And so it finally happened. I got an extension on my contract at the lawfirm which means I’m legally employed here until I screw up bad enough to get fired. At first I was employed on a quarterly basis, but then they decided to extend it to the end of the year and now I can finally rest my worried little mind about being unemployed. Not only that, I got a $300/month raise too. Merry Christmas!
(and everyone that knows me IRL are going “I told you!”, yeah, you did, but I’m the worst case scenario planner that I am I need to have it on paper!)
The other day I did something really, really bad. As I was driving a friend home along Huddingevägen (a road FULL of traffic lights all the way!) I accidentally drove against a red light. Those lights are always green except that one time and I missed it. The spontaneous reaction right after was “SHIT, I hope noone saw me?” since it’s one of those things you lose your license over. But after I drove home and through that same intersection again I realised just how badly that could’ve been. It was just pure luck that noone was crossing the road at that spot! If someone had followed the lights and crossed it I might’ve killed ’em! Even though I was doing slow 60 KPH, a car vs. human at that speed is not good. But that didn’t happen. And I still have my license. But after feeling like shit over how badly it could’ve gone I’m gonna be way more observant in the future.
Over the past three week’s I’ve migrated about 230 mailboxes from one mailsystem to another. And some small errors pops up here and there and I end up having to go through their mailboxes to find that one mail among thousands to see if it’s worth doing manually. And I’ve seen alot of fun stuff while doing it! Some fun legal things about company mergers that you wish you’d seen about a year ago but also some fun private stuff. I _accidentally_ saw a mail from a girls ex after they had just split up and man was he pissed! So even if it’s a really boring thing to do, those small things makes it worth it 🙂
Another tradition around this time is to change your tyres to handle the snow & ice. It’s a real hassle to do it and takes over an hour and I always end up with some muscle I haven’t used in a while aching for days after. And it’s cold, and boring. So yesterday I set a few hours aside to do this, put on shitty clothes, grabbed a beer and went to work. And on the second bolt of the first tyre I had to give up because I broke the damn tyre iron (or whatever it’s called in english, you know that steel cross thing you take off the bolts with). I don’t know who put that bolt on but it wasn’t coming off – at all. So I admitted defeat (even though it was the tools that broke, not me!) and put the first bolt back on…
… and drove 400 meter to the car mechanics and had them do it in 15 minutes for $20…
Guess we’re building up for Christmas now. Got the first snow this weekend which wasn’t a good surprised considering the tyres on my car. But the Christmas decoration at NK is up anyway and that’s always a nice thing to see. Unfortunately I’m totally swamped at work since we’re doing this huge migration from Groupwise to Exchange mail system. And you’d be surprised how important the integrity of the lawyers mailboxes are – by law! 🙁
But download this and enjoy! Griswald, eat your heart out!
Here’s a thing I’d like women to explain to me – the blonde issue. First of all I’ve never understood why a person would wanna go blonde in the first place, but that (much like the breast-size issue) is up to them. What I have a problem with is other women, and it is exclusivly women, commenting “oh she’s not a naturual blonde!”?? Does it matter?? Does it make a woman less attractive for having faking that? Or in one of those “what do people on the street think!” things I saw in Metro the other day when a woman answered “naturual blonde”, as if that makes her more attractive? Out of everything awesomely wonderful in women, hair color is not even in the list. But history shows I’ve always prefered brunettes…
And just when I started to cheer up our communiting service is there to slap me back down. You know, the assholes that don’t demand stuff like “must be able to cope with swedish winter!” when they buy new stuff. Now they bought new trains for us commuters and today was the first day I got to ride one. And they Suck. Basically you get the feeling that the ones ordering it never really use them because then they might have cared about more seats instead of more space for the people that have to stand up. And the ones that do have to stand were severly lacking bars to hold onto when the train twists as much as it is now with all re-construction going on there. I wanna go back to taking the car to work instead. It wasn’t cheap, it wasn’t environment friendly but atleast you were comfortable.
But this will cheer up your day.
Almost two weeks without an update. It’s a combination of being busy and not having anything positive to write. The past few weeks have been pretty depressing. And Michael Piller, one of the best TV writers there was, died. And tons of stuff to do at work, a job I still don’t know if I’ll have in 2 months time. But I don’t like being that depressive guy. Realist maybe, but not depressing. I prefer trying to cheer people up and I do a pretty good job of it. But I suck at cheering myself up!
But today I went back home to my parent’s place to celebrate father’s day and my sisters birthday. And that really put me in a better mood. Except when my mother starts babbling about me not delivering any grandkids but I’ve learnt to live with that.
So what did you do last night? If you’re answer is anything less than “bought dinner for John Rhys-David and Marina Sirtis” I got you beat! You’d think I’d be most impressed with meeting Marina Sirtis since I’m a trekker, but I’ve always been impressed by John! He’s just an awesome actor and now I can even say that he’s a great guy. And deep too! We had a Q&A with them and one of the most interesting ideas he proposed was to teach everything in school through history. Math, geography, religion, science, everything. And he was fun to. Unfortunately he was exhausted so after the Q&A and dinner I took them back to their hotel. Great saturday for me!!
As I was walking to work last friday I walked by a place with alot of posters and stuff on the wall and I noted a poster about some Katie Melua visiting Stockholm this weekend. She looked beautiful on the poster so I thought I’d download a song or two at work. Wow! Awesome stuff! I’ve never been much of a blues fan – as a matter of fact, until that night in Helsinki at Storyville I’d never even bothered listening to it. But this was just WOW! Just listen to Shy Boy, that was enough for me to go out and buy the album! Love it when that happens, things like this just comes along and leaves your mind blown away! And I’d also like to point out that had it not been for these things that the record industry is trying to stop I would never have bought her album, think about that!
