Let's make 2013 a good year!

In some parts of the world, some people are already getting hammered and doing stupid things they'll regret in a couple of hours, while I'm trying to work out a good way to composite my unique terrain textures. And thinking I should probably do something else, other than waiting for my parents to start with dinner so I can have a look and learn for once how they do those delicious oven baked lobsters. Biological diversity.

Anyway, it's been a weird year in many ways, mainly it's been pretty bloody horrible to me. Some things were bound to happen at some point in my life anyway, good to know how badly they can cut you.

Still, besides all the depression and painful self-revelations, I had a lot of good experiences. For example, I have my licentiate degree (halfway Ph.D. here in Sweden), I finally visited my good friend Jonathan in the US and I had a beautiful trip to Japan to meet my relatives and realize I MUST learn the language and, if I can, actually move there. I've also learnt that I have a decent initial impression on people, but I'm too scared of letting people in. I feel sorry for a few people because of that, and I feel really sorry for one person in particular...

The world is a big place and I'm not sure where to go. And what to do there. That's the inevitable and wonderful thing with life I guess, one must accept that, use common sense and try to be happy. Can be bloody difficult, not a good idea for the resolutions.

Never forget, but never dwell, and aim your eyes at the horizon and smile with the sun in your face,
Happy 2013 everybody!

Gosh, this post = mush x 1000, huh? :p

Buncha' trips and some self-revelations

Been traveling about and been "unavailable" for 6 weekends in a row, it's getting ridiculous. I hope next year will be a bit calmer, but I'll be dying from coursework and writing my Ph.D. thesis instead.

The trip to Örebro was real nice, my friend and his wife there are really good people and I enjoyed the stay. I forced them up the "mushroom" water tower, a well-known landmark of Örebro.

I started my travel to Japan early morning on the 1st of December, and after various flight and bus trips, on the afternoon the next day I ended up in Matsue for EMIS 2012, the largest conference I've been to yet. I'm glad I didn't have to hold a presentation there, the lecture hall in Kunibiki-messe is enormous. The poster sessions were nice, I learnt about really exotic ways of polarizing the nuclear spin of things, but they were all at low energies. Lots of technical and overview talks were a nice change from the usual 50/50 theory/experiment conferences I normally attend.
In the evenings, my supervisors and I picked restaurants not on the distributed map of restaurants (we were in Japan, the people there are great and you should avoid the "easy" places), including a shabu-shabu+sukiyaki place and a super-small amazing sushi-place where the chef prepared the pieces right in front of us. There was also a trip to a lighthouse in Izumo and a big shrine, and an evening in the beautiful Vogel park with an amazing buffet and a Kabuki-show. After the conference, I took the train down south, with a panicked 8-min change from a regional train to Shinkanzen in Okoyama, to Hakata station in Fukuoka, where my uncle picked me up and we went to Iizuka where most of my Japanese relatives live. I haven't seen my Japanese relatives for 5 years and their English (and my Japanese) hadn't improved one bit. Immense communication troubles was worth seeing them again though, and since the first evening after my return, I've spent 1+ h every day studying Japanese. I have to learn to speak, listen, read and write, no matter what and if I can find work, I will move there. The food and the people feel so much more like home to me than anything else.

Writing this from the CERN hostel in Geneva, had my talk today on the tilted foils experiment from July. Had to make a 20 min talk fit into a 5 min slot, managed to cut it down to 15 min and make the listeners happy about a slightly saved coffee break.

Working on removing the texture flickering on the FoF terrain, texture-magnification case solved, need to implement FBOs nicely to solve the on-GPU texture-compositing case.

Digging the heavy pure nickel Pyramid strings I put on my guitar, but I'd love to try even thicker strings so that I can let it rip even harder.

And oh, apparently I've had strong social anxiety and a mild form of AS, of which the latter will be dropped and included in the whole range of autism. I've had these since I was a kid (~4-6 years old) which explains a whole lot of things. I'm not gonna change who I am though, I've lived with these conditions all my life and this is the person my family and friends know and appreciate, and I don't feel a need to become "one of the pack" anyway. I just hope it won't be a growing problem.