As most people know by now, I’m trying to move from Skövde to Stenungsund because I’m changing jobs. However, that turned out to be not quite as easy to do.

It turns out that the apartment market in Sweden is, in a word, terrible – at least here in the Western part. I’ve been trying to get an apartment somewhere around Stenungsund and it takes a long, long time. I may have a chance at an apartment soon here, but there are no guarantees.

And leaving your old apartment isn’t easy to do either. There’s a three-month “notice” period; meaning that you have to leave a note to the landlord that you’re leaving your apartment, but you can’t move until three months later – unless you can negotiate a deal with the new guy moving in.

But if I get an apartment in Stenungsund in February, and I can’t leave this apartment until May… I’ll be stuck with three months of rent for two apartments.

Furthermore, I called my own landlord today and they say that the average waiting for a new apartment in town – any apartment of any quality – is about six to twelve months. For a downtown apartment, eight years.

Let’s just pause here for a moment. Breathe deeply.

Relax. Control your mind, control your spirit.

WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY!?!???!!

It’s easier getting an apartment in RUSSIA than over here! And everybody says it’s too expensive to build new homes, so no one is doing it.

So much for free enterprise in this God-forsaken country. If this was America, there would at least be a mobile home I could move into in some oppressed swamp outside city limits. But here? I guess not.

Maybe I’d just as well fix a bloody tent and set it up underneath the freeway.

I couldn’t hold it. I had to put up my Christmas tree, although I know I’m breaking many an unwritten Swedish rule by doing so.

Merry Christmas!

I got tired of all the comment spam on this blog. I don’t think anyone has noticed anything because of the terrific Akismet plugin that catches pretty much all of it, but right now I have 755 spam comments killed by Akismet so far.

It’s tiresome. And every once in a while I have to look them over to make sure that no “real” comment got caught and vaporized by it.

So I’ve added a little safety mechanism. The comment feature now asks you a simple question: Are you human or not? With any luck, that simple question will block out 95% of all automated spam-bots posting to every web page. Akismet will probably pick off the few that make it beyond that.

Please let me know if you experience any problems commenting.

Last Friday was my last day at work. Since then, I’ve been temporarily unemployed — that means, I have a new job starting January 8th, but until then, I’m free as a bird.

It’s a very strange feeling to not have to get up out of bed in the morning and go to work. It’s four days into “vacation” (as I call it), and already I’m anxious to start coding again.

How I’m ever going to last six weeks, I have no idea.

Free soda. :)

I’ll be going for the Coke and Fanta. I hope my dentist doesn’t see this.

I stumbled across this little gem today. If from a page of how to shoot yourself in the foot in any programming language. It was full of how to shoot yourself in the foot in Visual Basic, Prolog, C++, and many others. But this one was the best.

UNIX:

% ls
foot.c foot.h foot.o toe.c toe.o
% rm * .o
rm: .o: No such file or directory
% ls
%

Our fish tank has already shed its first victim.

Who knew that the peaceful, tranquil aquarium that glimmers so beautifully in our hallway, actually is a wild, bizarre deathtrap where those fish who aren’t fast and furious become lunch for those who are?

It is a relentless hierarchy of fish. Between those who eat, and those who are eaten.

The evidence we saw yesterday was a fish spine that was left on one of the rocks on the bottom. The gruesome picture posted tells its own story.

My three favorites of them all were… well, of course, as already mentioned, Miss North Ireland. But Miss Iceland and Miss Belgium really made an impression as well.

Miss North Ireland

Miss Iceland

Miss Belgium

And, also, a picture of Catherine Milligan performing in the talent contest, winning it with a “haunting interpretation of the traditional Irish song ‘She Moves Through The Fair’”.

Some nice guys came by today and installed an aquarium at my job. It’s right outside of my room, so I can sit and look at it all day.

Looks neat!