For all of you wondering about the status of me and my blog: We are still alive…

The last 2 months have been extremely eventful and beautiful; they were both final stroke and the beginning of a new period of life. It was time to say good-bye to many people, including good friends. And it was time to welcome the future.

I’m back home, back in good old Germany.

Many impressions have to be assimilated and filed for eternity. I neglected the blog, I enjoyed the time as a non-publisher. But I would like to share my incredible insights into the international student atmosphere.

Blogs are made to publish up-to-date information, but I want to look back during the next weeks. At least, I want to upload some pictures from events like:

• The outcome of my self-brewed beer
• The fabulous Sittning (extremely censored edition)
• The Brännboll tournament and the fucking mess in Aldiheim
• The visit of my parents and our travel to Lofoten/Vesterålen/Abisko
• The very last days in Umeå
• The way back home (aka on the road with daddy cool)

Until then, I give you 4 little pics from the last weeks…

Stay tuned!

I can proudly present: Two more international students here in Umea who decided to overwhelm the web with information about staying abroad in northern Sweden. And here they are…

• Whats up in sweden? Marco launched a blog (yeah!) to answer this question. Primarily written in English, the extensive travelogues (are|will be) published in German.
• Christoph launched his Experiment Schweden, a web page including his monthly newsletter and some galleries. Check out the beautiful Northern Lights page! Contents written in German.

Monday, 4:30 pm, workout at the campus sports field. No more excuses.

Norrlands Guld is a beer brewed by Spendrups. It’s very popular here in northern Sweden (“Norrland”) – especially with the hoi polloi and us international students. They offer – as many Swedish breweries – the “supermarket versions” with 2.8/3.5% alc. and the good old Systembolaget brew with 5.3%.

This year, Norrlands Guld celebrated its 40th anniversary (is it just a coincidence that the university has the same jubilee?) and launched its Jubileumsbutik. Of course we ordered some shirts and towels. This is how the stuff looks:

International Norrlands Guld resources:

• Micha about Norrlands Guld & its branding
• Rolf was our trend-setter

BTW: Our team for this year’s Brännbollscupen is called Golden Girls. Guess what! More details will be published soon…

There hasn’t been much activity on my blog during the last days. And this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to tell. In fact, a lot of interesting events took place and some new projects just started.

I haven’t told you about the first home match of Umeå IK’s women soccer team which they successfully won 7:0.
I haven’t told you about the beach volley contest with my mentor group last Monday where my team perfectly sucked.
I haven’t told you about the pleasure of sunbathing at 13°C after experiencing months of snow.
I haven’t told you about some really nice BBQ sessions at Nydala and in good old Mariehem.
I haven’t told you about the Valborg (Walpurgis Night) where I was camping out in the woods close to the freezing point.
I haven’t told you about the official world championships in Brännboll, for which I formed a team to defeat the world elite.
And I still haven’t told you about holy Norrlands Guld and Umea’s plan to apply for being the European Capital of Culture 2014 (*sic*).

The reason for not writing about all these wonderful topics is my incredibly poor time management: I have to hand in one assignment per week for my Speech and Language Processing class. I normally write that stuff some hours before the due date. Last time, I didn’t even meet the deadline. I haven’t been in Swedish class for 2 weeks now. I asked my teacher in Academic Presentations to postpone my final presentation, because I was running out of time.

So what do I actually do all the time? Well, besides doing all that fun stuff stated above, I spend many hours reading blogs and listening podcasts. It’s a weird contradiction that I was speaking about saving time by managing blogs using RSS in my final presentation, but I myself spend more and more time in the blogosphere. One can discover fantastic things every single day: People who understand the net as a social setting. People who think ahead. People who share and spread knowledge. The web is people, not just dusty documents.

But maybe this is just an excuse for my continuing laziness… Shit.

Just a short post with some links to photo pages and blogs of international students here in Umea… This is what I discovered during the last weeks:

• Marce’s Dagbladet (Marcello’s blog in Italian – Mica’s pics and much content, unfortunately I don’t understand a lot )
• João’s Suécia Photo Blog (Brazilian action, click últimas fotos on the left to see a list of all galleries)
• Aventuras en Suecia of Sebastian & Nicholas (photo page from two Uruguayan students, funnily enough hosted at German Arcor)

Hey guys, I know that there is more of this stuff out there. Show up & post your link!

