Wow, that felt good – getting away from it all for a week!!
So on Thursday 30th Helena’s mother dropped us off at Arlanda and drove away with our son. We knew he would be in a good hands and promptly checked in and bought our first pint – at 6 am! Got on the plane, I introduced myself to the cabin crew and got a really friendly welcome and off we went. We landed, got to the hotel and went to our room only to find that the seaview we were paying for was very, very limited. So limited that I actually went to complain and was expecting to have to argue what classifies as a “sea view” – but nope, the fixed a new room for us by Sunday so we were happy with that.
We walked around the town of Platanias, tried every restaurant we could find and we basically lamed around for 7 days trying not to do anything but work on our tan and we were pretty successful. With the first part of that – not so much with the latter!
I’ll write up a full report later when I have time but for now this’ll do.
But man it’s good to be back!!
Something that can annoy me sometimes, even make me angry, is when people go out of their way to find something sexist or homophobic or whatever their cause is. People can really ruin something fun like an ad on TV that has humor and BAM! someone shows complete lack of humor and just knocks it down because it made fun of women being portrayed in a special way.
Not that I condone portraying women bad, but there’s this huge space between making something funny in a 30 second ad to having an evil master plan. And sometimes I even feel sorry for those people that can’t look at an image without trying to find something politically wrong with it.
But sometimes there’s the freak occurence when they actually have a point! And I think Feminist Frequency may just have one, even though I think they mistaken in other areas. Who? “Feminist Frequency a video webseries that explores the representations of women in pop culture narratives.” says their website. It’s created by Anita Sarkeesian and they have published two long YouTube videos on the subject of how women are portrayed in video games. Not today, but even back in the 90’s. Video 1 is here and video 2 is here. Waiting for video 3.
When I started watching it I was hoping it would be just another feminist trying to prove there’s an Illuminati conspiracy to portray women as inferior beings. And she partly goes into that territory which I think isn’t really helping their case. I’ve played games for a long long time and I haven’t reflected much on this issue. And had there been a long running plan then they seriously failed, at least with me. Another issue I had with the videos was – “what point was she really trying to make?”. Most of episode 2 is covering how women are portrayed as fragile pieces of porcelain that needs rescue (“Pretty Woman” anyone?), right? And then she goes on with statistics of how many women are victims to spousal abuse? How did a (“women being fragile in computer games”) result in b (“women are being beaten because of how they are portrayed in computer games”)? Or did I miss a step?
I can give her points that there is a real lack of women heros in the gaming business. And when cutting so many games together with the common theme like “your wife dies and you have to save your daughter” then yeah it’s apparently lack of creativity on the writing-side of things. We need more Mass Effects and Diablo 3’s where we can chose the sex of our hero to make this even more of a non issue. Although I have to say she missed Diablo 3 when writing up exampled of “women turned evil so you have to kill them” 🙂
I have for a long time thought that treating something like a non issue is a good way to live. 2 guys wanna get married to each other? Not an issue. But Takei made me rethink that by saying that “if we don’t treat it like an issue we’re sweeping it under the rug and pretend there isn’t violence toward the gay community on a daily basis”. And he’s right of course. And I guess it’s the same here, for me it wasn’t an issue of women being portrayed this way. But if we don’t see the issue it won’t change. And not changing our ways is bad.
Not sure how many of you are into the “console war” of Nintendo Wii vs. Sony Playstation vs. Microsoft Xbox? I’ve never been a major fan of consoles really but back in 2000 I bought a PS2 and basically only played Tekken and Grand Tourismo on it, that was it.
Then I bought the PS3 when it came out. That, the PS3 version of “Civilization” and an exercise bike made me lose about 30 pounds! And I’ve watched bluray on it and used it as the primary media player with the use of PMS. But I’ve never been really big on console games. Racing games makes sense but I prefer games with keyboard and mouse. And I’ve never really seen a big enough reason to buy an Xbox 360. I missed out on Halo unfortunately and the entire Xbox Media Center thing and being able to download games and play them on a modified Xbox. But as I’ve said, never been heavily into console games. But it’s not that I’m a huge Playstation fanboy (I can easily crack down on it, like how it’s not nativaly able to play MKV files even though it’s suppose to be DivX compliant!), it’s just that I’ve simply not gotten around to it.
