When we moved into our house 2 1/2 years ago we spent a fortune on furniture and interior decorating. One of those things was a soffa from Ikea for about 10.000 Swedish crowns.Now, after our cats and son have done his part we’re totally in agreement that we need a new one and this one in leather. Hopefully the hair from the cats won’t build up like a massive core and everything our son spills will just clean right up.
So we spent last weekend looking around on the web and this weekend we spent going to all the furniture stores we could get to without Sam throwing a complete fit. It wasn’t easy but eventually we found a soffa in leather that felt good and was big enough for us to lie in comfortably. And it cost us about 20.000 Swedish crowns. !!! I know, right!
I just hope that in 3 years time we’re not back at this problem having to buy another soffa for 20.000 or more again!!
Wanna know what I hate? People on trains / busses with backpacks!!
Somehow when strapping on a backpack just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it aint there! Hardly a day goes by that a guy (and this is almost only guys!) backs into me with his backpack or stands in the way of the door not thinking that his backpack is sticking out another 10 inches. And since you can’t give it a small nudge because the person carrying it can’t feel anything smaller than a good push!
And then it gets even worse when it’s jampacked! The other day one train never showed up so the next train was jampacked and ofcourse people had their backpacks and was standing in the way left and right. One was standing so badly that one person on each side wanted to get off the train and not seeing the other one they squeezed his backpack between them and more or less carried him off the train. It was fun to see but pretty scary for the person with the backpack!
So please, if you’re gonna go on a train or buss or something with alot of people and have a backpack – don’t have it on the back! Take it off and carry it in your hand where you can see it and stop it from being such a bloody obstacle!
I very rarely stay home sick from work. Usually some cortison-based lotion, pill or spray helps with most things that go wrong with me. Last year when I had the shingles I still went to work, had to pop some Iprens towards the end but went to work regardless. But last week I got hit by a really nasty cold and woke up very early thursday morning and not only a soar throat – a really aching throat. Some Vicks and painkillers, an hour sleep and I then gave up on the idea of going to work. Took the son to kindergarten and went back to bed. And it was goooooooood! I stayed home on friday as well because I wasn’t fully operational and maybe even contagious (have you seen Contagion yet? 🙂 ) and got a lot of gaming done and just enjoying 8 hours off from work, wife and son.. well as much as you can while sneezing and wiping your nose all the time!
But now my 2 sickdays for the year are over and done with. I hope. ‘Cause I think over the past 10 years that should be my annual average.
Me and H (which is what I write when I don’t wanna write her full name, but I’m talking about my wife Helena, just for future reference) have really been plowing through lots of movies in the past few days!!
So small short reviews: “Killer Elite”, too long and too many twists to be even bother thinking about. “Real Steel”, I didn’t know it was such a kids movie when we started to watch it but combining the robots and Hugh Jackman taking off his shirt all the time and it’s clear that I wasn’t the target audience here. “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”, I didn’t expect much since the last “Planet of the Apes” was so very sucky but this one was actually pretty good. Only thing to complain about was James Franco which just haven’t got much acting depth to him. “Darkest Hour 3D” – yeah we actually went out to the movies to watch a 3D movie and boy did we regret that! The movie was “meh…” at best and for once the 3D didn’t help, it was actually a downside since both our eyes were sore afterwards. So no more 3D for us I think.
But the biggest surprise was “What’s Your Number”… Yeah I know, of all those previously mentioned action and/or sci-fi movies the movie we’ve watched that I’d rate the highest was a chic flic!! But it was actually quite good, funny and warm and modern. The huge downside to having that theme to a movie (which basically is “how many have you slept with?”) is it makes for really uncomfortable talk afterwards! Cause imagine it, you’re on a date with a beautiful woman and you take the bullet and go see a romantic film and the first thing she says afterwards is “so how many have you slept with?”, woooops! But me and H actually didn’t fall into that trap. Maybe because we really don’t care about what we did before …
I moved my blog here because it made it easier to update – I could simply send an e-mail to the blog and it’d be posted right away. Yet I didn’t make a “happy new year” post.