Today it was time to do the last presentation for my Academic Presentations course. I was talking about blogs in general in my very first presentation and discussed system selection and article publishing with WordPress in the second one. This time, I used the chance to speak about blogs one more time and concentrated on the reader’s perspective. And this includes of course RSS.

Explaining RSS is like explaining sex. You just don’t get it until you do it.
(George Siemens)

Well, I tried it anyway…

We had about 9 minutes for our speech and I didn’t really manage to make a sensible content selection. Ergo, I spoke reeeeeeally fast, which is definitely not the best idea when it comes to presenting “new” techniques. I hope that my audience understood the main principles of RSS & feeds anyway: They help you to keep track of fast-changing information sources.

There are tons of useful documents about RSS & feeds out there, but maybe you are interested in my PowerPoint slides.

I closed my presentation with a (slightly changed) quotation from Bicyclemark’s talk in HUMlab last week:

There is a problem in the world: There are people who know about RSS and there are people who don’t and are scared. I don’t know how we’re gonna come together.
(Bicylemark)

Hey Mark, feel honoured! You were officially quoted in an “academic” presentation!

Once again, my speech was videotaped (for evaluation purposes only ) and I’m really looking forward to watching it. Another comedy show with 2meter3…

The course is over now and it’s time to thank our teacher Van Leavenworth for doing such a great job. I had a good time in class and appreciated your enthusiastic and straight-forward way of teaching. Thanks for your feedback!

Today it was time to bottle the second session of my brew. Mindful readers may realize that it’s already 8 days “old”. This time, I used the maximum of the proposed fermentation period in order to minimize the sediments. We will see how it works out. I worked alone, took it easy and used only the thick version of PET-bottles. Don’t wanna see another explosion…

BTW: Hej Mormor, I know that you don’t read my blog and I know that you wouldn’t understand English, but I have to publish these greetings anyway. It’s your 88th birthday today and I wish you all the best. In only two months we will meet again! Have a nice party today; I will drink to you tonight! Grattis på födelsedag, har det så bra!

BTW2: Have a look at the web page of Paulaner (a popular German brewery). They offer three different versions – German, Bavarian and English. Very funny and well done (click the arrow first)!
Via: Shopblogger!

Bist du voll, so leg dich nieder, nach dem Schlafen saufe wieder.

Wow, it took 25 days after our return from the Easter trip to create the gallery! Altogether, we three “digital” photographers shot more than 666 pictures. An adequate selection had to be made, while obtaining the chronological order and adding comments. Lofoten Islands have definitely been the most impressive place during my stay in Scandinavia. The resulting gallery with 150 photos is absolutely worth a visit!

Thanks to Laure and Julien for shooting so wonderful pics!

Well, I don’t really know where to start this time… I have already mentioned HumLAB and Podcasting in my blog, but maybe it’s good to explain these terms in short:

HumLAB is in fact a nicely equipped computer lab at Umea University (under the library, opposite to that hopelessly crowded lab with the old and crappy PCs). HumLAB describes itself as “a vibrant and diverse meeting place for the humanities, culture and information technology”. They host a series of seminars and speeches covering all topics at the interface between IT & society. I think they have a really good reputation in the “scene”. Unfortunately, I have never been to HumLAB before, but I regularly check their English blog.

Podcasting refers to a relatively young fashion of producing and distributing (mostly non-professional) audio shows on the net. Google defines Podcasting as “making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user’s convenience”. Podcasting is often seen as an alternative to commercial radio. Read more about Podcasting at Wikipedia.

And now it’s time to combine these two things: Today, HumLAB presented a seminar with Mark Fonseca Rendeiro, who’s running a popular blog and podcast called Bicyclemark’s Communiqué. He is one of the pioneers of podcasting. Mark describes himself as a “Portuguese-American, radical, activist-journalist, pretend-academic, university employee, podcaster, blog fanatic”. And today’s topic was of course podcasting.

