A great idea this week by the high speed train operators Eurostar, Deutsche Bahn, SNCF, SNCB, NS Hispeed, ØBB, SBB and Thalys, Lyria and Alleo; they’re going to create a single tariff system for their combined high speed rail system. Reductions and special offers in one country will be available to customers in all the other countries etc. One step closer to a united Europe.

So far, so good. I found out however that while the tariffs become clearer, the names don’t. Today on the website of Deutsche Bahn I saw the mention of an ICE Sprinter, which is an extra fast InterCityExpress train that halts only on a few stations on the line, thereby winning time. French long-distance TGVs do this by default.

Ironically (?), Sprinters are the new and hip trade name (well actually the name existed already since the 70s for the SGMs) of commuter/regional trains of the Nederlandse Spoorwegen - replacing the clear but rather dull name Stoptrein. Now, I don’t know how it is in the rest of the world, but commuter trains are quite the opposite of extra fast.

Both sides have a fair argument for their choice of name; Sprinters are usually fast (point for DB), but they’re also specialised at short distances (point for NS).

One Europe, what a great idea. Let’s start with common and clear names for our products.

Strangely weird to stand on ice skates in the middle of summer… Even better to do so in Thialf.

Also nice to skate on the “same” ice as our heroes did before us. It looks bigger on TV though, but then again, what doesn’t.

And I found yet another panorama in my photo collection!

A very wide view over the friendly city of Edinburgh, Scotland, seen from Arthur’s Seat.

There’s an interesting festival coming up in November: Reykjavík to Rotterdam, featuring music, dance, movies and art from our beloved island up north.

Gigs I’d be interested in attending are Hafdís Huld and Apparat Organ Quartet, but then there are also the movies, with Baltasar Kormákur present for Q and A. Full programme already.

I’ll have to see what will come of that, as usual I tend to overestimate my time and money ;)

Funny thing I noticed that I once met the secretary of the festival at the [Sigur Rós concert back in July 2005]/muziek/2005/07/14/sigur-ros-paradiso-2.html)… Small world :)

Sad news this morning in my feed reader; Anneke van Giersbergen, singer of The Gathering is leaving the band after 13 years for starting a new band called Agua de Annique.

• Band’s statement
• Anneke’s statement

I hope they will both find their ways and come back at both their full strengths, then we will have two great acts.

Here’s another beautiful Icelandic song, Maístjarnan (the May star). By Halldór Laxness, written in 1937.

ó hve létt er þitt skóhljóð
og hve lengi ég beið þín,
þar er vorhret á glugga,
napur vindur sem hvín,
en ég veit eina stjörnu,
eina stjörnu sem skín,
og nú loks ertu komin,
þú ert komin til mín.

Það eru erfiðir tímar,
það er atvinnuþref,
ég hef ekkert að bjóða,
ekki ögn sem ég gef,
nema von mína og líf mitt
hvort ég vaki eða sef,
þetta eitt sem þú gafst mér
það er alt sem ég hef.

En í kvöld lýkur vetri
sérhvers vinnandi manns,
og á morgun skín maísól,
það er maísólin hans,
það er maísólin okkar,
okkar einíngarbands,
fyrir þér ber ég fána
þessa framtíðarlands.

Oh how light are your footsteps,
Oh how long have I waited for you,
There is spring rain on the window,
Cold whistling wind,
but I know one star,
one shining star,
and now finally are you coming,
you are coming to me.

It are hard times,
there’s not a lot work,
I’ve got nothing to offer,
not a bit which I give,
except my hope and my life,
whether I’m awake or asleep.
This one thing you gave me,
that is all I have.

But tonight winter ends
for every working man,
and in the morning shines the May star,
that is his May sun,
that is our May sun,
our uniting bond.
For you I carry the flag
of this land’s future.

The song being written in 1937, when Iceland was still a dependent nation under Danish flag – the Dannebrog – I assume “the flag of this land’s future” being a forward reference to the current flag and thus independence.

I’m not sure what the May star is, but I would say it is the sun, having returned with full force, starting to lighten up (and warm up!) the country after the hard and dark winter. Since a few days, Iceland doesn’t have a civil twilight anymore for three months to come; the sun sets and doesn’t go more than 6° under the horizon before climbing again for a new day.

Update I’m now a bit more educated and it’s clear to me now that the May star is an obvious symbolism for socialism; “this land’s future” referring to a future in socialism. Halldór Laxness was known to be attracted to socialism. He said that he “did not become a socialist in America from studying manuals of socialism but from watching the starving unemployed in the parks”.

After Abraracourcix the Iceland blog was next to move places.

The weblog is a Wordpress installation and thus the content is dynamically generated by PHP, using data in a MySQL database. This dynamic behavior is unnecessary for a weblog that has been closed and I therefore ventured on a plan to download the full website and make it available as a rather large set of plain static HTML files.

The first step you’d like to take when doing this is checking that the directory structure of the pages is to your liking. A standard Wordpress installation leaves a pretty clean structure: directories for each year, one for categories. If you have pages, they will show up with directories of their own.

These directories don’t actually exist on the server but are constructed by URL rewriting on the side of Wordpress. Very nice.

