I forgot to mention that yesterday our apartment appeared in all the listings. It is now for sale! So, if you’re looking for a very cozy apartment in Umeå, look no further. Plenty of space, stylish interior, fairly high standards of living, huge balcony, convenient location as well as excellent (i.e. 100 mbit) broadband.

Our apartment at Hemnet.

And some photos. These were taken by our realtor Erica, and she’s been excellent so far. Professional, efficient, easy to get along with. And, an excellent photographer.

There are a few things that I miss from the more decadent US of A. Among those things is the wide selection of soft-drinks available. Sure, a lot of the stuff is available here in Sweden, but there are quite a few flavors that aren’t. We can get regular Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper and various other products.

But we can’t get root beer, Mountain Dew or Cherry Coke. At least not through the official channels, although there are companies who import american products for us to enjoy at almost silly prices. Root beer is pretty common now. Mountain Dew and Cherry Coke is not.

(On another note: root beer is the preferred choice of drink for UNIX-people. Why? Well, why don’t you think about it for a while)

But today I found both of those. At really horrible prices I bought two cans of Cherry Coke and two of Mountain Dew. Combined with the amazing weather Umeå has today, I’m having an excellent day.

And in case anyone in Umeå is wondering where I bought them, you can find them at Nanna-kiosken downtown, right next to Vasaplan. They cost a horrendous 15 kronor (approx US$2.50) a piece.

Yeah, I kid you not! Computers can cause serious bodily harm.

Just a few minutes ago, stupid as I am, I reached into my darkened computer to adjust a fan slightly. I’m allergic to those LED-fans that blink and shine and hoot and do stupid stuff, so my computer is usually pitch-black inside. I normally keep a small flashlight handy for these online-adjustments, but this time I decided to be all manly and dumb. It’s just a simple adjustment!

KA-THUNK!

I accidentally brushed the earlier mentioned CPU-fan. Almost lopped my finger right off!

Not much to report today. I’m keeping my emotions in a tight reign. Today, I don’t want to break down. Today I want to feel good. The worries of the future will have to wait for just a while.

I went to a meeting with Arbetsförmedlingen (the swedish government employment agency) to discuss some of my future. I like my handler there, he’s an amiable fellow who is light on the bureaucracy and heavy on the empathy. Nice for a change. He’d been in contact with Rolf where I work-tried back in August. Even though Rolf and his supervisor were positive to having me back they were overloaded with work and felt that it was better to say no right now, but keep options open. I’m guessing the heavy workload is from them starting up the second server-room, and that’s probably consuming all the personnel they have.

None the less, my handler was positive and we’ve got a meeting set for mid-february to follow up on some things.

After that I picked up the birth control pills for my cat, and picked up my watch that had come back from repairs. Ann-Sofie gave me this really nice watch for christmas/birthday, unfortunately I quickly discovered that after a few hours it started lagging behind. Thus it was sent off for repairs. Or, rather not, since I just got a new identical watch instead. I guess the clockwork was fubar’ed, or something.

The weather today was horrible. Just around freezing, very windy and snow was falling from the sky as if it was the end of the world. The bus downtown got stuck once, and once slid backwards and hit some Toyota. Just a light touch, since the Toyota didn’t bother staying. None the less, it was slow going and the bus was almost 20 minutes behind schedule, which in turn made me late for that meeting I mentioned up there.

Here’s a photo I took with my phone while waiting for the bus this morning. Almost whiteout conditions. Of course the crappy phone-camera did an excellent job of not showing the snowfall and white conditions.

So, a few weeks ago I got a little bored. Started snapping pictures of my monitor with the lesser/smaller of our two digital cameras. Thought that it might make a fun wallpaper if enhanced in Photoshop. Did just that. Turned out rather geeky, and not one of my more spectacular wallpapers. But I looked at it again today and thought maybe someone might like it. As always it’s imaginatively titled, in this case “logfile“.

