Trainblogging

Posted by Martin R on April 15, 2010
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It’s been more than four years since the first time I blogged about how cool it is to have broadband on a train. But I still haven’t gotten over it. Trainblogging again! The sun is shining and Södermanland zips past outside the window.

I’m on my way to Linköping to drop off finds at the County Museum and teach a class on Late Iron Age elite settlement in Östergötland. The finds drop-off is one of the loose threads that remain for me to tie up after my last book project. Backpack and a cardboard box full of goodies from Sättuna in Kaga and other great sites!

BTW, is anybody reading this in Birmingham? I’m going to be there from Sunday to Wednesday for a workshop. Drop me a line if you’re feeling gregarious!

And let it be universally known that WIndows 7 has no native support for DAV drives, an important part of “cloud computing”. Go Linux!

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Comments

  1. #1 Hans Persson
    April 15, 2010

    … assuming normal air services have resumed by then, I guess:
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/7592774/Volcanic-ash-cloud-spreading-towards-London-forecast.html

  2. #2 Martin R
    April 15, 2010

    I read something about this on Facebook and didn’t understand what it was about. And now you’re my source of braking nooz!

  3. #3 Nomen Nescio
    April 15, 2010

    which version of windows 7? even i can’t believe they all lack DAV support, but it might not be found in the lower-end “home” versions.

    as for why it would ever be omitted from any version of a general-purpose operating system, well, there’s no good reason for that. plenty of bad reasons, but not good ones. if it’s in Linux, there’s no good reason to leave it out of anything else.

  4. #4 codero
    April 15, 2010

    if it’s in Linux, there’s no good reason to leave it out of anything else

    True for useful standards and protocols, but not for a lot of other stuff…
    If you like Linux, get Linux.
    If you want to cloud compute, do likewise (for now).

  5. #5 Nomen Nescio
    April 15, 2010

    oh, and for shame, Martin. your sources for breaking Icelandic volcano news are right here on scienceblogs.

  6. #6 Bob Carlson
    April 15, 2010

    The sun is shining and Södermanland zips past outside the window.

    :) Owing to time wasted on genealogy, I found Södermanland to be the county where my maternal grandparents were born and raised.

    Your mention of Linköping reminds me of meeting a couple from Norrköping in a hotel dining room in Eskilstuna and being surprised to learn that the pronunciation is Norrschöping. A number of times I have heard recordings of the Norrköping Symphony played on American radio stations, but I don’t recall an announcer ever getting the pronunciation of the name correct. Given that Karlsson isn’t pronounced Scharlsson, how did the centrally located k come to be pronounced sch?

  7. #7 Bob Carlson
    April 15, 2010

    Of course, I meant paternal grandparents where I wrote maternal. The maternal side is German, but its not my fault. :)

  8. #8 Martin R
    April 15, 2010

    Södermanland, cool! No family traditions as to why you people sacrificed stuff in bogs back in the Bronze Age? I’d really like to know.

    Karlsson / Köping: this has to do with the distinction between “soft” (eiyäö) and “hard” (aouå) vowels in Swedish. Sadly, the only way to determine whether a given vowel sound is soft or hard is to memorise the list.

    Schöping: this is a bit tricky. There are two main ways to pronounce the first sound in Eng. “shoot”. An upper-class Englishman will pull his tongue back here. A New Yorker will push it forward. That distinction does not carry linguistic meaning in English. It does in Swedish. So “shött” with the first-mentioned sound is a verb and means “tended”, while with the other sound it is a noun and means “meat”. Ditto for “star” and “berry stone”, “fragile” and “drive”, and “pleasant” and “sex”.

    Oh, and köping, a Medieval term for a town, is actually a cognate of “shopping”.

  9. #9 Bob Carlson
    April 15, 2010

    Were Södermanlanders of the bronze age different than the Swedes in other parts of Sweden, or was it that their bogs were better for sacrificing stuff? I got back to the 1700s for a few members of the family tree, but not back to the bronze age. :) My grandfather was a metal worker (smed arbeit), though. My father was a metallurgist and told my brother that our grandfather had been an apprentice of Carl Edvard Johansson. I don’t know if this is really true.

    I often chat with an old friend now living in Falun, and I have to spell many Swedish place names I mention because I am too far off in guessing the pronunciation of the Swedish vowels for his recognition. I don’t have the ability to remember his pronunciations, though.

    Is tuna (as in Eskilstuna) a more recent term for town than köping?

  10. #10 Martin R
    April 16, 2010

    Bronze Age Södermanlanders were doing pretty much what everybody else south of River Dalälven was doing.

    “Tuna” is a cognate of “town” but dates from the mid-1st Millennium, before there were any towns in Sweden. Both words go back to a root meaning “fence”, cf. German Zaun. Many Tuna sites were elite residences in about the 7th century.

  11. #11 eleanora.
    April 16, 2010

    Your scibling at Eruptions has good coverage, with heaps of links and hundreds of comments from readers, several of whom are geologists and some readers are in Iceland and giving updates as things happen, summarised translations of official info, etc.

    Have a look at the spectacular photos here
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/7498695/Iceland-volcano-eruption-volcanic-activity-in-the-land-of-fire-and-ice.html

  12. #12 Lassi Hippeläinen
    April 16, 2010

    Offering broadband onboard a train is quite tricky. When the standards for GSM phones were defined, one requirement was that the phones must work also in trains speeding around at 250 km/h. That causes a noticeable Doppler shift. That actually was the reason for setting the width of a speech channel to 200 kHz – enough room to shift around.

    “Tuna” is a cognate of “town”
    Oh bugger. I always thought Eskilstuna meant “Eskil’s barrel”.