Well now that both are coming out with new consoles I’m ofcourse thinking which one to buy first. And I’ve gotta say it’s looking alot like it’s gonna be Playstation again. Not that I was blown away by their pretty mediocre reveal or the games or anything like that. But because they aren’t conceded enough to think they can change how I have my entertainment setup at home in my living room which Microsoft thinks they can, but I can already tell them “no”.
Xbox One is supposed to be the “one” box to rule them all and make me throw everything else away in my living room. Well it doesn’t have speaker outputs so I’ll still need the amplifier. And unless the plan to release one specifically for Viasat in Sweden I’m still gonna need my satellite reciever with a build in HD to record stuff so there’s that. And there’s no way they are going to support MKV playback over my network at home so I’m still going to need a HTPC computer. So no, it’s “just another box”. I can see how they want me to connect my satellite box to the Xbox input so I can watch TV through my Xbox to minimize the screen and browse the web and read my e-mail on the side. ‘Cause today it’s terrible inconvenient to do that from my phone in my couch, right? .. And the EA Sports partnership? … not really! Had it been a FIA partnership then yay but focusing on NFL, really? Yeah, it’s big there but not anywhere else. What more was there? Halo TV series? Yeah, am I going to buy an Xbox to watch a TV show, that’s more than likely going to be on YouTube or downloadable somewhere else. And the size of the thing? And it comes with an 500 gig drive which by todays standard is pretty lame – and you can’t even upgrade it, something Playstation have not only supported but actually encouraged to prolong the life of their consoles! But yeah, I can buy a USB drive and hook it up (which I can do just as well with a PS4) and I’ve got one more device that I wasn’t suppose to have.
I’m not going to go into the “online” and “killing of used games market” because neither of those are actually a problem – FOR ME!
If I had any input on the development of the new Xbox here’s my list of things to do that would make me go “YAY!”:
– Multiple HDMI inputs. This would be a great solution so people won’t need to switch channels on their TV or amplifier (if you connect your HDMI inputs to the amplifier and then to the TV). That would be huge!
– Replaceable HD
– Full Xbox Media Center support over LAN.
– Stop focusing on partnerships that offer stuff only a small percentage of consumers want !
With those four things I’d easily buy an Xbox over a Playstation. Because the Playstation doesn’t have HDMI in at all. Or any sort of “play media over network” thing that works well. And the only partnerships I know of are all games-related. With the one exception for DivX.
Or I may end up buying neither until 2 years in when they are half the price…
I don’t know if you have Instagram, but if you wanna follow me and my wife when we’re off on vacation next week I suggest you turn to the official “Ving” Instagram channel – http://instagram.com/vingresor
Every week an employee at Ving get’s access to the account and Instagrams from their trip. Yeah, that’s how much we’re travelling – there’s always someone going somewhere willing to Instagram their holiday! Pretty good free PR and it goes both ways – people who are tuned into it via Facebook for example can write up their recommendations and tips for us on the other side, and we can promote our resorts. It’s all good 🙂
So tune in in one week when we’re off to Crete!
One thing I thought was very important for journalists is listening to both sides of the story. If you’re going to print a story about a trial it’s important to print both sides of story. For example, last week there was a ruling in a trial where 3 guys had apparently shoved a glass bottle up a girls vagina. That’s one side of the story. The other side was that she had just had sex with two of them and they thought she was ok with this since she never outright said “stop”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending the guys here, no matter what’s going on if you think a girl would like a bottle shoved up her vagina there’s something wrong with you, but the point is it’s important to print both sides of the story.
And right now there’s a very big lack of that. So much so it’s embarassing for all journalists in Sweden. Everyone from the people at “TT” who has historically been very good at printing facts down to the “let’s twist the facts so much it’s as juicy as possible without deliberately lying” so called “journalists” at Aftonbladet, they are all doing it. They have for the past 6 months printed one side of a story. Namely the one of Gottfrid Svartholm who’s right now on trial for hacking and stealing sensitive data from our IRS and hacking one of our largest banks mainframe and tried to transfer out money. The guy had apparently done this from his refuge in Laos or wherever. The swedish authorities, who’s already made it public they hate the guy, charged him with a high enough offence that they could have him arrested and deported back to Sweden. This was a long time ago and since then they’ve gathered evidence upon evidence. And most of it is logs on his laptop apparently. And the media have covered this from one angle and that is the information they are fed from the DA who’s handling the case and the managers at the places that got hacked. The DA’s job is to nail the bad guy, and he’s sure this is the bad guy so you could say he’s just doing his job. And the managers at the places that got hacked are, as victims in this case, hardly objective either. And now the trial has begun and in the days leading up to this the DA worked hard to make public what this guy was charged of doing. And he didn’t really speak in the “what we’re charging this guy with is…”-voice, rather the “what this guy did was…” which assumes guilt. But you can still excuse this guy for just doing his job.
