As most of the people that knows me know I have tinnitus – an old war injury from a Moby concert in 2001 (but to be fair I believe the front band Röyksopp is more to blame for that!). As a result my hearing in my right ear is slightly off. And on the friday before Christmas I got a really bad cold. So bad that I was tucked in bed all weekend which totally sucked since we were going to host the Christmas dinner for both our families and my wife had to work double-time to get things ready. But the worst part was that the cold resulted in my hearing in the right ear was almost gone! Went to the doctor and ofcourse he said “this is totally normal with a bad infection after a cold, it’ll sort itself out, come back if it isn’t better in … 3 months?”. Yeah, 3 months! Even though the hearing is slowly coming back I still hear the old peep from the tinnitus but multiplied by 10. Before I only heard the peep when it was quiet, like lying in bed trying to fall asleep. Now I hear it even when I’m driving the car with the radio on. Really annoying!
But the worst part is the side effects of not hearing what people are saying! Normally some things are easy to explain away but when talking to a person at work and you have to say “come again?” three times they don’t really think you have some ailment, they think you’re just plain stupid! Like when everyone thought an acquaintance’s father got really forgetful and might have come down with Altzheimers. When they finally made him go to the doctor it turns out he was almost deaf. It wasn’t that he forgot things, he simply didn’t hear what people were saying! So not hearing what people are saying isn’t as socially acceptable as the other things I suffer from unfortunately. If I’m in a meeting and I can’t sit still I can just say “sorry, my RLS is acting up” and everyone understands. Or someone doesn’t know what RLS is and you get into a discussion about that. Or when I can’t stop itching I just say “sorry, my eczema is acting up” and people understand. But after saying “what?” again and again I’m an idiot 🙁
Really hope it goes away and it goes back to normal cause this beep and people thinking I’m an idiot can drive a person insane!!
I doubt you’ve read this article : http://torrentfreak.com/uk-users-need-27-services-to-get-most-popular-films-report-finds-141208/ . What it basically says is “if you want to watch the most popular movies the legal way online you have to have 27 subscriptions”. It doesn’t say how much they cost but in my case that is irrelevant. Or you can have one subscription to a good Torrent/Usenet site and get it that way.
It’s the same issue with having physical purchased Blurays versus digtal media files. With the digital media file you simply double click and the movie starts. With buying a physical purchased Bluray you insert the disc and sit through adverts, commercial, trailers, discailmers, copyright notices, sound checks and animated menus that fly back and forth and then the movie actually starts!
That’s why filesharing won’t go away – because it’s a way more convinient way of consuming media today! I’ve started using more of online webservices like Netflix & Viasat which are great but still some issues. They don’t have deals with all studios so they can’t have all the movies & TV series. And the TV shows don’t have the latest episodes shown in the states. So as long as the entertainment industry is set in their ways and don’t want us in Sweden to see the latest episodes/TV series, as long as they have their distribution strategies and insist on showing us trailers, disclaimers and stuff on our discs when all we want is to watch a movie then filesharing won’t go away. I’d gladly pay $50-$100 per month for a service where I could see -> everything <-. But I don't want to pay $10 per service per month and still not get the latest stuff. That's what I think...
This week I’m on another 5 day Microsoft course. It’s a rather exciting one too – “Configuring Advanced Windows Server 2012 R2 Services”. Ok that doesn’t sound exciting but for me it actually is since it’s things that I deal with everyday. From NLB to failover clustering – it’s all good fun and usefull stuff. Because I have to admit, sometimes these courses do tend to talk about stuff you’ll never encounter in the real world!
But I am a bit confused. When we were doing the lab for Branch Caching I get a sense of deja vu and realised I know this stuff already thanks to the certification for the course prior to this one! I got so confused I even had to check my MCP status to make sure I didn’t accidentally write the “wrong” exam but nope. It seems MS are a bit confused what’s in the different courses. But I’m not complaining, can never get enough repition on this.
But I do wish MS would make it easier for us and actually license the virtual machines we use…
… they relase a new expansion that is really, really good! I know, I should and I wanted to quit World of Warcraft a long time ago. It’s a huge time sink and no matter how hard I try I can’t even come close to the level I played at 6-7 years ago! But this expansion is actually really, really good!