The reason is because we (as in me and my wife) were totally stressed out during new years eve because we had a 3 course dinner to serve to 8 people and making sure they are happy (or atleast content). It kinda made me miss the good old days of being single in my apartment – not having to worry about nothing 🙂 (I kid ofcourse) Fortunately the guests took care of Sam for us more or less but it’s still enough to make me forget about those little things.
But I still had a good new years eve and yesterday we were just slacking, watching TV and not doing much at all. Which kinda annoyed the hell out of our son that bores easily 🙂
The question was raised by a friend of mine “what did you get your wife” so here’s the answer to that.
I got her one of those Qube games with the “luxury” theme (cause she likes that stuff), a Nespresso-machine (she wanted one for work but she’s not really likely to bring it to work since it makes sooooo good coffee!) and pods for 500 crowns – that was alot of coffee! 🙂
So she was pretty much happier than I was about the presents – and she was even happier when her secret santa had bought a little Nespresso-glasscube for the pods!
So did you have a merry Christmas? .. I certainly did! I really love Christmases like this!
First we had a small little present opening at home and I got an electric toothbrush from my lovely wife! The story behind that is that I’ve always prefered electric ones, it just feels better afterwards. But during our very nice romantic weekend after we got married I lost mine. And I never really put a high priority on it (the Samsung Tab was much more important!!) but now I got one again!
Then we got into the car and drove 3 hours to her brother’s place and celebrated Christmas with his family. Lots of people, lots of food, lots of fun and lots of presents (with 3 small kids there it was plenty of toys!)! And that’s when my wife surprised me again! Not only did she remember me saying “I want that for Christmas!” when I saw the TV trailer for “Uncharted 3” – but she went above and beyond and got me the special edition of it!!
The day after we had some breakfast and that’s when the only bad thing that happened all week happened – Helena got some food poisoning with all bad stuff that comes with that. And then we got into the car to drive 3 hours to my parent’s place, stopping every 30 minutes when H felt a bit queasy.
But when we finally got there she slept for 2 hours and it was all good. Then it was the same story, lots of people, lots of food, lots of fun and… ok maybe not lots of presents since we had agreed to play the Secret Santa game. I don’t know who was my Santa but that person bought me two whisky glasses, really nice so thank you for that! Then it was time to play some games… first it was the social version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and that didn’t work out since we improvised the rules because the rules that comes with it only applies when playing 2 people and we were four. But I still think it should have been “last man standing” (which ofcourse was me) but nope. So then we moved on to Scrabble and on the second word we got into an argument about the rules. And when it was really close towards the end we got into an argument what happens when challening someone that puts down tiles that make 3 words at the same time.. but in the end I won again. I have really no clue why I win Scrabble so often (in english)!
Anyway, then we stayed the day and after breakfast (without the food poisoning) we got into the car and drove 1 1/2 hour home to calm down, get organized and start putting batteries in everything our son got… oh the noise!!!
So did you hear about the Swedish police and DA playing Jack Bauer last week? The story, as reported by our media, is that some woman claims she overheard a man talking Arabic (which wasn’t her primary language) on his cell phone talking about blowing up a shopping mall in Gothenburg. She reported it to the Swedish police who realized they didn’t have all the time in the world to investigate everything and after getting the logs from the closest cell phone station they narrowed it down to the 4 palistinians. And they were promptly arrested.
That far I can’t really blame them. They couldn’t risk this women being wrong or risk an actual bomb in the most crowded place in Gothenburg. So I totally understand them borrowing the pages from “24” and shooting from the hips. I can actually applaud them for having the balls to make the call. ‘Cause if it had been a real threat and they had hesitated it’d been far worse.
