This will be my last update as a 20-something guy. In 6 hours I’ll be a 30-something guy. So let us recap the past 10 years:
After 1 academically failed year at the University in Växjö, I moved back home, got a job I liked at great company. Got new friends, co-started a Trekker organization, started my home theater system, got an interest for Formula 1, got to go to Greece, got a promotion, got to go to Kenya. Moved to my own place (blasting housewarming party!). Got another promotion to the best job I’ve ever had (developing our e-commerce site), took a few trips on the party-boats over to Finland (another blasting party on my 25th birthday). Company went broke, got a drivers license, re-educated myself to pc techie, started working a little off and on at a lawfirm. Celebrated one sister’s 30th birthday in scotland, lost my best friend, got a job at the state department, travelled around the world, celebrated the other sister’s 30th birthday, visited Africa while suffering from salmonella and then got to go to Italy. Helped organize the first Star Trek Convention in sweden (ever) and spend a few days in the company of Tim Russ. Had a few lazy months as a consultant inbetween jobs. Finally got the boot and a headache that won’t go away and got a steady job at the lawfirm and bought the last piece for a home theater (projector)… and that brings us up to date.
Overall a good 10-year run I think. And to start my 30’s I’m gonna have a good get together tonight at The Dubliner tomorrow night (everyone’s invited) and then off to see the F1 race at Silverstone!
One more reminder “all good things must come to an end” is Ferrari’s performance in F1 right now. Or lack thereof. It was bound to end and we’ve been spoilt with wins over the past 4 years. But it’s still fun to watch and read, especially when planet-f1.com writes stuff like this:
Jarno Trulli’s pass on Fisichella was a bit like sex for the first time: It was fumbly, it was awkward and embarrassing, but he knew he had to go through with it. It didn’t work out for him, but hey, we’ve all been there.
Hope everyone had a great christmas, if you even celebrate it? Mine was pretty ok. Don’t know why it was only “pretty ok”, but it was. Probably my fault. But we finally ordered those F1 tickets for my 30th birthday! We’re going to Silverstone on July 10th which is one month after I turn 30, but this way Amy and her Paul will make it which makes all the difference!
Btw, pictures are up from the christmas weekend at my folks place.
Dude, have the past two week been the laziest of my life? I would think so! Especially the weekends – last weekend I was so bored I actually had to go an extra mile to find something to do. Don’t know when was the last time that happened. And this weekend has been “movie-catchup” weekend. “Troy”, “Girl Next Door”, “Timeline”, “Hellboy”, “Punisher”, “Godsend” and “Elf”. Puh… most of them were disappointing (“Timeline” was soooo bad, and I usually like time travel stories), some just what I expected (“Troy” made up and bended Homer’s work about as much as I’d expect) and some were even better than I thought (“Girl Next Door” was funnier and more serious than I though). And another Ferrari victory. A pretty successful weekend all in all. Looking forward to this working week when my future area of expertice will be decided.
This weekend had all the ingredients to be absolutely awesome! Star Trek Voyager DVD box #1, two new Enterprise episodes, a Stockholm Trekkers day which usually means I get to see friends I haven’t seen in a while, the hockey championship finals, a Formula 1 race and beautiful weather. So what happened? I forgot how many times I’ve seen the first season of Voyager so I already knew all the episodes by heart, I haven’t had time to see the new Enterprise episodes, one of my best friends came down with the flu and couldn’t make it to the Stockholm Trekkers day, I got a speeding ticket, we “lost” the hockey final to Canada (again!), the F1 race was pretty boring since noone can come close to the Ferrari’s – and to put in the biggest blow – my grandmother passed away. Now I’m gonna go to bed, forget all about this weekend and try to deal with that last part.
But atleast the weather kicked ass!
One more weekend over and done with and one more Formula 1 victory for the guys in red. That makes me happy. Driving home from work on a cool, calm saturday afternoon with the sun shining in my face and the top window back, wind in my hair, stereo pumping, that makes me happy. And I also saw a couple of movies. I did another attempt at watching and appreciating “Lost in Translation”, I’ve gotten some heat for saying “what was the point”. So when I finally got a good “this is the point” description, I watched it again. “What was the point?”. I mean, yeah, they are both completely unhappy with their lives. They are both surrounded by people who don’t get them. They find each other and hit it off in a totally platonic way. And yeah, it’s beautifully filmed. And yeah, it’s got some humor. And guess what? It sounds like my life. Seriously!
Got Matrix 3 on DVD and although most people were disappointed with the second and third one, I just appreciate them for what they are. Action flics with good effects and wallbouncing sound. Not the revolutionary movie that number one was, you can’t really live up to that again. And they have Monica Bellucci in them. And I also saw “The Cooler”. William Macy and Maria Bello, both favorites for an old ER fan, doing great jobs of a pretty good script, but a bit violent at times. But totally worth the 2 hours it took to see.
