No, the previous post (called "Ping") wasn't intended for the Facebook crowd, although it made its way there.


I was just curious to see if LJ is any alive at all. If anyone reads it anymore. Something.

Personally, I find it quite sad that it no longer is a hotspot as it was a good place for friends-locked entries. I could have got a blogger/wordpress/facebook/else blog, but I wanted to keep and cherish the opportunity to uncensor myself and talk more freely or express more deeper, personal thoughts and I always found that those public blogs just don't do it for me, for that purpose.

Plus, LJ is great for following threads of comments, something that every other places I have seen suck donkeys' asses.

Ah well. I am glad to see some people is still here!

There, I said what's on my mind. :-)

I mentioned in the recent content free post that I was planning to make mushroom cabbage rolls soon. They are made (and need to go into the oven for a very long time yet). This is a case where you can tell I'm not Polish: I have made some of the ugliest cabbage rolls the world has ever seen. The filling on its own is tasty, though, so hopefully they will be another in my long line of "ugly but tasty" dinners.

( Original recipe & some notes )
And since I've had a week and a half off from work, you would think I would be writing like mad. Only you would be wrong. instead, I've been reading like mad. I finally read the copy of Anya Bast's Witch Fire that's been kicking around the house for a while and it was quite tasty. I'll have to see about acquiring the rest of the series. (Yes, I know, Anya is a friend of mine, you would think I would make more of a point of reading her books.) Though I think in that case it's been that I keep running into 2nd and 3rd books in series from her, and I have never moved her books over from purchases of opportunity to things I should order. Anyway, tasty little book and a nice break from denser history books that seem to be most of what I'm reading right now.

I have a New Years post brewing, but I haven't gotten there yet.

Frederick's of Hollywood is having their year-end sale at the moment. I realize that post-holidaze is not the time when anyone has any money, but if you've been putting off buying bras, now may be the time.

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?
Lived in Taiwan. Drove a scooter. Learned Chinese. Taught kiddies. Scuba dived. (dove?) THE LIST GOES ON.

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I didn't make very good goals last year. I think I had enough on my plate with living in Taiwan.
good read: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2009/12/29/how-to-keep-a-new-years-resolution/

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
hhmm... a high school friend did. and ms_pooka! and a teacher I worked with got pregnant. that's it.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
old cally girl.


5. What countries did you visit?
Taiwan, US

( read the rest )

1) I have been interviewed re The Executor and stuff.

2) I have a new camera, and I kinda love it:


3) Off to pick up car to drive to Montreal, where it seems the weather will be extremely cooperative (currently: -17°C. lowest prophesied low tomorrow through Sun, when I depart: -7°C.) See some of all y'all there -

Before Christmas we invited Anders' mum here to celebrate with us. She was reluctant and declined due to health reasons, despite our efforts to convince her that a combination of bus and train would be nice - she could go by bus to Skien where my brother lives, he'd take her to the train which she'd ride from Skien to Lillehammer (it passes through Oslo, but she wouldn't have to change trains there, which avoids a lot of stress) and she could either go by train from Lillehammer to Trondheim (Lillehammer station has about two platforms) or Anders could go down there to pick her up. The ride home could be similar, or she could go by train all the way if she felt like it.

Well, apparently most of this would have failed: Only 7 of 10 trains were on schedule (source, with details for the recent weeks)("on schedule" means within 4-6 minutes of planned schedule, depending on the distance) the week before Christmas, the afternoon train from Trondheim to Oslo was stuck for 3 hours(!) at a small station inside Trondheim (it's between the departure station and the first scheduled stop 15 minutes later), with passengers waiting in the cold, and yesterday the evening train between Trondheim and Oslo was stuck at Otta for 4 hours. And every other day or so they have huge delays around Oslo due to tunnel fires (today) or problems with signalling (in general). I guess they should start having an armada of buses and busdrivers ready to replace the trains on a daily basis, in stead of relying on being able to hire enough alternative transport on the fly (even in the middle of Norway's third largest city this takes 3 hours).