Unfortunately though they weren’t just arrested, the police brutally stormed their houses/apartments with little respect to anything else than getting these guys arrested. And everything after this seems to have been one fuck up after another. After checking one piece of evidence after another they should have realized they fucked up and just dropped it and owed up to it. But here we are a year afterwards and all the so called evidence is just wrong and this woman that reported it have turned out to be far from a reliable witness and so far no one is even close to saying “we were wrong”. And the problem that really bites me is that until someone owes up to the fact that they made a mistake, they (as in our justice system) won’t learn anything from it or change how they work. And that’ll lead to this might actually happen again! Cause the only way to improve something is finding the problem and fixing it. If everyone keeps on saying, and god forbid actually believing, that everything they did was correct, then I’m really kinda worried.
But I can’t say I envy the guy who has to make the call – arrest four people on vague evidence or risk a bomb going off killing countless civilians. When Jack Bauer makes the call he’s the tough guy and it’s entertaining. Difference is, when Jack is wrong, which happens from time to time, he doesn’t go hiding.
So the “great” result of the summit about global warming last week was… “keep on going as we’re going right now while we think about it some more, keep on polluting and praying for a technical breakthrough that’ll solve all our problems overnight”. And it took Canada a whole 2 days to say “if the biggest baddies of greenhouse emissions isn’t in, why should we?” which kinda makes sense. But as long as none of the leaders risk losing the next election because they agreed to some ridiculous demand that might help, then I guess all is fine and dandy.
It’s at times like this you want some global rule that no head of state should ever be able to be relected no matter what. ‘Cause that seems to be the only way for them to have balls. And speaking of balls, sweden sent Lena Ek to that summit. Might as well have sent Miss Piggy.
Everyone who knows what’s going down in Durban right now raise your hands… anybody? …
Well all the worlds governments ministers in charge of environment are gathering to discuss what we can do about the state of the climate. Last time it was in Copenhagen and the only result of the meeting was all the jetfuel that was burnt up by all the planes there. It’s a bit sad when you have a conference to talk about lowering emissions and in comes a big ass jumbojet to deliver one person…
ANYWAY, I’m far from an expert at economics or the environment, but it seems to me pretty stupid. We have countries that doesn’t wanna be on the same side as other countries for various reasons. And we have some countries that feels that changing their ways will hurt their economy. And we have politicians that doesn’t wanna give in or take a bullet or anything because they wanna be reelected. Meanwhile we have a planet that’s drowning. It won’t be fun in 30-40 years is the sea level rises a few meters flooding the major cities around the world, it won’t even be fun watching those finances and borderes literally washed away.
As for me.. well I’m already taking the train and live in a modern low energy home and leasing a brand new little car that doesn’t consume much gas so I think I’m doing my part atleast.
I’m finally done adding old updates to this blog! I started this blog way before blog was even a word, back in 1997. Unfortunately I don’t have those updates (and the internet archives only goes back that far) and let’s be honest, before 2002 there wasn’t that much interesting happening. But all the updates dating back to January 1st 2002 are now added to this place. How many blogs can say that? 🙂 So now you can read about all my travelling again and my sadness when I lost my best friend and the excitement when I met Helena 🙂
Also added it to Facebook so hopefully you’ll get a notice there when I update this place. Just hope that works as intended.
So it’s December 1st today. And not many signs it is December at all. Still above 0 here, we had a little bit of snow Sunday night that melted fast and then nothing.
So now people start complaining about the lack of snow. And last year it was complaints abot too much. I don’t know which side I’m on. A lot of snow is good for a lot of reasons, most of all it’s a sign the weather is “normal”. And I also want it so my son can experience a white Christmas, seeing that he hardly remembers last Christmas. But then again I remember last year when I was out shoveling snow like a mad man. When it was hard to get the car out and slippery as hell on the roads and the electric bill made everyone turn down the heat a little bit. But still.. snow is snow so bring it on 🙂
Just a small quick update regarding our visit to the new O’Learys restaurant the other day.
