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 🙂
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.
I’m actually thinking about buying some random Diablo 3 beta account out there but everytime I’m hit with the thought of “really?? pay money that you have a thousand different things to spend it on than a beta for a computer game” and I give up on it. Only to look into it again the day after!
Actually the only thing stopping me is really the risk of being ripped off, like I almost was when I sold my old Warcraft account. Not so much the money but the idea of getting ripped off so easily online when your better judgement is saying “no”.
But I still wanna play Diablo more than a kid wants to open his presents on Christmas morning!!!
Slowly getting how things are setup here and what’s doing what. But it feels I could work here for a year and still I’d be surprised when some server popups up because there are so many everywhere doing things it’s impossible to get them all.
The bad thing now is that the media here in Sweden is doing everything they can to paint the company I started working for as “the evil empire” because of things that went down in some elderly care centers and that wouldn’t make anyone feel good about just starting working there. Kinda reminds me of the “did the subcontractors building the deathstar know that the empire was evil and did they condone the empire by taking the job there”-discussion from “Clerks” 🙂
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!
Yeah, it’s that time again – time for abig whine post about some small little thing that ruins bigger things.
I’ve always liked Dice´s products. From their early pinball games to Battlefield, I liked them. Ok most of them. So when BF3 was announced I was ofcourse a little bit excited although the first trailer was very annoying (more annoying sound than exciting visual). Then I saw the gameplay trailers and it looks sweet as hell. And for the past month EA have gone all out on the PR for the launch of BF3, here they are marketing it with the “Made in Stockholm”-slogan. And the launch is just two weeks away from Modern Warfare 3, another hyped shooting game. But when I got home last night I bought it through their own Origin-system (“Steam”-wannabe), downloaded it and got ready to rock.
That’s when the excitement died. Was the graphics not good enough? .. nope, it was good. Was the story terrible? Nope, it’s good. Was the multiplayer maps sucky or buggy? Nope.
After spending all this time, money, work and ideas creating this behemoth of a title, with the best graphics engine ever, they missed out on a very small tiny detail… making it easy for the user! At first I couldn’t launch the game. It doesn’t launch at all actually cause it starts my Internet Explorer (which is NOT my default browser!) to a website that I have to log into. And when I’m logged in my browser reports that the active x controlers are causing issues and the certificate isn’t valid for this https site and when all of that is done I get to the “launch campaign” and click it.. and then it downloads a game launcher that I can’t install in MSIE! When trying through Chrome there’s no technical issues.
But technical issues aside – who came up with the idea “to start the sing player campaign, you log into origin, you start the game, browser directs you to a page where you have to log into origin again, and then click ‘launch campaign’ and install another third party addon and then the game starts”?!? What the f*ck is that about!? I know I know, it’s probably their version of DRM to make sure pirates have a harder time to launch it but don’t they get it!? Every time you have some kind of DRM system, especially like this, all you do is encourage people to use the pirated stuff!!…
And so after 6 years (10 if you count the time as a consultant) here åt Vinge I am now starting the last week here before I am off to Carema Care.
It’s bitter-sweet kinda as it should be! Vinge has been a great employer. Some really Nice benefits here that I am going to miss but I really have to move on with my career and this feels like a good step. We’ll know in about 6 months if it was a terrible step! (that’s the trial-period here in Sweden for you and your employer. If during that time one of you thinks it isn’t working out you just say thanks but no thanks)
But if for some reason it isn’t working I’m fairly sure I’d be welcome back here 🙂
And during this last week I’ll be working 4pm ’till midnight or more if needed. Cause we’re reinstalling all the computers here one last time (for Me). So kinda going out with a bang 🙂
I read an article yesterday slamming media for not being more critical in their coverage of Apple. And it’s true, very rarely do you see, in Sweden anyway, some news that are criticizing Apple for anything. Sure we had that small little debate about Apple and Google geotagging everything (but as opposed to Google, Apple cached everything in a local file meaning if you managed to hack in to someones computer you could backtrace where their i-Device had been).
I can’t say much about Mr. Jobs, not because he’s recently passed but because I just don’t know enough to say anything about it. Most of my knowledge about him comes from “Pirates of Silicon Valley”. And I can’t say much about Apple as a company since I’m no business analyst.
But what I can say a lot about is their mobile products, iPhone and iPad. What positive I can say, and I said this a week after owning my iPhone I had for over 2 years, is that Apple has a very, very keen sense for interfaces. They make so much stuff easy for the average joe. But in my opinion it ends there with them. To my knowledge everything they’ve ever put into their iPhones have already been done by someone else. They just make it easier to use and overprice it. For example, I recently switched to Samsung Galaxy SII. It cost me about $600. How much would an equal Apple product cost? .. according to Webhallen it’d be around $1200. That’s double the cost. For what? I still can’t play my MKVs “out of the box” and all that other stuff. And I still can’t update my firmware without iTunes (or has that finally been unlocked now?). The Samsung phone already has everything that Apple introduced as “new!” with the iPhone, they even have the “S” in the model name. And did anyone, anywhere write that? Cause on a tech level it’s true but noone (except tech bloggers) seems to put that in print! No, instead Aftonbladets and Expressens webservers went down one night when I was working and for a second I thought we had internet connection issues. But nope, they just got overloaded thanks to their “Apple releasing a new product!!” coverage.
By the way – what happened to all those “win an iphone 5”-competitions I saw banners and links to? 🙂
No, I think it’s down to the fact that people just love an underdog that wins! It’s like the Brawn team in Formula 1 a few years ago. Very close to bankrupt, the boss keeps believing and somehow manages to pull the team together and they kick ass and win the championship against the evil competitor that has for a long time owned the throne, Ferrari. And people wrote alot of good stuff about Brawn as a person and the team as a “wonders can happen!”-thing. Not many dared to say “they exploited a loophole in the rules that allowed them to go between 2-3 seconds faster per lap and after everyone had caught up they didn’t win a single race”. And it’s the same here, Apple was very very close to bankruptcy when Jobs came back and started the whole i-Device thing and they’ve now won over the evil competitor, Microsoft. And little does anyone ever mention “the first thing Jobs did was kill the Newton and now, some 15 years later their iPad is one of their strongest products!”.
So my grief isn’t with Apple or the entire “iOS v. Android” thing, my grief is with the media not being the least bit critical when reporting on Apple, that annoys me…. Damn no I need cookies to make me feel positive again!