Pumpor natt

You know, I really can't believe that they don't do Halloween here. What do you do at Halloween? You dress up, eat candy, and, if you're an adult, perhaps you have a party at which you drink beverages that cause you to loosen your inhibitions. As far as I can tell, Swedes excel at all three of these things. Europeans, though, know it more as the day before All Saint's Day, when "... we go around to graveyards in the freezing cold and and rain and then go home and talk about dead people all day. Not so fun," explained Polish student Z. American-style Halloween has been creeping into Sweden somewhat, to the dismay of the youngish parents ("One more thing to do, and more things to buy..." groaned one of them to me) and traditionalists. Swedish student N. said that within the past couple years, there have actually been protests against stores displaying Halloween items, from people who feel that All Saint's Day is solemn and sacred and should not be associated with children running around having fun.

Well, I like Halloween a lot, and I knew I'd be grumpy if I didn't do anything to celebrate, so I decided to risk a little cultural imperialism and host a pumpkin carving party at work last night. Pumpkins are available in supermarkets (at roughly 60SEK for a big one); I had one, Joe got one, and three others (Swedish staff artist L., and student B. and her boyfriend, and new Danish student E.) showed up with squashes. German student M. was sorry that she didn't bring one, but confessed that she had mis-heard the word "pumpkins" as "pump-guns," and had been quite alarmed at my suggestion that everyone should bring their pump-guns to work, and we would drink some beers and light up the pump-guns to scare away the evil spirits.

Plenty of other Swedes stuck around after work to observe, and take the excuse to raid the departmental beer stash and help with the big bowl of godis that we brought. I had neglected to think of music, so I appointed student V. (who has the best computer speakers) as DJ for the evening. (He was able to play music all evening from his mobile phone. The nerd in me was deeply impressed.) I don't think I've ever had to actually teach anyone how to carve a jack-o-lantern. Joe and I did a tag-team demonstration of techniques, and everybody got up to their elbows in pumpkin guts pretty quickly. They all did a fine job of carving, I think, especially for first-timers. B.'s boyfriend squinted at mine. "I just now figured out that yours is Bootsy Collins," he said. We lit them all up and lined them up on the table, and everyone ooohed and aaahed at the effect. "It's like having a camp fire right in the room!" said N.

N. was also celebrating some good work-related news, and the beer was being consumed at a rapid rate. A liter of white wine was also drained. L. left to get more beer, and came back with a bottle of champagne, and then some rum that a friend had brought him from Thailand, and... well, let's just say people relaxed into the evening pretty well. It was still a Thursday, though, so we wrapped it up around 22:00, and cleaned up the bottles and pumpkin guts and candy wrappers in short order. The jack-o-lanterns were stashed in the lab cold room.

Next morning, the lanterns were retrieved for morning fika, and then again for afternoon fika, and thereby helped to cheer up an unrelentingly dark and dreary Friday. Joe put ours on the steps up to our apartment, where they still are sitting, still are sitting, hopefully keeping the evil spirits away for another year. And a welcome sight they were, when I came home an hour later, trudging through the snow... but that's another story. Happy Halloween!

Even More Weather…

I had this week off, so naturally the whole week it's been hovering between 1°C and 3°C, with near constant rain. We're done with that now, though: as the sunlight has faded over the past 30 minutes, the rain has finally turned into snow. Maybe this weekend is the time to put those studded tires on the bike…

Weather Update

Just a quick post to answer that always valid question, "What's the weather like?" Conditions on Blodstensvägen at 4:45 PM: 3°C, and a little foggy.

And the Kaja Goes To…

Last week was this year's Short Film Festival in Uppsala. I had hoped to go to a few screenings, but obviously my week didn't go quite as planned, and by Friday we hadn't made it to a single film. Fortunately for us the festival didn't end until Sunday, so Saturday morning I was at the ticket office when it opened in the morning to buy us tickets. We decided to get the small festival pass for 130 SEK (plus the required 20 SEK membership to the film society), which entitled us to attend 3 screenings, where each screening was a thematic collection running about two hours.

Saturday night we went to the Brick Film Fest, in which every film was shot entirely with Legos. The Lego "Battle of Hastings" was ambitious, if not entirely successful, and "Frankenstein" was certainly ominous, but our personal Little Brick Jackdaw definitely goes to the hilarious"Great Microbiologists".

Sunday we were at Slottsbiografen, a very cool old theater just below the castle, for the last four hours of the whole festival. We saw Norwegian Humor 1, part of this years five part Focus Norway series, which included "Regjeringen Martin", the story of a young man going on a blind date as seen by the bureaucrats living in his head; and "De Beste Går Først", a quintessentially Norwegian tale of a group of old men calmly sinking into a bog. We also saw a five year retrospective of notable entries in the National Competition, which had a really great bit of rotoscoping called "En Nattsaga" (and anyone who has heard me ranting about the evils of rotoscoping knows I would never say such a thing lightly); an interesting and personal animated documentary about progress as a disease especially affecting women, called "Tillväxtsjuken".