How are you enjoying seeing the war unfold on your TV screens at home? I had a very weird weekend. On Friday it was Star Trek movie premiere, dinner, then bed, then on Saturday it was F1 qualifying and then… 6 hours of Sky News / CNN watching. Then off on a date, bed early then up early on Sunday to watch the F1 race. Then after that, at about 9 am, when I was tucked down in my soffa I… didn’t do anything but watch Sky News / CNN for about 12 hours! Beginning with the early seige of Umm Qasr and ending with Pentagon breifing following the POW tapes. And it really felt like this war didn’t really exist in any real place, it was just in my TV! Really weird feelings. But it was happening, like that POW tape showed. The two funniest incidents all day was after the morning seige when they interviewed Nick Lerma, the big-ass seargent with plenty of toys. Testosterone squared! Then seeing some Iraqi soldiers hunting two imaginary downed allied airman in the shores of Baghdad. It shouldn’t be funny, it was a blatent disregard of the Geneva convention about the treatment of POW’s, but it was funny seeing them go on for two hours while seeing the “No coalition airplanes missing!” sign at the bottom. And it kinda reminded me about “Allo, allo” with the search for the missing british airmen 🙂
But with that tape on the evening it all ended with a big downer. Once again disregarding Geneva conventions about POW’s but it was really… sad seeing these totally lost techs who just took a wrong turn… and it was something emotional about this one quote:
I didn’t come here to shoot, I came here to fix things.
Here’s hoping it ends well…
I had a pretty funny update for today. But I barely made it into the office until I didn’t feel like being funny today. I got some disturbing news. Disturbing in the way that it upset my entire reality! My reality has included some undeniable facts like sky is blue, water is wet, women are impossible, Moby makes great music, everyone who is married is happy with that, Natalie Portman is beautiful, Formula 1 is fun no matter what anyone else says, Eminem is a bad role model, and so on. Today I got news that atleast one of them is false (and at the same time re-confirmed another one!). Unfortunately I can’t get into details for a while, but I just don’t feel like being funny even though it’s at times like this you really should try to shake it off with humor.
May I make a suggestion to a social study in human behavior? Why are certain people fans of certain teams!? I’m not sure why I’m a supporter of Djurgården hockey, but I think it was that at that time I thought they were the best, and for the past 15 years I’ve been a supporter of theirs, although the past season was sucky (and the current seems to go even worse). And I’m a fan of Ferrari’s since -97, when they were just getting good and now they are undeniably the best, to my great delight. But how comes a person becomes a fan/supporter of a team? It’s not genetics, if it was my sister wouldn’t be a fan of Ferrari’s competitors McLaren! It doesn’t have with upbringing either, becuase why would my upbringing lead to me favoring an Italian team? And how comes certain people just can’t be converted, and when they’ve made up their minds, everything else is ‘wrong’. In the F1 community there is a debate right now as to what really went on during that last corner of the race in Indy, and a lot of people are just too serious about some stuff. Like a column written on a swedish motorsport website, Forza-Motorsport, a site I’ve come to respect and posted alot in their forums. But now they had a column that basically said “Michael Schumacher is an asshole”. How can he say that, it’s not like he knows him or anything, he just drives for the competition? I can understand Finns or Columbians being fans of “their drivers!”, but we swedes can’t really say that… This is a pretty interesting side of human behaviour for me…
And so I’m back from a rather enjoyable weekend. Started off strong on friday evening with doing… my laundry. Ok, that wasn’t even an inch amount of fun (hey, if some can use lightyears as a meassure of time, I can use inch to meassure fun!). But I did get a chance to learn Warcraft III a bit better.
Then on Saturday it was time for a wedding. My friend Markus finally tied to knot with his “dude, she’s 16!”-Linda. When they met, Markus was around 22 and Linda was only 16. Now, 9 years later, they finally married. And out of all the couples I’ve seen, some of which have made me realise the upsides to being single, these two have been the complete opposite – making me realise that girlfriends aren’t mean and guys can still do their thing. We’ll see if that still applies now that they’ve taken it to the next level. The wedding was over and done with very quickly, less than 30 minutes (and last a lifetime. Hopefully!). Then it was time for the dinner afterwards. And that complicated things for me!
My “Rules of Conduct” include some gentleman-rules, like opening the door and picking up the bill at restaurants. Some gentleman-stuff I’ve ignored because they… in all honesty – make women seem incompetent. But during this dinner all these rules applied. Pulling out chairs, making sure her wine glass was never empty (I thought this rule only applied when you had other intentions in mind?) and so on. I didn’t know people still did that… Anyway, nothing happened that I’ll regret later.
