random bits

tsumego

2011-11-20T20:21:00.004+01:00

In class today we had a quite interesting tsumego. I was amused.

Very amused.

the Vencie of the far east

2011-07-16T17:12:00.014+02:00

During our stay in Shanghai we took one day off to visit the city of Zhouzhuang (周庄镇), a town in Jiangsu province built around water with canal streets throughout big parts of the city. The town has, since a couple of years, a strong focus on tourism; despite that the town still is very beautiful and most of the houses feel and look genuine - at least on the outside..
There are a number of cities like this around China, but this is the most famous one.

We walked around the town for several hours - looking inside houses that used to belong to someone famous such as a Mayor or a government official.

A home entertainment system

After that we had lunch, among other things some lung fish, some of their famous pork and some much longed after ice cream (the air was humid and the temperature was around 35°C).

James and Sally managed to play several games before lunch. They attracted quite a few pussled looks :)

After lunch we took a tour with a canal boat to rest and also enjoy the scenery.
Felix and Sally bought some dragon whiskers (sorry no picture) which is a famous local candy made from very thin and tightly twined strains of sugar. Quite nice!
Actually you can find these all over Asia it seems. It's made in the same way as stretched noodles, except that they also use some sort of flour to keep the sugar from sticking.

Article on Shanghai go camp

2011-07-12T05:50:00.001+02:00

This article was published today on go game guru - Well done Antonio!

In Hangzhou

2011-07-11T11:22:00.002+02:00

I'm back in my favorite Chinese city - Hangzhou. We're staying at the Tianyuan tower again together with some 60 Chinese kids from all over China.

Had an interesting experience in the lobby bar. I tried to order peanuts.

- Do you have any peanuts?
- Peanuts? Eh..
- Never mind.. I'll have a brownie instead
*waitress stares at translation aid*
*waitress giggles*
- No sir, sorry. We do not have penis.

Shanghai, take 2

2011-07-05T11:01:00.004+02:00

Since June 24th I've been in Shanghai attending the Shanghai go camp. We're at the same place as in 2009 - SISU Songjiang campus - which is just lovely! I really like this place, even the mosquitoes that seem to have an amourus relation to me - and only me.

We are quite a small group, compared to experience go last year and the trip in 2009. I like it since we get a lot of attention, but I would also like if there were more people here. This year we have a swede, a fin, three people from Spain, two Americans, one Canadian and two people from Hong Kong! The venue can support quite a lot of people and the accommodations are outstanding! I sincerely hope that they will continue this camp 'cause I want to go back here! :)

This week we are staying here in Shanghai, after that we are going to one of my favourite places in the world - Hangzhou! As last time, in 2009, we are going to stay at the Tian Yuan Tower hotel. I'm really looking forward to it :)

adventures in vbscript

2011-04-08T00:56:00.002+02:00

This weekend I'll need to do some recreational therapy programming in SML, Haskel or Lisp.

Well.. I have this problem at work that I need to solve. It involves modifying a lot of configurations on several windows workstations. Yuck.
Not only that; I had to restart services, call some some services, alter the configuration back again and restart services. Again.

Now I'm really not a windows guy. Working with workstations is really not my cup of tea either. And our setup is pretty old and locked down. So if I'm going to script this I don't have much choice - I'll have to use vbscript; because that's what is available (and still usable to some extent).

I do not care much for vbscript. I've tinkered with it to help friends with their problems, but I've never really sat down to write something that I'd care to use before. "Oh well", I thought, "When you get your hands dirty and actually start producing something you usually end up with a better understanding of the concepts of the language and you won't mind as much." After all, I don't loathe php much anymore. And I almost like perl sometimes. (g)Awk is quite practical.

I was so wrong! So Naive!

The error handling... if you could call it that is just horrible. You can trigger an error yourself, that's not so troublesome. The problem is that if you do this from a function returning a value you are screwed. The assignment after the function call will override your error. Very useful. Not.
Solution: Do not return values from a function. Use Call by Reference - which let's me segway smothely to the next rotten egg.

The calling conventions used, for historical reasons, is something I'm going to scare children with when I grow old. You do not want to know. Trust me. If you don't, read this. I strongly advice you NOT to do so. You'll need hard liquor. Lots of it. And a shower. And then therapy.

I could go on for ever, but I need some sleep and my script needs to test itself tomorrow. Everything seems to be working and the tests seem to be in good shape.

