Why do we celebrate birthdays?

I've been thinking. We (almost everyone all over the world) celebrate the day we are born. But why do we do that? I really have no good answer.
Usually we celebrate achievements. To quote Dr. Leonard Hofstadter from The Big Bang Theory "being expelled from a birth canal was not considered one". However for some reason we celebrate the day we were born. Every year.
I can understand why people would celebrate on the actual day we are born and give gifts to the parents. Especially the mother of the baby has achieved something great on that specific day. The baby has not. And definitely not something that needs to be celebrated on that day every year.
So why do we do it? Is it a celebration to show that "yay, I survived yet another year in this hostile environment"?
Some people don't like to celebrate their birthday because they don't want to get older, but that's just stupid. You get older all the time. Every second you're one second older than you were the previous second for example. The only way to stop growing older is to die.

Another pound-o-dice from Chessex

So I went and bought myself another pound of Chessex dice. Unlike last time I just took one photo and I'm just going to write really quickly what I got and maybe make a short comment or two.
D3 = 1 (the white "D6" with round corners and numbers)
D4 = 3 (one translucent purple)
D6 = 18 (one pipped 20mm, 8 pipped 16mm (two are glittery red), 3 pipped 12mm (one is frosted "white"), and 6 standard sized numbered)
D8 = 4 (all of them the same blue speckled colour)
D10 = 23 (four dark grey speckled, three green speckled with gold numbers, three green/yellow speckled with white numbers, three opaque red with blue numbers, two opaque grey with blue numbers, two purple speckled)
D% = 3 (one has purple speckles and numbers, and match the 7-dice set you get with every pound of dice)
D12 = 6 (two dark blue/light blue speckled)
D20 = 31 (eleven of them are brown with some red speckles, seven are half black and half grey, three are half brown and half black, and two are half grey and half green with gold numbers)
My 7-dice set was white with yellow/orange speckles and green numbers
All in all I got 96 dice in this pound.

Funny thing about this pound of dice was that it weighed 490 grams. 1 pound = 453.59 grams.So that's (if I calculated correctly) 1 pound and 1.28 ounces. I can live with that. Even if I also could live with a bit less brown D20s...

I guess after this I'm set for life. So no more pound of dice for me. Although, if I win a lot of money I could get the 30 pound box of dice I saw on Chessex' website. That would be legendary!

Changed the name of the blog

Since I post more random stuff than actual photo related stuff I decided to change the name of the blog from "Adventures in Photography" to "What's on my mind".

What I got in my Chessex Pound-O-Dice

 Yesterday I received my Pound-O-Dice from Chessex, so today I thought I'd take photos of all the dice and write about them. First I got the 7-dice set that's included in all the bags. Mine was the one with black speckles and numbers.

 These are the D4's.
The three in the back row all have the numbers along the edges. The orange looks frosted, and the green looks like a mix of translucent and swirly, and the blue looks like it's marble.
The middle one in the middle row is blue/purple and if you hold it up against a light source you can almost see through it.
The three in the front row don't show the correct colours in this photo. There are two translucent blue and one translucent yellow.


Then we have the D6's. First the numbered ones. The translucent red one in the left photo is 16mm. All the others are the standard 15mm. The red one with a smaller 6 is frosted.

The D6's with pips came in five different sizes. The big blue one is 22mm, the big black one is 18mm, the small white one is 14mm, the small red and purple ones are 12mm and the eight in the middle are the standard 16mm. The pink one is kind of like velvet and the one next to it is a translucent amber colour.

The only interesting looking D8 is the one at the top left of the eight. It's the same blue/purple as the D4 I mentioned earlier.
Oh and the pink one is misprinted. The opposing sides don't add up to 9. Some of the sides add up to 11 and some up to 7.
Edit: After looking closer to the pink one I think it's a countdown dice. Never heard of an 8-sided countdown dice before.

