Short Moscow visit

Posted on December 28, 2012 by jonas

Yesterday morning we left Sweden for Russia and arrived to a wet Moscow in the afternoon local time. The snow was melting and our feet got wet and our luggage will never be the same again. Typical for Moscow I would say.

In the evening we met with the Belovi family and Yana and Peter. It was very nice to catch up with them since we have not seen them for some time. Tanya has distributed New Year present across Moscow and western Russia and now we continue with the eastern region…

We stayed at Yana’s and Peter’s apartment close to the metro and train station Paveletskaya which was very convenient today in the morning since it was a short walk to the aeroexpress to Domodedovo. One hour from the apartment to the checkin desk is rather quick and comparable to our situation in Zurich.

At the moment we are waiting for our flight to Novosibirsk. Tanya’s parents are meeting us there and then we go by car to Novokuznetsk. Freja is enjoying a lot of attention in Västerås instead of more travel stress. Hopefully she will not be so spoiled in Sweden that she refuses to come with us back to Switzerland in two weeks.

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Christmas in Västerås

Posted on December 23, 2012 by jonas

On Friday evening we put Freja in her new dog travel box, grabbed our luggage and went to Zurich airport. It was the first time that we went by airplane with Freja and it was reasonably convenient at Zurich airport, first one pays at one place and then leave her at another place. We all made it all the way to Arlanda and both our luggage and Freja was delivered shortly after arriving. The customs let her through after checking that her tag corresponds to the id in her passport.

Here in Västerås it is about 30 cm of snow and -5 to -10 Celsius degrees so it was a sensible choice for a white Christmas. As usual we focus on good food and walks. Freja is enjoying the frequent walks, the snow and the forest areas in the neighborhood.

Yesterday I went to the Police station in Västerås for an interrogation regarding the double murder that took place in Linköping 2004. I used to live there then by I am afraid I could not help them very much. At least I gave them a DNA sample in order for them to rule me out as the murderer…

Yesterday we watched the movie My Week with Marilyn. It has been given a good rating at IMDb but it was a bit too slow and that might partly explain why I fell asleep a few times.

As Rasmus points out, if someone wants to come and visit us in January, February or March, SAS has an offer today to go back and forth from Stockholm to Zurich for 10 000 Eurobonus points.

I have put together a Christmas greeting, it is available for download.

Merry Christmas everyone!

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Numbered birdhouse

Posted on November 18, 2012 by jonas

I am sure it makes total sense from some administrators’ point of view but it feels very much like Switzerland 🙂

Birdhouse along river Sihl

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Short greeting from Wroclaw

Posted on November 14, 2012 by jonas

I arrived to Wroclaw on Monday and will stay until Friday afternoon. The days are packed with work, nothing else was expected, and in the evenings we try out the restaurants in the old town. The city center is very nice looking and has many cozy places.

My hotel is conveniently located between the office and the old town. It is a brisk 15 min walk or slightly less by tram between the office and the hotel.

So far I have had only good impressions – but this is my first stay in Poland so it is really my first impressions though.

I will probably write a longer “review” later but now it is better to invest in a good night’s sleep. Cheers.

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Automatic downloading of newscasts

Posted on October 28, 2012 by jonas

Time for a geeky blog entry to compensate for all the “these-are-all-the-everyday-activities-I-have-done-lately” entries I have posted recently…

Since the network speed is very limited on the laptop I have installed in the washing room, I wanted to download the (video) newscasts automatically in order to have them served without buffering issues. Why one would like to watch news in the washing room is another topic but the washing room is not only for washing.

This is not a trivial problem to solve from scratch when one wants to download the newscasts from svtplay after their recent re-designing, but by combining two scripts it was fairly easy. I use svtplaydown for the actual download and parts from the ruby script svtplay-episode-downloader in order to automatically find the latest episodes of for example Aktuellt.

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Weekend in Adliswil

Posted on October 28, 2012 by jonas

Freja and I are taking care of the household this weekend meanwhile Tanya is visiting Rita in Hamburg. It is Sunday afternoon and we have been quite efficient so far. Yesterday we went to Bauhaus to buy a fence for Freja’s security in her outdoor activities, and continued with some food shopping and electronics. Digitec is probably the best provider of electronics in Switzerland and yesterday I bought an external hard drive and a wifi repeater (to replace the router in the washing room).