I sincerely hope that this is the last thing I ever write in vbscript or vb.

experience go in china 2010

2010-07-18T21:01:00.000+02:00

the great wall

2010-07-18T20:59:00.001+02:00

the summer palace

2010-07-18T20:58:00.000+02:00

the forbidden city

2010-07-18T20:57:00.001+02:00

banking in china

2010-07-15T11:25:00.003+02:00

Two days ago I showed Mikołay where to exchange money. I've never been to a bank in China before so it was sure to be a great new experience ;)

Mikołay wanted to change some euros and dollars to RMB. By accident I glanced at the clock when it was his turn so I know exactly how much time it took for him to complete this task. 31 minutes and six different forms later he had succeded to get the precious RMB. No wonder banking costs are so high in China :)

Everything is possible in China but nothing is ever easy (not strictly true, but you get what I mean).

totoro bread

2010-07-15T11:19:00.003+02:00

It's raining today, not a lot but there is also thick fog all over town. I've spent the day sleeping in and doing laundry. For lunch I headed down to the bakery to buy a sandwich. Then I saw this!
I simply had to have it :)

beijing - short update

2010-07-11T07:24:00.003+02:00

So, some of you have asked me for updates. I have a few posts to write up about the forbidden city and the summer palace (where we went yesterday); but to be honest there hasn't really been much to write about - at least not things I'd like to share with you.

What I can write though is that I really like Beijing - or rather Wodaokuo. It's not as nice as Shanghai, but on the other hand it is not as humid here. Shanghai has less polution but it doesn't really bother me that much.

One thing Beijing has going for itself is that once you get out of your comfort zone it is really easy to do things on your own. Most things are really quite accessible by subway or bus - and the nightlife in Wodaokuo is pretty awesome. Especially since there are both a lot of Chinese and Western people studying in this area.

My back has improved a lot during this trip, It's almos sad that I have to leave soon; would be nice to see what another month here could have accomplished.

beijing day 15 - things to do on the subway

2010-06-30T18:39:00.003+02:00

Today I a rare thing happened. On subway line 13 I got stuck near the same guy and his (presumable) girlfriend for the second time. The reason I recognized him was because he persisted in showing his girlfriend pictures of models on his cellphone. The girlfriend started to look really angry; but nothing happened the first time. The second time I ran into them she actually took his cellphone and started hitting him with it while yelling. He had it coming I guess since everyone around them just smiled :)

java 4-ever

2010-06-30T18:22:00.002+02:00

Although the "trailer" contains some gross inaccuracies and is a bit zealot it is quite easy to appreciate this short video snippet if you - as I - do love programming :)

+5 for programming whilst copulating (OK, not really - but it was funny :)

beijing day 10 - short summary

2010-06-29T20:58:00.002+02:00

I'd like to write more - but this will have to suffice. Sorry.

Black to live.

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Japanese]SZ[19]KM[0.00]
PW[White]PB[Black]AW[pa][pb][pc][qc][rc][sc][qd][rd][qe][se][qf][rf]AB[qa][qb][rb][sb])

beijing day 9 - second league game

2010-06-27T07:05:00.002+02:00

Today there was no lecture since we have an 8p "teacher" visiting us in the afternoon. Instead we had our league game in the morning. I played Fredrik (AKA Gims from Sweden). It was a fairly comfortable game despite some criticism from the Brian who reviewed our game. He pointed at better moves that I should have played.

Many of the moves he suggested for me I had considered but discarded since I wanted to play it very safe. There were some nice things I hadn't seen though so it was a quite interesting review.

