Movies

I’ve seen 4 movies recently, but this is mostly gonna be about one of them. Colombiana, The Dictator, Hunger Games & Love Bird. Out of all those I had the highest hopes for Hunger Games. And the least hope for The Dictator. ‘Cause Borat really isn’t my kind of humor!

And as it does so often in life the complete opposite happened! I loved The Dictator. The humor was dead on, the sarcastic speech about what a dictatorship allows the elite to get away with, it was hilarious stuff. I didn’t think anyone would be allowed to be that racist in a major movie, but there we had it all! Hunger Games was a huge disappointment ’cause I’ve heard so much good stuff about it and as it turned out it was a knock off of “Running Man”. Granted, most people involved wasn’t even born when that movie came out, but still … and throwing in a bit of teenage love story with a “imossible love”-theme alá Twilight didn’t make it better, quite the opposite. Had they completely dumped the love story it’d been a helluvalot better. In my opinion. I have no idea how the books goes (didn’t even know it was based on books but since I hardly ever read that’s irrelevant), but I was disappointed that they never ever went over “to the dark side” and had her kill anyone unless it was in self defence or by accident. But oh now, we had to take the high road and have this character win the entire thing “the good way”. THe one good surprise was actually the character of Cinna. And it was only after I found out Lenny Kravitz played him. I had no idea he could be so articulate and … good! Every interview I’ve ever seen of him he’s always seemed to be on some slow-motion trip and I’m think “dude have taken way too much of that!” but here he proved me wrong. Nice!

Colombiana was pretty much what I expected. Pretty darn good. Written by Luc Besson (and Robert Mark Kamen) and I could never shake the feeling that “this really should be “Léon 2” (or if it ever was one it’d been called “Mathilda”)! Unfortunately Natalie Portman doesn’t really have the physique to be an action actor and there is a stretch to come up with another long drawn out traumatizing event for Mathilda that’d keep her in that trade. But still, this should’ve been “Léon 2”!

Love Bird was just bad. Predictable, hardly much humor, best part of it was actually the end credits when characters from the movie were singing Queen songs.

As soon as we get a night off to watch another movie we’re doing The Avengers. And I’m afraid I may have gotten my hopes up for that one.

Busy Weekend

Wow what a weekend! Surprisingly busy!!

Friday started with a nice calm dinner in front of the TV after Sam had gone to bed. Then we kicked into overdrive going to Ikea and Netonnet and blew almost 10.000 SEK on stuff like a new bed for Sam, new shelves, a TV for our bedroom with an arm so we can yell PIVOT!!! I know we made a promise to each other that we were never gonna have a TV in our bedroom but we needed to relocate our exercise equipment and our bedroom was the only place big enough but then the problem is that it’s oh so boring staring into a wall when exercising so we bought a TV. And to make it so we could lie in bed watching TV as well we had to buy a special mount. Oh and a bluray player because … well surprisingly enough we didn’t have one before. We have the PS3 but that’s to our TV in the livingroom and we needed one for the home theater.

After that we went to Nykvarn (over an hours drive from where we live) to visit som friends and check up on their progress with the house and daughter. Then back home, sleep and on sunday it was time to mount up those shelves, the TV, all the wiring for it, change around the bedroom, move furniture, do the shopping for the week and all of that stuff, all the while Helena was entertaining some guests but once they left we really got going and by 8 pm Sam tried out his new bed which he loved. At first. Unfortunately at around 3 am he fell out of it and hit the floor so he spent the rest of the night in our bed. We went to bed early but not to sleep. Or that other thing. But to watch a movie in bed. Unfortunately it was a pretty lame movie (“Love Birds”) but it was still fun 🙂

So now we’re back to trying to make it to next payday 🙂

Kickstarter

You know what “Kickstarter” is right? If no then a brief explanation here – it’s a website where people with an idea but without finance can seek people who pledge money to the project and if it reaches it’s financial goals the project goes ahead and you get the final product. It’s a great way to eliminate that whole “we’re not sure how many people will actually buy our product” thing that can put a stop to a good project.

So far most of the projects through kickstarter have been about hi-tech things. Like the new gameplatform/mediaplayer Ouya, or the hi-tech watch that you can customize.

Well this week I found a very different kind of project. It’s for a … BBQ sauce!! But it’s got… HABANERO!!!! 🙂 Go pledge so they can make it 🙂

Still Here

Sorry for not updating for a while. Not been much to update about.

