Heli arrived on last Friday. It’s been good.

Özhan, l’artiste took a photo of me and Heli yesterday. I haven’t been featured on Deviantart before! Not that we are recognizable, but still it’s cool. The weather in Metz really is that melancholic. No wonder Verlaine and folks liked it here.

It was a good and peaceful new year. We drank a bit (not too much like I did in Paris on Saturday when I got a stomach disease), and found a nice small bar where it was fun to dance. It was somehow amusing that the DJ played all the songs from Youtube, though :D.

We have also been playing Mario, taken lots of photos, talked, wandered around, seen lots of sights, prayed, relaxed, written, gotten lost and then found, talked with people in a couple of languages.

Tonight, going to see Hunger. Nähdään nälkää, heheh. Heh. Hee… öh.

• Metz, octobre 2008 - landscapes etc.
• Metz, octobre 2008 - adventures
  

Metz:
Ekat kuvat
the first photos

Taking my little brother to school today morning, I found it funny that I was unsure whether to identify with the kids in the yard - my little brother’s friends and the others - or with the teachers there, who I then realized, were pretty much the same physical age as me. And in that moment, I greatly enjoyed allowing myself to stick with roles of the kids, and thinking that if those teachers were not on duty, they could join us, too.

Also, even before that, as we entered the yard, I first saw the other kids in roles, in which I saw other pupils, when I was in comprehensive school myself. But then, I was not a pupil anymore now. I was something everybody else in the yard probably considered an adult. I seemed to have power over the kids, some sort of a strange respect, though it seemed to me I was not at all sure they were not wiser than me, in all their living in the moment.

Kids assume being subordinate to adults, since in practical life, adults often can handle things better. (Too bad if the adults a kid identifies with are not healthy.) But kids are better at being happy and unassuming, only occasionally being interrupted by their parents or by other adults. To grow up successfully is to remain without worry, although life around you becomes more challenging, and possibly more boring and more scary?

To be an adult is to stand straight up and not shiver when others talk to you, and to show who you are - convincing other adults you are something “more” than a kid now. This is how you get things that adults appreciate.

I organized most my papers today so I know pretty much what I am taking with me. For once, Coldplay’s music matches my mood.

The contrast is somehow very strong at the moment: I am strong but I am so weak.

During the past months, I have further and further learned how to keep hold of myself, how to avoid bending too much and making too many compromises. Still, I am so often a leaf that just shivers. I am hoping this will keep me honest, at least. Any time I try to identify with something seemingly too strong, I just get lost, since it is not real. I need to be strong in weakness. But whose weakness, whose strength is that?

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

I quote this even though it seems I am distant from the weakness (or the boasting) Paul is talking about. I have gone far from the context of faith again myself, but still reading the Bible felt good now that chatting with Minna got me browsing around.

This is not based on migrating the database, but on keeping both systems, Nucleus and the new blogging software working, and the old one’s URLs intact (using some simple .htaccess magic) while adding the new one’s urls.

The downside is that when Nucleus has security holes fixed, you have to keep upgrading it, as well as the new one. This could be solvable by making a static mirror of the nucleus site using, say, wget. Then you could delete the old nucleus installation and just upload the static files in their place - but you would not have the posts in any semantically rich format any more - unless, of course, you backed up the old database before doing this. (more…)

To celebrate going to France in a week, decided to throw out the old blog engine nucleus and use the oh-so-fashinable Wordpress. Most links should still work, though. Going to customize this theme when I have a chance, to look like pilpi.net again.

The old blog entries are still here, too.