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Japanese]SZ[19]KM[0.00]
GN[League game]PW[Gims]PB[Peter Lundqvist]BR[2k]EV[Experience go in China]RO[2]PC[China, Beijing, Haidian]AN[Peter Lundqvist]US[Peter Lundqvist]RE[B+Resign]
;B[pd]
;W[cp]
;B[pq]
;W[dc]
;B[ep]
;W[hp]
;B[dm]
;W[eo]
;B[fo]
(;W[fp]C[Overplay]
(;B[dp]
;W[do]
;B[co]
(;W[go]
;B[fn]
;W[fq]
;B[dn]
(;W[dq]
;B[en]
;W[cq]
(;B[de]
;W[fd]
;B[cc]
(;W[dd]
;B[cd]
;W[ee]
;B[df]
;W[ef]
;B[dg]
;W[eg]
;B[eh]
;W[fh]
;B[ei]C[Very good for black]
;W[nd]
;B[pf]
(;W[nf]C[Overplay, but maybe it is necessary due to the left side]
(;B[nc]
;W[mc]
;B[oc]
(;W[od]C[Aji keshi]
;B[pc]
;W[mb]
;B[kg]C[Good]
;W[nh]
(;B[ki]
(;W[pg]
;B[qg]
;W[qh]
;B[qf]
(;W[ph]
;B[po]C[Good]
;W[mj]
;B[kk]
;W[fi]
;B[kq]LB[lq:A]C[Too far; should be at A]
;W[fj]
;B[ej]
(;W[ll]
;B[kl]
;W[lm]
;B[hm]
;W[km]
;B[il]
;W[mq]C[Good]
;B[ql]C[Very good. Black is now far ahead.]
;W[kj]
;B[jj]
;W[lj]
;B[ji]
;W[ik]
;B[jk]
;W[hl]
;B[im]
;W[jm]
;B[jl]C[White resigns.])
(;W[km]C[White still must fight if he is to win the game]))
(;W[po]C[White should take the big move]
;B[ph]
;W[pi]
;B[og]
;W[ng]
;B[qi]
;W[qj]
;B[rh]
;W[pj]))
(;W[qh]LB[qe:A]C[White should threaten the peep at A]
;B[qg]
;W[ph]
;B[qo]
;W[kk]TR[kg][ki]C[White must fight and put preassure on the two black stones.
]))
(;B[ke]C[Black should decend]))
(;W[mb]C[White should simply decend to avoid destroying aji in the corner]
;AW[qh]C[Later, if white has a stone on the outside]
;B[]
;W[qc]
;B[qd]
;W[pb]
;B[ob]
;W[rd]
;B[re]
;W[rb]))
(;B[jc]C[Black should just invade]))
(;W[kd]C[White should just take teritory to regain some balance in the game])
(;W[pc]
;B[qc]
;W[oc]
(;B[qb]
;W[kd]C[Also possible, but black may instead opt to invade.])
(;B[jc]C[Playable for black])))
(;W[cb]
;B[cd]
;W[eb]
;B[dh]C[White should just play joseki to avoid losing the corner entierly]))
(;B[eq]C[The cut is dangerous for white since..]
;W[er]
;AB[jq]C[If black later has a stone at k3 the cut is sente]
;B[dr]
(;W[fr]
;B[cr]
;W[br]
;B[bq]
;W[bp]
;B[ar]
;W[aq]
;B[bs]C[Bad ko for white])
(;W[cr]
;B[fr]
;W[ds]
;B[gr]
;W[hr]
;B[gq]
;W[gp]
;B[hq]
;W[ip]
;B[iq]C[Disaster for white])))
(;W[cq]
;B[en]
;W[dr]C[White should avoid the cut att e3 in the game since k3 is sente]))
(;W[fn]
;B[go]
;W[cn]
;B[bo]
;W[cq]C[Very bad for black]))
(;B[do]
;W[eq]
;B[dp]
;W[fq]
;B[en]
;W[dq]C[Bad comparedt to joseki]))
(;W[dp]
;B[en]
;W[eq]
;B[do]
;W[fq]C[Joseki, but slightly good for black])
(;W[en]
;B[dp]
;W[cn]
;B[fn]
;W[em]
;B[cq]
;W[co]
;B[bq]LB[pd:A][fp:B]C[Joseki, good for black localy, but white gets two ko threats at A after the cut att B]))

beijing - mr pizza

2010-06-26T16:15:00.002+02:00

beijing day 8 - first league game

2010-06-26T11:05:00.004+02:00

Oh righty then. After a night of delightful Chinese party noises when I was trying to sleep it was finaly time for the serious teaching to start. In the morning we had a lecture on the 4-4 keima corner enclosure. It was a very good lecture and Jeff was drilling us hard. The only bad thing was that I had a hard time reading the variations since I almost fell asleep when I tried :/

Luckily I remember enough to review the lesson myself when I'm not feeling to tired.

During the lunch I had some food (it tasted a lot like any ordinary Swedish casserole) and tried to rest a bit.