The main problem in Oslo is that the signalling equipment is old and should have been replaced. The train system was reorganized a decade or two ago, and since then things haven't improved - at least not at the right speed. The physical railways and everything on and around them are owned by a public company that gives the right to traffic the railways to commercial or public railway companies (with trains). Since much of the railway traffic is heavily subsidized, politicians have their say here but in general the good ol' national railways (NSB) has the majority of the railway traffic, with the private Airport Express between Oslo airport and the city itself (about the only really well-functioning railway distance, although they are also prone to signalling errors and tunnel fires) and a few rather small companies on distances NSB don't find valuable or that politicians don't want to fund. In reality all of these suffer from the structural problems with the railways themselves, but NSB get most of them since they are biggest. I am pretty sure NSB also are part of the problem - schedules, the trains themselves, backup plans and emergency procedures are their responsibility, and when they let people wait for 3 hours less than 10 minutes from Trondheim central station with hardly any information, they have a problem as well as those people responsible for the electricity along the lane. They also try to blame it on the weather - but Norwegian weather is not really that extreme right now, it's just cold (between -10C and -20C) and the long-distance trains regularly experience these temperature ranges over the mountains. Short-distance trains in the Oslo area may be a different story, but predicting temperatures down to -25C even in Oslo shouldn't have been considered extreme or very rare when shopping for trains or when maintaining them afterwards.

I don't have a solution to these problems. I am however a true believer in trains, and wish I could go by train more often. So why don't I? The main reason: it takes too much time. The trains leaves less often than planes or buses.

Between Trondheim and Oslo there are 21 daily plane departures, and 6 train departures. The plane trip takes 55 minutes, add 45 minutes for security and 50 + 25 minutes for transfer to/from the city centres and you're still at less than 3 hours from city to city (with hand luggage and some luck; however the airport shuttle in Trondheim leaves every 15 minutes and the airport express train to Oslo every 10 minutes so no careful planning is necessary). The earliest departure from Trondheim is at 06:10, which means levaing home at a bit before 5, but then I could almost be in the centre of Oslo at 8 am, spend a whole day there and be home for a late dinner at 19ish without too much stress.

By train I could take an overnight train and be in Oslo around 6:45, but this would mean spending the night away from home, and also spending NOK 850 on a sleeping car in addition to the ticket (which is between NOK 200 (by planning well ahead) and NOK 850 (by not planning, but then I'd probably not get one of the rather limited sleeping cars either)). I could also take a morning train (05:40) and be in Oslo at 13:30 - might be in time for some of the after-lunch sessions of the conference, then... The price of a plane ticket would be between NOK 300 and NOK 1200, plus about NOK 300 for transport between the airports and the city, so it's is neither much cheaper nor more expensive than the train option. The hourly rate of the plane trip is about twice the train, since the train trip would always be more than 6.5 hours. And in this case I lean towards a higher hourly rate - I don't want to spend 14 hours travelling to and from a meeting that is probably less than 4 hours long, when I can spend 6 hours in stead.

There is a lot of talk about building a network of long-distance express railways between the biggest cities in Norway. This would be excellent, at least if we're talking less than 4 hours between Trondheim and Oslo - and definitely if it's 3 hours - and with a schedule with enough daily trains, every two hours would be nice, every hour a dream - and even every 4-6 hours like today would be decent, although not enough to replace all plane travels.

Train is a better way of travelling than by plane - less annoying security (although that will probably come to trains, too...), and not least a less interrupted journey: board the train at departure, leave at arrival, and you're done. No more calculation to find the optimal bus departure, board the bus, leave the bus, queue for checkin and security at the airport, wait at the gate, board the plane, leave the plane, walk for the train, board the train, leave the train. I can work on any leg of the journey, but it's interrupted every 30 minutes by plane - on the train it could be 3-4 hours of uninterrupted time. And you could add to that a more environmental friendly way of travelling (most of the electricity here some from hydro-power), which I am generally pro.