They’ve decreased the amount of spells, dropped atleast 2 digits on all item attributes and they’ve made the game much harder to play! When I played as healer I have to work pretty hard to keep the gang alive! And when I’m doing it as DPS I actually have to work hard to keep up the DPS as warlock which used to be easy mode.
And the new content, the new dungeons with some of the encounters (like the one on the train) are pretty awesome! UBRS is back and better than before. The one thing I really don’t like is that we can’t fly in the new zone – and they really do utilize altitude as an obstacle in some zones which is pissing me off riding around for 10 minutes to try to find how to get up a cliff!
So nope, will be a while more before I hang up the wizards hat…
And so the Formula 1 season of 2014 is over with Hamilton & Mercedes taking home the titles this year. Has it been an exciting season? In my opinion … no. Because even though the title fight went down to the wire, to the very last race and alive and well a good 30 minute into the race until Rosberg’s engine started acting up, despite that I don’t think it was too exciting. And I don’t think it’s only because I’m a Ferrari fan, and Ferrari hardly even got a podium all year. I think it’s because one team was so dominant that it never really got exciting for me! It reminded me of 2009 when Brawn GP were so dominant that it never got exciting!
You could counter with all those years that Ferrari were dominant but as I said, I’m a Ferrari fan so how can I complain about that? But I do enjoy a good season where two people from different teams are contenders. Like those seasons with Schumi vs Hakkinen, Schumi vs Alonso, Hamilton vs Ferrari and Red Bull vs Alonso. Those were more exciting than this year. Sure, some great racing but I can’t say I’ve been sitting biting my nails off really.
Now I have to spend all winter getting warm to the idea of rooting for Vettel!! I’m always rooting for the Ferraris – no matter who’s driving them!
It seems everytime I say to myself “right, now I really have to get better at updating my blog” the worse I do. ‘Cause I really want to get better at it! But again I fail. It’s been way too long since my last update.
So what’s new here? Not alot really, life is chugging along nicely. Alot of drama and uncertainty at work but nothing compared to my short time at Carema.
But I’m also trying out Office 365 (Business pack) since it’s great value for money right now. For a mere $10 a month you get the full Office package to install on your computers, you get 1 TB of storage space, you get both an Exchange and Sharepoint instance in the cloud, and even if I really don’t need all of this it’s still great to have if nothing else for my work. And it is a great experience learning how Microsoft is thinking that the business of tomorrow should operate and setup. And if I ever were to startup a company I’d most definitely use it. Also trying to see if I can move my blog in some good way, but to be honest it doesn’t feel like Sharepoint Online is really made for blogging. And I still haven’t found any good way of backing it up and without that it’s a no go.
Have a few more updates planned in the week now that both the F1 season of 2014 is over and a Warcraft expansion etc so my hope is to update it more. Again.
The other fallout from the election in Sweden is that the independant party “Sverige Demokraterna” (“Swedish Democrats”) got 13%. They are a party with a very racists heritage. Their representatives, from local politicians to member of parliament are time and time again caught being very racists. Yet they got almost 13% of the votes. That’s 1 in 8 people that voted for them. Now everyone is asking if 13% of the voters are racists, or they voted on them to show discontent at the other established parties, or because they were charmed by their leader Jimmi Åkesson, or what was it. One of the best comments made during the election from the blue party was when Jan Björklund (leader of the blue FP party) said “you can’t simply dismiss their voters as disillusioned idiots or racists – you have to take the debate, you have to listen to them and argue with them and their arguments”. And that was before when we feared they would get over 10% – not when they actually got 13%! Personally I agree with their point that there is a problem that we are accepting too many immigrants compared to what our infrastructure and budget allows. Their opinion is that we should have a much harder policy on accepting immigrants. But one may also see the need to up our infrastructure instead. Start building and expanding!
Because unlike the image they (“SD”) want to project, immigrants don’t come here and just collect welfare. They do contribute alot, there’s no question about that. And the ones that don’t have jobs don’t necessarily don’t want jobs, I think quite the opposite – if given the chance they’d love to bring home the bacon. And that means taxes -> bigger budget for infrastucture.