Today Metro did something really nice! Metro is a free newspaper that doesn’t have to create stories by twisting facts, they make their money off advertisements. ANYWAY, they had picture with the Crazy Frog and text that said “SMS to this number and pay $4 for an annoying ringtune and support a millionaire”, and right next to it a picture of an orphan pakistani child with the text “or SMS to this number and donate the money”. I think that really hit home cause it was so in your face. And if I wasn’t donating money to Unicef, Amnesty, Greenpeace and the Red Cross as well as donating blood – I’d feel guilty.
And today I found out what people that don’t have a site like this do when travelling and want an online diary – Resedagboken.se. Didn’t know that place existed until a cyber-friend of mine went downunder to australia and started a diary there. I’m gonna go there someday too, I just suck at saving up for something like that.
Now I’m just pure lazy! I was reminded I even have this place today when I bumped into one of the managers of the projects that had me travelling the globe. And it made me feel all kinds of happy so I went through my logs and updates during that time and it’s so funny reading it now 2 years later 🙂 I think I should make some kind of special section on this site (or even design a new one) for all that stuff. I actually wish Blizzard would have some kind of melt down at their datacenters so I could get my ass out of the cyberworld and do stuff!
I don’t care what anybody says, when it’s the 27th september and I can go around stockholm in a t-shirt and still feel comfortably warm – that’s just wrong! Something’s really messed up with the weather. And the fact that Bush says the opposite makes it even more likely.
This morning I saw something on the train that made me smile. A woman, a beautiful one at that, was talking on her cellphone. Nothing special about that. Thing was she was deaf and was using the third generation cell phones with the camera feature and “talking” with sign language. Made me smile cause it’s the first time I’ve seen that. And people say technology doesn’t make people’s lifes better…
Another sad day for journalism. Aftonbladet, the tabloid that likes to think of itself as the biggest newspaper in sweden, had a front page today that was… totally irrelevant. Some guy in “Idol 2005” (our version “Popstar” or whatever) performed some song to his new girlfriend and started crying. Yeah, seriously, that’s the story on the front page today! Maybe if he had sung some love song to his boyfriend or something it might have been miniscule newsworthy, but not even that.
If I’d done the front page I probably would have had a some kinda memorial to Simon Wiesenthal. But that’s just me.
I think I may have spoken too soon. When I was thinking about it I think I owe september 11th 2001 for working here at the law firm! Because at the time I was working as a consultant hired out on a long term assignment to the biggest swedish airline (SAS). But after september 11th and another accident in italy they got rid of all their consultants to save money fast. So it was back to the office for me and just when that happens this law firm called wanting more people and I was the only one in idle mode. And who knows, if I’d been at SAS I might not be allowed to participate in the world tour of 2003 & 2004 🙂 So I guess I was affected after all.
I finished my september 11th by watching “The Flight that Fought Back”. Sounds like a bad horror movie. It was a documentary on Discovery about UA093, the plane that was crashed in the middle of nowhere (sorry all Pennsylvanians) on September 11th 2001. You remember reading about that plane and I have some distinct memory of hearing the passengers crashed it so it wouldn’t hurt anyone else but this is the first time I’ve ever seen what, to the best of anyones knowledge, happened. And it was pretty emotional. All the personal stories and everything, and the clips back to what happened in NY with all the news footage, very emotional stuff. And I don’t know why! I mean what happened that day was a tragedy all around, but this was the little light that made it into a “could have been worse”-scenario, but why would I get emotional about that? I wasn’t directly effected by it? I didn’t know anyone there or effected by it? Or anyone that knew someone even. And it’s a war between the US and muslims, so nothing I’m involved in. But still when I see footage of the second plane hitting I’m praying it’ll miss… I don’t get that emotional when I see footage and read horror stories from New Orleans in the past weeks, and that was on a humane scale far worse!
September 11th again. Almost missed it had it not been for WoW telling me the date. Double memorial day. 4 years ago now since they changed the NY skyline. And 2 years ago since some asshole took away Anna Lindh, one of the few politicians I could really vote for. I can’t remember exactly what I did last tuesday at 5, but I can tell you exactly what I did and how I felt 4 and 2 years ago. 4 years ago I was home sick from work and laid in my couch playing GT3 all day until turning on the TV for the 6 o’clock news and then not turning the news off for 8-9 hours. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was just so unreal, like someone would yell “cut!” any second you know. And 2 years ago I was busy installing computers in Gdansk but that day I didn’t get alot of work done. All I could do was refresh the swedish newssites all day and feeling like I really didn’t wanna be there, I wanted to be home because I pass the place it happened at almost everyday and I just wanted to do something. But couldn’t. So that’s the kind of day I’ve had. 🙁
Yesterday some idiots proved another odd point they made in “Crash” – criminals don’t watch the Discovery channel. If they did they’d probably do their homework alot better. Because yesterday some 3-4 guys decided to rob a Securitas van carrying money to their clients. They got into the van by blowing it up, really smart, huh? But that’s not the funny thing. Their escape plan wasn’t the best so they had to stop, or atleast delay, the police to give them a head start so they sat a few cars on fire on the E4 highway at the bridge at Vårby. Good plan. Except if they knew anything they’d know the cops come down on the highway at the NEXT exit (Slagsta) so that stunt had no effect at all except jam up traffic for a few hours. Geez, stupid criminals. I happen to know this cause I drive that road alot. But I guess we should be happy they’re stupid.