I mailed the HQ and got a very nice mail back tonight. He apologized very politely and even offered us a free evening off bowling and dinner which was really nice of him. Surprisingly nice. They could just have deleted the mail like most companies would and gotten on with their business but he not only read it but replied. I thought that was nice. Unfortunately me and Helena don’t have the luxury of going out much, we pretty much have to plan logistics one or two weeks ahead of time so when we do go out we want it to be something or someplace special. And it was on Sunday so not very likely to happen again anytime soon and when it happens we’re not likely to go there again. I think. Then again it is free… but as our old spam protection software said, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”…
When I left my job at Vinge my nice colleagues there got together and bought me two gifts. The first was a whisky that was really nice. And the second one was a gift certificate for 1.000 Swedish crowns (approximately $140) at O’Learys. They knew I liked going to O’Learys since I’ve gone there alot ever since my first Formula 1 at O’Learys experience in 1999. The gift certificate was for the newly opened restaurant in the north part of central Stockholm (Norrtull). And as this was the last race of the season, and it started at 5 pm in the afternoon it was a perfect time to use that certificate.
When we got there they made two things clear – alcohol wasn’t covered by the gift certificate and there was no refunds. That seemed Ok to me since we were 5 people I thought we’d eat for 1000 swedish crowns. The food was good (above average for O’Learys actually) but that was about it. They forgot our orders left and right, they never even asked us if we wanted desserts (which we definitely did) and at the end me and my brother Jocke was left waiting for our beers but we got tired of waiting for that so when the race was over and the soccer game was done we just wanted to pay and get out of there.
And this is where basic math skills actually outsmarted my drunken math skills. I’d like to think I got some advanced math skills but after 4 beers not so much. The tab ended up at 1250:- swedish crowns. So I had to tell this waitress that we had a gift certificate we handed in when we got here 3 hours ago so go sort that please. Which she did and came back with two tabs. One for 250:- since the certificate was only for 1000:-. And one tab for the alcohol for 500:-. Which meant we paid 750:- for a tab of 1250:- with a gift certificate of 1000:-. If we hadn’t wanted to get out of there so badly and if I didn’t have 4 beers in my system I would indeed have protested their math skills saying that we really should only pay for the beer since the way they counted we in practice paid for everything but the beer. So they ripped us off of 250:-.
That combined with the lack of service and the fact that I was sober by the time we got home (which wouldn’t have happened had we gotten that last orders of beer) makes me say “no more!”. But I’m not sure I’ll be able to honor that promise since there really is no other good way for me, my sister and brother to meet up and watch F1 while drinking beer and enjoying good food since we live too far apart, otherwise they could just come over to our place all the time for that 🙂
I’m a huge supporter of freedom of the press. And freedom of speech and all those other beautiful things that democracy brings. Even if they can be used for bad things like oh say starting wars and invading countries left and right. But all in all it does more good than bad. But one thing one has to know and think about is not trusting everything you read and instead ask “what’s their angle? what do they have to gain from this?”. Everyone knows Michael Moore’s documentaries that go into that grey area in between “telling the truth” and “not quite lying”.
Well for the past few weeks my new employer Carema have suffered the fate of having the media against them. And reading the headlines and articles in the newspapers/web in the morning while going to work and when I get to work I get “our” version of the truth and although they have the same facts, it’s just angled differently. And I don’t have access to any classified information, it’s all on the web. But most people aren’t interested in reading our side of the story since it’s much more fun / juicy / interesting to read the medias version than the other side of the story.
It’s all pretty frustrating – but still, huge supporter of freedom of the press. I just wish people would care more for finding out the truth than taking the headlines at face value.
If you wind the clock back 10 years I was just starting my career as “consultant” and driving around Stockholm doing all kinds of computer magic. Everything from installing a few PCs to travelling the world. But everytime I was either involed in how the computer system was built up and evolved or it was so well documented that I had it all under control. It didn’t happen that often that I got to a customer and had no clue what their computer environment looked like.
And when I was eomployed by Vinge full time I had more knowledge of their IT systems than the people who worked there since they had only worked there a year and I’d been there on and off for four years. And after 5 more years I knew the IT systems inside and out even though it changed a lot over a year and I often had to find that out myself!
