This page was last updated 14.11.2016

News and Updates

14.11.2016:	I jsut realized that I hadn't written anything about my crocheted design from 2014-15, so I added a page about that.
05.11.2016:	Since I moved back to Iceland in 2007, I've been active on Facebook and other social sites, and haven't been very active with updates on this site. After more than ten years since the last update of this news page, I now have added some notes regarding updates that I have indeed been doing during the last few years.
05.11.2016:	I've added a page about my Finnish folkloric costume.
03.02.2016:	Updated my CV.
Nov 2014:	Updated the page about 3000 most common Chinese characters.
Oct 2013:	Updated the design page with patterns of the year.
20.09.2013:	Updated the page about knitted sweaters.
27.06.2013:	Updated the page about my first book on Tunisian crochet.
Oct 2012:	Updated the design page with patterns of the year.
14.08.2011:	Updated the page about hats in Tunisian crochet.
May 2011:	Added the design page.
2008.09.03:	Updated the page on Chinese phonetics.
25.03.2006:	Today I've updated all my lists of links. Recently, the list of the most common Chinese characters, the page about Emi Siao and some of my models to knitted sweaters for men have also been updated.
22.05.2004:	Oh yes! My homepage is very much alive even if I rarely update this newspage. I mostly make a few additions and modifications, for example in my list of the most common Chinese characters and my page on poems by Emi Siao.
05.07.2004:	Lately I've been working on some Chinese pages, e.g. the list of the most common Chinese characters and a Swedish translation of a poem by Emi Siao.
22.05.2004:	I've been busy lately... But there have been a few updates, e.g. in the list of the most common Chinese characters and my text on Mandarin Chinese phonetics.
02.04.2004:	It starts to get crowded on this domain... I removed some pages that I didn't value any longer.
20.02.2004:	I have realized that it is too costly to have a "picture of the day". Maybe I'll continue with a "picture of the week" instead? We will see. I have updated a few entries on the page with diagrams to knit European names with Chinese characters.
04.02.2004:	I have improved and partly re-written my text on Mandarin Chinese phonetics, which is now around ten pages long when printed on paper.
11.01.2004:	General updates on some pages about the Chinese language as well as better linking between the pages. I have also created a game to practice Chinese characters and the list of the most common Chinese characters has been extended.
26.12.2003:	The list of the most common Chinese characters has been remade and improved radically (and only sinologist will EVER find the pun in that sentence!) and some other text about Chinese have also been updated a bit, e.g. my text on Chinese phonetics and the description of how to get Chinese characters into your computer.
27.11.2003:	There have been seemingly few changes lately - mostly some general corrections and "invisible" fixes. Most visible in the English edition of this page are modifications in my CV. All my pages now cover around 25 Mbytes on the server.
19.11.2003:	Since I now have a digital camera, I considered publishing a photographic diary, but it became to troublesome...
04.11.2003:	Lately, there have been mostly "invisible" updates... Some corrections and improvements here and there, some additional translations and a few new quotes.
03.10.2003:	I have noticed that I have a number of readers interested in the phonetics of Mandarin Chinese, so I have now improved my page on that subject. I've also made a multilingual navigational menu, so that all pages in all languages are readily available.
13.09.2003:	Now I've published some new pictures from Iceland, taken by visitors that have come here this summer. I've started using a better routine for displaying pictures (click on the flowers here to the right, and you will see!). Further more, I have, finally!, come to my senses and started to write a presentation of myself in Chinese.
26.08.2003:	This summer, I've been working mostly on my thesis on idiomatic expressions in Chinese.
01.08.2003:	I've got a domain of my own!!! The domain is located at http://www.zein.se - but it contains "the same old stuff". Now my files should be available quicker, with higher security and with NO advertising. I sort of feel this means I should update most of the old pages....... I think this is the fifth location for my homepage. I do hope that all those that have links to me will update those!