Except an aspect of my job that came into play last week. Every month Microsoft releases their patches and every IT department has their way of dealing with it. 99% of the patches are for security holes that you don’t need to care about if you have an isolated secured environment. Sometimes your business can accept you rebooting servers during lunch, or as we did at the lawfirm early friday morning. But here we’re 100% exposed to the web and we can’t bring the IT systems down during daytime at all, some systems can’t even be down at all. So last thursday me and 3 other geeks here teamed up at 9 pm and started patching and rebooting the servers that weren’t super critical. And then at midnight we proceeded with the routines to restart our webs, that generate about 75% of our business. So there’s a few things that needs to be done to make sure that anyone wanting to book a holiday at like 1 am can still go ahead and do so. And then we went home at 3 am and I got the day off on Friday 🙂 I kinda like it and will probably do it again. As usual it’s fun until something breaks – and it’s just a question of when a server that’s in our seconday site doesn’t reboot properly and we have to go there at 2 am! 🙂

I like my job 🙂

Hilarious stuff

This is the real reason the internet was created – for me to watch a compilation of how different people react when on Chatroulette people end up on a guy dancing to Call Me maybe. It’s pretty hilarious stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCiY1y3uJ3o

The Internet Is A Scary Place

Do I have your attention with that title or what? I’m not talking pedophiles or people trying to steal money or some stuff like that. Now I’m talking the devious lurkers that will take over your accounts and play havoc with your online life! For the regular Joe that has an e-mail account and Facebook it might not be much of a problem. But for someone like me that has so much stuff online, use so many online services and not only have personal but also professional life on the web, we are most certainly shaking in our boots that what happened to Mat Honan last friday won’t happen to us!

Full coverage of the story can be found here on Wired.com. But to summarize – Mat Honan is an tech journalist writing about tech, the internet and stuff. So he has Google account, Twitter, Facebook, iCloud, Amazon and all that jazz. Now through some work, which just about anybody can do, they managed to get his last four digits of his credit cart, his home address and his e-mail address and with that Apple Support was more than happy to reset his iCloud password and let the scammer take control of it. And through that his Google account and then on to the rest from there. And they also wiped all his iDevices which were linked to his iCloud, as Apple wants you to.
The worst loss for him wasn’t to be publicly hacked and the embarrassment than he if anyone should know better. The worst part was that he lost all the files on his Macbook, most importantly photos of his kid that were just gone. And I can relate to that. I use an online service for my “important data” so I know it’s backed up online, but at the same time, if someone were to hack the account bound to that they could wipe it all. Fortunately I have it backed up locally to my NAS, but it’s still a very big convern that if someone were to hack my big e-mail accound they’d have access to do alot of things. ‘Cause this can happen to anyone!

The lessons learned is : have one e-mail accound per online service and try not to link them! Use 2 stage verification where possible. Backup your data. And for the love of good don’t trust a fruity company with all your stuff 🙂

Thank you NASA

Just wanted to post a quick “thank you” to NASA for not stopping this space exploration thing they’ve got going. If it wasn’t for them an the american taxpayers, Roddenberry’s dream wouldn’t stand a chance!

Back To Work

Yeah I know I’ve been very quiet here. And that’s actually a good thing because I’ve kept myself busy! Since I’m new here at Thomas Cook I don’t have the full pot of vacation days so I could only take 3 weeks vacation. And I’ve been busy non-stop!

We went to Söderköping for our annual ice-cream binge. Like three years ago we stayed the night so we could enjoy it one more time. But unlike three years ago when we stayed at a local hotel this time we decided to rough it a bit and rented a small cabin at a local campsite. And it was indeed a small cabin, no loo, no kitchen and bunk beds. So after rearranging that so we basically slept on the floor we went for our first taste of ice cream only to be met with a queue we didn’t want to be in. So we walked around town, found a little cafe that sucked big time and then we made our way back and after two hours the queue was still way too long. But the only option was to give up for today and that wasn’t on so I got my ass in the queue and after about an hour we got a table and it was good! Sam enjoyed it too, last time we was there he was like 6 months old so that wasn’t as fun for him as this time around. Then we went back to the campsite and put him to bed and we spent the rest of the evening in bed watching a few episodes of “White Collar” on the laptop. Then we finally fell asleep and on the morning after it was cleaning up, going for a second round of ice cream (this time without the queue) and then going back home. All in all a great little trip.

Then we teamed up with Helenas friend, her husband and their 2 year old daughter for a 24 hour cruise. As I’ve stated before about these cruises it’s mostly about getting drunk or laid than to actually go someplace but this time it was actually a very kids-friendly cruise. They had converted their entire conference deck to rooms with different activities for the kids. One had a ball-pit, the other videogames etc. and Sam really enjoyed that ball-pit! The two departure times we had to chose from was either 7 am or 7 pm . If we’d gone 7 pm we’d barely be able to get onboard and get comfortable before Sam had to go to bed and that meant one of us had to stay in the cabin for the rest of the evening. So we chose 7 am and not sure that was a good choice cause we had to go up at 4:30 am and leave at 5:15 so Sam was really cranky all through the breakfast buffet but after going back to the cabin and sleep for two hours he was ready to deal with it. It was a lot of eating, some tax-free shopping and some beer. Also got to see the F1 qualifying at a bar on the boat! Overall he totally enjoyed that trip and so did we, probably gonna do it again (next year will probably be for free thanks to American Express rewards).

And fortunately thanks to my sister me and H got atleast one day for each other when she took Sam to Skansen (a zoo in Stockholm). Unfortunately he didn’t care much for the animals there but he got to “drive” the cars on rails so he was pretty happy!

Other than that we mostly spent the the vacation working on the garden and home improvements or having guests over and a day welcoming my sister with her family who flew in from Scotland last Tuesday. So yeah, it’s been busy and I haven’t take the time to update this here place but here I am 🙂