But here is where the journalists are failing so hard. They are printing his statements and they are printing them as facts. And so far I have only seen one 30 second clip from the defense where he said “he’s pleaded guilty to some of the lesser charges but not the major ones” and that was it. Where are the people to examine the case against him? Where are the technical experts that will tell anyone that an online computer is easily hackable and anyone could have used this computer to do anything, even plant the logs which now makes up the majority of the evidence against him? Or the people to question why this kind of sensitive information was stored at the outsourced private company in such an insecure way that it was leaked? Where are the journalists to question why they have treated this person as guilty before they even made the arrest (and gained access to those previously mentioned so very important logs)? Where’s the impartiality? Is it left to us in the blogosphere to handle that?
I’m not saying the guy isn’t guilty and that he’s a saint. I can see this guy being totally guilty, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are two sides of the story and the media should cover them both, not just re-print what the DA feeds them!
So how was that weekend you wonder?
To start off, meeting up with my trekking buddies for a beer and burger, great! Always a pleasure. Then came the movie… well I don’t know why I still bother going to the movies actually. First I had to pay extra for the 3d glasses! They should also have offered earplugs because the sound was way too loud. And not “I can hear this through concrete walls”-loud because that I can enjoy. This was loud as in sharp hurting my tinnitus-ear, so I spent half the movie covering an ear. And who needs an AC when you have a thousand people watching a movie when we can make them sweat?! Why do I bother!?
Afterwards I went home (which took longer than it should) and spent a few hours playing computer games until I was tired enough to fall asleep. And I thought I’d be enjoying lying in bed and just not do nothing without having a son yelling at me to get up. But I didn’t, got up at 8 again and watched some TV, movies, Formula 1 and whatnot and playing games, just like I planned. What wasn’t a part of the plan was a phone call telling me that an acquaintance passed away during the night. He’s a guy I met every month at our Star Trek gatherings, a really nice and all around righteous dude. So that pretty much ended that day on a downer. On Sunday it was back to the same stuff and the F1 race from Barcelona with another Ferrari win! And by now the family was back home so it was back to normal life again.
So yeah, it could’ve been better, definitely. But it was still pretty good!
And right away comes the next reality check – namely this. To summarize – it’s your everyday normal family and the mother drops off their 2 year old son at kindergarten every morning. Except this one day she can’t and the dad steps in. Except this one time he forgets and goes to work and leaves his car in the parking lot with the kid still inside strapped to it’s seat. And the worst timing ever since yesterday happened to be the first really hot day of the year in Sweden and the sun cooked the car and the kid dies of heat exhaustion.
The tragedy is just amazing!! And it makes me happy that I’m in charge of dropping him off at the kindergarten because I’m not sure this would never have happened to me if I wasn’t. Because one time when my wife had asked me to pick him up I actually drove all the way home before I remembered I was suppose to pick him up so I turned right around to remedy that. So I’m afraid what might have happen if it was the other way around. But it’s just so tragic that it can happen. And I can’t say it’s the kindergarten’s fault for not following up why the kid never made it, with their limited resources they can’t investigate shit like this too.
Nothing like a terrible story about how absolutely evil people can be to give you a reality check about things, eh? I’m of course talking about those 3 chicks that finally broke free after being held captives in a house for 10 years. 10 freaking years!!! I can’t even wrap my head around that, it’s just absolutely absurd the evilness that lies behind something like that! Compared to that one doesn’t really have much to complain about. Because it has to be one of the most evil thing you can do, right? What makes people like that tick, really?! It pisses me right off, and all those TV series and movies you’ve seen with innocent girls being kidnapped and held captive by some psycho, that hasn’t gone on for 10 freaking years!? …Here’s hoping they can adjust to life as free people again :/
I saw the movie “AFK” last weekend. I say movie although it tries to be a documentary. But 99% of the film is following the 3 people on trial for running the Pirate Bay and allowing them to talk freely without any opposition and very limited fact check.
