Well I decided to update the blogging software that I use – Wordpress, to the latest version. I guess that I will be trying to sort out problems for a while ;-)
It does seem more responsive – but it has messed up a few things.
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So we have 16 more days to go before we move in to the new apartment and the wait is getting frustrating – I want to be in already. I think what is frustrating is that we have all these ideas of what we want to do, but we can’t really finalise them until we have a good idea what everything looks like and in typical Swedish house buying style we haven’t seen the apartment for weeks now.
I find the buying process rather strange: go and see a viewing of the apartment with lots of other couples and in a day or two later the bidding process starts. This can go very quickly – in our case just a day I think, and then you sign the papers and its more or less yours. After this you don’t really get to see the apartment until you move in. I guess that we could make a request to go and see it but that doesn’t seem like the done thing. So its been almost 3 months without seeing the place!
All that furniture we have/want – where is it going to fit? Is it going to fit? How big was that space again – the documents drawn up by the estate agents for the plan are not exactly accurate.
So now is the frustrating wait to the en vitiable pain of moving, and the fun of unpacking and deciding exactly where the forks are going to live in relation to the dish washer.
Longest 16 days of my life – spent looking at furniture and cat trees (probably the ugliest things you can put in an apartment).
This is a blog page to some data visualisation places for future reference:
http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/2008/04/16/data-visualisation-blogs-you-might-not-know-about/
I have also cut+pasted them in to the extended entry in case the blog goes down.
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This weekend was a busy one, but strangely relaxing at the same time.
Kristin and I hired a van, and took some things of hers from her apartment back to her home town of Karlstad roughly located between Stockholm and Oslo. In the new apartment we decided that a lot of her furniture was of the wrong period predating the apartment quite significantly so what we didn’t want we stored. It took about 3 and a half hours to drive there, not bad going in a van and we arrived at 1pm after spotting the odd Badger and Beaver along the way.
After a good nights sleep we moved the furniture in (including many of her collection of chairs) and also helped her family move some of their items around and throwing out what we didn’t need.
We got a bed that was more suitable from her mother – a kind of a bed that is a sofa, or is a sofa that is a bed? But one thing is for sure its not a sofa bed in the manor that we would describe in England, and is much prettier. On further investigation it is what in English is referred to as a day bed – but instead of sleeping parallel with the bed we are going to fit a double mattress so that the back of the sofa becomes the head board.
After a trip to Ikea on Sunday to collect some lamps that we both really liked, two small ones for the bedroom and a larger free-standing lamp we headed back to Stockholm in time to drop everything off and return the van. The lamps look very white here, but we choose some warmer bulbs to change the colour temperature so I think they look a bit more attractive than the picture that you see here.
Since the introduction of Google’s appengine which includes support for some of Django’s code, and the template system there has been an incredible amount of press for Django.
At the moment there is no backend support for AppEngine in Django (and DB2 support is still lacking – there was a blog post about a year ago but nothing seems to have happened since, and I would love to be proved wrong on that one) but it must only be a matter of time before this happens so for the moment you have to disable the ORM support. Pity, but I can see why.
But I am glad that Django is getting the attention that it deserves, I have long know that Python is well used in Google (and Yahoo for that matter), and now we should see even more people using Django which can only be a good thing for the ever-growing community.
Here is an excellent write-up on Google App Engine http://www.dougma.com/archives/81
So, lots of thing have been doing on lately and I have been rather remiss in updating this old blog, I suppose getting things done takes a precedence over writing about things that are happening at the moment..
So a couple of weeks ago my Mother came to visit me in Stockholm as I hadn’t seen her in ages, and it was a good way for her to see the town that I lived in, not having been to Sweden before. It also gave her an opportunity to meet Kristin which was good.
On the night that she came over it was her Birthday so we took her out to Sonja’s Greek, just around the corner from us in Södermalm. On the Friday we just relaxed a bit, as I had to work, then on Saturday after working we met up at Medborgarplatsen for a couple of drinks before going to Humlehof on Folkungagatan for a nice meal. Sunday we had booked Falstaff at the Royal Swedish Opera house which was really nice, I particularly enjoyed watching the music being played, and the hall itself is splendid.
Monday was mum return home, but for us the start of lots of things to do in preparation for the move in to our new apartment. Cleaning, packing, moving things is now the order of the day and whilst not on its own the most fun thing to do with our spare time – I think that its worth it.