stoff
I don’t know if you know this but during the summer I did alot of gardening stuff. The biggest thing I did was dig up some 30 square meters of grass and replanting alot of roses and bushes. And if you know me well enough you know that when I decide to do it I go full throttle with it. And then in August I started getting aches in my right foot when I woke up and went to take a shower. After that it was ok so I didn’t think much of it. Then it got more and more frequent and now it’s aching pretty much the entire day. So I finally called the doctor for an appointment and yesterday I went to see him and he kinda chuckled and said “you have a classic plantar fasciit” (or “hälsporre” if you’re swedish). Come again?
Apparently it’s an infection in my heal which comes from straining the sole of your foot either during a long period of time or short impacts. Say like digging up grass and thumping down the shovel with the sole of you foot over and over again while wearing completely inappropriate shoes? (yeah, 3 years as a homeowner and I still don’t have proper “get dirty and gritty”-shoes!).
“Ok, that sounds bad, what do we do?” … “Nothing! This is the kinda thing that usually heals itself in … oh I don’t know, say 6 months. So buy some comfortable walking shoes that don’t ache much and bu February next year call me if it still bothers you, ok!”
And ofcourse like any normal person on this planet I Google the shit out of that and read horror stories from people who have had aching feet for 2 even 3 years! And there’s even surgery for it! But I’m kinda happy noone said “it could become a chronic thing” meaning it will pass, just a matter of riding it out. He also recommended painkillers but I’m already limping a bit so I don’t wanna be that much like House. And I hate taking pills. ‘Cause if we’re talking 4-5 months and I’m taking painkillers that long I’m afraid they’ll just stop working. Like Clarityn, doesn’t do shit for me anymore, I’ve had to step that up to prescription pills!
And all these things that are wrong with me (like allergies and restless legs) are stuff that are helped by distracting your brain enough. Say playing computer games! Seriously, I’ve never felt like scratching the skin of my face while playing World of Warcraft. And I didn’t feel my heel aching at all when playing XCOM for 3 hours last nigh.
Sharepoint is keeping me really busy at work. And not only work, I’m finding myself doing alot of work at home as well which is kinda annoying. Not only for my wife but for me – I don’t want to become one of those people who take my work home with me all the time! I wanna be one of those people who goes home at 5 and just stops working, totally disconnects. But when working with so many complex things at this level as well as the fact that here we can’t reboot the servers when we want, it forces me to take my home work with me.
I’m just hoping this is temporary and it’ll subside once the big upgrade is done and I’ll go back to going home at 5 in the afternoon. ‘Cause that’s the way it was all those years on the lawfirm. And at Carema .. well they never gave me the chance to get that into things there so wasn’t a problem.
It’s Friday again. And Friday before payday which means spending as little money as possible. Which means using and abusing friends and families hospitality. Ok, that was an exaggeration..
But today I will actually be doing that! I’ll get off work early, 2:30, go home as fast as public transportation enables me to, pack the car, pick up the little guy at kindergarten and then drive 100 kilometers south to Södertälje, straight through Stockholm just as the weekend rush hour starts up! “Why would you ever do such a mad thing!?” you may be wondering? Well, first it’s because I love my wife and owe her so much that I’ll let her have a Friday evening with her friends at home with no worries. No Sam needing attention and being fed and helping him go to sleep, no husband in the way, nothing, just her, her friends, good food, wine and just talk girl-stuff all night. And for that I’m taking the son to Södertälje for reason # 2 – visiting my brother at his new place. I’ve seen it ever so quickly before but now I’m actually gonna have dinner and stay the night, barring any Sam-related incident. So actually looking forward to that.
I’m just not looking forward to spending time in traffic ’cause Friday rush hour in Stockholm can be a real bitch and with my son in the backseat I won’t just be able to relax and sing “don’t you worry be happy now”.