Because if you think immigrants are only collecting welfare I dare you to run a hospital, the railway, hell even Stockholm without them!
So if the swedish government is guilty of anything it’s not accepting too many, it’s not keeping up with the flow and built the increased infrastructure!
That’s what I think anyway.
In case you missed it it was election time here in Sweden as is customary every 4th year. I don’t know if it’s a sign that I’m getting old or what, but I’m actually really following this. I say “following” because it’s not really done yet even though the voting is closed!
I have for the third time voted for the environmentalists. There is only one party that puts the environment over economic growth. We have one green party that says they put them on the same priority but as we in the western world should realise by now is that they are unfortunately mutually exclusive. In our global world you can’t produce anything 100% green and be competetive with say the chineese for example. There’s a reason 99% of all Apple products are produced in China. So for me there was really only one choice (or as my favorite saying goes “it’s not a choice, it’s a lack of options” (from “Armageddon”)). And unlike last election it seemed that the red-green block would win this election over the “blue” alliance which they ultimately did. But not by much. Actually they only won with “enough” to outvote them but not “enough” to have a majority on their own. Which has created alot of commotion in all the different parties and blocks trying to for a new alliance led by the reds, instead of the blues, but still consisting of some blues.
For me I want the green enviromental party to get a majority on their own so they don’t have to make compromises at all. But unfortunately we’re not there yet, maybe in the next 4 years the situation is so bad for mother Earth that they actually will get a majority – we don’t know. As one of their leaders said in the campaign which sums up my opinion – “we are the first generation that knows, have the hard facts, that indeed we are destroying the planet, yet we’re doing nothing about it. How can we defend that when our children asks ‘you knew, why didn’t you do anything about it?'”. But I’m not really a big fan of them ending up in a government with the previously mentioned blue-green party (“Centern”) since they’ve dropped the ball so hard on so many things, everything from the SAAB fiasco, the Nuon fuckup and Vattenfall investing in more coal-driven energy in Germany. So not a fan of that.
But the option that unfortunately isn’t too far away is for an extra election to be had when the budget proposals from the different blocks go head to head. If everyone goes 100% with what they are saying today it shouldn’t be a problem. The red-greens will get their budget voted through because they have more votes than they blues. And SD, the block-free “we don’t want no more immigrants but we’re not racists even though most of out representatives are caught again and again posting very racist things on different forums”-party, aren’t going to vote for the blue party since it’s too immigration-friendly. So the red-greens should get their budget through. But there’s still uncertainty in the air and politicians are knows for not keeping what they are saying. Which is actually a good thing that people can change their minds.
We’ll see how it goes later this year.
I started writing about that “not racists, but”-party “Sverige Demokraterna” but it got so long that I’ll save that post for tomorrow…
I’m no expert at religion. Far from it. I did go through that enter confirmation thing when I was a teenager but that’s pretty much it. But I am a big moviebuff. And alot of times when religion have been shown in movies it’s usually done pretty well. Some stuff, like Star Trek, try to stay clear of it and when they do deal with it it’s an alien religion. Then we have movies like “Schindler’s List” which really didn’t have the Jewish faith in the center of the story but it was still present. And it didn’t bug me.
What did bug me was when I recently saw “Mom’s Night Out”. I was under the impression it was a movie about a mother who just wanted a night out with the girls and it all went comically to hell (no pun intended). And that’s what a good 99% of the movie was about. And those 99% were pretty funny and got some laughs. But unfortunately it’s that 1 remaining percent that I’ll remember this movie for. How Christianity had helped some characters stay on the right path in their lifes and deal with life’s challenged. And that bugged me – alot! In my opinion it’s you who chose to stay on the right path and you that deal with life’s challenges, God or Jesus doesn’t have anything to do with it. It may be that your faith is keeping you strong but that’s still you! Don’t go giving someone else credit! This movie went very far from just having “faith” somewhere in the story to it being downright Christianity propoganda. ANd I hated that. Not because I hate Christianity, not all. But I hate propoganda like that, especially that cheesy. But if you can take that 1% I’d recommend that movie because it has so many “I totally do that!”-moments of being a parent!
As far as I know noone have challenged me for the ALS challenge.