This last showing also had a nearly interminable bit of experimental film called "Hur Man Gör" which the program summed up as, "This film gathers a motley crew who shares an intense passion for trees, but they cannot agree on which tree is the best." The tree argument took up maybe two minutes of the half hour film, the rest of which revolved around several more or less successful acts of attempted choreography, a closing cinema, a dying father's bequest, a bunch of aging hippies in search of something to protest, and a man in a dress. It also had nearly as many false endings as the Return of the King. Really, it was a relief to see it, because it just wouldn't have felt like a Swedish film festival without something truly inexplicable; nevertheless, it was also a relief when it finally ended.

The best part? I got a t-shirt half price! (I'm such a tourist.)

Autumn in Uppsala

This autumn has been quite beautiful in Uppsala. For one thing, the weather has improved. In August and early September, it seems like it rained every day; in contrast, October has been generally pleasant and sunny. Some mornings have been wonderfully foggy, and my walk to, and wait at, the bus stop is often quite lovely indeed. It has gotten cooler, of course, and a few mornings have seen frost lining the fallen leaves and still-green grass.

But what does it feel like? Well, honestly, it feels a lot like Michigan. For instance, Kanelbullardag felt like a beautiful afternoon in East Lansing. Uppsala University doesn't have a campus, exactly, but there are areas in town that remind me of the tree-lined walk-ways by Michigan State's student union. The woodsy area that our apartment is in reminds me more of Leelanau, the place we'd vacation in northern Michigan, with the cool night air and earthy forest smells and the birch trees and evergreens so close.

I see that I have specifically mentioned that Uppsala reminds me of two places in Michigan in which I have spent a relatively small amount of time. Oddly, I haven't yet gotten a St. Joseph or Ann Arbor vibe nearly as much. St. Joe I associate with farm- and orchardland and squash and apples and the various other bounties of the season (although we're surrounded by farmland here we very rarely see it); in A2, my favorite memories of autumn include grad student life, the insanity of UM game-days and sports season, and the various mysig rituals we had settled into over the years with friends (Halloween and pumpkin carving come to mind at the moment...). I stand by my earlier statement that Uppsala feels like home, but it's still a new home, and I think it's possible, just possible, that autumn in Sweden has made me a little homesick for autumn in Michigan...

Another Long Week

Yesterday at 6 PM the final project in my constraint programming class was due, officially marking the end of my first term at Uppsala, and let me tell you, it came right down to the wire. I hadn't done any real work on the project before this week (beyond choosing which of two problems I wanted to do, reading over that, and thinking about how I might solve it), but I had the whole week to work on it, so I wasn't too worried. The week progressed about like you'd expect:

Sunday, afternoon: Started coding.

Monday, morning: The bulk of the coding is finished, leaving just a handful of small bugs to work out.

Wednesday, approx. 2 AM: One of the small bugs has proved to be completely intractable, and possibly fatal to the whole approach.

Wednesday, morning: Start the day by abandoning problem 1 in favor of the now much more appealing problem 2.

Wednesday, afternoon: Problem 2, attempt #3, mostly finished, leaving just a handful of small, but horrifyingly familiar, bugs to work out.

Wednesday, midnight: Yup, nearly the same intractable bug. Suspicion that I have a deep and abiding misunderstanding of the basic tenets of the problem begins to take hold. Urgent e-mail sent to professor.

Thursday, morning: Professor replies with encouraging e-mail hinting at solution. Further reflection reveals that I don't see what he's getting at, so it's off to his office.

Thursday, noon: Professor has agreed that bug is probably intractable, but wonders why I haven't taken the approach suggested in e-mail, which (a) completely bypasses intractable bug, and (b) is both easier to write and more promising from an efficiency standpoint. After listening to explanation, I am forced to agree.

Thursday, 3 PM: Armed with new approach, attempt #4 is much simpler, and materializes in mere hours. Test run #1 starts.

Thursday, 7 PM: Test run #1 making progress, but still running. Long solution time is theoretically acceptable, but need to run another dozen tests before deadline, now less than 24 hours away. Spouse suggests running tests on her currently idle and oh-so-much-more-powerful computer at work. Forehead slapped and "Doh!" uttered, it's off to spouse's office to start an automated run of tests #1–8, while tests #9–12 run at home.

Friday, 8 AM: Tests #9 and 10 complete, but with distressing results which imply that tests #1–8 should have been structured differently.

Friday, 9 AM: As feared, test #1 not complete. Now forced to wonder why tests #1–8 were left to run in sequence on one of the more powerful computer's 4 processors, instead of running four at a time. Using results from test #9, new test #1a–8a set up to run in parallel.

Friday, 10 AM: Report writing begins (time to remember how to use LaTeX). Lack of any results makes reporting on testing… vague, at best.

Friday, 5:30 PM: Spouse reports that approximately half of all tests completed, which will have to be enough. Results received by e-mail and hastily written up.

Friday, 5:57 PM: Project submitted online.

Friday, 6:30 PM: Met spouse at local eatery to heave big sigh of relief, and consume Turkish food.

Not my finest project ever, but should be sufficient to get the 12 points out of 20 that are required to pass the course. Meanwhile, grades on the exam were posted, and it turns out I did just fine, so no real worries there. Sure am looking forward to a little time off, though.