When I was a teen it sucked. It sucked really bad. No news there because it does for a lot of people. Had it not been for Knut Fischer I don’t know if I’d be here to talk about it. And when I saw the movie “Pump Up The Volume” it was dead on – it sucked being a teenager, it sucked being different and your parents or any other real adult didn’t understand you. Unfortunately it seems it’s still that bad – if not worse thanks to social media!
Check this YouTube:
It’s about a girl, Amanda Todd, who flashed some random guy through a web cam and it destroyed her life. And no matter where she went that thing followed her and after enough people screwed her over she comitted suicide, but not after posting that “somebody help me… anybody?”-video. That’s fucked up in so many ways. It’s fucked up it still happens and nothing is getting better. It’s fucked up that Facebook pulled the plug on an app designed to show how being bullied on Facebook feels. It’s fucked up that the first thought in my head was “is this real or fake” and had it not been for so many newssites picking it up and the police giving interviews about it I may have written it off as fake. But it’s not. It’s still a reality – that beeing a teenager still sucks.
I just hope I’m somewhat prepared to handle it with Sam in 10 years.
I’ve been home sick 2 days now. I thought it made for an excellent time to watch some movies in my home theater on actual Bluray. So I decided to watch one of my old favorite movies – “Contact”. Yeah, that movie from 1997!
And .. yeah, probably the best movie ever in my opinion. The acting, the scope, the science, the ideas and thoughts behind it and the special effects, all of it is still today unmatched in my opinion. But one thing I didn’t expect is to discover a new aspect of the movie – that of a lone parent trying to raise a child. I’ve never thought much about that until now. That just goes to show how much being a parent changes your views on things, even a movie you’ve seen 10 times before!
There are a few things I really hate. And two of them happened today.
First one is people who work with customer service without having the least bit of interest in customer service. I’ve worked for years with support and customer service and I may not be the most service oriented person in the world with a constant smile, but I do like to help people and make their day better and I love to make things work like clockwork. In the past 2 weeks since our freezer gave up the go I’ve had to call a few customer service people and only the one guy at Bosch impressed me, but the other 5 people I talked to at Bosch and the people at If weren’t that well trained in customer service. But when we finally did get our payment from the insurance company we ordered a freezer from an internet retailer. Good prices and good service over the web and on tuesday morning I placed the order since they had it in stock. On Thursday it still hadn’t shipped, so I called them and got a complete nonsense reply from someone at their customer service that basically didn’t do anything to help me or anything. And today at lunch they finally upgraded my status to “shipped”.
And that’s when the other thing I hate came into play. I hate when PR people twists and spin things to make it sound better. Because they included a link to the distributor. And according to them they haven’t received the package. Only a notification about the package they are picking up this afternoon. This isn’t uncommon practice, I order on the web frequently so I know the routine. But I get annoyed at some PR person at “trettio.se” who thought it sounds better to print out “Shipped” as status when in fact it hasn’t been shipped, only “Notification sent to distributor”. But that’s confessing that they still haven’t physically sent the package. So now, according to these two websites, our big ass freezer is lost in cyberspace! I hate that. At my old work they instructed us to “spin” our weekly reports about disruptions in the IT systems. And I hated that too.
After the 6th phonecall to Bosch I managed to get someone on the phone who could go on record with a exact figure how much it’d cost to fix our freezer. Fortunately for us it was a big number and once I had that I armed myself for another round with the insurance company. Only to have them say “ok, that’s that, so I’m sending 10 000 SEK your way, should be in your bank account before the weekend. Anything else?” 🙂
So now we ordered a new freezer with the extra service of them taking care of our old one since our car isn’t big enough for it. And money over for a “kräftskiva” this weekend as well. It’s all good right now, on that front anyway. Unfortunately Sam has come down with something so Helena is home with him.
I haven’t had many dealings with insurance companies in the past. But now our freezer gave up so it was time to go at them!
