Martin Geisler Online

I arrived in Switzerland late in the evening yesterday — today was spent buying a table and a shelf in IKEA and unpacking some of my stuff. That’s it for now, I’m terribly tired…

I’ve just discovered that Google has found all the old auto-converted news. Pretty cool!

I still haven’t moved the news from the old PhpWiki system, but I will do so one day. So far I’ve investigate the necessary SQL:

SELECT pagename, version, mtime, content
FROM phpwiki_version JOIN phpwiki_page USING (id)
WHERE pagename LIKE 'HomePage/200_-__-__'
AND pagename >= 'HomePage/2002-08-24'
ORDER BY id, version

That gives me the data I need: the name of the page in the Wiki together with the versions and the modification times and content of those versions. I then “only” have to create a new post in WordPress dated based on the first version, containing the content from the last version. Quite simple actually. There are some corner-cases where I’ve written about some event and back-dated the pagename, but that can be detected by comparing the pagename with the modification time given by the first version.

So that’s the outline — I wont have time to implement it before I go to Switzerland, so you guys will have to wait a couple of weeks before being able to enjoy five consequetive years of blogging!

I’ve begun cleaning my room so that I can move out Monday morning. And I must say that I’ve been into some dark corners in my bathroom, corners I didn’t even know I had! But apparently the spiders and general cruft knew about them… :-)

The plan is to pack up the rest of my stuff and clean my room today and tomorrow. Monday morning I’ll hand over the keys to Bjarne, the janitor, and then Stéphanie and I will drive to Aalborg to my parents house. There we will pack the car with the stuff that I want to bring with me to Switzerland, and the next morning we will begin the adventure.

My dad has voluntered to drive me and Stéphanie back, and by driving all day we hope to be able to make it to Aarau late in the evening.

I don’t know how long it will take before I get back online, but don’t expect too much in the first couple of weeks. I’ll be doing an intensive German couse the first ten days, and after that I start at ETH Zürich.

So this is finally it — I’m going to Switzerland! It has been planned now for many months, but it is only now that I’m beginning to realize that I’ll be going away real soon now. It’s nice that I’m finally going, for the last couple of months have had a sort of “temporary” feel to them. I look forward to spending an entire year in Switzerland — that’s pretty long time, long enough to become settled and get a daily life.

Of course Stéphanie and I will have to solve the “international puzzle” again after the year is over, but right now I just cannot wait for my new life to start!