I am worried. Am I doing the right thing? Will my decision affect my work environment in the right direction? I really hope so. It looks very promising, but (there is always a but) what if it isn’t the right thing? So I worry, but I guess I shouldn’t. I have taken the decision and I shall stand by it, right? Right!
Anyhow…..
Johanna’s back went out of order today so I got the honor of putting T to sleep today again (second day in a row). Usually we do it every other day and I was really surprised how easily Tovah accepted that I would put her to sleep today as well. It must be all my nice singing and my stories about the “Red Lava Bubble” from the lava lamp. Today the red bubble went to China by digging a whole through the earth and then moving in with a new lava lamp family, a blue one with glitter 🙂 T really enjoys those stories and I make it up as I go along.
During the evening I went for a cycle ride but only got a few kilometers before turning back. I just didn’t have the energy and will and by not having that I got really cold.
After putting T to sleep I feel quite good actually. When I lye there besides her waiting for her to fall asleep there isn’t much else I can do than to contemplate my day and my problems.
Tomorrow is my second lecture in SMD151. MBone and Scalable Media.

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!

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.

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 :-/

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?