But until we're seeing these short travel times between major cities, I am unfortunately more likely to catch a plane for most of my travelling. And I am very glad we didn't convince my mother-in-law to come here by train this Christmas...

http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2009/12/29/cephalopods-rocking-out

Archie feeling the rock.



Foregoing drumsticks, Bandit takes on the drum pads himself.

http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2009/12/29/drug-resistant-tuberculosis-hits-the-united-states

One might wonder if medical science is starting to feel the fear, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it. Disease has long been an adversary of human life; everything from the common cold to exotic diseases that could have given H.P. Lovecraft a rough night's sleep have been worthy opponents. In recent years, however, the no-holds-barred battle royale has turned into a game of four-handed chess due to the appearance of strains of common diseases which have developed immunities to commonly used antibiotics. In a nutshell, if you are instructed by your physician to take all of your prescribed antibiotics even if you feel better, follow their orders. The reason for this is because antibiotics work by building up in your bloodstream and tissues; regular doses over time maintain these levels which renders your body an inhospitible environment for infectious organisms. The idea is for the active concentration to last longer than all the bacteria do. If you don't do this, not all of the bacteria will have been killed off and the ones which remain will probably evolve a resistance to whatever it was that you were on. Maybe your body's immune system will mop up the ones that remain, and maybe it won't.

It's the strains which escape that pose a threat today. The strains which killed an estimated 65,000 people in the United States in 2008.The news has been running stories about antibiotic resistant bacteria for a couple of years now. Staph, strep, salmonella... this has been going on since the 70's, depending upon who you listen to and how much you trust them. Now strains of tuberculosis and other microorganisms have been documented which are resistant to the best compounds pharmacology has to offer right now. Early in 2006 one Oswaldo Juarez from Peru was diagnosed with what is termed extremely drug resistant TB (XXDR, as distinct from multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively drug resistent (XDR) strains) after he was admitted to a hospital in Florida complaining of fever, chills, difficulty breathing, and coughing up blood. More's the problem, cases of XXDR TB are incredibly rare so medical science didn't have a whole lot of data to work from; his was the first case ever discovered in the US. They're not sure how many people he potentially exposed (which is transmitted through inhalation of droplets coughed or sneezed into the air) or where he contracted it. Late in 2007 he was transferred to the last remaining TB sanitarium in this country for aggressive treatment in quarantine.

Oswaldo was treated using a harrowing protocol of intravenous and ingested drugs administered several times a day. Some of the drugs had a beneficial effect, others did not. The side effects of such treatment, to be blunt, were hideous, but yet he endured. In July of this year he walked out of the sanitarium with his bags packed, his head held high, and his body rid of the bacterium (modulo a bit of scarring on his lungs).

http://drwho.virtadpt.net/archive/2009/12/29/now-we-can-watch-television-while-were-shopping

On my way home after work this afternoon I stopped at the Safeway a couple of blocks from the apartment complex Lyssa and I live at to pick up a few last minute items for dinner. On my way out I stumbled across a most curious thing: a TV Kart, which appears to one of those shopping carts with the vehicle-like plastic thingy underneath that lets kids pretend they're driving with a pair of television screens attached to them. The idea is that you check one out on your Safeway membership card, unplug it from the recharging station, and wander around the store half watching television and half looking for whatever it is that you're there for. It would appear that kids need their pacifying media device also. The screens of the TV Kart I saw weren't functioning at the time so I don't know if they even work (though I strongly suspect that they do) or what they normally show. It wouldn't surprise me if they played an endless stream of commercials or adverts for Safeway. I've half a mind to go back there this weekend and try to chase down one of them just to see what's up with them.

This twenty minutes into the future stuff is starting to give me a migraine.