I am at Landvetter and waiting/working until my flights to Zurich via Copenhagen depart. I have had a few lazy days in Scandinavia and it is time to get back to normal with more work and less leisure.
On Friday I took an evening flight to Oslo after work. I have told Jim more than two years ago that I would come and visit them. Since they are about to move back to Sweden in a few days I had to go now in order to keep my promises. 🙂
Jim, Isabelle and Scott live a few days more in a nice and central (walking distance to Karl Johan) apartment in Oslo. As usual when we meet, our tech toys are central since playing with computers and cell phones is a common interest. During the last two years I have been doing much less of pleasureful geek activities and now I have probably filled by quota for the next months. Apart from spending time with computers together, we also went to Holmenkollen during the foggy Saturday and a walk along Karl Johan on the sunny Sunday.
One of the projects I dealt with this weekend is to set up VirtualBox with two virtual machines on my Solaris server (Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 to start with) which anyway is heavily under utilized. The remote administration is done either via their text interface (terminal via SSH) or via RemoteBox (GUI via X11 forwarding via SSH). The virtual machines can be reached via RDP tunneled via SSH (much more modern protocol than VNC) and terminal via SSH.
On Saturday I went by bus to Gothenburg to visit my brother Joel. It is always good to catch up face-to-face and not only via computers. I also went up to the attic to see if I could find some useful stuff among the things that I left when I packed my Saab and moved to Switzerland two and half years ago. I found some jackets and shoes which I think could be worth bringing with me. Let’s see what Tanya, who is not always impressed with my “findings”, says about their suitability…
Another reason to go to Scandinavia is that I had to renew my passport and the cost for the passport is much less in Sweden than at the embassy in Bern. I applied this morning and it will hopefully show up in Zurich (via the embassy in Bern) in Zurich in a few weeks. The plan is to apply for a Russian visa with the new passport before Christmas and our Sweden-Russia-tour.
After refilling the stock of Swedish fish roe spread with dill (Swedish: “dillkaviar”) for myself and some Polarbröd to Tanya, it is now time to proceed to the check-in desk.