But now I’m at a big company with hundreds of servers and systems and I have no clue what’s what or what server does what and most importantly where to look when something is broken! I’m doing all I can to learn it but it’s going slowly. Thing is I have no reference point that I can use to know if I’m learning things fast enough or if I’m looking like a total noob! … but it’s only day two!
Saw a really good story yesterday on the TV4 News about abusing online identities, in this case for political purposes. It’s basically about two young “everyday” women who found out that someone have set up Facebook pages in their names, using their personal details and photos and joining political groups. And the person doing the story, Lena Sundström, got some first hand experience about this when someone set up a fake Twitter account in her name pretending to be her. Ofcourse there’s nothing new about fake Twitter/Facebook accounts, that’s a rather old story but using it for political purposes was a new angle for me! Especially with Lena Sundström (who’s from South Korea but raised in sweden since she was like 6 months) who have done numerous stories about Sverige Demokraterna, a political party in Sweden who wants to send all immigrants back home and it’s been interesting to see her meeting people and they having no idea she’s an immigrant until they meet her for the interview.
I’m pretty grateful that even though I’ve had an online presence since -98 when I set up my first website and started a blog nothing like this have happened to me. Maybe that’s because I’m too boring, I dunno…
You may remember a few weeks ago I made a post that we were now “leasing” a car instead of owning it so we wouldn’t have to worry about stuff. Well what I forgot to mention was that we did have another car, a Volvo that has server us well. I bought it 2 1/2 years ago for 30k SEK (it really was 40k but I got 10k for handing in my old Mitsubishi) and it was the car on all our photos of when the house was built. It was the car we raced to the hospital in when H was going into labor. But it was also the car that last year cost us 10k SEK in spare parts alone (thanks to H’s brother the work was more or less free). And now was the time for it to go through the annual inspection. And the verdict was surprisingly good – green across the board! That’s only happened to me ONCE that my car went through on the first try and that was so many years ago I can’t even remember it!
And right after we got the all clear I called the car dealership where I bought it and asked if they wanted to buy it. They said “sure, bring it by and we’ll have a looksy”. We were expecting to get like 10k for it but asked for 15k.. and we actually got 15k! Well needed 15k! First thing we did was buy a sulky for Sam since our old stroller was a bit too cumbersome for the new car. But that too served us very well for these 17 months!
And then we went to Stinsen to blow some money on clothes and stuff and the rest I guess goes to our house account that’s bound to take a beating soon.
Just a small quick little “rest in peace”-note about Stefan Liv (1980-2011). Never knew the guy, but I saw him play a lot of hockey since it DIF played against HV71 alot back when he played in Sweden. And I never missed a game when Sweden was playing so saw him alot there. And even though they guy stopped DIF from winning the trophy at least once he did it in style and he did it with raw talent and skill. There was not much luck with that guy, he was simply the best goalie. And in 2006 he helped the Swedish team not only win the world championship but also the Olympics. And he always seemed like a nice guy in all the interviews.
And then he goes and board the wrong jet and dies.. such a damn tragedy. And after watching alooooot of “Air Crash Investigation” episodes on national Geographic I’m pretty sure that once the cause has been determined it will seem even more pointless.
Just sad when stuff like this happens and it reminds you of what really matters. So what if the train is 10 minutes late, atleast it didn’t crash…
So this weekend we’re going out fishing for crabs! Yeah, I know, I don’t even eat crabs, but what tha hell, I’ve never done it so here goes! Then on saturday we’re gonna have a gettogether with alot of our neighbours and eat those poor crabs (or in my case shrimps). And then on sunday we have a relaxing day with Formula 1.
And Sam is spending the rest of today with my parents and tomorrow morning my sister AC takes over until we’re picking him up in the afternoon. We’ll see how long it takes us to really, really miss him and want him back. But we’ll probably have our hands full with crabs by then 🙂
Have a good one!