We’re in Munich airport again, this time waiting for a flight to Dublin. We are in Terminal 1 this time, the older one, which is basically all non-Lufthansa flights. I personally find this terminal mostly easier and faster to get through, as some of the gates are no more than ten metres from the security checkpoints.  Those are pretty quick too, with at least four lines operating at a time and four or five entrances to the terminal.  Check-in and security took no more than 15 minutes and now we get to kick back for half an hour before boarding.

I checked out a pair of sunglasses earlier, and think I have finally come up with a decent pair that sits well on my face and looks good.  My nose is crooked, which means that sunglasses mostly look shit on me, but these ones may actually work.  Anna likes them too, which is kind of a pre-requisite.  They’re called “Whisker”, by Oakley, and come in brown with transitions lenses.  They are also bloody expensive, so I’m going to pick up a pair when we get back, possibly over ebay.

My Dad turns fifty on Monday, so we’re having a large party for him.  Last time I was talking to Mum about it, all of my parents siblings were coming (eleven of them including husbands & wives), and potentially some of my numerous cousins.  There are a few surprise visitors too, and some old friends of the family.  Later on Saturday, the rest of Trim have been invited to come and partake of a few bevvies and join in the celebration. All in all it promises to be a fun day, provided the weather holds out.

We’re probably up close to cruising altitude for this leg of the journey, and most of this part of central Germany is covered in cloud.  It was raining earlier in Munich, and well, miserable.  Up here its lovely and sunny though, with a snow-like carpet of cloud far below.  I have U2’s Vertigo Tour Live playing on my MP3 player, with my headphones completely killing the noise of the A320.  We’re bearing 310° and I think I’m gonna veg out with my book for a while.  We were delayed about an hour on the ground and I’m more tired than I expected.  Anna was saying earlier that we should travel only by train next year for holidays, and that sounds just fine right now. I’ll post this later when I get to my parents.

We’re home from Göteborg now, and have a couple of days downtime before we set off for Ireland.  I still haven’t figured out how to spell that city name in the previous sentence, as I have three of them available to me : English, Swedish and German.  Obviously the Swedish would be preferable, but that entails using an extended character which means opening another application.  The straight English “Gothenburg” is an option to counter that, but it doesn’t feel right either. I have the same problems with Munich and München too.

The day before yesterday we were in a theme park called Liseberg, which is apparently the oldest theme park in all of Scandinavia.  We didn’t go on all that many rides to be honest, in part because they were fairly old, and in part because they just didn’t look all that exciting.  I did take a trip on one awesome ride though, called Kanonen (The Cannon).  Its a roller coaster, where you accelerate very fast at first, and then stay there while it goes around the track.  Think about the fastest kick you’ve ever gotten from an airplane taking off.  That doesn’t come close to the acceleration of this ride, it was just incredible.  Zero to sixty in under two seconds.  For all that, it felt completely safe.  We were hurtling around these enormous metal girders in a car made of fibreglass, but the grip the car maintained on the track and the control exerted over the speed were uncanny.  I’ve never felt such a sense of completely in control / completely out of control before.  Awesome stuff indeed.

Anyway, I read earlier on the BBC that there was an accident on one of the rides yesterday. Nobody was killed, but twenty people were seriously injured.  Some were thrown out of a ride, and some were injured when that ride fell about three meters to the ground.  Not cool at all.

Our hotel wasn’t quite what I had been expecting.  It was lovely, and did have a splendid view over the city, but it was probably a luxury hotel ten years ago. Today it was more shabby-chic than luxurious. Still, a pretty good choice all in all.  If we had known we would have looked at staying in that four-masted floating pleasure palace in the harbour.  Its an old barque called the Barken Viking which we had a peek inside while we were there, and it was very nice indeed on the inside. There are only ten ships of this type left in the world.