But still .. some things in that entire thing is very disturbing. As is the latest twist Peter Sunde is blogging about. In short … if you’re up for digital copyright violation charges in Sweden you are in for a very very tough uphill battle. Not only is the prosecutor very “Hollywood”-friendly, so is the judge, the jury, the police and the court of appeals and as it turns out the European court as well. It’s pretty scary!
But what strikes me as the most upsetting thing in the entire story is that no one with judicial or political power is taking them seriously. There have been some serious integrity breaches and legal procedures never followed and bias that you’d think that some politician with real power would say “this entire thing was handled wrong!”. But no one is even listening to them. It’s like they hear “pirate bay” and just turn on ignore mode. Which is really sad and makes me embarrassed to be Swedish to be honest.
I can’t argue much for their innocence since they are guilty as shit of “assisting copyright violations”, but even so, a fair trial is the least they deserve.
And here we are, 3 years later and what has happened on that front? Well we have Netflix and HBO has just started in Scandinavia (albeit with very limited selection) but other than that we’re still pretty much screwed. If I wanna see a movie in HD the legal way I either have to go to the cinema, which is an entire project now that I have a kid. Or I can buy the bluray for $30 (which either involves taking a trip into Stockholm or order on te web and wait 3-4 days) and sit through commercials and advertisements and disclaimers and copyright warnings and a menu that takes forever to load because it connects to the internet and then I can finally press play. Compare that to the illegal way of “what movie do I wanna see? this one, ok, download, go make popcorn and poor up drinks, unpack, go to the bathroom, and the press play. They really should offer more legal ways of doing it because I’d pay for it! Valve realized a long long time ago that the best way to fight piracy is offering a convenient alternative and every game I’ve played for the past 8 years I’ve actually purchased.
Oh man I’ve got that “Chuggington”-song playing in my head now! Our son Sam just loves watching trains on YouTube so it’s Thomas The Tank Engine and Chuggington all the time!!
But life is proceeding pretty well. It’s ok at work, I’m having daily battles with Sharepoint 2013 trying to get it to work with an upgrade from our Sharepoint 2010 which isn’t as simple as going from 2007->2010 mostly because of the claims thing. At home I’m having weekly battles with our budget, trying not to spend much for anything ’cause we’re off on vacation in about a month. Finally! And my woman has just recovered from being i’ll for about 2 weeks. For her the worst part is going back to work only to see that noone has done nothing and her mailbox is swamped with stuff and she already had a backlog … she’s what you could call a single point of failure, and if it was a small company there wouldn’t be much fuzz, but this is one of the biggest phone operators in Sweden so they really should know better.
Also planning to build a deck on the front of our house. I built a huge one 3 years ago on the back but my woman wants one in the front too so that’s what I’ve got to do. So I’m keeping myself busy all the time 🙂
Having so much to do that I’ve forgotten this little place a bit. But a month, that’s just too long!
Been busy attending a SQL 2012 course and now studying for the exam. And while doing that I’m toying around with Sharepoint 2013 both “on premise” but also the cloud version that Microsoft offers. So yeah, keeping busy!
But I really should’ve posted something when Ferrari won the Chinese GP because that was a helluva good feeling! The race was good but the great feeling of having a Ferrari come in first, and not by a few meters but by actually a big margin. And sipping some Peroni while watching it felt extra sweet!!
Also saw a movie that I can’t talk about. Yet 🙂
10 months ago when I was hired it was for one main purpose – to upgrade our Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010. Sure it’s normal IT operations, some SQL and Exchange management and other stuff too but mainly it was to upgrade Sharepoint. And now 10 months later the day has finally come for me to start and reap the fruits of the past 10 months work!