Nothing that exciting among the D10's. The one at the top of the pile is translucent but I can't decide if it's a dark pink or light red. It's pretty either way.
The white with red speckles and numbers looks like it belongs in the 7-dice set that's included. I got one D20 just like it too. You can see that they are factory seconds because of the paint.
Only got four percentile dice, but how often do you have a use for more than one?

Only two D12's. The white one is a millimetre or so bigger and looks almost like a pearl. Also the white one has a different order for its numbers. The opposing sides are still adding up to 13 though so there shouldn't be anything wrong with it.

Last but not least the D20's. Some of them it's hard to tell the difference between the 6 and the 9 because the line underneath is almost worn off.

The two white ones at the bottom are 20-sided D10's. However like the pink D8 the opposing sides do not add up to the correct number.

All together I got exactly 100 dice. Split like this:
D4 = 9
D6 = 33 (17 numbered and 16 pipped)
D8 = 9 (8 regular and 1 countdown)
D10 = 16
D% = 4
D12 = 2
D20 = 18
20-sided D10 = 2
7-dice set

At the same time as I ordered the pound of dice I also ordered a 7-dice set of mini dice (on Amazon.co.uk they are listed as: "Big Cherry Poly Dice Set, MINI, Toxic Purple, 7 Polyhedron Dice"). I took a photo of them with the set that came in the pound of dice to show the size difference. Not only are they a nice colour, they are so cute so I thought I'd include the photo here.

Dice tray made from a photo frame

I think we all have had the problem with dice falling off the table so I thought a cheap photo frame might be made into a dice tray.
The frame I chose was a cheap 18cm x 18cm frame I got for about 20SEK (in today's exchange rate that's around £2 or $3US).

 I removed the glass and the backboard as well as all the small metal pins that held the glass in place.

I removed the "stand" and glued some ugly looking light blue felt onto the backboard.

 Then I turned the frame over and glued the backboard onto the edge that the front of the glass rests against.

 Works very well.

Sure it's not the prettiest dice tray out there, but it does its job. Total cost was around 30SEK (about £3 or $4.50US).

Made myself a dice bag

I've played a lot of role-playing games and board games in my life and I've gathered quite a lot of dice from them. Yesterday I had this idea that maybe I could make a dice bag for all my dice. I went online and found lots of inspiration from DIY projects.
Today I scavanged my apartment for cloth. I found an old, black, bed sheet that I thought would make a great outside and I found an old flannel shirt with holes on the elbows that I don't know why I haven't thrown away but it served me well for the lining.
I decided to do a "round bottomed" dice bag so I used a saucer to make a round piece since I don't have a compass (I have the kind of compass that points North, but that's not really helpful here). After calculating the circumference I decided on the height of the bag and cut out one rectangle from each cloth. To make it easy to fit a string I just sewed a strip of cloth to the outside and left the ends of it open. For a string I used some red ribbon I had left over.
After putting it all together I ended up with this:

It's much too big for the dice I have in it now, but I might gather more in the future. Also for next time I know to make a smaller one and maybe I can use this one for something else.

Fireworks at midnight 2012-2013

Here are some of the more successful photos I took of the fireworks at midnight.
 

A look back at my 2012

The first two months were pretty uneventful. Pretty much all I did was start this blog in January.
Then in March several different people told me if I really want to get a job I need to get a driver's license. So at the end of March I spent a lot of my savings and started doing just that. I finally had the license at the end of June, so approximately three months to get that.
Then when I still didn't get any job offers people kept telling me I had to have a car to be interesting on the job market so I spent even more of my savings to buy a cheap car at the end of July.
Just to keep score:
Job offers without a driver's license = 0
Job offers with a driver's license = 0
Job offers with a driver's license and a car = 0
So yeah, that helped... It helped wasting almost all of my savings on nothing. Yay...
Anyhow, after that nothing much has happened. Not even the end of the world happened like that moron said and that everyone spread as if it was real. For all of us who actually bothered to read about the Mayan long count calender it came as no surprise at all. That calender lasts for at least another five million years or so before it starts over and goes on forever. Kind of like how we count months, years, decades, centuries, millenia and so on.
What else happened this year? I got back to pretty much my high school weight again. That's about the only positive thing that I can think of...