After lunch we were divided into groups. Our group was further divided into two more groups ince the middle group is so big. I play in the C1 group (I believe) and for my first league game I played Helen (4k) from Czechoslovakia. It was a quite easy game, but I was yet again forced to fight due to a poor choice of direction after the first joseki (which incidentally was incorrect :S)

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Chinese]SZ[19]KM[0.00]
GN[Experience go in China 2010]PW[Peter Lundqvist]PB[Helena]WR[2k]BR[4k]DT[2010-06-26]EV[League game 1st week]RO[1]PC[China, Beijing, Haidian]AN[Peter Lundqvist]US[Peter Lundqvist]RE[W+Resign]
;B[cp]
;W[pp]
;B[dc]
;W[pd]
;B[nq]
;W[lq]
;B[qn]
;W[np]
;B[mp]
;W[mq]
;B[qq]
(;W[oq]
;B[qp]
(;W[de]C[Wrong direction]
;B[ce]
;W[cf]
;B[cd]
;W[ep]
;B[dn]
;W[cq]
;B[bq]
;W[dq]
;B[bo]
(;W[df]
(;B[cj]C[Black is already strong here so this move is not necessary]
;W[ec]
;B[eb]
;W[dd]
;B[cc]
;W[fc]
;B[fb]
;W[gc]
;B[gp]C[White must fight (this was the plan)]
;W[fo]
;B[go]
;W[fm]
(;B[dl]C[Too small]
;W[gn]
;B[hn]
;W[hm]
;B[in]LB[jl:B][im:C][ip:A]C[White can play A, B or C]
;W[ip]
;B[hp]
(;W[io]C[Bad move]
;B[ho]
;W[jl]TR[io][ip]C[The white stones are very weak]
;B[kn]
(;W[lo]
;B[lm]
;W[ml]
(;B[mm]
;W[ll]
;B[im]
;W[il]
;B[hl]
;W[gm]
;B[om]
;W[nl]
;B[nr]
(;W[nm]
;B[mo]
;W[mn]
;B[ln]
;W[nn]
;B[lp]
;W[kp]
;B[ko]
;W[no]
;B[lo]
;W[jq]C[Game is over]
;B[jo]
;W[iq]
;B[kr]
;W[kq]
;B[or]
;W[jm]
;B[jn]
;W[gr]C[Black resigns])
(;W[mo]
;B[nm]
;W[km]
;B[ln]
;W[pk]C[good enoughfor white]))
(;B[ll]C[Only move]
;W[lk]
;B[mm]
;W[nl]
;B[nm]
;W[ol]
;B[om]
;W[qk]))
(;W[lp]
;B[mo]
;W[lo]
;B[ln]
;W[mn]C[white can attack this way instead]))
(;W[iq]C[The proper move]))
(;B[gn]C[This is the only move]
;W[fn]))
(;B[fc]C[Black should protect]
;W[dj]))
(;W[hp]C[Even though white can fight - it is to big to avoid protecting the territory on the bottom.]
;B[df]
;W[cg]
;B[ee]
;W[cj]C[Even if black cuts white is ok.]))
(;W[ep]C[The correct direction]
;B[dn]
;W[cq]
;B[bq]
;W[dq]
;B[bo]
;W[hp]C[Good for white])
(;W[eq]C[The correct direction - probably the best move]))
(;W[qp]C[The proper move]
;B[op]
;W[no]
;B[oo]
;W[oq]
;B[pq]
;W[nr]
;B[on]C[Best choice for black]))

beijing day 7 (ok I didn't count so well last time..)

2010-06-25T16:37:00.007+02:00

shoping
Today started with a breakfast and a mild panic trying to catch up with the people who were going to go and buy some go equipment. We had misinterpreted their plan and had to hurry to try and find them. As it turns out all this hurrying lead to a lot of waiting, but it usually is worth it.

After a slightly hurried subway ride and a mad race to get a cab (not always that easy) all twenty or so of us arrived at the quite interesting looking sports mall where they sold go equipment. Yes. You read that correctly. A sports mall. For Chinese people sports is equal to competition - i.e. they do not seem to make much difference between football, track and field, hockey or go, bridge, mahjong, poker, chess, xiangxhi (chinese chess). The mall was basically a rundown warehouse with three floors of "storage area"-like "shops". In this mall there were no less than three shops with a lot of go equipment - but many stores carried some simple go equipment as well.