The rest of Göteborg was really nice. We took a trip out to Elfsborg fortress, which is a small defensive island in the harbour.  The guides there were in period costume and played two characters who were closely linked with the fortress and its use as a defence against the Danes.  We also shopped a fair bit which probably isn’t that unusual for us on holiday, but the biggest shopping mall in all of Sweden was just there…

Our trip here was actually shorter than we had planned.  The airline pilots from Lufthansa City Line were on strike the day we were supposed to travel there.  We didn’t know this until we got to the airport (early in the morning!) and got shuttled to a desk where we could look for alternative transport.  Trains to Göteborg would have taken our whole holiday though, so we elected to fly out the next day instead.  This was the first time I have ever flown without travel insurance, and the damn airplane was delayed by a day.  If my Amex insurance was still active then that delay would have entitled us to take a shopping trip to the tune of about £4,000 to compensate us for the inconvenience.  ::sigh::

Okay, so its 10:30 and we’re in a small Lufthansa CRJ900 somewhere over Germany. I’m tired, and grumpy and have probably had too much of that shit airport coffee that you get at the gate in Munich. We were supposed to fly out yesterday, but the flight was delayed by a strike. Its probably a good thing though, as Anna picked up some kind of stomach bug over the last few days and is only just getting better now.

Yesterday morning we got up at some silly hour and lugged out heavy baggage to the airport.  It didn’t take too long as the airport is only twenty or twenty five minutes by train from us. It is also a direct train, so we don’t have to go through the hassle of changing three times like we did in London. So we got there and went to check in at the machines and there was a notice that the flight had been cancelled.  Fuck!  So we talked to some attendant who sent us upstairs to a different desk where we queued for about 30 minutes to talk to someone.  While there a film crew came around reporting on the ongoing pilot’s strike that was affecting Lufthansa City Airline.

Unlike other countries, there seems to be a tradition here of official planned short-period strikes. It is very well organised and they usually make contingency plans for when it happens, but that wasn’t much help to us.  They were offering train connections to anyone travelling within Germany or to neighbouring countries, where the rail connections are excellent.  Unfortunately for us there wasn’t a quick way to get to Götheburg by train. It would have involved going around the Baltic through Finland and would have taken just too long.  So we organised another flight for this morning and took that instead.

Do you know what the real pain in the ass was?  I cancelled our travel insurance with American Express a couple of months ago when I cancelled our Platinum cards.  In seven years of having that awesome travel policy I have never had to use it.  If we had been covered by it yesterday then we could have gone shopping with our Amex cards to the tune of £2000 EACH and they would have covered everything.  Awesome? Yes. Untimely? Definitely.  Annoying as all hell? Fuck yes.  But hey, we did get some vouchers for very nice Thai food at the restaurant so we took that home with us.

Anna started throwing up late on Sunday evening.  We had been to her company summer party on Saturday and ate and drank a lot (who knew light Weissbier was SO awesome?). We had originally thought that there was something wrong with the food at the party, but I ate some of the same things that she did, and it all seemed to be very well cooked so I don’t think that was it. She has starting to feel better now (we’re in Sweden and its 22:30 now) though, and has eaten some food.

Emma and Helgi (let me know if I have spelled Helgi correctly, and if you don’t want your names published), and their daughter Lillia have all made us feel very welcome and comfortable.  Emma used to go to university with Anna, and now lives here with Helgi, a professional footballer from Iceland that she met years ago.  He plays for a team near Götheburg so they moved here a couple of years ago.  Their place is lovely; its a small hamlet of houses outside the town with nothing to do except enjoy the fresh air and walk around the ground-skiing / walking / roller skating trail through a local forest. 

It was interesting to catch up with them.  For one thing, I thought Helgi was blonde, but he isn’t.  I accurately remembered his face and… him from the one time I met him in the past (at some dimly light UCL party in London a few years back), but somewhere along the way I forgot that he wasn’t blonde.  I don’t know why I thought that he was; maybe some biased opinion I have of Icelander men or something?  Either way he actually has far darker hair than I remember.  Emma has since had a child too, which was pretty interesting as the last time we saw her was in London a couple of years ago when she was pretty heavily pregnant. All change!

Okay, so I’m really tired now and need to get some sleep.  To illustrate that point, I just spelt “some” as “smoe”, so its all going downhill now.  I can’t post this now because they don’t have a wireless connection (though they do have fast broadband, can’t wait to try that out), so I’ll publish tomorrow.

The BBC just ran a lovely article about typewriters and their use in the digital age. It made me think about the creative process behind this blog, if you could call it creative.  It lead me to conduct an experiment which I will tell you about later.  The article also made me think about the methodology I use to write this blog.  All in all it was a very thought provoking article.

There really isn’t an actual creative process behind this blog.  In fact, I mostly set out with only a broad idea of what I’m going to write before I start.  Most of the time this works out ok.  Sometimes however, I find myself deleting sentences of even whole paragraphs simply because they “came out wrong”, or because it sounded shit.  I used to be a far better, and much more prodigious writer than I am now.  I remember in school once, when tasked with a theme-less two page essay for homework, coming back with a twenty page short story.  It was a pretty good story too, which may well still be back in Ireland somewhere. 