All the scripts are written, polished and tested 3-4 times and everything is prepared so at midnight tonight the old Sharepoint 2007 will go into read only mode and I’ll start copying all the 250 gigabyte or so of data and migrate it to 2010. And we’re also taking the opportunity to clean up some previous wrongs (like “SiteDirectory” things). So it’ll take more or less the entire weekend but lot’s of downtime waiting for copying, backups, restores and moving things around in the content databases, all those nifty scripts will do that work, I just have to check in once a while to make sure there are no errors and start the next one. So I’m actually triple booked this saturday – first this work, then Star Trek day in Skarpnäck and in the evening we’re having our neighbours over for dinner and to celebrate Sams birthday. Then on Sunday I might still have some job to do (although if all goes well it’ll just be building the search index which I’ll just start and leave for 12 hours) and off the the kids funhouse at Barkarby. All in all a busy weekend.
But it really feels good that FINALLY! I can put all my scripts and preparation to good use, I’ve waited for over 6 months to get the go-ahead for this!
We have some more piracy stuff going on here in Sweden. Our big ISP’s are more interested in expanding internationally than care about the free speech on the internet, which has made it difficult for the Pirate Bay to find an ISP. But our political Pirate Party supplied them with internet access because .. well why not really, everyone has the right to be online if they want right?
Well not according to the anti-pirate corporation here in Sweden, you know the one that dragged on the Pirate Bay-court for years and years and are backed by an army of lawyers (fortunately none that I worked with) and every studio in Hollywood. They sent them an ultimatum to cut off the internet access to pirate bay bu feb 26th “or else we’ll sue the individuals in charge of the party”. And the pirate party isn’t a big party, doesn’t have much funds and the ones in charge of it aren’t wealthy either. So they knew they couldn’t defend themselves in a lenghty trial and “fight the good fight” even if there is no law or court order to support the anti-pirate corporations threat. So the pirate bay went to Norway and Spain and someone the anti-pirate corporation thinks of this as a win for them. And I don’t see how?
First of all – the pirate party just got atleast one new member and voter, so good going there. Secondly the pirate bay is still online. Thirdly, instead of going to court against the pirate party they’ll be going to court explaining what gives them the authority to demand this in the first place. Which I for one hope ends up like it did in Norway.
But don’t get me wrong – I’m not rooting for or even using Pirate Bay and not a big supporter of people who thinks “copyrights are the devils work” and the anarchy label that comes with it. It’s more that I’m against how the Hollywood studios are going about this and what their idea of how distribution should look like which I’ve said many times is so inconvenient and counter productive for the customer that I can’t possibly support it – something I’ve said for years since that Moby “18” CD fail a few years back!
So this week is a week I was looking forward to. The release of Dead Space 3! I absolutely loved the first one and liked the second one, so I’ve really been waiting for the third one. And the trailers for it hasn’t disappointed. But now it all has a bit of a bitter taste thanks to the publisher EA and Visceral Games for sticking with EA!
If you wind back the clock to pre-World of Warcraft and most of the games I played wasn’t legally acquired. Not something to brag about but something changed with WOW but probably more because of the evolution of Steam – a great way to buy your games and download them digitally to your hard drive over the web. It was a lot more convenient than going to the store, buying a physical CD/DVD and installing it. Not to mention when you felt like playing it again you had to find the CD and hope it still worked. With steam you just download it again and play. My Steam library has more games than can be displayed on the page so I’ve been using that a lot. I actually bought the first two Dead Spaces through Steam.
Then EA decided to start their own. I don’t remember what the first one was called but I bought Command and Conquer and it wasn’t as good as Steam. Then they decided to ramp it up and started Origin which is their own Steam platform and the only way for EA games to be digitally retailed (at least in EU). And I’ve bought the Battlefields, Syndicate and even bought Dead Space 2 again since it was that good. But I can’t say I like it. Things like them defaulting the install dir to C: (which nowadays is pretty small when most gamers have SSD drives as C:), and it’s not cheaper to buy them there. Actually it’s cheaper to buy codes off web-stores that you then claim in Origin to get the game. I did that with Battlefield Premium and it saved me $20. It’s why I jokingly call it O(verpriced)rigin. But now they’ve taken it one step further with the launch of Dead Space 3!
I preordered it around Christmas cause I had some money over and it now finally showed up in my library. But guess what? It’s not playable until February 7th! Why is that a big deal? Cause it’s a EU thing – my friends in the states are already playing it!!! And there is no possible practical reason to delay it – it’s not like they are gonna translate it or make it less violent for our censorship or anything. There’s no reason to delay it for 2 days for us! It pissed me off! But here’s the kicker – it’s available on Torrent sites! So if I wanted to I could’ve played the game yesterday, albeit illegally obtained.
