Welcome, oh mighty Zois!

For those not fluent in cool 1337 speak, Zois = 2015.

Or to be traditional and boring: Happy new year!

I'm full of Swedish style home-made snaps (no, we did not make the ethanol ourselves, my dad just chucked some secret spices into clear spirit...), red wine, armagnac from a friend of mine from last year for my Ph.D. defense, Japanese whisky and nice champagne I bought for the occasion. Hmm, that was a bit much I realize now. Still, I don't quite feel like going to bed, I need to be nerdy for just a little bit longer.

HWM soon has really simple and nice support for the RANDR extension, been working on that the last few days and I will work on it a little bit now before giving in to whoever has taken the role of Mr Sandman this year. Sod off you, I'm not ready yet!

I picked up our old family-violin and made it wailing, I'll probably look for a cheap second-hand student-violin in Germany. Playing the guitar is fun, but it can never be as touching and beautiful as a violin used properly. For some reason I found it easier to find the intonation now than last time at Chalmers, so it looks promising!

To round off, let's be strong, smile inside, and make 2015 a year to be proud of!

I'm turning 30 this year...

EDIT (2015-01-05): On New Years' Day, my dad and I finally fixed the old Canon Ixus 95 IS something or other that I ruined in my backpack with a leaking water bottle at GSI. Didn't look up any instructions at all, tore it to pieces, cleaned it up with dishwasher liquid, left it for a few days, brushed with some kind of cleaning and greasing mojo from my Dad's old job and put everything back together. Without notes. And every single little screw went in place on the first try. Not a piece left over. How it's done. (I shouldn't hide the fact that I put in a circuit board a bit wonky so I had to remove almost _everything_ and put it back together again, but whatever.)
The reason I brought this up is that I just read an article about how young people these days cannot mend things. I would like to take that a bit further and say that an incredible amount of young people cannot even fathom understanding or doing anything other than smearing up glass surfaces. Even I, 4 years younger than my older brother, noticed that I was spoilt in many ways by technology, with faster PCs, more programs, access to source code from the web etc. But when I lectured for the top maths and physics students at my high school and asked about what the pupils do in terms of "cool sh!t" outside of school, I got nothing. Programming, what's that? The question, which together with evil, that will never die: Wth are kids doing these days? :p
Lego Technic seems to be alright these days, I'd really like to buy their huge crane mk2, whereas Meccano is simply laughable.

100% homemade Opera cake is wonderful, with coffee-drenched almond-based biscuits layered with fluffy coffee/butter cream and ganache, everything topped with dark chocolate. I made it for my family on New Years' Eve, but man is it a lot of work... Anyway, time for another evening with old high school pals!

EDIT (2015-01-11): Just played through Back to the Future by Telltale Games, and was just reminded that in the second movie they went to the year 2015! Freakin' hoverboards! Gotta love that I was born the same year that thing started too... That's all :)