rastplats

This is my last week living in Sweden starting today since I’ll be moving to Australia this sunday. It’s been such a distant thing for so long that I’ve become used to the thought but the nervosity has been incresing these last few days. Big steps usually mean falling or tripping, hopefully I’ll at least land on my feet..

Spent the day taking a really long walk through Malmö with Charles and took some pictures, some of which can be seen below. The entire flog can be seen here.

In order to keep in touch and share my experiences when moving to Australia in a few days I’ve set up a fotolog here at my site. I’ll try to add photos from my days at least a few times every week. Photos will be sorted by date and each month will have a main index for all photos. Things is still in its infancy and my NanoFlogger addon for the NanoBlogger software I use for this site is nowhere near ready for mass consumption, sourcecode will be released when I get there. The flog will eventually be merged with the gallery and some specific photo albums added, the gallery has been given a facelift in the meantime.

To kickstart the flog I’ve added the photos from my last day at work which can be seen by following the link below.

Sorry for the lack of updates in the past week, since quitting my dayjob I’ve been taking a mini vacation from doing things which was due since long. I’ve been hacking a bit on a fotolog addon for this site which I’ll be documenting my daily life with down in Australia, this will however be put online starting tomorrow since I’m way to tired now to finalize the last details. Stay tuned for more to come..

Tomorrow will be my last day at work and thus my 7 month employment will be over and I’ll join the ranks of the unemployed for two weeks until I leave the country. It’s been 7 fun months and the learning experience is invaluable, I dont regret my acceptance of this employment even though theres been a fair share of rough days and hard work. The crew will be deeply missed, I never thought a workplace with about 80 people could get this personal in such a short time but I was horribly wrong. In retrospect I feel I could have done some things different but I must have made some good moves, I was offered a full employment..

A whole day spent at work managing technical personnel resources, getting them all to focus on a common goal.. and in the end failing on an error in the configuration out of my control. How painful it is to have your own technical skills abstracted into management and not being able to just Do The Right Thing. It has been very interesting to work as a project manager for the past 7 months but it has also made things clear, I should be doing something else.. frustrating.

Since publishing my artwork in my gallery it has become the most frequently visited part of my site which is quite flattering. A bit less joyous is the growing amount of deeplinks that I have aggregated to this content. The big offenders are blogsites such as Xanga, NeoPets and MySpace but lately the amount of deeplinks from forums and torrenttrackers has escalated. Conversations on irc revealed that I am far from alone suffering from this. These sites run their servers in a commercial environment and is thus profiting on using my bandwidth without giving me any credit for it which I consider bad practice, but I guess that is the way of capitalism.. one guy making 10 bucks is always preferred to ten guys making a buck each. In the long run I worry that the growing desire to profit by leaching on others resources will break the internet. I have though about removing the images but have to the conclusion that this practice is probably a lot like spam, you always lose in the end and then end up losing a lot of time spent as well. It is at the same time flattering that so many people want to use my artwork to express themselves with. Am I the only one seeing the tightrope?

The by far most popular document to deeplink is my Pirates Cove logo which racks up 10 times the amount of hits as all the compendiums together, apparantly skulls beat knowledge. Some facts on the deeplinking of Pirates Cove:

Total amount of hits: 21673Total transferred size: 1.58Gb

Things went clearly downhill today.. figuratively speaking, the day was spent skiing at Vallåsen. Compared to the offpiste tours I’ve done in Italy and Austria over the years this little hill is pretty much horizontally aligned, but seen in its context Vallåsen is an astonishing feat given that we live in a totally flat part of the country. The weather was alright, snowconditions pretty good and the slope(s) was more or less free of people all morning which all added up to a really nice day. Until this morning I hadnt done any snowboarding for about two years and my board hasnt seen ski wax for innumerable years but its just like bicycling.. and I was still able to outride the competition.

I finally went out today and bought a digital camera which I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. Given that I’m interested in photography and intend to do some documentation of my stay down under I went for a Canon EOS 350D which I’m so far is really satisfied with. More on this to come, including some test shots. New computer.. new camera.. I’m slowly degrading into materialism..

After a long slow fall with most things heading downwards, including my creativity, I’m slowly getting the urge to hack again. I’ve finally resumed hacking on TenDRA and I took up another project this evening which I’ve been meaning to look into for some time now, Wikipedia. The concept of open source knowledge sharing is very appealing to an old hacker like me who grew up firmly believing that Information wants to be free.. I still believe it today.