Went spinning today! It was the first time in my life and it was rather nice. I am going on Wednesday again. This first time was only an introduction lasting 30 minutes but I feel good.
This morning me and J took T to her first day at preschool. She is going to Udden’s preschool, the “Biet” group. This first day she was only there for 1 hour playing on her own. Tomorrow she will be there for 2 hours without me or J around. I am convinced that she will do fine there!
Puh, training takes the energy out of me.
Saw the first half of Kill Bill yesterday. Cool movie. I hope the second half will be just as good đ
All posts by Peppar
Hi!
I am sitting here in the sofa watching TV (Robinsson). This is the first actual TV program I’m watching since last Saturday. I have more and more switched over to only watching series and movies downloaded from the net. Earlier this week I finished the series John Doe which I highly recommend. The availability of so many movies and series (before they get up on the big screen or are aired) totally changes my TV habits!!
Earlier this week I was out at Brändön with my leadership education group (three days) and as always it had its lows in the beginning, but after 1.5 days I felt great. I had a very good session with Jerker where we ironed out a number of issues, both professional and personal. As always I learned a number of new things about myself and I also came to some conclusions. The latter includes that I should not plan for the rest of my life but try to keep the horizon closer. Since the summer the horizon has drifted further and further away from me making all decision huge. The conclusion I have come to regarding my personal future is that I should relax for a while (weeks? months?) and let the future iron out itself. Barbro “painted” me a nice picture where I am standing with one foot on each side of a trench with each arm being pulled by myself in different directions. Her suggestion was to relax, take a good stand and let the solution grew out and show itself. I was out at Brändön Monday to Wednesday and since I got back my energy level has risen and I feel rather good. My trip to San Francisco was very good and relaxing. A climate change is always good, but as soon as I got back my energy disappeared. But as I said, now it is back and I feel rather good!
The only concrete thing that has happened with my work situation is that Kåre now is the division head. It was settled Thursday a week ago and Kåre announced it to the division Monday this week. Unofficially I was demoted before I left for the US, about one month ago.
For recreation I have been reading a lot (a book update will come later) and playing the car racing games Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 and Need for Speed Underground. The latter is really cool!!
Last week our dish washer broke down and while I was out at Brändön J went out and but a new one, as well as a new freezer, a new refrigerator and a new microwave oven. Even T got a new toy, a “baby” dish washer đ
Yesterday we watched S.W.A.T. which was a disappointment. A while back we watched Identity and it was really good. I like movies with a new kind of story or a twist in the end.
Blaaaaaaaaa
For the first time in a long time I wrote a long message about how I feel this weekend. I had been writing it on and off during the afternoon and to be honest I forgot about it. While installing a new webcamera under Windows it asked me to restart the computer, and hey I wasn’t doing anything important was I? No, and it rebooted. Of course my blogging tool, w.bloggar doesn’t save anything by autosave and my whole post got lost in /dev/null. đ đ
To summarize, I don’t feel to well this weekend. All agitated and jumpy. I have not been sleeping very well (woke up at 5.30 this morning). Now I have to iron a bit before putting T to bed.
San Francisco 2003
Our photos from San Francisco are now online and can be viewed here.
Laptop with a thin edge?!
I like cool devices and Sony has “done it” for me a couple of times. Their latest laptop, the PCG-X505 is THIN. 9.7mm thick and weighs only 785 grams! Than is thinner than my palm!!! It has a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 10.4-inch display but no wlan built in and all normal connectors are moved to an external mini-dock. Read all about it!
Sound too loud?
Here are some neighbours that got tired of the high volume from a HIFI-store!
Everywhere Displays
IBM Research has done some very nice research on Everywhere Displays. That is a small projector with a moveable mirror in front so the image can be presented on any surface within viewing range. The image is compensated for distortion and when you tie cameras and image recognition to this then it becomes really cool! Read more about it on Gopal Pingali’s project page!
Packing Day
Today was packing day, or should I say, Johanna preparing to pack everything for me for my second trip next week. Tomorrow morning I am heading out to Boden for a 1.5 day department meeting. To be honest I am not really looking forward to it. I don’t know how many such meetings I have attended over the last 9 years but it feels that they do not lead to anything. Yes, yes I know. It is everybody’s responsibility to make something out of it but at the same time we all have so many other things to do so the ones without a clear deadline or a clear responsible person tend to vaporize. My taxi for the airport leaves at 18.00 on Tuesday and I guess I will get back from Boden around 15.00 which leaves me a few hours for the last packing.