19.06.2003:	Just about a year ago, I wrote about a bug in Microsoft office. Today I extend the description of the bug: If MS Word keeps crashing without any explanation, it may be caused by the spell check. Deactivate the spell check, turn of automatic identification of languages, mark the entire document and specify the ONE language that is valid for most of the document.
26.05.2003:	Adesso si può leggere le regoli di "KaleidoChess" anche in italiano! :-)
05.05.2003:	Most of my spare time is currently spent in learning C++/Java, to be able to program a computerized version of my round chess, to which I FINALLY have found the perfect name: "KaleidoChess"! Unfortunately, this has led to a lack of updates on my homepage, except for the page about the game... But one day, fans of interesting strategical games will thank me for this.
14.04.2003:	I've been fiddling and fixing on some of my pages, but no new additions or radical changes have been made...
20.02.2003:	Well then... What new items could I try to tempt you with today? The recipe to a seductive sticky cake with additional flavour, maybe?
20.01.2003:	More information and new models are now presented on the page about Bajoran earrings.
09.12.2002:	After having appreciated StarTrek for several years, I finally seem to have become a proper fanatic, and celebrate this by writing a page about Bajoran earrings.
14.11.2002:	The first new page I've added since... I don't know when. But the page was removed om 02.04.2004.
17.09.2002:	At the moment I'm busy with a lot of things, so I don't have much time to work with new material for my homepage. At least I've realised that I better specify when each and every page was last updated, so that my readers can see to what degree the pages are alive. The most recently updated pages are my work on Chinese idiomatic expressions and my models to knitted sweaters for men.
29.08.2002:	The first international honours for achievements in web based multilingual educational creativity, issued by the Swedish National Agency for Education: Tagalog interactive language and culture resource Somali folktale project Focus on Luganda language Patrick Hassel Zeinīs Chinese language and more Concertinointown music language To nurture a language - not to lose a language
04.08.2002:	The only recent updates in the English edition of this site are in the thesis on idiomatic expressions in Chinese. I'm also currently working on some knitted projects...
15.07.2002:	Today I've been a realy good boy! I've cleared among the illustrations to which I was unable to specify the copyright holders. As replacements, I've used some of my favourites from the Design Gallery at Microsoft.
06.06.2002:	Microsoft-tip of the year: Is MS Word crashing when you try to write voluminous or complex documents in more than one language? Then try to deactivate the spell check, turn of automatic identification of languages or change all markings of "American English" to "Brittish English"! :-)
04.06.2002:	Bye-bye, guestbooks! Since I moved my homepage to the new server, the number of visitors has diminished somewhat. The reason is probably that other sites still link to the old address and therefore confuse the serach engines to set lower weight on my new address. The number of meaningful entries in the guestbooks is far below my expectations. From now on, the only way to contact me will be by e-mail.
16.05.2002:	Feel free to call me a puritan! Now I've removed all references to English expressions such as "frame" and "site" from all my Swedish pages. The guestbooks are half way down the dustbin. Practically all illustrations have clear markings of their origins. What else needs to be fixed if I want to make my homepage deviate from the pages of the broad masses?!?
12.05.2002:	Some of my steady readers will be perplexed by my latest update of my pages. The thing is that I'm about to shut down my guestbooks. Total strangers have often used my guestbooks to make plain advertisements for their own pages. Others have written questions for which there are already answered in my FAQ or for which I would have to charge them. Actual comments or suggestions regarding my pages have been very rare, and the few cases of criticism have been either fuzzy or rude (if not both). Therefore, I've removed all direct links to the guestbooks. The only way to access the guestbooks is now from the contact page! One may regard this as a step in the direction of making this site less of a personal homepage and more of a site that presents China and all sorts of Chinese stuff...