My plans for the new year. Get a job... As if that will happen.

Where I lay my head is home?

On Sunday, October 21, I have lived in my current apartment for 5475 days (approx. 15 years). That's one whole day longer than I've lived in any other apartment/house. The weird thing though is that I still don't feel like it's my home.
Even if I would move soon I will not get more than one or perhaps two chances to beat this record. If I can't feel at home after 15 years, how big is the chance that I will find another place where I do feel at home?
I actually hope I can move out really soon. I need to get a job though. That's the biggest problem.

I don't know where I wanted to go with this rant, I just felt so sad that I've lived here longer than anywhere else and can't shake the feeling that I don't belong.

Swedish months

About a month ago I made a blog post about the names of the weekdays in Swedish. I haven't had time to make any posts since then but I thought I'd make another post now with the names of the months in Swedish.
This one is going to be so easy because the origins of the names are exactly the same as in English. It's just the spelling that differs for most.
January = januari
February = februari
March = mars
April = april
May = maj
June = juni
July = juli
August = augusti
September = september
October = oktober
November = november
December = december

Swedish weekdays

I'm sure this information is available all over the internet but I thought I'd make a post about it anyways. The names of the Swedish weekdays and what they are derived from.
To begin with I should perhaps mention that the Swedish word for 'day' is 'dag'. While we're at it the Swedish word for 'night' is 'natt'. Also the Swedish word for a 24-hour period (usually starting at midnight) is 'dygn'.
On to the weekdays (this is what I learnt when I grew up, I only looked up the spelling of the names in English):
Weekday - Derived from - English description - Simple meaning
Måndag - Måne - 'Måne' means 'Moon' and he was the personification of the Moon in Norse mythology (in English the Norse god is called 'Máni') - Moon's Day
Tisdag - Tyr - 'Tyr' was one of the Norse gods (in English his name is spelt 'Týr') - Týr's Day
Onsdag - Oden - 'Oden' was one of the Norse gods (in English his name is spelt 'Odin') - Odin's Day
Torsdag - Tor - 'Tor' was one of the Norse gods (in English his name is spelt 'Thor') - Thor's Day
Fredag - Freja - 'Freja' was one of the Norse goddesses (in English her name is spelt 'Freyja') - Freyja's Day
Lördag - Löga - 'Löga' is an old word that's not used anymore, but it meant something along the lines of 'to wash oneself' - The Day you wash yourself
Söndag - Sol - 'Sol' means 'Sun' and she was the personification of the Sun in Norse mythology (in English her name is spelt 'Sól') - Sun's Day
So basically we have six days named after Norse gods/goddesses and one day we had to name so we didn't forget to wash ourselves at least once a week.

Weight loss update

One year. One whole year. August 22, 2011. That's how long ago I weighed 113,5 kg (250.2 lbs). Today, August 22, 2012 I weigh 70,6 kg (155.6 lbs) and I feel so much healthier.
It would've been awesome to lose 100 lbs in one year, but 94.6 lbs lost in one year isn't bad. Also my current weight is pretty decent for me. So I probably shouldn't try to lose more. Losing 50 kg would've been a great milestone as well, but if I'd lose that much I would've been unhealthy. I know BMI isn't an exact science, but my BMI has gone from 37,15 to 23,11. If I had lost 100 lbs it would be 22,3 which isn't bad. If I had lost 50 kg it would be 20,78 and that's way too thin for me.
Now after this year has passed I kind of wish that I had taken a photo of myself each day to see the transformation. Oh well, too late for that now.
Next goal: Not gaining the weight back, and also get a job...