For me, that short story was a trigger. It opened the door for me to a whole new world of words.  A world where I was the lord and master, where I made the decisions. To a kid of seven or eight (I can’t remember which) that was heady stuff indeed.  I have all but forgotten that feeling now, it is lost in these digital decades, banished in the cacophony of new and ephemeral delights.  Something happened today though, which brought it back to me.

I decided to write this blog entry. I don’t mean write as in compose, I mean it from the “pen and paper” perspective.  I have a very old notebook that I have used for a long time to jot down ideas. There are pages ripped out everywhere, the spine is cracked, and the paper has changed colour from white of cream. I believe this was a present from my long-dead aunt, which would make it at least fifteen years old. I tell you this to illustrate that this notebook and my have a long history.  There aren’t many empty pages anymore, but I found some in the middle and started to write this blog post.

I am now on my second page, and I suspect that this will be one of the better written entries on DaveWhite.Net, from both a technical and creative perspective. (Do let me know if you find it so, or indeed if you find it all a load of drivel. I would be interested in different perspectives on this. Click the title above and leave a comment at the end of the page).  It seems there may actually be some truth in that BBC article, and I might well make this a permanent part of my creative process.  Hell, until I get to the point where I fully understand my it, then this IS my creative process.

Up until now, I have never really cared about structure too much. My blog entries have usually contained a single idea that I wished to share and maybe expand on. Either that or they were factual representations of things that happened, in the format of a diary I wanted made public.  (There used to be further data in this blog that was unpublished thoughts I intended to keep personal, but I lost them somewhere along the line).  It was mostly stream of consciousness, mildly organised before I spewed it onto the Internet.  This time however, I find myself checking back over the pages and looking to form a more coherent piece.  I haven’t completely succeeded, as this paragraph should be earlier in the entry. I find this process much more comfortable though. It is harder work, and takes longer to get right, but maybe that should be the whole idea. Maybe it should be harder to write blog entries than I thought it should.  If so, then it only took me ten years to find out. 

What can I say? Thank you BBC.co.uk.

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Why typewriters beat computers

I woke up this morning after having pretty much been asleep for the previous forty hours.  All of yesterday barring an hour or so in the morning and the evening, and most of the previous day.  Its all a result of having been vaccinated against a bunch of potential killer diseases.  So, with three injections, I was vaccinated against TB, Diphtheria, Polio, and two others I can't translate; one of which is part of the standard vaccination sets given to children here, and one to counter the disease carried by tics which you can encounter in the mountains here. 

I continue to be impressed by the quality of medical practice here, and the complete absence of payment except to out medical insurance group.  Don't get me wrong, we're paying about two hundred euros per month for that medical insurance, but it seems to be very comprehensive.  For example, most of our drugs are covered, all of our medical costs (so far) and access to specialists is particularly easy. I wanted to get a follow up test done for my cancer, and instead of needing to be referred by my GP, I can simply pick up the phone and call a specialist.

I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism about medical things when we came over here first.  In London, we paid nothing for our medical costs either, but the conditions of the hospitals and GP practices were positively Victorian.  I have seen both sides of that system too, both the beautiful (private room in Westminster hospital overlooking the houses of parliament) and the ugly (public room in the same hospital where there were eight of us in a ward), and even the best of them left a lot to be desired.  Here in Germany you have to pay for medical insurance, and its typically pretty damn expensive, but you really get what you pay for.

Oh, that reminds me of something.  There is apparently no blood test for the type of cancer I had (seminoma), but they took blood from me every time I went back for a check up.  Have to go look at my medical records and see what they were looking for...

Hey Dave, I have no idea if you've ever played it, but I want to share with you something that has kept me going through many many nights over the last... erm... twenty years.  Its a card game called Shithead (I've heard Ozzies call it President though I've just Googled and found something completely different.  Shithead Googles with the wrong rules too.*) and its one of the top three or four games I've ever played.  It goes like this.

Two to many players can play. You need two decks, from which jokers must be stripped. Shuffle the decks together.  Dealer deals clockwise : four cards face down which players cannot look at, then four cards face up for everyone, and then another four cards face down for all, and one card in the middle which stares the discard pile.  You are allowed to pick up and sort the eight cards you have access to.  You can sort the cards and place your top four cards face UP on the four cards you have face down.