My plan was to only buy 2-3 magnetic sets. My mission failed. Badly. This is what I bought:

1 2cm thick goban of some sort of spruce
2 magnetic go sets
1 clock
1 set of double convex yunzi stones with a "bonus" plastic board

There was much shame ^^; After that we simply took a cab back during rush hour; the ride home took twice the time of the ride to the store. Luckily we caught a cab with air conditioning!

midsummer celebration

The plan was to go with Paul (a British guy staying at our apartment), the Finn (Max) and the Swedes (Me, Johanna, Gims, not Huang (since he is still sick)) and go for dumplings at a restaurant which the teachers claims has excellent dumplings but is too far away for the whole group to visit. Gims couldn't be bothered with the cab ride though so he decided to do something else.

However Max - the man who is CONSTANTLY nagging us about getting dumplings - chickened out when it turned out that no one had brought the home adress in Chinese. So we went to a nearby supermarket where we suspected there might be some more dumplings on the table. Indeed there was and Max ordered insane amounts of it.

After the restaurant we headed back to our apartment and played pair go and a few games while we watched max drink gin and tonic :)

Tomorrow the league games will start. Time to get some shuteye!

beijing day 4-7

2010-06-25T04:09:00.004+02:00

Nothing much special has happened the past days. Some lessons, some games, eating Chinese food and sleeping. Well, yesterday morning there was no lesson for me since I had a really bad head ache. Worst one I've ever had I think. But it cleared up during the day. Thanks to some helpful friends I got a summary of the lecture afterwards.

After the headache I also lost the first game to a student in my class. I was quite far ahead but stumbled during the final endgame. Inexplicable really; somewhat amazed.. so I blame it on the former head ache ;)

We've had two different kinds of Beijing duck. The difference wasn't as big as the price would suggest though. Still it was a tasty duck (as always).

Another thing worthy of mentioning was this chengrish sign over a Mr pizza shop: "Mr Pizza - Love for women". I cannot imagine what the rationale could be for that slogan.. but I think it was the biggest photo opportunity since we arrived. There were many comments along the lines of "Hi, I'm the pizza delivery boy - did you order sausage pizza?" Sadly I had no camera with me at the time - I'll see if I can sneak a picture from someone later.

beijing day 3

2010-06-21T17:08:00.003+02:00

I woke up feel ing very well this morning. Not the slightest bit tired. "Great, no jetlag!" I thought; I was poorly mistaken. T he last couple of hours have been a fight against the sooo nice and cosy bed - but I persisted.

Today we had our first real lecture. We're over 40 people here now so it was quite crowded. We split up in three groups, 1 dan and stronger, 1-4 kyu, 5kyu and weaker but I've heard that the groups will be adjusted during the week.

The first half of the day was spent being drilled in joseki. It was quite hard to stay focused though since I knew most of the variations. Every now and then though there would appear something new and interesting - I hope I didn't miss anything while I dozed off :)

During the afternoon we had lunch, registered with the police and played a "teaching game". Not much of a teaching game though - we were paired up with a stronger/weaker player and was told to record the game. I played Gregory Santone (4k) from Connecticut (IIRC).

I goofed up in the beginning and had to fight to keep som pressure up. In the end he cracked completely and gave up. I feel I was somewhat lucky since he played quite solidly and he really didn't give me much to work with. I'm no fan of fighting games like this..