So I did this instead:
It’s a really horrible sickness to “get”. Anyone can get it at any time, it’s 100% mortality rate often within 2-3 years and the last months alive looks like hell. So I have no problem donating money for this research.
It’s almost election time in Sweden. And the Facebook feed is full of people posting lists and carefully chosen statistics about how bad things will be if you vote this way or how terrible Sweden was when “the other guys” had the power – alot of that shit. And I get annoyed when I see that because when I load Facebook I actually prefer to see lighthearted stuff like baby-pictures or YouTube vids rather than politics. I hope my friends will tone that down so I don’t have to clean my friendslist!
Personally – well things haven’t changed much in the past 8 years. The planet is still in overconsumer mode (guilty!) completely disregarding the fact it can’t take it and mother nature is fighting back constantly yet there’s only one political party that thinks protecting the planet is more important than economic growth. And now that I have a son (that just started wathing a movie about a turtle going from here to there and seeing how humans are destroying the planet) I feel it’s even more important than ever for.
But that’s what I feel. It’s a free country and as long as it doesn’t get any worse I’m not going to force my opinion on anyone.
So we finally got ourselfes one of those robotic lawnmowers – a Husqvarna 308. There was a period in May that I had to mow twice a week so I gave up an ordered one.
This is how I mow the lawn nowadays with my Automower 308
Then I spent a few days of troubleshooting the lawn and everywhere that it got stuck. Had to change the wires a bit and fill up some holes and such but after that it’s been going like clock work all summer long. Surprisingly well as a matter of fact! Except that you still need to cut the edges of your lawn manually since this bounces of things (including the cable) and therefor doesn’t go all the way to the edge. And then I noticed that our grass looks more bent than cut and I checked the blades and they were completely worn down! They do recommend you to change them a few times but I didn’t think it’d be after only about 8 weeks!
Other than that the only issue I have is the surge protection that I bought for it (per Husqvarnas recommendation) that cuts the power a bit too easy, meaning the mower doesn’t start at all and it can be like that until I notice it’s off.
I do regret buying it a bit since the lawn hasn’t really improved at all. Yes, it’s been nice not having to cut the lawn every weekend this summer but I could have used the money more wisely than on this. But that’s the way it is.
Yeap, we’ve been travelling again! This time to the UK! I would say “London” but I actually never sat foot in London. We we’re in Brighton, Farnborough, Croydon and alot of time at the Gatwick airport (thank you for that Norwegian Air!).![IMG-2014-07-19-14.03.39[1]](https://kristoffer.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/IMG-2014-07-19-14.03.391-169x300.jpg)
The point of the trip for me and Sam was to go to the Farnborough Air Show. My dad loves those air shows and I thought it was time to introduce Sam to them. Unfortunately it became too hot for him so he got tired and fell asleep and woke up just as the arrows we’re landing!
My sister had convinced my wife to tag along so they could spend all saturday in London, enjoying a good old English afternoon tea and some shopping at Harrod’s. Let’s just say things don’t always goes as planned!!
I’ve updated the photogallery with photos for 2014 – which include Sam’s 4th birthday, Adrian’s christening, H’s trip to Barcelona and our trip to Rhodes. Awesomeness ensues!
(as usual, the password is the short Swedish name of my current employer, with a capital first letter)
This time I have a perfectly valid reason for not posting stuff here. Not that nothing is happening, but I’ve actually been on vacation!! Ok, maybe that’s not a shocker considering where I work nowadays, but still pretty fun. Especially this time since it was my son Sam’s first time on an airplane!
We decided to go to our all inclusive, super family friend Sunwing hotel in Rhodes, Greece. “We” in this case wasn’t just me and my wife, but also included a couple that we are pretty good friends with who have a little girl. As it turns out that part was genius because they played with each other and had a great time and when they were apart they kept asking where the other one was so yeah, they enjoyed eachother’s company alot!
But us grown ups? .. Well I enjoy their company too but at the same time we spent pretty much all the time every day together which in hindsight wasn’t a good idea because me and my wife hardly spent any time together. We got a few hours when they took care of Sam, much like we took care of their girl one evening, but still it wasn’t much “us” time. Or maybe we just remember our time in Crete last year a bit too fondly when it was just the two of us!