After giving a general overview about the topic, he became more personal and detailed. He presented some of his favorite podcasts, showed iPodder Lemon on his new iBook and reflected on the future of podcasting. It was really fascinating to realize that the podcasting scene is still such a small and connected group: I knew almost every European podcast he mentioned. And he already knew about the Loudblog project of Gerrit van Aaken (one of the most popular German podcasters), which was launched just 10 days ago.

The seminar was live-streamed and archived; a seminar chat was set up as well. The audience seemed to be familiar with the world of blogging (most people knew RSS), but I can’t assess their interest in podcasting. I think that some questions showed the continuous uncertainty of classifying podcasts into the world of media. Podcasts are asynchronous, podcasts are underground, and podcasts are subscriptions. Podcasting claims to be easy for both the producer and the listener. Podcasting is not about sophisticated content tagging or 24/7 broadcasting. Not yet.

After his presentation, I seized the chance to talk to Mark personally. He is really excited about the development of podcasting in 2005.
Bicyclemark, it was a pleasure meeting you! I’m looking forward to hearing your “Soundseeing” in Stockholm and the next German Phrase of the Week!

More resources:

• Seminar information in the HumLAB blog
• Mark about his talk
• Mark about Sweden
• Jim with a short review
• Stephanie shot a pic

Today I started another round in my little brewery to make use of the second half of the concentrate. There is actually not as much to report; I didn’t change the procedure from the last time: Heating the concentrate, adding sugar, mixing with boiling water, adding cold water, stirring the brew, and finally adding the yeast. But of course I couldn’t keep my hands off my cam:

• Pic01: The second half of the concentrate
• Pic02: Brewing equipment
• Pic03: Heavy stirring
• Pic04: Adding Swedish water
• Pic05: Close-up of the brew
• Pic06: The bucket (2nd round) and the bottles (1st round)

I open the bottles from the first round approx. every 3 days in order to avoid another explosion. It’s incredible how much carbonate acid is still being produced. According to the schedule, the secondary fermentation should be over soon. It would be better to find a cooler location for the bottles, but up to now I haven’t had the perfect idea. Unfortunately, my house has no basement. Or didn’t I find it yet?

Ein bayerischer Papst? Na der kriegt nix von meinem Bier…

Once again, we had a nice party weekend here in Umea. On Friday, Michael invited in the “Mariehem-Party-Room” to celebrate his 25th birthday (well, he didn’t state this explicitly, but every party needs an occasion and his real birthday was only 8 days ago). Hey, so it was only 30 meters to go home! Ergo, I drank a little bit too much and made heavy usage of Kirsi’s camera. I ran around like a lunatic and made tons of crappy pics. See a selection of 6 impressions which show me and [Fabio; Rolf + Kirsi; Elena; Steffi; Sarah; Nils], being not sober at all…

On Saturday, I had a nice party in the Spanish Corridor©. I’m a little bit too shy to publish that picture showing me wearing pink gloves…

Yesterday I visited the last performance of this year’s Spexet from Umesperxarna. Spexet refers to a troupe of non-professional student actors who normally rehearse and stage one self-written play per year. These performances are very popular in Sweden; they combine the passion of an amateur theater with the hilarious improvisational performance of a stand-up-comedian.

This year, Umespexarna staged “Franksa Revolutionen” – the French Revolution:

Tänk er ett land kontrollerat av en envåldshärskare, vars ätt styrt över riket så länge någon kan minnas och som regerar med dekret från ett slott en bra bit utanför huvudstaden. Nej, det är inte Sverige vi talar om utan Frankrike anno 1789 och en tid då revolutionen låg i luften.
(Umespexarna)

Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Maximilien Robespierre are the well-known characters of the historical event. The re-written story introduces the Swedish king as a wild Viking and opens with a concatenation of the Marseillaise and ABBA’s Waterloo. Can this be a good sign?

The audience has the power: Interjections provoke the actors to speak higher, “drunker” or even in German, to act faster or backwards.
I understood probably less than 10 percent, but I had great fun anyway. The play lives on the various songs and dances. I especially want to highlight the fabulous quintet which their clear voices and sophisticated arrangements and lyrics (well, as far as I can assess them).

I spend 70+20 SEK for a funny and cultural Sunday afternoon. So what?