Mikael Fernstrom

>Be prepared to be rendered. Condo Airlines’ friendly personnel (a.k.a. Civilian-clothed Interrogator Assholes) will collect you anywhere on Planet Earth and provide soothing drugs and orange jump-suit. Free transport to arbitrary conversation-therapeutic centre via European airports in full denial – FOR FREE. Special offer this week: full body massage including electrodes attached to naughty bits.

>I’ve borrowed the title of this posting from a song my brother’s band recorded.
That’s what life is like, right now. I’m having the heaviest teaching load in years and I’m also managing the IDC, projects, students, etc…
Deadlines and emails are piling up. All the spam (f***k you) is not making it easier. UL isn’t making it easier is their daft email servers don’t block all the rubbish, and I have noticed that some email I send is never received and vice versa. We can’t trust the net anymore. If things don’t improve I might as well buy a typewriter and start buying stamps again.

>For the first time as a university lecturer, they are asking me to lecture to 1st years, tomorrow. While preparing my notes this evening, I felt that I should give a personal perspective on Computer Science. Back in the early 80s I started to develop a programming language that I called Russell after Bertrand Russell (after reading Principia Mathematica and discussing set theory with people on-line). So, I decided to Google Russell programming language and found this . Scary stuff. The implication is that somebody in the Swedish government agency NUTEK (which was called STU at the time) must have leaked everything I sent them… I think I know who it was, but can’t remember his name. That’s old age for you!

>We had a great week out in west county Clare. Mostly nice weather. Great fish. Good reading. Total disconnection and relaxation. Thanks!

>During the week, I had my first experience of the tram system in Dublin – LUAS. Hving read about it and seen it in the news on TV, it seemed like a good idea implemented 30 years too late. Now, having had a firsthand experience, it’s just silly. I now believe that the name LUAS is an acronym for Largely Underdimensioned Asynchronous System.
1. Nowhere else in the world would you find a tram that stops and waits at traffic lights for cars to pass. Nowadays most countries have computers that solves this.
2. Nowhere else in the world would you have motorists that are so stupid that they stop their car on the tram track.
3. Nowhere else in the world would you have passengers that are so silly that they rather squeeze one to many onboard (and the doors won’t close => delay) than boarding the tram that’s just 100 meters behind.
4. Nowhere else in the world would you find ticket machines that for some strange reason talk to you at the end of transaction. If you are visually disabled, you can’t use the ticket machines…
5. Nowhere else in the world have anybody managed to create to totally disconnected piece of transport infrastructure.

>I thought spam was bad. Now there are bots that post crap as comments to your blog as well!
Where will this stop? If EPIC is indicative, it won’t stop until unknown bots print real-time ads on our underpants.

>Maplin Electronics had a special offer in the past week. A complete sat receiver kit for 148 euro. And it worked. We’re now finally free from RTE and TV3 and we can now watch Euronews and BBC whenever we want – for free.
I really like the idea of Free-To-Air sat broadcast. It allows you to pick up high bandwidth stuff from all over the planet. Amazing. From Earth to satellite and back. For free.
Choice…

>The NCT is a scam. I had my car (’93 Rover) fully serviced, and then brought it for testing. One FAIL. Re-test. I brought the car back to the garage, and HONESTLY, there wasn’t any fault on the little silly rubber part they had indicated. I guess NCT is part of the backbone of Rip-Off Ireland. So, two little rubber bushings have been replaced in my car and and I’m bringing it back for a re-test. This time, I’ll carefully question their work. Who’s testing the testers?

>I’ve finally installed my new weather station. It’s from HeavyWeather 😉 Despite my age and everything, I spent the whole afternoon on ladders with a power-drill and tools, to get all the peripherals installed properly. I think I might be complaining about pains and aches throughout the week.
It’s a pretty miraculous machine, temp, humidity (indoor and outdoor), wind speed and direction, air pressure. Full interface for downloading data. The only thing missing is getting broadband – always on. If, or rather hopefully when, I could put up realtime weather-data for HERE.

>Since the rebuild of the IDC server, my images have been off-blog, but now they’re back in full features. Term has started and we have a nice new bunch of students to take through the year of study and research.