Hjelmensraum

Disuse

I’m not going to write much more here. My life have taken odd turns lately (for the better, so don’t worry), but everything has been, and is still, tremendously hectic, confusing, terrifying, fantastic and wonderful at the same time, so writing down my thoughts is not something that I feel I need at the moment. As I have said before, I write here to vent and to mull over things or just to put to “paper” my thoughts, but things are just going great right now, and I’m going with the flow, so there’s nothing to vent over, not much to contemplate, and my thoughts are all over the place, so… you know how it is!

I’m sure I’ll become crotchety again, but hopefully not for a long long time!

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

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Toy Soldiers

With my exams done, I’m finally able to indulge myself in things not entirely like computer science, so I’ve gotten a second blog up and running dedicated to my hobby: miniatures war-gaming, modelling and painting.

If you’re interested, check it out at Toy Soldiers

My personal updates will continue here on Hjelmensraum, but all the stuff that wouldn’t interest you “normal” people will be posted on Toy Soldiers.

I renamed the post to fit the name of the other blog; the other name was crap.

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More procrastination

I have to get this presentation done today, but as usual I just can’t find the motivation. So instead I’m doing some admin work here on my site.

I’ve decided to create another subdomain for my pewter-addiction, so as to split off my more personal ramblings from the more public hobby-related stuff I’ll be doing.

It’s not quite up and running yet, but I’m working on it!

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Tired, aggravated and ranting!

I’ve got a pretty big presentation Wednesday, and thanks to a quicky bout of flu and hangovers during the weekend, I haven’t gotten properly started yet.

That, of course, is my own damned fault, so it won’t really do me any good ranting about that. But in my constant search for new and exciting ways of procrastinating, I’ve gotten to ranting about “group” projects at university, and since there are no one around to rant to, I might as well spew my rambling vitriol here.
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Slow news day… week… months

Hjelmensraum has been pretty stale these last months, but since there are no regular readers, I don’t think anyone has actually noticed.

I started this blog to function as an outlet for all sorts of stuff that was rummaging around my head, and because that particular appendage has been pretty empty as of late, the blog has stayed empty too.

I’m not going to to a huge update regarding my whereabouts just now, but suffice to say that everything is going just fine.

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Bummer.fm

A few weeks ago Last.fm released a new client and I was ecstatic!
I love last.fm, and have recommended it to everyone I know that has the slightest interest in expanding their musical horizons.
There I was a work, scrobbling away listening to all sorts of awesome music and suddenly the music stops!
Confused as ever, I check that I haven’t been disconnected from the WIFI or VPN, but no. Then the last.fm application informs me that:

Your free trial has expired.

Free Trial? Expired? WTF?

So now it seems that they figured out that there’s money to be had, and you have to pay $3 per month to continue using the great features of Last.fm.
I know you’re going to say “$3!? Go suck a lemon you cheapskate!”, but I was sorely disappointed when this happened.
This seems to be the fate of all web 2.0 services, and it saddens me a bit. Don’t get me wrong: I love money and I sympathize completely with last.fm squeezing out a small amount of money for a great service, but at the same time I cannot help to think that the all-embracing and everloving internet is feeling the pinch of the financial crisis.

I’ll pay up, but it’s still a bummer.

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Workin’ hard for the money

… or not, really. I’m sitting at work, and since there aren’t any issues that demand my attention, I’m getting paid for blogging. Which is sweet in it’s own right, but I feel a bit bad about it actually.

Yet another post updating the few uninterested parties reading this blog of my current whereabouts.
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New stuff on the horizon?

Oh boy, have I been busy!

Or, not really, but it sounded good. My coursework at uni is a real bitch this semester, with 3 big projects and a hellish course on combinatorial search. Right now I am in the middle of the relative calm that is the evaluation period, full of final exam goodness!

I finished the first of two exams this morning, and although I am not really satisfied with the grade, it’s over for now. On monday (the 30th) I have yet another exam in a course to which I am strangely ambivalent; Positioning. The course deals with methods and theory for positioning; fx GPS or WIFI.
While the discussion of the course, it’s projects and lecturer shall remain a topic for drunken ranting, it has spurred me onto something fun; Geocaching!

Most people have probably heard about this, but it was news to me until I started this course, and through the course, I’ve become more and more interested in playing around with it. Also, it’s a good excuse for buying new gadgets and going hiking (mostly the first part).

Since I’ve just gotten some money back from the taxman, and found a pretty penny in my piggybank, I’ll be buying my first GPS during the week, and hope to spend my summer wandering around the surrounding countryside finding caches! If I’m lucky, my girlfriend and I are going to Helsinki this summer, and finding some caches up there would be awesome!

So if I take nothing else from the Positioning course, I might at least have found a new hobby.

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Scamz for the winz

Heh, so I received a letter the other day from the nice people of the Domain Renewal Group.
They offered me that, for a small fee, they would make sure that this domain didn’t expire and that they would provide this excellent service for only $30 per year. $50 for two years!
And all I had to do was send them a check for the amount, along with my signature on the contract and my credit card number, and they would take care of everything for me. Isn’t that nice of them?

It sure is nice of them to take my money and try to steal my domain as well.
I’m sure that a lot of people pay these idiots, just because they don’t want to risk losing their domain, but if you do, it’s your own fucking fault! A quick search on Google turns up around 200k results, and while the first hit is of course DRG own website, the next three pages is blogs and articles warning people that it’s a scam.

People! We live in a day and age where information is so freely distributed that all you have to do is open a browser and Google something. If you fail to seek information before paying/voting/choosing, you’re not in any position to complain when shit fails on you!
There’s no excuse for being uninformed anymore (at least not in the industrialized parts of the world), and the old “well I didn’t know”-excuse is exactly that: old. So knock it off!

Now the only thing I have to do to finish my correspondence with the DRG, is find a suitably noxious material that I can send back to them in the nice addressed envelope that they provided…

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Long time, no see

Bloody hell, how time flies huh?

The last semester has been quite busy, mostly with university-stuff, but also with my hobby-stuff, and some reiteration of the last several months of my whereabouts may be in order. This is a pretty long post, so brace yourself.

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