i summon one kim

There’s a first time for everything: I got out of bed in the middle of the night to write an entry in this blog. I’ve considered it a few times in the past, but never actually done it before.

I just arrived in Germany yesterday, and I was hoping to conquer jetlag with the usual method of staying up late without any napping in order to sleep soundly through the first night. Maybe having nodded off on the train is the culprit, but I woke up at 3am and could not go back to sleep.

Last night after dinner I was eventually ready to fall asleep standing up. I enjoy conversing with my brother and sister-in-law, but it is obvious now that my brain was mostly storing rather than processing at the end of the evening. A trip to the bathroom was enough time for it to completely wake up, and at that point it was a total avalanche of thoughts!

You know how sometimes in the evening you cannot fall asleep because something is stuck in your thoughts and won’t go away? It was sort of like that, but different, because after each thought there was a new one pushing its way through. And there was no end to it — conversations from yesterday; tasks to tackle once I arrive in Finland; that it’s really a fact I’m not living in the USA anymore; and so on.

Finally at 4:30am I gave up and thought it would be better to actually focus on something. So much easier than a constant merry-go-round of random thoughts in your head.

Well, that was that — I’ve signed my termination papers at work today. It’s an odd feeling not to have a job, even if I’ve known for months that this day was coming. If I wasn’t moving at the same time I’d have absolutely nothing to do right now… :-)

I’ll need to tie up some loose ends tomorrow: a bit of cleanup at the apartment, mailing my friends a list of stuff I can’t take with me but seems too good to throw away, figuring out what to pack and how (I wasn’t thinking straight when I had the big suitcase packed in with the household move and left too many small ones behind), and do some last minute shopping. That should be it.

I rented a Dodge Dakota to drive for a week. I’ve found out it is just a bit bigger than an average parking spot…

Probably about two weeks ago Artsi told me I might like In Absentia by Porcupine Tree. So I got it uploaded to my iPod so I could listen to it on the train. Indeed, I liked it. I didn’t think progressive rock was made anymore, but apparenty I was wrong (you could search for “neo prog”). In Absentia is an airy and happy album — I kept it playing while I walked from the train to the office, and it went well with the cool breeze of that day. Of course, as always, there is a price for finding new music: I now own five Porcupine Tree albums already.

A new album was just released a couple of days ago and is called Deadwing. It has a much heavier rock sound. I’ve only listened to it twice, so I can’t yet say too much, other than that so far I seem to like it.

However, I’ve been more drawn to their older material. Right now I’m listening to the Stars Die double album, which is a compilation of their music from 1991–1997 released under the Delerium label. From what I understood from the biography this material is mainly solo work by Steven Wilson in tribute to the 60’s and 70’s music that insipired him. I really want to make note of my favorite songs and look up the albums on which they originally appeared.

David Sasaki (oso) wrote on the wp-polyglots mailing list with some questions for an article he is working on about “multilingual, multicultural, and transnational blogs.” I answered him and I also wanted to post here about blogging in two languages.

As you may have seen my blog now respects the language settings of your browser. You will not see posts in languages that you have not enabled in your browser (unless your settings would rule out all posts). If you want to see all posts, just make sure your browser is configured to requests both English and Finnish content. To exclude a language, check that your browser settings include all the languages you do want to see.

As an example, if your browser is configured to only prefer content in German (de), you would currently see all posts (since I don’t have any in German). If you’d rather not see the Finnish content, you can add English (en) to the list of preferred languages. This would result in the Finnish ones to be excluded (just force a reload of the page).

Read on for the questions and answers… (more…)

I’ve released DoFollow 2.0 to go with WordPress 1.5.1. The functionality is the same as before, and the plugin can be used with (an unpatched) 1.5 as well.

The patch I had proposed to core WordPress functionality is gone: the developers prefer to keep the current nofollow implementation as is. If you had previously applied the patch, you can download a copy from Mosquito issue #1087 and reverse it (e.g. using patch -p -R).

I wanted to make this change to DoFollow, as it removes a chunk of code that was digging in some internal structures of WordPress that don’t have an exposed and documented API. Now it is much less likely that changes to DoFollow would be required for maintaining compatibility with future WordPress releases.