I installed the fence and picked kiwis after coming home from shopping. Since the weather forecast had predicted snow in the evening I had to pick the kiwis before they got frozen and ruined. Last year we picked kiwis at Sam’s place but this year we have our own. I almost filled a big bag and my guesstimate is 10 kilos or so.

In the evening I started the project of merging music and film collections. Over the last two years, the collections in Gothenburg and Zurich have diverted a bit since I did not have enough of storage capacity here to keep a full replica. With the new drive it should be possible.

Since it actually indeed did snow quite a bit yesterday evening and continued during the night and today, it is snowy outside. I bought used but well preserved Saab original winter tires a few days ago and mounted them today. The ones with studs are still in Gothenburg and I did not switch to winter tires last year. In Switzerland it is legal, but of course not advisable when it is wintry weather, to use summer tires also during winter season. Anyway, now I have got my act together and am ready for snowy weather. I am sure the snow will disappear quickly this time but in a few weeks it will come and go again. I also plan to go to Germany in November and there, like in Sweden, winter tires are required when there is slush, snow or ice on the road.

At the moment I am watching the Merseyside derby via Viaplay. It works flawlessly to use it via VPN to Gothenburg. It is much nicer than streams via Atdhe or similar. Yesterday evening I watched the three new Johan Falk movies. It was a good opportunity since they are of little interest for Tanya. Three more are expected within the next months. They are of course no Oscar candidates but works as casual entertainment.

I might as well mention that I installed Ubuntu 12.10 (or actually Lubuntu, the lightweight edition) on Tanya’s Toshiba ac100 yesterday evening. It worked much better than Ubuntu 12.04 and it now serves well as a surveillance station (like my Asus eeepc 900). Lubuntu 12.10 is certainly recommended for everyone who owns a Toshiba ac100. We bought it at Media Markt in Kazan for 100 euro, shipped with Android, as a light travel companion for Tanya and have not used it much since. Now it is more useful than ever if you ask me.

The plan is to try out the new winter tires and go to Nordiska for a workout session in an hour or so.

Btw, I have put the pictures from the Santorini holiday in the web album. Beware, we have not done proper filtering yet so there are too many of them…


Freja enjoys the snow very much and likes to play soccer in all weathers.

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Going home via Landvetter and Copenhagen – The end of my Scandinavian tour

Posted on October 22, 2012 by jonas

I am at Landvetter and waiting/working until my flights to Zurich via Copenhagen depart. I have had a few lazy days in Scandinavia and it is time to get back to normal with more work and less leisure.

On Friday I took an evening flight to Oslo after work. I have told Jim more than two years ago that I would come and visit them. Since they are about to move back to Sweden in a few days I had to go now in order to keep my promises. 🙂

Jim, Isabelle and Scott live a few days more in a nice and central (walking distance to Karl Johan) apartment in Oslo. As usual when we meet, our tech toys are central since playing with computers and cell phones is a common interest. During the last two years I have been doing much less of pleasureful geek activities and now I have probably filled by quota for the next months. Apart from spending time with computers together, we also went to Holmenkollen during the foggy Saturday and a walk along Karl Johan on the sunny Sunday.

One of the projects I dealt with this weekend is to set up VirtualBox with two virtual machines on my Solaris server (Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 to start with) which anyway is heavily under utilized. The remote administration is done either via their text interface (terminal via SSH) or via RemoteBox (GUI via X11 forwarding via SSH). The virtual machines can be reached via RDP tunneled via SSH (much more modern protocol than VNC) and terminal via SSH.

On Saturday I went by bus to Gothenburg to visit my brother Joel. It is always good to catch up face-to-face and not only via computers. I also went up to the attic to see if I could find some useful stuff among the things that I left when I packed my Saab and moved to Switzerland two and half years ago. I found some jackets and shoes which I think could be worth bringing with me. Let’s see what Tanya, who is not always impressed with my “findings”, says about their suitability…

Another reason to go to Scandinavia is that I had to renew my passport and the cost for the passport is much less in Sweden than at the embassy in Bern. I applied this morning and it will hopefully show up in Zurich (via the embassy in Bern) in Zurich in a few weeks. The plan is to apply for a Russian visa with the new passport before Christmas and our Sweden-Russia-tour.