And now I ask the suits that are making the Origin decisions this one simple question – give me ONE good reason why I shouldn’t download it from Torrent and play it now? Because of your idiotic no-refund rules I can’t get my money back so my money will still be yours so don’t dare play the “support the developers of great games!” card. Just give me a reason why I should use your service over downloading it through torrent? Anyone? How about “to enjoy the multiplayer”? To hell with multiplayer, I play Dead Space because of that “one man against the universe and winning” feel so multiplayer is directly negatated. Anything else?
This is what drives piracy – poor executive decisions. And whom does it hurt? Your customers and your developers. Because there is no way in hell I’m going to enjoy Dead Space 3 now because of this idiotic thing that forces me to the world of Torrents to play I game I purchased! That’s who, but what do you care – it’s the bottom line that counts isn’t it? Maybe if you would play by the rules and offer refunds or the ability to second-hand sell my digital games, your bottom line would take a hit. But I promise you I will never buy a game through Origin again – this was the last straw!
Updated: I gave it a try and talked to a EA advisor through their support and ask for a refund. It went as expected, if you’re expecting corporate greed and customer service incompetence at understand the issue that is.
That title is a little inside joke, but anyway. Today as I walked back to work after taking a little walk after lunch and I saw our building with our logo I got this weird fuzzy feeling. It took me a while to get it but I think I do now. I’m actually proud to be working here at Thomas Cook (aka “Ving” for all you Swedes!). It’s been over 10 years since I could say that.
After working for companies like “Pulsen” who never saw me as an individual but rather something there to make them money, and Carema who tried to make the most of every dollar they had, it’s such a pleasant thing to be able to say that I work at “Ving”. Because unlike “Vinge” (the lawfirm), this company is very well known, have a very good reputation, are very visible in the media and really takes care of their brand. Recently we just had an ad drive and some of the pictures of people on holiday were of gay couples, and it’s not like they made a big deal out of it or anything, the pictures were just there just like that “happy man / woman” couple pictures. I liked that. And yes I do realise that I’m defeating the purpose by actually making a deal out of it, but it can’t be helped! Also the fact that Ving take very good care of their employees. Even though I was a bit peeved at my boss 2 weeks ago for not giving me the bonus I was promised all year, I’ve gotten over it and it’s not like it was personal or anything. And besides, me and the wife are going on holiday soon that’s alot cheaper than it would be had I not worked here.
So yeah, for the first time in 10 years I can actually say I’m happy and proud to be working where I am. Let’s hope that never changes!
I fixed my little fuckup with help from Google. I tried restore files but MySQL didn’t like that, but fortunately Google had indexed these pages and I could use their cache to re-write the few posts that were lost. So thanks Google!!
I’ve redone the image gallery again. I couldn’t find a gallery system for wordpress that worked “the way I wanted it to” so instead I went back to Imagevue and created seperate galleries for every year, in seperate folders. What that means for you is that it’s easier to navigate, however you can’t navigate from one year to the next without going back here. Quite simply because the navigation thing in Imagevue didn’t look good when having over 10 categories and subcategories and sub-sub-categories, it just wasn’t practical!
Hope you like it, and as usual, the password is the short Swedish name of my current employer.
So I fucked up again … I rearranged things on my server and lost the SQL database for this site. So I went back to the NP.com which is dated early December, that’ll do until I have time to restore the missing month (which with my updating frequence can’t be much!)
I really do hate expectations and now they’ve cost me about $1500! I wish I could just eliminate them completely. You know when you go into a movie expecting one thing and getting another. I think I’ve learnt to not have expectations in that regard, I’ve been disappointed so many times (“Star Wars The Phantom Menace” anyone?) that I just don’t have them. When I went to see “Prometheus” I made damn sure not to expect an “Alien”-movie and in hindsight most of the people that are giving it bad reviews went in with that expectation!
