I’ve had tons of fun in the past few weeks, even though they’ve mostly been permeated with something people usually dislike: moving. Yes, I am moving again. This time I’m moving from Jyväskylä, Finland to Göteborg, Sweden. And as you can imagine, I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s life like in Sweden. Which also means that I’ll write about that too.

Moving around is fun. Sure, it can be a bit stressful doing all the paperwork and trying to figure out all the packing so that it’s done right on time and as efficiently as possible. There’s always just that one more book I’d like to read before I pack it. It could take forever for me to move, I guess.

But with moving also comes a fine opportunity to clean up your life a bit. You definitely learn to throw stuff away. This experience is especially therapeutic for a person like me who always finds a use for something, somewhere, at some point in the very near future. You see where I’m heading. You should just take a peek into my hard drives. Thus seeing all those papers go into recycling bin is nothing short of exhilarating. But most important of all, I have finally got a hold of my library. Or at least that part of my library that came along to Finland.

For a while I’ve been looking for software that would be able to handle my books without much effort on my behalf. After sifting through all kinds of applications it boiled down to just two options Delicious Library and Booxter. If it was for the mere eye candy, Delicious Library would have won, but Booxter does the job much, much better: it searches through 26 different databases from Brazil to Sweden, retrieves enormous amounts of information about many books and exports to all the formats one would ever want (almost). Job well done. And it really made indexing my library a breeze, even though I don’t have a web-cam or a bar code reader and had to type all the ISBNs. Even if I have had twice as many books, it would still be fun to do it.

Writing and packing during the day, watching movies at night. For the past seven days I’ve seen a movie each night and finally caught up in many ways. I have had sort of Woody Allen retrospective going on for a while now. Woody is just incredible. His movies are so eloquent, full of details and incredibly fun dialogues, characters and interactions.  They are so life-like I can imagine myself watching them all over again when I see them all. But most recently I’ve seen Zelig, Love and Death, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask and Manhattan Murder Mystery. Great stuff.

However I’ve also watched Spike Lee’s impressive documentary about the disaster caused by the hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August and September 2005 that was ran on the Finnish public TV station YLE last week. As I watched When the Levees Broke, I’ve more had an impression that the documentary is really about the breakdown of solidarity in the US. It’s just sad to see how individualistic, myopic and money centered the US society has become. I highly recommend this documentary that kept me bolted down for every single of its 255 minutes.

Mladen