After refilling the stock of Swedish fish roe spread with dill (Swedish: “dillkaviar”) for myself and some Polarbröd to Tanya, it is now time to proceed to the check-in desk.

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Freja, German and Fermented herring

Posted on October 13, 2012 by jonas

After coming back from Greece three weeks ago, Tanya went to Novokuznetsk for two weeks. Since Freja stayed with me I had to plan a bit more carefully in order to not leave Freja alone at home for too many hours in a row. She is usually fine with 5 hours or so, but more is not desirable. This meant that I had to go home at lunch time to let her out. That worked well though since it only takes 20 minutes to go home. In the evenings I either worked from home, or went home for a while and then went somewhere with or without her.

The day after we came back from Greece I started my German course. It was only me who signed up for the course so instead of twice a week I only have one class a week. Hopefully this will help me to improve my German substantially.

This week Natasha is visiting us which means that four ladies, including Freja, are staying in our apartment. Tanya and Natasha have been doing some sightseeing and shopping in Zurich during the week and we will soon go to Luzern for some more sightseeing. In the evening Nordiska has a Fermented herring party (Swedish: surströmmingsskiva) which we will attend together with some other friends.

Next weekend I am going to Oslo and Gothenburg.

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Back from Greece

Posted on September 25, 2012 by jonas

We spent last week on the Greek island Santorini and the holiday was very nice. The weather was sunny and perfect and it was great to spend a few days without a busy schedule. Since Santorini is a rather small island it was convenient to move around, either by foot or by rental car or quadcycle. I will put some pictures in the web album later.

Today Tanya went home to Novokuznetsk to be at home during her father’s birtday and her grandma’s last part of her funeral. This means that Freja and I have to manage on our own at home. I will go home during lunch to take her out and with a long evening walk I think that will make her satisfied.

Today in the evening I put up a fence in the garden so Freja can not escape the garden easily. I hope that will make it easier to let her be in the garden on her own if she likes to when I am at home.

Now, sleeping time. Cheers.

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Weekend in Adliswil

Posted on September 2, 2012 by jonas

After coming home from Siberia there has been two more normal weeks but they have been enhanced by two friends coming and staying a few days. First came Sasha, a guy doing his PhD in northern Italy, and then Rasmus, my old time friend and once flat mate, from Stockholm. We did some sight seeing, e.g. a car trip to Rigi, and last Saturday we went to Nordiska’s kräftskiva with Rasmus and Sam.

Today in the afternoon we have been walking in our neighborhood mountains, around Felsenegg, with Freja and Sam. On the way back we passed by a self service shop attached to a farm, where one can buy locally produced delicious food and drinks. After writing on a text pad what one is buying, one simple puts the money in a hole in the wall and walks out with the groceries. I can imagine that this concept won’t work everywhere but obviously it works well enough around here which is very nice and cool.

Except for walking we have also been doing some practical stuff today. I gave the car some much needed care and Tanya has been doing her first major work with the sewing machine. Earlier on I used to be the operator but now she is more skilled than I (not too difficult in this case) and seems to enjoy the creative process, at least when the sewing device adheres to her often vocal and explicit directions 🙂

Last Friday I did my last day for the project I have been working in for the last 26 months at Credit Suisse. I expect next week to be a soft start in my new project though since I will start with four days of training (strictly speaking not related to the new project). I also expect quite a lot of work during the autumn to get into the new project which is supposed to be a “high pressure project”.

For the coming two months we have plans for Greece (both), Russia (Tanya), Norway and Sweden (Jonas). We start off by ending our fragmented holiday (part three) with a week in Santorini, then Tanya will go back to Novokuznetsk for the third part of her grandmother’s funeral (the finishing part after 40 days). In October I will go for Norway and Sweden for errands and pleasure. Bis gleich!

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