Sunday arrived and off to the big city of Stockholm to take a walk down chick-lane (Drottninggatan). This is the kind of street that’ll make you twist your neck, especially in summer time. And then to O’Learys sportsbar to enjoy a Formula 1 race and the company of my two sisters and one of the Pauls (the other one is not into F1). Oh, and Jocke was there too. And for the first time that I’ve been there they got my order wrong. But me, being the “I’m not afraid of new things”-kindaguy, ignored that and just went ahead anyway.
So generally speaking – a very, very great weekend indeed!
So my mother thinks I should stop using “So” to start these updates. But you know, it’s like everyone has a word or expression they use abnormally much. Like a F1 commentator uses “precisely” on average 1.21 times per lap, and Juan Pablo Montoya uses “you know”, and Schumacher “to be honest” and Natalie Portman “like” and so on. So I use “so”, so sue me 🙂
And Will Smith and Wycleaf Jean are in town. And boy do we know it, it’s been hyped to the max in the media. Are they really so bored they have to write what these two guys had for breakfast? It’s like a couple of weeks ago when the biggest headline was that princess Madeleine was finally old enough to buy her own alcohol. I can really see that happening, Madeleine buying her own alcohol. Exactly how would that go? In case you didn’t know, we have government control on alcohol so we have a special chain of stores that only sells alcohol, noone else is allowed to. You can’t stop at a 7-11 and buy anything stronger than 3.5%. And these places tends to get very overcrowded, especially around the holidays. So yeah, I can really see Madeleine waiting in line to buy her alcohol. And then being asked about her age and ID card to prove it. As if …
(now all the smart readers are thinking “how can you bash the media for talking about it when you’re just as bad”. Well, I don’t get the hundreds of thousands of hits everyday or sell a million issues! They should have something better to cover than that!)
So how many reacted to me saying it’s been six months? That’s right, I got to counting, it’s only been five months! Stupid me 🙂
Anyways, so I’ve really gotten used to driving now. I think it’s kinda fun, even sitting in queues in to Stockholm. But there are three huge drawbacks to driving compared to commuting. 1) Money! It’s so expensive driving here, most of all because of the gas! 2) I’ve eliminated the little exercise I used to get, which was walking to the trainstation! c) I hate to sound repetitive, but there’s not that many women to sit and admire. Sure, there’s a couple of them but that’s when you’re reminded that “HEY, you’re DRIVING!”.
(I’m purposly avoiding mentioning anything that happened in the F1 race in Austria)
So that was another great weekend over and done with! Decent weather, great F1 race, new car to drive everywhere and just all over nice to visit my parents again. Do I need to say my mother’s cooking rocks? (I thought it went without saying, but she thought I’d atleast mention it so I did)
But about the F1 race this weekend (Spain), I’m a bit undecided if I like Ferrari’s dominance or not? I’m a Ferrari fan so ofcourse I love it when they win, but seriously, Schumi dominated it so much (same with Imola) that it just wasn’t as fun watching as it used to be. Hope the other teams can do something to make it a little more exciting.
Ok, so what’s happened since I last updated this page… not much. As usual! The free Guestbook that have worked so well isn’t working at all anymore, so I had to go over to a new free guestbook service. Feel free to sign in!
My favorite Formula-1 driver, M. Schumacher, won the World Championship and I won 1.000 SEK since I knew he would 🙂 Also updated my “Who am I?” page to make me look better. And it’s not for show, I actually am a member of the Red Cross and Amnesty. Hope to expand that pretty soon but hey, I wanna enjoy my hard-earned money myself a little too!
I don’t know if I’m that booring, but not much has happened in my life. The most exciting thing that’s happened in recent days was when me and my sister, AC, went out in Stockholm for a movie (“Hollow Man”, I’ll give it a 4) and then to O’Learys sportsbar to see the Indianapolis Formula 1 race live. Quite an experience, it really beats sitting home alone watching F1. The mood was great, the food was great, the service was good, the race was excellent and the crowd was superb (and mostly Ferrari :)).
On a personal note, I’m now officially a staff-member of NataliePortman.com . Yeah baby! I’m in charge of the image gallery. Sounds easy right? You trying indexing, categorizing etc. over 2000 images.
I’ve gotten some complaints that I don’t have any stuff or any interesting things on this site. Well I’m sorry, but this is “my very own domain”, and mostly it contains info about me and some very few special others, so you can complain all you want, but this is my place.
So what’s new in my life? Not much I’m afraid, trying to keep everything rolling at work. Other than that, Sweden was knocked out of the European Championship in soccer. Surprise? Not very… But on the upside, Schumacher won the Canadian Formula-1 GP 🙂