[back to index]
[?]
[texts]
[links]
[picts]
[music]
[@]
About this Homepage
My name is Arvid Nilsson and I am a student at Katedralskolan in Lund, Sweden. There, I study the natural sciences in a bilingual programme. This means that the subjects are taught in English, at least to some extent.
Please note that this homepage is far from finished; this is just an experiment with this layout. You may find references to material that is not available or other discrepancies, as well as the odd broken link. None of the different sections accessible from the index are complete.
My main interest is computers, and I have a Power Macintosh 7600/120 at home.
If you want to know more about me, read my opinions on different subjects. Various essays are provided on the Texts page. Please read the disclaimer carefully, though.
You can also e-mail me by clicking the @ on my index page. My address is mj22162@janus.swipnet.se. I also have a hotmail account, which I would prefer you do not use, since I rarely check its contents; arvid@hotmail.com.
My homepage was designed for the font Monaco. It is very aesthetically pleasing in it's simplicity despite being monospaced. I recommend that you download it, not only for this homepage, but it will serve you well for any application that requires the use of a monospaced font. If you do not have this font, these pages will be displayed using Helvetica or Arial. These two are definitely inferior to Monaco though. If you would like a preview, check out the text on the buttons on my index page.
Download Monaco in .TTF format as a zip archive
Note to Macintosh users: I recommend you remove the bitmap (screen) versions of Monaco from your fonts folder. Otherwise, your system might use those instead of the truetype version when prompted for sizes 9 and 12.
Sorry about the font fuss, but HTML really has deficient typography support. In my opinion, this is one of it's main shortcomings as a page description language.
The Bilingual Programme at Katedralskolan
The teachers that have agreed to teaching their subjects in English are not native from an English-speaking country. Most of them are Swedes, whose English may not be the best. The technical terms, though, they know quite well, and after all those are most important. We also follow a dedicated English course, which serves to teach us the actual language, with pronunciation. None of the bilingual subjects ignore the swedish technical terms, and the amount of English content varies from 25%-95%.
A few subjects we do not study in English are Maths, Physical Education and Biology1. Several of the people in my class have expressed that had gotten the impression that the bilingual programme would be more English-intensive than it actually is. The main reason why it is not this is poor knowledge of English on the teachers' behalf. The misleading impression was provided by careers advisors who were not sufficiently familiar with the details of the bilingual programme.
Notes
1. Initially, this subject was supposed to be studied in English. We eventually decided to have it in Swedish anyway, because of the teacher's lacking English skill.
The Power Macintosh 7600/120
The Power Macintosh 7600/120 is part of the PCI family of macintoshes. My machine has a 120 MHz 604 processor, 32 MB RAM, 2 MB VRAM, 17" monitor and 1.2 GB harddrive.
When it comes to operating systems, I don't believe it matters which one you choose. There is one important consideration though: can you get hold of the programs you want to use? If you are comfortable paying money for the programs you use, you can use whatever OS suits your tastes. However, if you intend to pirate, the wintel platform is often the best choice. There are more programs available, and more users that pirate them. There is usually some kid in the neighborhood who can get everything they like. Perhaps that's you who are reading this? On the other hand, if you have access to the internet, it's not very difficult to get hold of everything you need for the MacOS. Not that I'm speaking by my own experience, of course.