Tovah has reached the age when she wants to play more advanced games. It started out me and here playing the Disney Racing Tour which means that she sits in my lap and I drive. Earlier this week I grew tired of that game and thought that we should try something more in my taste. Need for Speed 2. Great game and very addictive. Even without Tovah. I haven’t really wasted time on computer games since August 2000 when I stopped playing Mafia. A friend told me back then that I should focus on my daughter instead of computer games. So I did đ I always listen friends (well not always ;-). I just cannot make that BMW M5 make it around under 1:55. My record is 1:55:20. Humph.
My application for associate professor has still not been handled, at least I haven’t heard anything on the issue from Jerker. Mailed him earlier this week but as usual I didn’t receive any answer. How can I make him do anything on the issue. When I ask he just says he is sorry and he hasn’t had the time. Perhaps I should talk with the dean about it? Before Jerker becomes the dean that is. The whole issue makes my angry and it all turns into negative energy for me which in turn comes out in anger.
Just got an email that some “lost” money has been recovered in one of my projects which means that the division will get another 250K this year and we will end up on a strong plus again. Always nice to have a positive balance sheet at the end of the year, as we have had since 1999 when I took over the division. Congratulations to us đ
Mikael Drugge celebrated his birthday yesterday. Congratulations!! He is one of my young promising graduate students.
I have been up way to late the last two nights so today I am heading for bed early. Have to get up at 0700 tomorrow!
Good night and sleep tight!
Ps. If anybody in Luleå need anything from San Francisco then this might be a good time to tell me!
San Francisco
On Tuesday I am leaving for San Francisco. I will be attending the Multimedia 2003 conference in San Francisco, or actually the conference is in Berkeley but the restaurants are better in San Francisco and it only takes 15 minutes to get there with the Bart. I will be gone until November 10.
Monday and Tuesday I will spend in Boden with the Systemteknik department. The main issue is obviously how to handle the problem of to few students.
November 18-21 I had planned to attend the Microsoft Research Academic Days: Security in Distributed Systems but I figured it will take to much time. Microsoft would actually pay for the trip and the housing. Quite generous of them, right? The topic wasn’t perfectly right for me though.
Tomorrow is the exam in SMD151. 110 students and the following exams I have to correct. Fun fun fun. That will have to wait until I get back from the States.
With all the other short trips planned for November, if I had attended the Microsoft Research thing then I would have had 6 working days in Luleå during November!
Finished reading Grisham’s latest, The King of Torts yesterday. A VERY good book which I recommend to everybody. I continued with Clancy’s latest, The Teeth of the Tiger. Not much happening yet but it is a Clancy.
The snow has hit Luleå. It is white outside. White is nice but unfortunately I cannot ride my bike during the winter đ I need my training or else I will get fat as a pig and totally restless. Today I went for a fast walk. It was only 35 minutes but when I got back I felt really pepped up. What a difference some exercise can do. I need more endorphins, what a great drug it is.
During last weekend I switched over to using my fiber instead of my ADSL and during the day it works splendidly but during the evening (between 16.00 and 24.00) and totally flakes out with high delay. It is still usable but rather bad. Throughput is OK but you get very high delay getting into Tele2’s core network. Support say that they have ordered new hardware but hasn’t given me any dates on when the problem will be fixed. When the network is not loaded I get over 10Mbps between my home and the university. Hmm, I just checked and tonight it seems OK. Might they have upgraded today or is it not used as heavily this evening? We will see… Besides the longer delay in the network it works very good. Stable and good. Hopefully the local peering will get set up during the winter and then we will get real banded out to the rest of the world by going via SUNET (what I cannot do that? đ I don’t know if I need that though. Tele2’s world Internet access seems rather good. Anyhow the whole deal is much cheaper than my Telia company ADSL.
No, now I have to get my attention back to the movie, Ghost of Mars.
iTunes
I have started using Apple iTunes for Windows (released last week) and I just added all of my music to its database. The program is quite nice. I can search my music, share it, share my playlists, and it keeps track of it all for me. Right now I have 15188 songs in my small library of music.