11:49

I am writing this from Danderyd, a rich northern part of Stockholm where I am attending a course in how to update my knowledge of Microsoft-databases to SQL Server 2005.

Sadly, the instructor is not Tibor Karaszi, who led the first course in MS SQL Server I ever attended, but somebody who seems more intent in showing off his knowledge as a hubris-saturated general would to her/his troops.

Anyway, I just had lunch at Ikki, a plastic little place with plastic little foods that only reared some sort of authenticity when the wooden eating-sticks I was using to engulf my plastic yakiniku turned into wooden splinters as I ate. Yes, just like those that Sly made in “First Blood“.

Now, I'm sitting at a coffee-place where the attendant walks around talking to her friends on the company phone while the stereo blasts poor Alanis Morrissette-wannabe's. I need a walk.

16:40

I am eagerly awaiting the train to take me home. Even though the instructor at said course has a lot of knowledge about the course, he is very eager in showing it by using acronyms, misspelling words on the white-board and leaving very little room for actually explaining stuff. I miss Tibor, ye olde instructor. I guess this is how children feel when they have to spend a week with the parent they don't like as much and the other, and are quite cross about it.

Walking around Danderyd was fun. I saw the sights, i.e. the very expensive villas strewn about the place, while listening to “Start The Week“ from yesterday. A man spoke of a book he'd written about MacArthur, the American general who invaded and took Japan for more than half a year; he said the reason why that went on for such a long time was that after MacArthur first over-ruled the Japanese government, he somewhat quickly realised that the only way to successfully rule the people was if he ruled it through their local administration, making it look as if they were more than a proxy-government, which of course is something Dubya doesn't let in Iraq. Strange thing, history, how it's used. I just read a few pages from Sam Harris' “The End of Faith“ where he describes how christians have often used the passages on killing infidels from the Old Testament, especially Deuteronomy 17:12-13, where it is clearly stated that everyone who is too squeamish to partake in such killings must be killed themselves. Dubya's administration apparently only picks the good bits out of the cake, which mean they cannot be killed, themselves. Just like Dubya's not going to get criminalised by the RIAA for carrying around copy-protected music in his iPod.