Basically 12 days ago when we opened our freezer it wasn’t freezing anymore and everything had thawed up. We had to throw away alot, alot! of food! But after a quick defrosting problem it went back to freeze-mode again. But 2 days later it gave up and decided life as a refrigerator was better and kept a cool +7 degrees Celsius.
At first I called the insurance company wanting money back for the ruined food, something I found out by a colleague that it’s actually covered! I called them up with the aggressive attitude that “they are the enemy and I will have to fight for every crown”. But I was pleasently surprised when the first response was “no problem, this is covered and we’ll sort this out for you”. So I dropped my guard and politely assisted them with their request for information. And when it totally broke down I called them again to upgrade the claim and I was met with the same helpful “we’ll sort this out for you”-response and I gladly assisted with more information about the freezer. Little did I know this was all a part of their evil scheme to give me as little money as possible because now, when it’s close to payout time I am finding myself having to fight for every crown!! Had it been like that from the start I wouldn’t have been surprised or pissed, but I’m pissed at how in two weeks time it’s gone from “no problem, we’re gonna sort this out” to treating me like an enemy! If this goes sour I might not be their customer for long, because as it is we’re only customers because we haven’t bothered to switch. Much like our bank that I’m hoping got something to think about when we fulfilled our ultimatum of switching banks if we didn’t get the interest rate that I wanted.
Right now the ball is in Bosch Home Appliance court coming up with a guestimate how much it’ll cost to fix the freezer.
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.
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 🙂
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 🙂
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 🙂
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
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 🙂
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!
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 🙂
I’ve finally gotten around to updating the image gallery with some new images of me, Helena and most of all Sam. Enjoy!
(and the password is the Swedish name of my current employer with a capital first letter)
Gotta love them flash mob events, especially when they’re performing one of the best, if not THE best, piece of music even written!
Life proceeding as normal here. Getting into how things are done at work. Trying to do house improvements. Trying to be a good husband and father. Just the normal stuff!
But yesterday we broke the routines and went all the way down to Södertälje for a night out with my brother, his girlfriend, my sister AC with her boyfriend. Although “night out” is overstating it quite a bit because we headed back home before 10 pm, but it was still fun to get out of the house and not have another night of slacking in the sofa watching some TV show you never had any interest in before!
Oh and Sam got an outbreak of chickenpox starting last Thursday but it’s already calming down and the fun thing is, he never really noticed it as far as we can tell. He didn’t spike a fever, didn’t have uncontrollable itching or anything, it was pretty smooth sailing. Or maybe that’s because Helena “vacation” started this week and she’s been home with him and he’s gotten almost anything he wants so far. Me, I’m working another week and then have a three week vacation which is fine for me! (since I’m still on an trial-employee status here I only get half the vacation days for now but once I’m made a full employee I’ll get the rest in time for Christmas!)
I had a great weekend!! It was Midsummer’s Eve on Friday in Sweden and we went to Kungsängen to check out their “old school” celebration, complete with band and everything. And somehow I ended up helping to carry and raise that big pole that’s so symbolical of swedish midsummer (and yeah, there are pictures of that coming soon). Then on the afternoon we went over to our neighbors down the street for a somewhat casual celebration of midsummer’s eve. On saturday Helena’s brother with his family came by and that made Sam go energizer bunny wanting to be everywhere and play with everyone. They have two kids and they did the best to play with him. And we ended up watching “Wrath of the Titans” which was really, really disappointing, even on a 100″ screen 🙂
And on Sunday they went home and then there was the Formula 1 race from Valencia. I had some hopes that Ferrari would do well even though the qualified poorly. And it turned out to be one of the best races I’ve ever seen since the golden era of Schumacher / Barrichello! Lots of good overtaking, some crashing, cars breaking down – and best of all, that all happened to people who threatened Alonso for the win! I thoroughly enjoyed that race! And on the podium there was no less than 3 Ferrari drivers, 3 world champions (2 of which champions driving for Ferrari) so it was all good! Only thing that could’ve made it better was Massa taking second …