09.05.2002:	Moving my homepage to a new server and updating the searchengines has clearly temporarily reduced the number of visitors to my pages to the half. However, I'm very positive about the future. And besides; you can now use google.com to search WITHIN my site!!! I've finally taken me time to check all my Chinese links and all general links, remove dead ends and add some new threads. Currently I'm working with the Chinese pages on my site...
10.04.2002:	Some updates have been made among the Chinese lucky characters (including a treatment againgst hangovers!). I've also publish some more pictures from Iceland, and have thereby a homepage consisting of 18.5 Mbyte.
04.04.2002:	During the last few years, I've tested a number of free web-servers, and have collected some experiences... Passagen.se gave me reasonably good space, but became unstable when the amount of information on my pages grew. Also, the server doesn't allow all filetypes that I want to use. Home.bip.net is very good, but gives a more restricted amount of space, that my pages have grown too large to fit in. Geocities.com gives a good starting space and stable service, but puts annoying ads on all pages. Now I've found web1000.com, that gives me as much as 50 MByte without ads or costs - and it seems quite stable even if slightly slow when used from Sweden. Furthermore, all my filetypes are accepted. The big advantage with web1000.com is that I've recieved the URL http://phz.web1000.com, which means that I will be able to allow my readers to use Google.com to search within my site! I will continue to test this new server, but it does seem I'll stay here for a while.
31.03.2002:	Currently I'm working more with studies in Chinese than with my homepage. Specifically, I've started translating my thesis on idiomatic expressions in Chinese to English... But wait! I've also uppdated my Mah-jong-page!
25.02.2002:	Now there is more written about knitting on this site... If I didn't have enough to do already, it's a quick job to get more things to do! Look at the page about knitted sweaters!
31.01.2002:	Free knitting pattern! This is a sketch of my current knitted project in plait-pattern, where the plaits are in relief, like a net, above the coloured fields. They grey areas are purled, while the net and the coloured areas are knitted. Available both with and without hood. Level of difficulty: Not recommended for beginners. Write me a letter if you'd like a FREE copy of the instructions before I sell them to Istex!
16.01.2002:	After celebrating 30 years of diplomatic relationships between Iceland and China, by going to a consert of classical Chinese music in Reykjavík, I shook hands with the Chinese ambassador and thanked him personally for a nive evening. Isn't it funny to see how excited and inspired one can get by something as trivial as that? *wide smile*
2001.12.24:	Merry Christmas! Today I've updated my Swedish collection of recipes, but otherwise I'm currently mostly working on my list of Chinese idioms and not directly with my homepage...
27.11.2001:	Hereby I want to express an official THANKYOU to my school friend Maria Åsard (recently nominated to my personal muse), for supporting and inspiring me to yet again throw myself out into the sea of sinology – this time with a linguistic essay on the subject "Chinese idioms" as my goal. I hope that you too will find energy, courage and inspiration to tackle some similar written project!
20.11.2001:	Just as expected, my latest changes have given a visible increase of the number of visitors to this site – more than 140 per day during last week! Today I don't have any new material to offer, but I've started to reorganize a bit "behind the curtains"...
14.11.2001:	It's amazing to notice how long it took me to realize that studies at the university isn't half as giving when I already have a job (a job that I really like very well, I might ad)! Intelligent people do something with their skills – those that can't find use for their knowledge better find themselves jobs involving research/teaching at a university! From now on I'll follow the good advice to leave the university and concentrate myself on purely autodidact learning instead. Most certainly I'll also produce some linguistic compilations – I do learn best on teaching, and I also really appreciate to be able to share my knowledge. This should hopefully result in EVEN MORE reading here on my homepage. I'll just have to find some more disk space on one or more servers, or, gods forbid!, clean away a couple of pages... Thanx, Anna See, for your VERY warming comments on my list of the 5000 most common Chinese characters!
01.11.2001:	Go ahead; enjoy some pictures from my vacation on Faeroe Islands and Iceland! Thereby I've almost filled my 20 Mbytes on the server... *Ooops!* Time to clean away some old "garbage" while I'm dealing with a lot of all the planned updates. If I know the search engines on the Internet, this massive update of my site might give an increase in my number of visitors... And my text on Chinese calligraphy has finally been translated to English!
