Resouces for Learning Swedish

In case you wanted to learn swedish on your own, here are some resources I find useful:

1. Ilya Frank's learning method - foreign language books with in-text translations, and lots of other resources. Russian speakers can learn not only Swedish but also lots of other languages, like French, Swedish, Yiddish, Romanian, Irish etc. English speakers can only learn Russian and Japanese (no Swedish unfortunately).
2. Björn Engdahl's Swedish course - excellent for beginners.
3. You can watch movies in Swedish, in particular Karlsson pa taket that's also available as a book on Ilya Frank's Russian site.
4. Lots of videos on YouTube - for instance this one.
   

Useful File System Tools for Windows

Here are two useful file system tools for Windows that really make a difference:

1. TeraCopy
   Did it ever happen to you that you copied a large tree containing lots of small files and near the end a file has made some kind of error (e.g. not enough space) that stopped the process and you had to start from scratch?
   
   Or that you had to copy files from one partition to another when both sit on the same physical drive and it was terribly slow?
   
   Try TeraCopy, you really won't regret it...
   
   
2. Link Shell Extension
   I still haven't tried it, but it's the reason I decided to write, because I really missed the hard link feature (and its variations) in windows. For instance: you have pictures that you've taken and didn't backup yet, and the pictures that you've already backed up. You want both old and new pics to be in the "Pics" folder, but you also want the new pics to be in the "To Burn" folder. Link Shell Extension solves the problem using the "hardlink clone" feature that copies the folder structure putting the new picture albums on the same folder level as the old ones, but using hard links as the files.
   
   Junction Link Magic is supposed to have similar functionality.
   

Samsung Omnia - Performing a (Hardware) Hard-Reset

A couple of days ago I've got my new toy - a Samsung Omnia mobile phone. While playing with it, I had to do a hard reset several times already, all using the settings menu in the operating system. The last time, however, I didn't manage to get there, and was glad to find on Wen Qiang's blog mobile.silence a way to do so. The problem was, that similarly to some of the people, unfortunately it didn't work for me for some reason.

After sporadically pressing buttons, I discovered that a very slight variation did work for me. Powering on the Omnia (or soft-resetting), and immediately afterwards (while the B&W Samsung logo appears) pressing the SEND-END-POWER combination for 10 seconds. If you press the combination too late, you get to the jingle, otherwise you get the long awaited hard-reset screen.
Hope this helps some lost people :)

On Handling Critique

For a long time I believed that I could do whatever I would find right, and it didn't matter what others thought of it. What I can't say, is that it was always easy to do so. Many times I was getting that bothersome feeling that something wasn't right in what I've done or said. And since I strongly believed there was nothing wrong, that feeling has riddled me for ages.

After I was thinking about it today, it has suddenly dawned on me, that all these years I've been looking at things incorrectly, and in fact it was all the other way round. While I shouldn't have been bothered by doing things I believed in and people have found strange or wrong, before acting, I should have taken into consideration not only the logical rightness of that saying or activity, but also the way people would look at it, and its consequences. There are many things that the society considers to be wrong, with that being the only reason not to do them, which I consider to be stupid and incorrect inhibitions to follow. But, sometimes, it is better not to stick out when there is no underlying ideological reason, because many people won't understand, and the harm might be more significant than the gain.

Umami...

Heard once about the fifth taste (Umami) and how monosodium glutamate is what triggers that taste, and never got the chance to read it. Now I have :)

Quite interesting I might say, especially the history of its discovery that is. Keep in mind the quite problematic health concerns though.

Efficient timeout

Did you ever notice how much you can sometimes learn by stopping doing something for a while?

Occasionally, when I skip a workout or two at the gym, I notice that the weight I can handle improved pretty seriously. Today, after a little period of not playing the guitar, perhaps my playing ability didn't change much, but I discovered a comfortable position on my chair after deciding that I must get a more comfortable chair for playing.

I'm usually using my computer chair to play. The problem is that it has arm rests that don't allow me to sit with the guitar while resting my back. Today, after using this chair for almost a year, I discovered that I could sit diagonally :)

It's interesting how breaking the routine can allow us to gain new... uhmm... strengths? :)

Dusty Davis

Dusty Davis is a guy who has made several long motorcycle trips throughout Switzerland and the US. I'm against motorcycles, but the pics are so dazzling that I've got a huge motivation boost... Perhaps I should do something like that on a bike one day :)