The text is a “tail -f” of the Apache logs from my domain. Most of the entries visible are regarding this blog. It’s 1280×1024, in PNG-format. Enjoy if you like it.

The seasons pass without us being able to affect them at all.

Spring is a very brief affair up in the northerner parts of Sweden, it’s usually taken care of in about a month or so - from start to finish. The first tinglings usually show up here in Umeå around the end of April, and by the end of May it’s full summer. I personally don’t like the first part, the slush and mush that covers everything as the snow melts more quickly than it can be dissipated. But I do love the other half of it, the dry half, the half when grass starts to grow again and the trees sprout leaves. I love how you go from wearing heavy jackets and pants to shorts and t-shirts in the period of just a few weeks.

Summers are absolutely gorgeous up here. Anyone who thinks that summers up in the northern parts of Sweden are chilly affairs have obviously never been here. Even though Umeå is quite a bit south of the arctic circle we get a similar phenomenon to the midnight sun, and there’s no lack of warmth. The great summers are mostly thanks to the gulf-stream, making sure that we get shorts-inducing temperatures.

Fall (autumn) is something that I both love and loathe. I love the first half, the dance of colors that takes place in every tree. I love taking walks and soaking it all in. The other part is not so great though, and I think most people who experience it will agree with me. It’s the part where all the leaves have long since fallen off, and the darkness of winter has arrived, but not the snow. It’s very cold, very wet, and there’s no snow to reflect the light at night so everything is a compact darkness.

That part ended last night. As I was getting ready for bedways I took a gander out the window. It was snowing. I had no choice but to go out and snap some quick shots of it.

And today it lookes like this. I was lazy and took this shout out through the office-window, but it still looks a lot more inviting. I’m doubtful as to whether this snow will stay put, I think the ground is still too warm to make it last. But it sure looks cozy, and more snow will fall.

UPDATE: As I suspected it didn’t last very long. I was surprised to find the snow still here the day after it arrived, but the day after that it had turned to slush and later the same day it was all gone. The first snow never lasts.

Today was the big day. The day that I mentioned in an earlier posting.

About 9 in the morning I took my bicycle down to town and met with some people. I met with the cheery girl that I up until now only knew as a voice on the phone. Her name was Linda and she was as cheery in real-life as she was on the phone. She did however have a very soft voice and I had some trouble hearing her at times, but other than that she was nice. I also met with one of the department-heads for the IT & Telecommunications department in the municipality. The third person was a man named Rolf, and it turned out that he would be my supervisor for the duration of this project. They were also very professional and we got along swimmingly.

We chatted a bit about what they do, and what I needed from them. All in all it was very efficient and I felt confident that this would work out to something beneficial.

Umeå municipality does all of its support in-house. They have a department that recieves whatever need fixed from all the parts of the system (schools, social system, the municipality itself) and then delegates it to a team of technicians. There’s some travel included in the job, since not everyone is located in the same building. The schools also tend to have a technician working to take care of the day-to-day events that need solved, but if they need bigger guns they just call someone up and schedule something. The municipality also runs its own server-park dedicated to all the systems that are needed to maintain the municipality - finances, schedules, payment, workers. Everything is managed in-house instead of subcontracted.

I also learned that Umeå was one of the earliest municipalities to take advantage of computerization, and have been doing this since the 1960’s. Kinda neat. It’s also interesting since a large number of people in the south of Sweden has a prejudiced attitude that northernes usually are some kind of troglodytes barely capable of not dragging their knuckles when they walk.

For my own part, I’m going to go through a two-week trial now, to see if this works well both for me and for the IT & Telecommunications department. We’re starting off soft, and on Tuesday my first day starts. We aimed for 10 hours of work per week (5 days @ 2 hours per day) but I suggested that we change this to 3 hours for three days instead. I felt that two hours a day was too little to get anything done, and I’d rather have it dispensed on slightly longer periods over fewer days.

That pretty much sums it all up. I’m really excited about this, somehow a blog-post just doesn’t convey it properly!

