My Weekend

I had a nice and relaxing weekend with my family. Yesterday we spent the whole afternoon watching TV and we saw among other things the 3 first episodes of 24 season 2. I like season 1 very much and season 2 started very promising.
Today we worked a bit in the backyard preparing for the winter (it feels like it will start snowing tomorrow). We created a new stone step in front of the garage back door and stacked the last of our fire wood. We only use the wood for enjoyment fires in the garden. For dinner we had sushi (yes, again 🙂 followed by a nice fire and marchmallows.
After a while it started to get really cold (like 5 degrees) and we headed inside for a movie, The Pianist. It was a very good movie but I think IMDB readers are overrating it. It currently has a rating of 8.6 which puts it in #29 on the top 250 list. E.g. Schindler’s List got a 8.8 and I feel that that movie is very much better than The Pianist. Don’t take me wrong. I highly recommend both movies.
Tomorrow is my first day of teaching in SDM151, Multimedia Systems.
Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite!

My week

This week has been filled with my management education and many long meetings. During the management course we worked with sociograms revealing good and bad about ourselves and our projections about others in the group. This, once again gave me new insights about myself and how I work. “What you see in others, you must have within yourself to recognize.” I think that is very true.
When I was cycling home from Brändön (in shorts with rain and HEAVY wind) I made a rather substantial decision that hopefully will make me happier in the future. I cannot share it with you (yet) but I will as soon as possible. Some things have to get settled first. Just taking the decision has lifted a big stone from my chest.
I haven’t had time to write very much on my blog this week and that is something I really miss. I have instead chosen to prioritize sleep and my family,, which I think is rather important 🙂
Now Tovah is asleep and I am going to watch the second half of “The Ring” together with my lovely wife, some candles and crackers with cheese.

Bugs do not exists in PHPBugTracker

A problem&solution for my own record.
Two bugs disappeared in PHPBugTracker and the reason was that the status_id field was set to a value that did no longer exist. The following sql solved it the problem but the bug is still there.
update phpbt_bug set status_id=’8′ where bug_id =31;
update phpbt_bug set status_id=’8′ where bug_id =32;
select * from phpbt_bug where bug_id=’31’ or bug_id=’32’;

[Written while listening to: En till som jag]

Service is at its best when it is not seen, right?

Shouldn’t service be something that is provided as a service for the user, not a hinder? Right a very very minor thing happened but it still annoys me. I requested the sysadmin to remove the DHCP service for my laptop so I could provide it from my own server instead, but they refuse with the argument that they cannot keep track of the computers otherwise. Wonder how they managed for the last 8.5 years which is when I started working at Systemteknik and I already had my own DHCP server running. I guess I better not tell them that I have 17 other hosts handled by my own DHCP server.
Argh, why do I get upset about such minor issues. I just block the DHCP traffic from their server and be happy. Quicker than asking them to remove it in the first place :-/

Away and Anxiety

I will be gone Monday until Wednesday evening on a seminar in Brändön. It is the final seminar with sleep over in my management education course, but I cannot really say that I want to go 🙁 I would rather sit under my corkoak and program on my SIP prototype. It is like all the work related issues are washing over me. Issues I am not really interested in or care for. Being a researcher is very fun. Being a research leader with the financial responsibility is rather boring and creates a lot of anxiety (for me). For me getting funding for research feels like begging and I don’t like doing that. In the industry it can be compared with living of stock money but the main difference there is that eventually the goal is to live of the profit. I.e. do something good that the market want then you don’t have to beg anymore. That is unfortunately not the case in the research world. The individual researchers can get rich (spinoff companies, patents etc.) but that doesn’t make the situation easier for the research group (unless personal profit is put back into the research). The latter is really a Swedish problem where the inventor owns the results, whereas in the USA the university owns the results. The Swedish academic system is a bit strange where if a researcher is successful that only creates envy instead of admiration and the researcher doesn’t really get anything “for it” (unless s/he commercializes the results on their own).
Anybody interested in hiring an assistant professor in Media Technology and Chief Science Officer at Marratech?

Outing to Hägnan

Today we went on a picknick with the children’s playgroup at Hägnan. It was about 10-15 children in all ages and we had a very good time. We grilled chicken, sausages and ate it together with breadsticks and melon. It was very delightful. It is the kind of place where you can just let the children run around on their own. No strange places where they can fall down, no cars, no high speed bicycles and just tons of fun things to do. In the beginning I was a bid of a protective dad and followed Tovah around but I got over that after lunch but that unfortunately proved not to be to good as Tovah for the first time in her life got lost. She was on her own about one house away but it was still very scary for her.
They also had straw barn where the children (and adults 🙂 could jump into the dried straw. Tovah was a bit scared, but she jumped nicely when she held my hand. Later there was an unfortunate accident 🙁 Tovah and another girl were supposed to jump together. They held hands and Tovah started counting to three and the other girl jumped immediately, pulling Tovah with here. Tovah landed on top of the other girl. It must have hurt quite a bit as they both cried for some time and I couldn’t get Tovah to jump again.
When we got home I was really tired, and found myself just sitting in front of the computer for a while. Some the and chickpeas helped my mood back to happiness. Played with my photos for the rest of the day and learned tons of new things about Photoshop and the most misnamed filter, Unsharp mask which is actually a tool for making the image look sharper.
During the evening I also made IP-telephony experiment. I used Marratech Pro as a SIP client towards DigiSip and called my mother using it as a phone replacement. After a while Tovah wanted to speak with her as well so I called the Pingtel phone as well and included that into the conversation using Pro as a mixer and gateway. It worked very well and the only real problem was sound levels as my speech came out much louder in the Pingtel than my mother.
It is my mother’s birthday today! Happy Birthday, mom!!
Today was also Dick’s funeral. Tina was there. I couldn’t go as I was giving an exam today and honestly I didn’t feel like going.
Now I am just waiting for Tovah to fall asleep so I can get into bed with my lovely wife.