Friday, February 29, 2008

Zombie




Zombie - "is a person who is believed to have died and been brought back to life without speech or free will"

Last week was Zombie-Marathon week. Watched 7 zombie movies within 2 days, namely the 3 seminal Romero classics (Night of the Living Dead (1968),Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)) and the brilliant Shaun of the Dead. Fell asleep with visions of flesh eating dead scrounging for the flesh of the living.

Useless fact 1: To kill a zombie. shoot them in the head or smash the brains.
Useless fact 2: Zombies don't move very fast so you can outrun them.

There's even a Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks.Very detailed stuff on zombie causes, strategic tactics on fighting zombies, defending against zombies, attacking zombies etc. (you get the drift)

Rue the day you watch a B grade slasher films but the zombie genre is somewhat addictive. Zombie information is rampant out there and you begin to wonder if they are real. Too late, you realize after watching all those zombie movies, that you've become one your self. Mwah hah hah

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Finding MSPME


Thus ends the MSPME 2006/2007 course. It has been a wonderful, tumultous, roller-coaster 16 months for the 26 souls who braved leaving their families, jobs and homes to arrive in Europe in 2006.


Hedi and myself attended the final theses seminar which belonged to Vara and Bharad which incidently was the last session in the whole course at 5pm on January 15th, 2008 in Room S305. Especially difficult to fathom as we had laboured over so many hours of classes, assignments and case studies.


All of us successfully received our Masters degree in hand at our graduation dinner on the 16th of February 2008 with a nice dinner and ceremony at E Pub. The co-ordinators from each university i.e. Dr Paul Gardiner from Heriot Watt University, Prof. Antonio Calabrese from MIP Politecnico di Milano, Prof. Anders Soderholm, Tomas Blomqvist and Monica Palmqvist from Umea University witnessed this moment which was pretty nice. The miracle of the moment according to Anders was actually seeing this event happen after years of planning for the course. It took so much time to co-ordinate and wait that they(the co-ordinators) were beginning to wonder if any students would come at all.



Words can say so much and it's impossible to express the precious moments in the past 16 months. Many tears were shed and sad good byes said in the last few weeks. A course-mate smsed me after returning home saying "We were not just coursemates, we have become family"



Last week my Creative Songwriting group wrote and arranged a song within 2 days which I find pretty fitting. So I've made a short presentation on my personal-view of the last 16 months with it.

Finding

Travelling in the space
Of your open mind
You will find a place
See what lies behind
And when
You see a glimmering
You just find

Bridge

Silence
Can bring out your art
Listen
You will feel your part
And when
You hear your heart
You will find

ps. Special thanks to Malin, Maja, Amanda, Olov and Elina for this track (it was all recorded live on a little mp3 player therefore apologies for the sound quality)