Anyway, the hotel was great! Our room, which was more like a house, was awesome! We had some great views and it was spacious so it never got cramped. One issue though was the all inclusive. I mean, for our kids it was perfect – we never had to think “I wonder of they have anything for Sam?” or “maybe it’s time for us to find some place to eat” – the restaurant was always there and always had food for kids! But for us grownups it was kinda boring. Not that varied, not that good quality of the food, the service was so-so and the atmosphere was chaotic – the complete opposite of what you’re looking for when you go out!
We did manage to get to the á la carte restaurant once, and that was awesome by comparison. Then we got a recomendation of a small, family owned greek restaurant in Rhodes named “To Steno”. And it really was small! And the father in charge sat at our table half the time to ensure we were enjoying ourselfs. And we turned it into a meze with small dishes coming all the time, great fun!!
We also visited Lindos, which is an old village in the south part of the island. It’s really, REALLY, tourist focused so if you want the tourist thing, then you should really go. But it wasn’t much else there.
The biggest disappointment was actually the weather, which you can’t really blame anyone for. We knew we were travelling a bit early and would get the best weather, but we didn’t expect to have 2 really grey days, 2 rainy days and only 2 days of sunshine when we booked. But when the sun was out it was amazing 🙂
All in all a great week – most of all for Sam!!!
I remember when “Matrix” came out and pretty much everyone was blown away by the special effects in it and the “bullet-time” filming and kung-fu action sequences. Some of us were also very impressed by the story.
Well last weekend I had some time home alone and after seeing “Gravity” on bluray I noticed I hadn’t even take the plastic off of my “Matrix Trilogy” bluray pack. So I though “what tha hell” and saw them all in one sitting. And even though the story still holds, the special effects… well they really haven’t aged well!! Some of them look like a college project, atleast next to “Gravity”. It really didn’t look good at all and I think that bluray actually hurts them. For example the brawl scene in Matrix 2 where Neo fights off a thousand Smiths, in bluray it’s pretty silly when you clearly see how computer animated it is. Then you compare that to “Gravity” where they faked pretty much everything you see in the movie, except the faces (they even digitally removed and recreated a leg for Bullock during the “rebirth” scene in the airlock). I know it’s not a fair comparison given the 14 years between them, but still compare it to Contact that also faked alot of the stuff you see. The trademark of good special effects are the ones you never even see. But somehow when it comes to the “Matrix” I actually think they wanted you to see them because they were so obvious and fake.
So Plan A didn’t work. Those people over at Owncube promised 30 TB (or “unlimited” in the promo e-mail), but when I finally got the backup-routines in place (which included RAR-ing everything first) and the backups actually went through (after getting alot of disconnects) it halted after 600 gigs saying “not enough diskspace”. But when checking the interface is still said unlimited. At that point I couldn’t be bothered with them anymore and decided to go with plan B. So now I have a double-drive USB case hooked up at work with enough storage to take backups of all my stuff at home. The only downside compared to the other alternative is that I will have to prioritize what to backup from home to here because the storage won’t be enough for both. At first. But when I’m not in savings mode anymore (i.e after the summer) I can buy new drives for it so that it’ll have more storage.
So now I can finally change my raid at home from 10 to 0, and go from “only” having 6 terabytes of storage to 12. As anyone with tech knowledge will tell you, raid 0 is suicide redundancy wise but if I have everything backuped up here at work I don’t see the problem. Plus – now the house can burn down and I won’t have lost my “Star Trek” collection!!
This is what happens when I take my work home with me!! Not quite the same with my wife though, her’s is cheaper but it stinks up the entire house with the small of burnt popcorn!
One of the things I am good at is finding and eliminating “single points of failure”. When I see a process or procedure I look at it and check for weakest link. Ever since my first job when my boss told me “if you’re hit by a buss on the way home, the company needs to live on” I’ve done a good job of making sure I’m not it. And when “ITIL” comes along there’s the Matrix organizations that’s all about spreading information, responsiblities and risk I felt it was totally natural and a given. And here at Thomas Cook we hate single points of failure in the IT organization and work to eliminate them constantly. Much like the lawfirm we have 2 datacenters to run from so we can lose an entire building and the IT would still work!
