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!!!
This weeks movies have been “Little Piece of Heaven” and “Contagion”.
“Little Piece of Heaven” is so totally a chick flic that is damn predictable as hell. Decent acting and story and everything but still predictable chick flic. But if you want some nice “cuddle in the soffa during a dark december night with some candlelight and watch a movie” it does work quite nicely.
“Contagion” is the recent “oh my god a new über virus is unleashed on us and we’re all going to hell”-movie. Atleast that’s what I thought it was. But the movie didn’t quite work for me, or Helena for that matter. I don’t know if it was too fast paced or trying to convey so much or what but you just never got involved in the plot or the characters. Never really felt for any of the characters at all. I guess from a “yeah that could happen” this movie is the best pandemic movie but for pure entertainment I’ll go with “Outbreak” any day of the year. It’s got Keven Spacey, military coverups, bad Donald Sutherland and a monkey saves the day! If you make the comparison to the “oh my god a über asteroid is gonna hit earh and blow us all to hell”-movies “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact” I guess “Contagion” would be the latter. Which is weird cause I prefered the “yeah that could happen” feel of “Deep Impact” way more than the entertainment factor of “Armageddon”…
But I’d still recommend it to you 🙂
Now I’ve played with my Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 3G for a few days and ready for a judgement.
In short … “pleased”.
I’m happy with the size, the wieght, the battery life, the customization, the speed, the apps, alot of it I like. But two of the things I used in my pros and cons list isn’t living up to expectations!
First it’s the USB connector. I’ve read a few reviews and I checked up on “prisjakt” for technical specs and nowhere did it say it required a special USB connector. Everywhere I looked just said “USB”. But it seems they liked Apple’s idea of having special connectors so you have to buy their accessories if you want more adapters and stuff. For my iPhone I had 3 USB cables, one for work, one at home and one in my car. They each cost around $50. And now I have to buy 2 for my Galaxy Tab for $50 each. That just plain sucks! Why do they do it that way? On the Galaxy SII phone you have simple micro-USB connector that is enough to charge and transfer things, but apparently on the Tab it’s not enough.
Secondly it’s MKV playback. On my Galaxy SII phone there’s no problem with MKV playback. But on the Galaxy Tab I I’ve only found one media player capable of playing MKV files so I know it has the power to play them, I just don’t know why I have to have a special media player for it! And it wouldn’t have been a problem if I could buy the full version of that media player but alas the writer of that player had his account frozen so I can’t buy it and the demo version is only for 3 days. So until I can either find another player capable of playing MKV files or his account is fixed I can’t play MKV files without converting them first. And converting them only takes 15 minutes but it was one of the reasons I chose the Galaxy Tab – the only player for the iPad that could play it flawlessly was the VLC player which isn’t available anymore (without voiding the guarantee by jailbreaking it).
But I’m still pleased with it. These two things are problems that will be solved in time but also two things that I used as pros for the Galaxy Tab that didn’t live up to expectations. But still, just the fact that I can change the user interface on it with a few clicks and that I don’t have to hook it up to my computer or installing iTunes or getting a special SIM card for it and yadda yadda, I’m still pleased 🙂
Also pleased with Mobilgiganten.se that delivered it in 24 hours after I ordered it!
I’ve been wanting to buy a tablet for a very very very long time now. And I finally ordered one and hoping I get to play with it today.
I got into a bit of a tussle with my friend Mats who loves his Apple things. He has an iMac, iPhone and iPad and he just loves how they all work perfectly for him without him having to do things. As you may know, I had an iPhone 3GS for 2 years. I was quite happy with it but when I saw what the Samsung Galaxy SII could do there really wasn’t any way I could not switch. And I’m perfectly happy with my phone!
From a technical point of view, the things that makes the Samsung Galaxy Tab better is – standard USB connection, better screen resolution and better DPI, better cameras (both of them), smaller (because of the smaller screen), new bluetooth standard, DLNA support, stereo speakers and twice the RAM. I probably won’t ever use DLNA, the stereo speakers maybe and taking pictures with it is doubtful too. The only downside is a slightly slower CPU (1000 vs. 1066) but the difference in RAM more then outweighs that!
But putting aside the technical differences, what Apple does well is interfaces and making things that “just work” without having technical skills. Well I do have those technical skills and I don’t have an iMac or an iPhone that this tab to interact with, I have a PC and a Samsung (android-based) phone. So it makes perfect sense for me to buy the Samsung (android-based) tab I think. I don’t have to “take a chance” and see if the iPad 2 does what I want it to do (like play MKVs without converting them or having to hack it to install VLC), think that I know this one will? And I also like to change my interfaces now and again which, as I understand it, isn’t that easy without jailbreaking your iPhone but easily doable on an Android device. Just look at my “World of Wacraft”-screenshots and how often I change my interface there!
But one huge, majorly disappointing thing is still the lack of being able to upgrade the storage. I thought you could upgrade it in the 8.9 (but not the 10.1) and most retailers list memory upgrades as accessory. But they will have that ability in next years lineup which right now only has a 7.7″ screen which is too small for me. Or rather the difference from my 4.3″ screen on my phone to a 7.7″ is too small to justify the cost of upgrade. And speaking of cost, another + on the Samsung side albeit $20-$30…
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.
Thanks to the wonders of the world wide web time machine I have been able to restore the updates for 2000!! I have the updates for 2001 as well as restored the missing ones for 2010. Pretty sweet huh?
And anyone saying they’ve had a blog for a long time should check it out, the first capture they have of my kristoffer.com was back in 1998 🙂
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 🙂