Kostya's Boring Codec World

Sweden is awesome country and its food is plain but decent and heart-warming. And everything gets even better in late December.

There’s no Christmas in Sweden, they have Jul — it’s less Christian in nature but significantly better. As an Ukrainian I totally approve Swedish version because the national Ukrainian animal and products from it are well celebrated.

Yes, that one

Sweden has really good dairy products (I’d especially recommend cheeses and filmjölk), surprisingly good selection of meat (including horse, deer, reindeer and elk), outstanding herring (really, nothing beats fried fresh strömming) and other fish products. And oh so many variations of candies everywhere. And drinks.

Berries

In jul it all gets even better since special food appears — traditional julskinka, sylta (and especially julpressylta), marzipan pigs, special versions of prästost and other cheese… And of course julmust.

One can try traditional game of mine — try different variations of everything. For example, drinks (Trocadero, julmust/påskmust or filmjölk), cheese or even köttbullar (I’ve finally found köttbullar made from deer meat for example). Or at least look at designs of marzipan pigs, every konditori makes their own.

Fun fact — in Gävle they like unofficial symbol of the city so much that they have marzipan goats along with pigs.

And another fun fact — there is a drink from Norrland called Portello and it has unlicensed clones. The real Portello is produced by The Norrland Brewery (aka Vasa Bryggeri) but some other breweries have drinks with similar taste but different name. Guttsta Källa produces Ortello and Mora Bryggeri produces Candelo, though it’s a trollish brewery that makes Rio Cola with familiar Cuba Cola design, too lazy to produce Julmust and Påskmust (see picture) and less popular drinks like Guldus or Haiwa are all renamed too.

Mora Bryggeri — no julmust or påskmust

The Reference Drinks

I’ll continue exploring the wonderful world of Swedish food at every possible occasion.

And some fun things to try:

• julmust with semlor (they are always available in Norrland, it seems);
• fried gravad lax;
• filmjölk with berries (I mix lingon, blueberries and raspberries — they are available frozen all year round);
• julskinka and Wastgöta Kloster cheese on tunnbröd;
• Swedish apples;
• chewing candies;
• and of course Trocadero from any brewery in Norrland!

I still don’t have Internet connection at home (for two months and counting) and not sure if I get any this year.

So here’s the list of rants I’d have written, had I had access:

• SD cards as modern floppies — similarly ubiquitous and slow;
• Swiss cheeses — some are OK, most are slightly sticky, coated in something very smelly and named “chas”;
• WMV9 pre-RTM P-frames decoding: how it should be decoded and why our decoder is still wrong sometimes;
• Bink2 decoder progress report (since I’ve not started working on it yet).

Do not stay tuned.

When I visited VDD13 (they’ve finally made it right — with Trocadero and surströmming, hopefully they’ll keep the level in the future) I could make some additional observations on the rail that finally lead to this post.

First, I like to talk about catenary constructions. They usually come in two variations — a single post with a special support for the wires or two posts with a horizontal construction between them that supports the wires.
It might be hard to believe but they can be æsthetically appealing too.

The top on my list is Sweden (and Netherlands since they seem to employ the same construction). The poles are made from lattice and thus are nice and horizontal supporting constructions are always made as trapezoids.

Runner-up is Switzerland — they also have nice lattice constructions but they seem a bit compressed to me.

Germany has the same poles but for wider ranges they usually have only a wire between poles from which the wire-supporting constructions hang.

Most of the other contries have simple round masts or H-shaped beams that are not interesting, though I must admit French ones have nice wire support constructions reminding of violin bow.

And on the very bottom of the list is Denmark with its large ugly ?-shaped masts in the colour of rust.

And now to the second thing — toilets. I usually try to avoid them but sometimes I feel I have to visit one onboard. So here’s a comparison of that essential thing.

Ukraine — toilets on so-called “InterCity+” should not be that bad, toilets in older carriages are better not be visited at all (and since they dump contents onto tracks directly, toilet rooms are locked long before stations and after them).

Germany — on InterCity trains toilets are decent (or at least tolerable), on ICE they are too small even in the first class. Even on regional trains and trams it seems to be bigger.

France — on TGV first class they are even smaller that on ICE, in the second class even a person smaller than me has problems fitting inside.

Sweden — those people really care. The spaciest toilet rooms on trains I can remember (especially on Reginatåg).

Switzerland — the toilet on Rhätische Bahn regional trains seemed quite good even if those are narrow-gauge trains.

Moral of the story — Swedish trains and railways are the best (and if you have doubts you’re reading the wrong blog).