(now I’m going to go all computer tech on you!)
So … I took my job home again. When we got the annual bonus I bought stuff to have a 6×3 terabyte RAID 10 in my server for storing all the digital stuff I have. Everything from documents to images and the DVD/Bluray backups I have, they all need to be stored somewhere, but I’ve always felt like “if I lose this harddrive what will I do!?” – but with a RAID 10 I could easily lose one drive (actually 3 – if they are the “right” ones) and it wouldn’t affect anything… but the next level was “what if the house burns down to the ground”? In such a scenario I’m pretty sure I’ll have bigger issues to deal with than “oh no I lost all my Star Trek boxes and the digital backups of them!”, but I still wanted to make sure that’s not an added headache if it were to happen. One solution was to buy a 2 drive USB case and 2 4TB drives in a RAID0 and get a safety deposit box and once every 3 months take it home, back it all up and put it back again. That was actually looking like the most practical & cost efficient way of doing it…
Until OwnCube offered me a deal to store 30 TB of data as long as their company exists for a one time fee of €150! Done! So now I’m set to once every .. does 3 months sound enough?… zip everything I have to encrypted files and send it up to their datacenters for storage! Even though I only have a 100 mbit upstream connection which means this is gonna take over a week I can’t say I’m in much of a rush since it’s automated and running in the background.
So now the house can burn down and I’ll still have all my Star Trek episodes 🙂
Really sorry again about neglecting my duties here. It’s just very hectic at work.
Mostly for me the past 6 weeks have been about upgrading Sharepoint from 2010 to 2013 with all the issues that comes with it and all weird phenomenons that only Sharepoint can produce. Right now it’s all done and I’m “only” cleaning up and trying to be friendly with the users who are pissed off, and rightly so!, over features that are no longer available. But not my fault if Microsoft decided to do away with features they think noone is using.
And we’re also being dragged into an outsourcing project. Yeah, you can hear the “*sigh*” already right? The story of me and outsourcing goes back over 10 years and I think it very, very rarely is a good think in the long run unless you only want to save money and don’t want to care about IT issues. But if you have IT as a core for the business it’s a bad idea and Thomas Cook here in Northern Europe is all about IT and selling our products online so we shouldn’t be outsourcing in my opinion. But orders are orders so we’re going down that path and let’s see where it takes us.
But unlike the Carema outsourcing, this time they’ve guaranteed me I won’t lose my job. My problem is will I still want my job when they are done? It’s still about 2 years away from being “said and done” so still a long way to go and a lot of things to be decided. So I’m patiently waiting to see what happens with this, what else can I do? I love my job so much and I don’t want to quit because I think it may not be as a great 2 years from now…
I saw Gravity the other day. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it so expectations were high although I was a bit sceptical – I mean a movie with only two actors portraying 2 doomed astronauts falling from space towards earth, how good can it be?
Well it was. It was definitely the best movie I’ve seen .. maybe all century!
Why? Well the story was pretty damn good. The acting was top notch. The laws of physics was respected (mostly). The f/x were awesome, never could I imagine space destruction could be so beautiful! The music maybe a bit too epic. But there was something else, something I’ve realised only I and Paul Buchman appreciate (mail me if you get the reference!!) – the mind blowing cinematography!!
Ever since Cameron’s groundbreaking The Abyss I’ve always had the idea of “how are they filming this?” in my head when I see movies. That’s why I put Contact and Forrest Gump on very high pedastals, and why I even remember movies like Bonfire of Vanities (with the very long uncut opening scene). And this movie pretty much made those other look like college projects. Granted computer effects have come a long way since those movies. But the opening shot that never seemed to end (was it 13 consecutive minutes?) , the way they got inside her helmet, the way the camera moved during the dialogue in the capsule (that should’ve been impossible given the cramped space), it was all just a mind blowing experience for me !! And usually I’m only this impressed with epic movies, but this, 2 actors and the voices of 2 other actors, can you get a smaller cast !?
The only one complaint I have is that Sandra Bullock have lost so much weight that it was worrying …
So go see it, totally worth it!!