As reported by slashdot, thepiratebay.org, a Swedish bittorrent tracker, has been shut down by the Swedish police. Servers have been confiscated and two operators are in custody.
It is a funny situation, since linking to illegal material (as a bittorrent tracker does) is NOT illegal in Sweden. I hope justice will find its way out on the right side, and that some sensible person changes the filesharing laws in this country to be a lot more liberal.
Dear blogreaders.
I am interested in what you would expect from an adventure like the one I will be doing next year. I will be working on Sweden’s largest (and fastest) sailing performance megayacht, Elida V from August 2006 to midsummer 2007. It is (as far as I know) the first ship in the world that has a passenger certificate and is build in plastics, and it is also a ship that is focusing on the environment.
The primary method of transportation is sailing, in contrast to the previous Elidas. Elida V is build like modern race boats you’ll find in the Volvo Ocean or America’s Cup fleets, but a lot larger.
So the next year I will be working on this marvelous ship as a volunteer. As a sailor, I will be helping out with a lot of sail handling and trimming, but as all members of the crew I will take care of the ordinary things on board like cooking, cleaning the dishes and washing. There is at least ten people on board all the time, so there will be no lack of people to socialize with.
What about the destinations? Well, Elida V will sail around in Sweden until the 27th of September. Then we depart Gothenburg and sail for the Mediterranean Sea. Down there, we stay for five months and work with people on the shore. The primary mission of Elida is to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ, and that is what we will be doing.
So this is a great adventure, and there will be tough and joyful hours on board. What would you, dear blogreader, expect from such an opportunity?
I’ve been wearing dental braces since May 2005. Yesterday, I was finally relieved of this steel contraption in my mouth, and I could enjoy having straight and aligned teeth. One year ago, my eyeteeth were sticking out like vampire teeth, but they have been pulled to the right position now.
Even though my braces have been removed, I have a glued wire behind the teeth that hold them in position. I also have a type of plastic brace that I put over my teeth during the night. This ensures that the teeth stay in the same position during the night.
It feels great to be free from the braces, and I am not disappointed with the time that I’ve worn them. To anyone who thinks of getting them I would recommend you to take it. They don’t hurt too much and you get used to cleaning your teeth as thoroughly as you need. Since I am under 19 years of age, I don’t have to pay for my dentist visits, so this has been an all-win situation for me.
The dentists were really nice to me all the time, and my time as a patient at Folktandvården Svartån will be a good memory.
Elida V, the next generation of the long-running missionary boats Elida, is going to be launched on the 4th of June at Hunnebostrand, Sweden.
Elida V is a performance megayacht, 45 meters tall and 40 meters long and with performance that overcomes most boats. In fact, Elida V is supposed to be Sweden’s fastest megayacht today. In comparision to the older boats, Elida V is built of modern plastic materials, which gives a very light but strong construction. Elida IV weighed 250 tons but Elida V, which is longer, taller and wider, weighs in at quite exactly 100 tons.
Still, with a new boat, the focus remains the same. Elida continues to preach the good news of the Gospel, the message about Jesus Christ. The launch will take place at about 3 pm, and there will be many things to do in addition to the launch.
I will be there with my family and watch the ship that I will work on the next year take its maiden voyage on the Swedish West Coast.
Elida.se (Swedish site)
I did not have the strength to write a lengthy post yesterday, so I’ll describe my injury in more detail now.
I jumped on a trampoline with a friend yesterday, and it was fun since it was the first time I jumped with someone more heavy than me. I looked down on my feet, and as I landed the next time I saw my right foot bend in a strange direction and then come back to the normal position. I for sure remember whether I heard a cracking sound or not, but I felt an immediate and strong pain. I quickly sat down on my trampoline and shouted that I had injured my foot. My friend on the trampoline stopped jumping and sat down.
I looked at my foot and saw that a large swelling had appeared on the right side of the foot. Two of the friends that were nearby are excperienced soccer players, and since they are quite familiar with this type of injury they quickly ordered me to put on a bandage very tight around the foot. I did, and as I sat down with my foot held high, the pain went back a little.
The swelling started to slow down, and I went in to get some rest. At this time I had jumped on the trampoline for about fifteen minutes, and I was quite tired in my legs.
I took two pain relievers, which helped reduce the pain a lot to the point where I could join my friends in their meal they were having.
Today I went to the hospital to borrow two crutches. I am sure that it only is a sprained ankle, and since I can move my foot without pain there is probably nothing broken inside. I am now hopping around on my crutches in school and have got probably thirty questions about my foot.
The pain is getting better, and I am resting my foot to help it heal as quickly as possible. I will have my graduation next week, so I do not want to hop around on crutches then.
I hurt my foot today and do now have a sprained ankle (I googled up the English name for it). I am not writing as much as I use to today, since I feel quite a lot of pain in my foot and will go to bed early. Be careful when playing with “bouncing pads” (I didn’t bother looking up “studsmatta” in English)
The news report I talked about yesterday is finally getting finished. There are still a few touchups to do, but the story as a whole is finished.
The downtown concerto yesterday was great; the band plays music with a good feeling and great sound. My friend Marc has bought a new guitar, and is very happy with it. The band is an enseble consisting mostly of students at the music education programme at Växhuset in Västerås. They are simply called “Afrogruppen”, the Afro Group, because of the school’s classification of their musical style. (Afro music is supposed to mean all sorts of music that isn’t classical nor folk music). The music education programme is an evening-time course for advanced students at Växhuset, and if I would not have chosen to sail for Elida next year, I had taken this music education programme instead. I applied and came in, but I turned down the offering last week.
Apart from my final assignments and music, I am planning the summer and graduation day. Me and my friends will probably take a weekend in London, but nothing is for certain yet. We will meet at my place tomorrow and plan for what we will do. Apart from Elida and various excursions, I will mostly work this summer. It is the first summer for me when I almost exclusivley work, so it will be a different thing than I am used to. I will work for ABB Automation Products and support their sales department with programming. I hope that all the nightmare stories told by developers about the sales department aren’t as bad as I have heard. Well, I am only developing someting that is used internally, so the stories do probably not apply to my case.
Tomorrow I will for the first time in several weeks go to the Sunday Service in our church. There should be a good preacher there as well as my friends.
Happy reading!
I am not used to having Thursday and Friday off from school, but that is the fact this week due to Ascension day. The last lession I had this week was physical education, and it was the last lesson of that sort that I will ever have. When I graduate from highschool and start to attend university, there will be no such lessons while at school anymore.
We played brännboll, a sport similar to baseball that is very popular in Sweden. Luckily, it was the only day this week that had sunshine instead of the usual rain showers, so it was a great game. My friend hit the ball farther than anybody else, and he made a homerun while our team tried to fetch the little green thing that landed over a hundred meters away.
This weekend I have spent quite a lot writing on a news story about the robot project I had last year. It is a compulsory task in the Svenska B (Swedish B) course we are finishing right now. The text has become quite long, three and a half pages, and I am still not finished. There is actually quite a lot to do during the next week, the final of my highschool period. I have a large assignment to write in the Power Electronics course, a reflection on the similarities between the Bible and the movie Narnia: The lion, the witch and the wardrobe. I have also got to finish the slideshow movie that we will show during the ending ceremony. The slideshow will feature a lot of pictures on our class from the three years that have passed, and will be “thank you” to all my classmates since we won’t see each other again.
At one o’clock today I will go downtown and listen to a few friends of mine play in the central park of Västerås. Hopefull y it won’t rain.
