This post will be short, because it’s pretty late and I want to get some sleep. Today we had an early conference and then went out for a sightseeing tour around Istanbul. The weather could have been a bit better but at least it wasn’t snow and far below zero as it was back in Sweden. Below are some photos from today, I’m sorry for the bad quality but it’s not easy shooting through a bus window on a rainy day.
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The unknown destination from yesterdays post turned out to be Istanbul, Turkey. And after a day of flying and socializing with my coworkers I’ve finally lain myself down in my hotel room. Tomorrow I’ll even try to take some photos of the city, but until then some pictures of my hotel room will have to do.
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Let me tell you about the latest proof of my “chronic bad luck”. Fortunately this time it was followed up by some good luck. Anyway, I ordered a first class ticket from Linköping to Arlanda Airport so that I could sit in peace and quiet all the way to my hotel at the airport. First of the Internet connection on the train was totally worthless, and the power outlet in my seat shut down when I was charging my laptop battery. Then when we did a stop in Södertälje the whole train went black and after a little while we hear a voice in the speakers saying “We have encountered an electrical problem and those of you that are going to Stockholm, we have another train for you leaving… right now, from track X.”, where X is a track on the far side of the station. So I had to pack my stuff and start to run to track X. The new train to Stockholm was packed full but I managed to find a spot to stand the rest of the way. Finally at Stockholm C I had to run and get a special ticket to use on the Arlanda Express train. And finally got that and got on the Express train to Arlanda. And now I’m here at my hotel room and can finally take and relax a bit.
Sitting on a train on my way to Arlanda, where me and the rest of the company staff is going away for a few days to an unknown destination. So tonight I’m staying at the hotel in Arlanda. I really, really like sleeping at hotels. I’ll make sure to put up some photos of our destination ASAP.
What else is new? It’s a new year, with new challanges and expectations. It will be exciting to see what will happen. Speaking of new years, I ended up at a Bond-themed party. I went as Bond’s most dangerous foe, who can remove Bond’s existance with a push of a button, i.e. myself. But there where some interesting people at the party and lots of conversations besides the theme. So it was a fun way to celebrate the new year. It can’t be worse than the year before, right Jake? 
Now I’m gonna see if I can get some work done on the train, but I might just throw in a new post when I’m back at my hotel. Cya later.
It’s December 24th, and time to celebrate Christmas. I’ve been busy a couple of days seting up my linux machine to play nicely with the receiver. And yesterday I finally got it to work by upgrading ALSA to the latest version. So now everything works as it’s supposed to be working. Also moved all my music to a jailed user on the server to and used sshfs to mount the home directory to my laptop and my other linux based computer so now I can access all my music wherever I am in the world. Perfect when having friends over for a party and so on. Then they can play around with the play list best they want to without me having to worry about the rest of my computer.
Now I’m going back to celebrating christmas! Have a nice day.
Today I’ve gotten my home theater up and running. It’s something special with watching movies in 1080p with 5.1 sound I must say. I had some problems connecting my computer to the reciever via hdmi. I got no sound from the computer. Even though I had the internal S/PDIF connected to my graphic card and used the dvi-hdmi converter (it gives an audio stream when connected directly to the TV though). But that wasn’t really a big problem, I just connected a coax from my external S/PDIF to the COAX IN on the reciever and plugged the computers hdmi into the DVD input. And now it works like a charm. I probably need to recalibrate the speaker volumes a bit though, because I’m not entirely satisfied with the configuration I have made right now.
What I need right now is one more hdmi cable so I can have the Xbox 360 plugged in at the same time as my computer (forgot to buy another cable before), an optical cable to output the TV sound to the Sony. Besides that I’m still wanting to build the multimedia solution I described in the previous post, with a TViX and a squeezebox connected to the reciever as well.
But that stuff will have to be bought after Christmas i think. Christmas itself is a disturbing time when you’ve grown up. Friends and family exchanging money, that’s all it is. And since you have a job you know that you can actually buy the stuff that you want (and get the correct stuff) so there’s no need to add them to any wish lists.
My wish list is pretty simple this year, as every year. It contains stuff I need but never have the time or patience to get hold of myself:
And that’s pretty much it. If you’ll excuse me, I have some movies to watch
…for my 5.1 system. And it has got me thinking about how to build myself a kind of hi-tech multimedia solution. So right now the plan looks somewhat like this:
This seems to be a pretty nice solution, the reason to use the HDD inside the TViX instead of streaming the is that some people seem to have problems with playing 1080p over the network.
Well, it’s been about 1½ weeks since my last post. What can I say? I’ve been busy with fixing up the apartment, playing Mirror’s Edge, working and my projects. I’m also helping out some of my old classmates with the projects they’re working on back at the university. So my mind is pretty messed up at the moment. Should have been away playing squash tonight but Jake forgot to put us up for the court so I’m staying at home tonight.
I’ve ordered a 5.1 sound system for my LCD-TV yesterday. A Sony HT-SF1300, it may not the best sound system in the world but it fits my needs and my wallet as well, and I can plug in 3 HDMI based systems in it, so the only thing left after that is my digital tv box. But that will probably work with an optical cable and my old DVD will have to do with a coxial connection. I will post some pictures when I’ve got everything up and running.
Now I’ve some stuff to do, so cya.
Ordered what I think might be the game of the year, Mirror’s Edge, today. It will be released tomorrow so hopefully I’ll have it by the weekend. I’m not a big gamer but this game is just simply a “must have” in my collection.
If you missed all the hype, check out the game play trailer here.
Sources:
it24 (Swedish)
So tonight the new WoW expansion will be released. And as usual I’m not going to play it. “Why not?”, you might ask. And my answer will most likely be because I don’t see the fun in paying more money for a game I already own. Now I don’t own WoW in the first place, well, because I think it pretty much sucks and lots of the monsters if not pretty much all of them were created by Gary Gygax (R.I.P) and TSR/WotC and released into the (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons games for up to 20-30 years ago. At least show some originality and create your own monsters.
Nah, I think I’ll stick to my Dungeons and Dragons Online, where new modules are for free. Speaking of Dungeons and Dragons Online, tomorrow the new module 8 will be released here in Europe. Hopefully I will have the time to play it a while before leaving for the weekend.
I just had to put in this cartoon from Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
Sources
Aftonbladet (Swedish)
PC För Alla (Swedish)
