doesn't even drink alcohol).

It clearly displays both how huge companies can benefit the society by bringing what they want, but cheaper, but also how "cheaper" might start to mean "the only and more expensive choice" when regulations and bought politicians start to hit an industry.

You can download the movie from here for example: 
http://www.mininova.org/tor/2717144

If you want to learn a lot of interesting things about beer, then this movie has not so much to offer. It's more about business, but it's quite fun, especially in the beginning. In the end it's more about Anheuser-Busch(Bud, you know?)-bashing.

I myself had never heard of that three-tier beer distribution system (http://www.beer-brewing.com/beer-brewing/US_beer_industry/beer_distribution.htm) which is another one of those American inventions that should have been undone (Even though it's a step up from the prohibition). Compared to that the Swedish Systembolaget-retail monopoly seems like a good idea.

The Pirates have sold out

For you who like squids and such stuff. This is a really nice talk:

Ocean depths and the Undersea Voyager Project.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4iDQsXIi3I

http://underseavoyager.org/

One interesting fact is a calculation about that to support the sperm whale population of the world, there have to be about 6 000 000 000 giant squids in the world's seas. But they live at such depths and are so afraid of light that they are almost unknown anyway.