The order of play is to lay a suitable card or cards to the discard pile and then pick up from the deck.  You must hold at least four cards in your hand where possible.  You must play higher or equal to the card last played except on a seven (you must play seven or lower on a seven).  Ace is the highest, two is a wildcard which can play on and be played on by anything, and ten reverses the order of play.  You can play multiples of cards up to a maximum of four on the discard pile.  When four of the same cards have been played, then they and the rest of the discard pile are put away for the duration of the game.  The person who puts away the discard pile with "four of those" gets to play again, after picking up if necessary. If you are unable to match or beat the last card played, then you have to pick up ALL the cards on the discard pile.

Once the last card is played from your hand, you can play your face up cards in any order you like.  Once they are gone, you are forced to play your cafe down cards blind. The one who is left with cards remaining is the Shithead, and can sometimes be required to forfeit something (go make the coffee etc).

* If you google Shithead there are a myriad of variations on the net.  There seems to be a very popular variation with three cards played at the start and requiring only one deck of cards.  It might be worthwhile looking into that too. Enjoy :-)

I started a new German language course today.  Its not run by the same group as before, but by the Volkshochschule (the state adult education group).  So far I'm pretty impressed.  The previous classes were very intense and very expensive.  This is the opposite.  However it actually seems to be a better structured course in that it follows through with a subject more that the Berlitz courses did.  For example, we did some work on modal verbs today. but instead of only dealing with them in first and third person in the present tense, we dealt with them from all perspectives and multiple tenses.  Its good, because I think it is more like actual conversation than the other method, which maybe was a little too rigid.  I'll know for sure after a few more lessons.

So, I went to enroll in another German course today, but they were all full with the exception for one which was too far away to be viable.  So, I'm going to enroll for one starting in April.  I'll do it early so that I can get the course in the location I want (ie: close to where we live).  I could have enrolled for one today, but it was three days a week and so far out from us that it would have taken an hour or more to travel there.  It seems to be very common here that people speak English.  That makes it not impossible for me to do stuff like buying things and interacting with people, as long as I can take the time to communicate with them.  I went to get a hair cut today after searching for the German course.  There were a bunch of salons that would have suited my needs, but they were all booked out for the next few hours.  So, I found one, and absolutely typically I discovered the one salon where the guys spoke German and Hungarian, but no English. Still, after getting around that with Anna's help, I ended up with a fairly decent haircut.  Unlike London, hair salons here are stupidly cheap for men.  The women's prices are lower than in London usually, but the men's prices are just stupid.  Figure €10 to €15 for a decent wash and cut.  Try matching that in London (though the barbers down the road from the office used to be seriously cheap too).

In other news, my sister just passed the last phase of her doctorate!  I think she has a couple of revisions to make to her thesis, but nothing too much, which is nice :-)

I have been doing some more work on the C#.Net version of this site of late, though not as much as I wanted as I've been bust with other stuff.  One thing I did discover was that there is now a fantastic new .Net blog engine around that I have downloaded and played with a little.  Its called BlogEngine.Net, and does everything that I want my blog to do already.  It is written in C#, and released under Open Source (actually I think its shared source, but I don't have the license in front of me.  Its so good that I may end up actually using it on this site instead of something else I might write myself.  Stay tuned for more!

My consultant wants me to go back to the hospital to see him every month. No particular reason they say, and they seem pretty confident in that. Just routine they say, and that this is the way he likes to operate his schedule. So the novelty value of cancer, and hospitals, and treatments is going to wear off real fast. I was there twice over the last week to see my oncologist and have an ultrasound, and while I was typing this sentence, something occurred to me. It isn't every six months that I'm going to have to go back, it IS every month. I'll have to go for bloods, x-rays and cat scans every month with the oncology department, and the same every six months with the urology department. Fuck, what a drag. And I don't even get miles for this.

Lots of things happening right now.  Work is busy as ever, though its all a bunch of little jobs that need to be done.  I had to go for an ultrasound today, and everything was clear, which is great news.  Eve is starting to bore me, so I'm going to leave the corp I work in and try something else.  Anna is working in The Passage this week.  I'm re-designing my web site, and going to finally engineer it as I want it.  I have an idea involving liquid metal that, if I can manage to make it look like I want it, is going to be awesome.  I'm sure there's more, but I'm going to get some sleep now.  Back to our regular scheduled program from tomorrow :-)