29.10.2001:	Nowadays my site has at least 100 visitors per day – most of them looking for Chinese tattoos. I get the feeling that not too many of my readers are very interested in the more philosophical parts of the site... However, the list of planned updates on my site has now grown rather long and promising. I've started to sketch the new page about Chinese Lucky Characters and updated my FAQ-list.
05.10.2001:	The first edition of my text on Chinese calligraphy is now available (though the English translation is not entirely finished...). There are also some new answers in my page with frequently asked questions.
20.09.2001:	Currently I'm constantly busy updating the 5000 most common Chinese characters and my bachelor thesis...
09.09.2001:	The pure html-code behind my homepage is now exceeding 1.5 Mbytes! During the last few weeks, I've been continuing the work on some unfinished pages and making a hurried check that the pages still are reasonably readable with Netscape (since I work to almost 100% with Internet Explorer). Further work is also going to be made rather soon on the pages in question. Most updates are on the following pages: my bachelor thesis (only available in Swedish), the 5000 most common Chinese characters, "Chinese Phonetics" and "Chinese Calligraphy".
27.06.2001:	Recently updated pages: my collection of quotes, my B.A.-thesis, my CV and the Chinese phonetics. A new page has been added: the Chinese language (however, this text isn't quite finished). Further updates will have to wait until after the summer.
10.06.2001:	More or less only for the reason of having something to present as "news", I've now published the list of characters that I'm currently studying fore whoever might be interested: the 5000 most frequently used Chinese characters. Those of you that actually like the list are very welcome to contact me!
29.05.2001:	My professor has now take a look at my B.A.-thesis, so I'll soon have to make some corrections there... The most positive aspect of this is that this gave me back a great portion of inspiration for further studies. Now I'll study Chinese characters (I just HAVE to get better at reading and writing Chinese!), and continue sketching on my nice idea regarding the M.A.-essay. Some parts of my homepages are practically screaming for updates, and I don't quite know how I should prioritise all these small "projects"... Fortunately most of my spare time activities are in one way or another related to something Chinese, so I don't need to risk becoming schizophrenic right away...
08.05.2001:	Woops! Obviously it-s been a while since I wrote any news... That's probably mostly because of all my knitting projects. But I have actually made a few updates – for example in the page about Chinese phonetics!
03.04.2001:	An extra page for chocoholics has been added!
23.03.2001:	The competition from 13.03 has now been settled. My congrats to you, Kicki! The price (one package of chocolate-tea) will come in your mailbox.
13.03.2001:	Well let's see now... A few updates in the FAQ and in the collection of quotes have been made, but the BIG change is the fact that I now am mirroring this homepage on a second server. Are you able to find the identical copy of this page? A nice award is guaranteed to the first person to send the correct URL:s to both my sites! ;-)
28.02.2001:	Now I have a tool to keep an eye on all my links on my homepage. From now on my hope is that there should only very rarely be any "dead" links anywhere on this site. I have also made a few fun additions among my general links and linguistic links. A number of new quotes have been added, and I've finished my bachelor thesis in Chinese.
29.01.2001:	There are now altogether 27 pictures in my Icelandic photo album. I have also added one new picture among the pictures of ferrets. Currently I'm working on the last statistics for my bachelor thesis, and will hopefully wrap it up during this week.
22.01.2001:	The first "Good-Friend-Award" of the year has been given to Magnus. Motivation: a warm and encouraging homepage, nice writing in guestbooks and a happy smile.
21.01.2001:	Now there is yet another page to read: Mah-jong! Further more I've messed around with all menus and my bachelor thesis. All pages have received more or less treatment.