On a side-note, I’ve gotta say that we’re having a truly gorgeous fall up here! I arrived a lot earlier than expected, and this allowed me to relax a while. I took some snapshots while relaxing, and these two are somewhat pretty.

One of the grassy areas outside the municipal building. They’re remodeling inside, thus the ladder and crap in the background. The lawn was covered with dry leaves from the trees, and crunched nicely when tread upon. I took this photo after I was finished inside.

I sat in a nearby graveyard. It’s very calm and relaxing, and whenever I’m in the area and have time to spare I go there and sit a while. I don’t have any particular morbid interest in graveyards, but I do find them very calming and inspirational. Today the lighting was very conductive, and even though the fall-sun didn’t warm very much it was still very nice to sit there and ponder things.

Min far håller på att gå igenom sina bilder. Han har tusentals bilder i varierande grad av kvalité - allt från pressfoton till skolfoton, allt från natur till betong, allt från kändisar till okändisar. Han går igenom dem nu och avgör vad som ska sparas, och i vilken form det ska sparas. Det som inte sparas som fysiska bilder sparas som digitala bilder.

Han skickade en bunt med bilder som blivit scannade och digitaliserade. En av dem föreställer mig och min bror med våran morfar. Vi spelar vad som ser ut som en PacMan-klon. En bild jag inte har något minne av men som föreställer ett för länge sen försvunnet ögonblick.

Technorati Tags: nostalgi, morfar, pac-man, arkadspel, foto

Jag var nere i centrum idag. Det är (stora) saker i rullning som jag ska skriva om senare, men just nu är det inte färdiglagat och inte redo för servering.

Hursom, jag hade lite dötid mellan två olika saker och spenderade en stor del av denna inne i en musikaffär jag inte tidigare besökt. Det här var den sorten som sålde instrument och inte skivor, och jag hittade två saker med stor vill-ha faktor. Den första var en Korg MicroX, en jättekul liten wavetable-synth med inbyggd MIDI-controller och lite lagom godis. Prislapp lite över fyra lakan. Jätterolig pryl, jag stod en lång stund och lattjade med den samtidigt som jag fäktade bort expediter. Jag gjorde också ett besök i trumavdelningen och provspelade ett par Roland V-Drum (som jag skrev om för två år sen) och hade hur kul som helst. Känslan är faktiskt kuslig i trummorna med nätskinn, det känns exakt som “riktiga” trummor. En trevlig fördel för oss som bor i lägenhet är också att det enda egentliga ljudet från trummorna är ett dovt “tocktock”. Otroligt lajbans, tills jag såg vad sakerna kostade - lite under 18.000 kronor. Dock ingick hage och “cymbaler” men inte någon pedal. Det var nedsatt från 21.000, och när jag kikade på samma rigg i en annan musikaffär kostade den över 25 lakan. Ändå en bra bit utanför min ekonomiska räckvidd. Men man kan ju drömma…

Iaf. Jag var på väg till den andra saken och såg den här skylten på vägen dit. Reklam för en ny bilmodell från KIA.

Om någon inte ser det heter denna bil alltså

cee’d_sw

Exakt sådär. Hur uttalar man det? Jag gissar att man tydligen ska uttala det med rätt sorts font också eftersom skylten byter font när modellnamnet kommer. Jag gillar hur man klämt in en underscore ( _ ) mitt i bilnamnet - hur ska den uttalas? KIA har ju visserligen en förkärlek för udda bilnamn, men det här är väl ett nytt rekord. Snart låter man väl som en afrikansk bushmänniska när man ska grymta och klicka sig genom uttalet för deras bilnamn.

Nästa steg blir väl att hitta på ett eget KIA-språk bara för bilnamnen, och sen får man gå på kvällskurs för att lära sig det…

Technorati Tags: Korg, microX, Roland, trummor, digitalt, kia, cee’d_sw, v-drum, underscore, bilnamn, musikinstrument