Now you take wget and run it once over your entire site, for me it was wget -nv -r http://ijsland.luijten.org/. If you now look inside the HTML files, you’ll notice lots of absolute hypertext references back to your own site. This is because of the options home and siteurl in Wordpress you’ll want to change. I changed them both to /.

Next I went into the theme files (make a backup of them) and removed all forms, like search and comment forms. I also removed any reference to RSS feeds and other scripts from the header. You may also want to remove eventual Feedburner references for tracking visitors.

The site is now ready for one last sweep with wget.

If you find that some images of the layout aren’t loaded correctly, it might be that they are referenced from the CSS file and not directly from any HTML files. You’ll have to open the CSS file and download these images yourself.

Don’t forget to make a backup of the database, you might want to reopen the weblog somewhere in the future!

So, next time you’re at http://ijsland.luijten.org/, you’re being served static HTML files by lighttpd.

Over the weekend, I have transferred the web site from Abraracourcix to Sunny. I’m in the process of slowly phasing out Abraracourcix’ services, eventually moving the hard disk into Sunny and then put it to a well deserved sleep.

My own mail setup has been moved to Sunny already, the other accounts will follow somewhere in the next few weeks.

The web server changed from Apache to lighttpd and so far, I’m pretty satisfied with it. Configuration is a breeze, it responds quickly, logs are in the common logfile format so the local Webalizer statistics also still work, there’s an RRDtool plugin which makes it pretty easy to construct graphs of the web traffic (also per virtual host or even for specific directories).

Abraracourcix has been my personal server for more than 7 years. It was a router for the internet connection at my parents’ home and before that it used to be my desktop. In 2003, operations moved to Spacelabs where it became the main web and e-mail server for the luijten.org domain, serving up all static web content and doing SMTP and IMAP.
Especially the latter service is very heavy for this Pentium 166 with only 48 MB RAM, so it had to go off the machine.

Sunny is a Sun Ultra 5 desktop machine with a UltraSparc IIi at 360 MHz and 256 MB RAM, which should be able to hold up the load a bit longer. I got this somewhere in 2005 from Tilburg University who were dumping their old hardware.

Een 32-jarige vrouw keek afgelopen weekeinde raar op, nadat zij bij een supermarkt in Boekel boodschappen had gedaan. Toen zij thuis een zak chips uit haar tas haalde, viel er een betonboor uit. Het is onduidelijk hoe de betonboor in de zak chips terecht is gekomen.

Een stukje Bieslog

Ampelmann anno 1998

Ampelmann anno 2007

Ampelmann became big business in little more than a few years. Back then, a t-shirt was all you could get. Now there are mouse pads, ice cubes, reflectors, bags, et cetera. Back then the shirt was a protest against the Westernisation of the traffic lights in former East-Berlin. Now it is just another souvenir, be it one with history.

Yeeeh, Rivella is going to be marketed throughout Europe, according to the readers of Frank-ly! (Hint: whois drinkme.nl, Heineken is owner of Vrumona, thanks to the research-fu of the visitors of Frank-ly ;-))

Update: Yes! As a little ‘thank you’ note for all the free advertisement, Vrumona decided to put the stuff in new soft PET bottles (yuck) and raised the price by 20%! Hooray! As a side note, Schweppes’ stuff is also affected by this.

While it is not very uncommon to see advertisers go to Iceland to use the magnificient landscape as a backdrop for their productions (Axe also does it= for their self-tanning body lotion stuff by the way), it is pretty uncommon to hear Icelandic folksongs on Dutch television.

Mentos in their new series of demonstrating the freshness of their stuff show the people of Grundafjurdhuhurdhur (actually there is a town called Grundarfjörður on the Snæfellsnes peninsula) involved in some refreshing bath in the fjord filled with Mentosessess (pun intended).

Another installment shows the refreshing of some guy’s mouth by first throwing a bucket over his head to protect the others from the bad smell and then hanging him in some construction to put him headfirst in a tub filled with Mentosses.

Anyway, the song they sing at the end is a song about a horseback tour through the Sprengisandur desert. It’s called á Sprengisandi and was written by Grímur Thomsen who lived from 1820 to 1896:

Ríðum, ríðum og rekum yfir sandinn,
rennur sól á bak við Arnarfell,
hér á reiki er margur óhreinn andinn,
úr því fer að skyggja á jökulsvell;
Drottinn leiði drösulinn minn,
drjúgur verður síðasti áfanginn.

Þey þey! þey þey! Þaut í holti tóa,
þurran vill hún blóði væta góm,
eða líka einvher var að hóa
undarlega digrum karlaróm.
útilegumenn í ódáðahraun
eru kannski að smala fé á laun.

Ríðum, ríðum og rekum yfir sandinn,
rokkrið er að síga á Herdubreið
álfadrottning er að beisla gandinn,
ekki er gott að verða á hennar leið
Vænsta klárinn vildi ég gefa til
að vera kominn ofan í Kiðagil.

The first strophe roughly translates to:

Ride, ride, ride over the sand,
Run with the sun behind Arnarfell,
Bad spirits/winds come and go here.
Dusk is falling on the gletscher ice,
God leads my horse,
Long will be the last stage.

You won’t find a Icelander that doesn’t know this song. It’s quite funny to hear this familiar tune in an advertisement, since we also had it at the Icelandic course last August as part of our cultural programme :-)