My first car

I was going to wait with this post until I had had a chance to take a few photos of the car, but I think that won't happen anytime soon.
On July 30 this year I bought a 2001 Ford Focus stationwagon. All was fine until later that evening when my brother found that the "backup light" (or "reversing lamps" or whatever you want to call the white light at the back of the car that turns on when you put the car in reverse) didn't work. So yesterday we tried changing the light bulb. Still didn't work. We tried changing the fuse. Still didn't work. Now we notice that the "central locking system" didn't work as it should either. If I lock/unlock the passenger side door all four doors lock/unlock as they should, but if I lock/unlock the driver side door I only lock/unlock the driver side door. The remote that's built in to the key doesn't work at all, but I knew that when I bought the car.
So after those two "awesome" findings I thought nothing else could go wrong. Well, think again... Today I got the bill for the vehicle tax. A tax that the previous owner should've paid in April... GREAT!
Well, at least I have a car... That I can't drive, since it's illegal to drive without having working lights, and because having to pay this tax I can't afford any petrol.

Driver's License!

Forgot to post about it yesterday, but at 12:09 CEST (10:09 UTC) I passed my driving test and from that time I'm allowed to drive a car on public streets/roads.
Considering I took my first driving lesson on April 3 this year I'd say it's not too bad to have gotten the license on June 28. If I had gotten a date for the test sooner I would've been able to get it two weeks ago, but hey, I got it now!
In total I have spent 18530 SEK (that's ~$2680 US, ~£1710 or ~2110 Euro) on this license. That's about twice as much as it cost when I was 18 and "should've" gotten it...
There are two tests you need to pass to get the license. First a "written" test that's done on a computer with multiple choice questions. You need 52/65 correct answers to pass, I got 63/65. Then it's the driving test. What that test contains depends on the instructor. There are 26 different situations that they can choose from and you get to do about 10 to see if you have the skill to actually drive safely. The test takes about 30 minutes and if you're prepared it shouldn't be a problem.
Next goal I need to accomplish: Get a job so I can afford buying a car and fuel.

Failed Venus transit

Ok, so I got up early to try and see the Venus transit from sunrise. As you can see in the photo it was a bit cloudy at the horizon and clear sky above. Actually if the photo had shown more above me it would've shown a completely clear sky above my head. Unfortunately the Sun is not above my head at sunrise. The clouds moved from North to South which meant the Sun was behind the clouds pretty much the whole time. It was also too windy to project the Sun onto a piece of white paper. Excuses, excuses, excuses. Truth is I should've been more prepared and gotten a piece of welder glass or some "eclipse glasses" so I at least could've seen the transit in the gaps between the clouds, but hey, only 105 years until next time. I'm sure I will have been able to prepare for it by then...

Yes I know there are a lot of trees in the way in the photo, but I was on my way back from a big open field (a.k.a. a golf course) when I took it.

2012 (the movie)

I just watched the movie 2012. Even if I overlook all the made up "science" and faked stuff and bad CGI it wasn't a very good movie. They did get one thing right though. If we ever find ourselves in the situation that we need to evacuate this planet the rich will be the first in line to board the spaceships (or "arks" that stays on the planet). The really important people that know how things actually work in the real world will be left behind and that will be the end of humanity. Now that I think about it, it's not such a bad thing if humanity did exterminate itselves...

The little house on the mountain... revisited

The view of most of my hometown from the top of the mountain.
That's the ocean in the background.

In a post a few weeks ago I said that I would come back and take new photos when there's leaves on the trees. So here are some photos I took today.

The sky got a bit overexposed because the sun was too close.
At least there's leaves on the trees now.

Looking down the steps from the top. It was scary walking down.

The view of some of the rest of the town.

Decisions...

I've been posting here on this blog every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for a few months now. However I feel that I have too much to do IRL at the moment so I've decided that from now on I will only post when I actually have something to say or show.

Spring is in the air... continued

As I said in my previous post I dislike this time of year. So I dug up two old photos from the season I like the most. I'm sure you can all guess which one that is.

Spring is in the air

The Sun is shining bright in the sky. Almost no clouds can be seen. The temperature is rising. People are wearing less clothes. I HATE THIS TIME OF YEAR!
Ok, that some people are wearing less clothes is fine with me, but I can't stand the heat. Also this is the time of year when everything starts to blossom. That means allergy season is here... Woo... hoo...