Now how did that cost me $1500? During my hiring process here at Thomas Cook my boss told me about their bonus system. And at the same time I was pursued by a big company that wanted to hire me and give me a higher salary and when I discreetly hinted at that she again told me about the bonus system and said “over a full year we’ll be able to match them salary wise” and it was one of the reasons I started working here. That and the fact that my boss and the colleague I met seemed like the most professional IT people I’d ever met! And during all of last year I kept hearing about that bonus as a carrot for us to achieve our professional goals here. Even as late as last Wednesday I was promised this bonus is coming with this months paycheck. But I knew I wasn’t going to get the full bonus since I had “only” worked here for 8 out of the 12 months of the year, but that should still give me $1500 after tax.
Well this Monday she called me for a spontaneous meeting to give me the bad news. I had only worked 5 months of the fiscal year and I needed to have worked 6 to be eligible for the bonus, something even she didn’t know about until she checked with HR. So instead of $1500 in cash that I had counted on that was just 4 days away I get $0. I do get something on the side but nothing in real hard cash.
I can’t say that she lied to me during the recruitment process because she didn’t know about this, but it’s very damn hard not to feel disappointed over it. And more than that, I feel like they stole $1500 from me! Because I’ve been promised that bonus 5 seperate times last year and twice this year and when it was only 4 days away it just vanishes!! If they had at any point last year said I wouldn’t get it I think I’d been fine with that, but now it got to the point where I had actually counted on getting it, and it was all going to go to pay our vacation this summer. Even besides that there are so many holes that money would fill that I feel robbed of that money. Kinda like Clark Griswald! But this was after Christmas though…
Anyway, what can I do about it? I’m professional enough to suck it up and keep on trying to do the best job I can! I can’t say I’m less motivated to do a good job than before. But I can’t say I’m happy that Microsofts analysis of our Sharepoint enviroment that I’ve set up said “it’s the most healthy Sharepoint environment we’ve seen” and I get nothing for it except a “good job”.
This time I can’t blame anything else than I’ve simply forgotten to write something here in a while. Last week my son was really ill so that took up pretty much most of my thought processor when I wasn’t working. But I really should be updating more often, I know. I’ve looked into getting my tweets posted here automatically but so far no go.
Anyway, I’ve dumped instagram now because their user agreement doesn’t agree with me so that’s out of here which is really sad. Other than that it’s pretty much same stuff going on here as usual – me playing computer games, us watching movies, our son complains that we don’t spend enough time with him. But all in all it’s going pretty well actually.
Read the other day that movie box offices in Hollywood broke the 10.7 billion dollar mark for 2012 which is a new record. Also broke the record of amount of movie premieres (655) for one year. And that’s while claiming illegal file sharing are killing them.
And I’m pretty sure when I say this – the problem is lack of options! In Sweden HBO Nordic just started up, but only after first opening up to people who have the “right” ISP and bought the “right” TV – that kinda thing would never happen with a file sharing site, now would it? And the fact that HBO Nordics list of movies and TV shows are seriously lacking anything I’m interested in. Ok they had Back to the Future, but what about new movies? And the new TV shows they were supposed to have? We also have Netflix who has a pretty good lineup so I’m still paying monthly for that.
But one suggestion I’d like to make to Hollywood is to think a little outside the box. When I watched a movie the other day called “Giant Mechanical Man” (great movie by the way!) I though it was one of the best movies I’ve seen for quite some time. And there is no way I would have seen it had it not been for the way I got it. But I felt bad afterwards because it was so good I wanted to pay for it. The thing is there is no way for me to pay for it. And that’s when it hit me.
How about starting a donation site to a movie for people like me, that see the movie and feels it was so good I really do wanna pay for! I think that most people would think that a donation of say 5-6 would be ok for a movie they thought was worthwile watching! This would hugely increase the revenue for these small movies that never make it to the theaters in sweden and that “only” made $5 million in the box office in the states. I’m damn sure that would double if we had the oportunity to pay for it online somehow. Because right now my best way to pay for it is to actually pay CDON $5 for renting it online. And I’ll do that only because it’s the only way I know how to give money back for it. Unfortunately there is no way the writer/producer is going to see that revenue!
Speaking of which – I wonder what the creative force behind that movie would think. Is he or she or them ok with as many people as possible watching the movie regardless of how we obtain it, or are they pissed that I saw it and liked it and gave it a good review at IMDB and want to give my money to them for it, if only there was a way??