12.01.2001:	Since the New Year there has been an immense increase in the number of visitors to my pages. On request from the reader, I've started to work on a couple of new Chinese pages Chinese phonetics (including an "alphabet") and Chinese calligraphy. These new pages, however, are still rather rudimentary...
22.12.2000:	Microsoft-tip of the year: Have you experienced how your Word-documents grow far too large and clumsy to be practical to work with? Is MS Word filling your documents with a lot of unnecessary codes, tags, old information and other stuff that you don't need? Then you might try to save your document in html-format. After that, you open the new html-document, and save it as a Word-document again. This may cause some unwanted changes in the exact format of your document, but usually that's easy to fix afterwards. By applying this strategy, I succeeded in compressing a document from horrible 45 Mbytes down to 2,5 considerably more comfortable Mbytes!
29.11.2000:	OK, now I've realized that I MUST go though all my pages, to get the CSS to work to a full, and to make the pages look real nice when using Netscape (personally I've not used that browser for two years, you know). This job will take a while, and unfortunately I must ask 2.5% of my readers to upgrade from Netscape 3 to a more modern browser...
03.10.2000:	Since some visitors have asked me to do it, I've now added a little gallery with a few hurriedly selected pictures of ferrets. Thus I have around 75 photographies on this site, and only 4% free space (414 kbytes, to be precise) on the server... Otherwise? Well... Since I've received some more answers to the research for my bachelor degree, I've also updated the thesis on teaching Chinese to Chinese children abroad, but for the rest of the pages there have been no radical changes, just some fiddling here and there.
24.09.2000:	Minor updates here and there on the site, visible updates in my Curriculum Vitæ, but most important: a radical update of the navigational menu on the left side – and about time, since this site now consists of 10 Mbytes of data and many pages to scan through! The side-menu may now, in a flexible way, be hidden or reopened. I do hope this will come in handy for the 65 visitors that I have on an average day!
15.09.2000:	After far to much postponing, a Good-Friend-Award has now, today, been given to the very much deserving Mr Peter (Eeyore). Persons that achieve this nomination have the right to later hand the same over to their own friends! :-)
14.09.2000:	After having had close to 30.000 visitors during the last three years, I have now simply removed the guest-counter – it was making the page slow, and it was not totally accurate. Instead I've put a faster and almost invisible statistics-counter on all pages. The purpose of this counter is to show me what my readers are searching for, and make it easier for future readers to find those items. At the same time I've put copyright-texts on all pages, for my personal illusion (?) of security...
08.09.2000:	Recently I've mostly been working on my bachelor thesis in Chinese, but have also made some additions to the list of Chinese literature and software to be found in my bookshelf and added some new pictures in my photo albums. The number of visitors to this site is increasing steadily – especially all the people that find the words "Chinese tattoos" on this news page! :-)
15.04.2000:	I have written some more on my philosophical page, fixed this and that, but mostly been working at the office (would you believe that!?!), fixing my apartment in Reykjavík (it's necessary) and preparing my examination in Chinese (well, at least I'm trying) – and these things are not always visible here on the Net... Some uninteresting (?) statistics: This site now consists of more than 9 MB of data spread on 80 pages. Each page has been updated at least once during the last 5 months (2/3 has been updated during the year 2000). Number of visitors per day: usually around 30 (mostly Swedish people, of course). Most popular keywords searched by the surfers: China, Chinese characters and Chinese tattoos.
30.03.2000:	There have been a lot new pictures added to my gallery - around 39 pictures from Iceland and China, to be precise. Thus my homepage now occupies over 8 Mbytes of space on the server.
19.06.1999:	Recently I've noticed that some pages on this site were not totally accepted by some browsers (mainly Netscape and some older versions of Explorer), but now I've fixed the error I could find and also remodelled the style sheets on all pages. My goal is to make this site just as fine on any browser (though it looks a little bit better with Explorer, and I still haven't been able to surf it with a Mac...). But still I got the Golden Penguin Award today. Jee, thanx Kicki!