(;GM[1]FF[4]CA[UTF-8]AP[CGoban:3]ST[2]
RU[Chinese]SZ[19]KM[7.50]
GN[Game 1]PW[Peter Lundqvist]PB[Gregory Santone]WR[2k]BR[4k]DT[2010-06-21]RE[W+Resign]
;B[dp]
;W[pd]
;B[cd]
;W[pp]
;B[nc]
;W[lc]
;B[ic]
;W[nd]
;B[od]
;W[oe]
;B[oc]
;W[pc]
;B[md]
;W[ne]
;B[mc]
;W[fq]
;B[pe]
;W[qe]
;B[pf]
;W[qf]
;B[pg]
;W[nh]
;B[ng]
;W[me]
;B[ld]
;W[mg]
;B[nf]
;W[mf]
;B[oh]
;W[ni]
;B[pj]
;W[qh]
;B[oi]
;W[nj]
;B[pl]
;W[qk]
;B[pk]
;W[qj]
;B[nl]
;W[cn]
;B[lh]
;W[mh]
;B[lk]
;W[li]
;B[np]
;W[pn]
;B[eo]
;W[iq]
;B[pq]
;W[qq]
;B[oq]
;W[qr]
;B[ki]
;W[kh]
;B[lg]
;W[kg]
;B[lf]
;W[le]
;B[kf]
;W[ke]
;B[jf]
;W[kd]
;B[lb]
;W[kc]
;B[kb]
;W[ob]
;B[mb]
;W[kj]
;B[ji]
;W[lj]
;B[kl]
;W[jj]
;B[ii]
;W[ed]
;B[ie]
;W[cc]
;B[il]
;W[ij]
;B[hi]
;W[hj]
;B[gi]
;W[gj]
;B[fj]
;W[gl]
;B[fk]
;W[hl]
;B[gp]
;W[gq]
;B[ip]
;W[fl]
;B[em]
;W[el]
;B[dm]
;W[cm]
;B[dl]
;W[ek]
;B[di]
;W[im]
;B[ik]
;W[kk]
;B[jl]
;W[mk]
;B[ll]
;W[ml]
;B[om]
;W[mm]
;B[nn]
;W[kn]
;B[hq]
;W[hr]
;B[hp]
;W[jr]
;B[kq]
;W[kr]
;B[lq]
;W[bp]
;B[ln]
;W[lm]
;B[jn]
;W[jm]
;B[km]
;W[ko]
;B[hm]
;W[in]
;B[hn]
;W[jo]
;B[io]
;W[jn]
;B[lo]
;W[hk]
;B[bc]
;W[dc]
;B[bb]
;W[gc]
;B[cf]
;W[ib]
;B[jc]
;W[hb]
;B[jb]
;W[ge]
;B[cq]
;W[bq])

bejing day 1-2

2010-06-20T15:33:00.008+02:00

So, I arrived in Beijing yesterday.
No, sadly everything went ok, no hospital visit this time ;)

The area were we live is nice enough and all of the participants seem quite nice. I share the apartment with Max (Finland) and Paul (Great Britain). Its a three room apartment on the 19th floor overlooking a quite busy four lane street. It looks spectacular at night! .. to bad it's slightly annoying with the Chinese peoples love for use of the car horn though.

Part of the view from our living room window

Not much to write about yet since all we've done so far is eat, shop and eat some more.
We've had a lecture as well but it was quite high level for me I dosed off at one point and after that it was quite hard to follow the review. The lecture consisted of our head teacher, Peter Liu, reviewing the game between Tian Ye (1p) and Benjaming Teuber (6d) from Amsterdam Open. After that we had simul games with our teachers.

I had a quite nice game against Brian with four stones. I really think I had him but I made two blunders by playing too impatiently in the beginning of the endgame. He looked quite troubled before those blunders.. Oh well. I don't mind losing to a teacher ;)

Tomorrow we start our first real class; I'm really looking forward to it!

motivation

2010-05-22T01:21:00.001+02:00

Not new. Interesting. Well done. Nice presentation.

go players are nice people

2010-05-09T14:59:00.003+02:00

From Hajin's blog:

I have a theory that Go players are all good people. Playing Go means one knows how to accept his/her own mistakes and defeats, how to respect other people (opponents) and admits the fact that no one can win every time. So Go players are modest. And modest people are usually friendly and easy going.

Yep - that sounds about right :)

lucid upgrade 'tainted' kgs

2010-05-08T20:25:00.007+02:00

Last Thursday I upgraded my Ubuntu desktop at home from Karmic to Lucid (10.4). Everything went almost without a hitch. One of the things I noticed was - however - that the screen redraws in my kgs-client had deteriorated. I didn't think much of it since I could live with it.

Today however - xrillo brought to my attention that his sound was misbehaving in the client and this of course called for further investigation. It turns out that lucid had depricated sun-java6 and substituted it with openjdk. The client works just fine though - apart from the mentioned snags above.

Since canonical are not completely crazy they still provide a repository for sun-java6 - the partner repository.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin sun-java6-fonts

If you still have problems after this you should have a look at what java-alternatives you have installed with

$ update-alternatives -l
java-6-openjdk 1061 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk
java-6-sun 63 /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

and then set the the java-alternative you desire (sun-java-6 in this case).

$ sudo upate-alternatives -s java-6-sun

And after that you should be good to go :)

Update:
I forgot to mention that the openjdk software also broke chinese character support (well - maybe it didn't, but it was hard to tell with all the pretty colors where the characters were supposed to be..). The change mentioned above will fix this.

dissappointed

2010-05-05T09:31:00.003+02:00

I've been a long time fan of the empathy project. Mostly because they work so hard to integrate their project into the desktop and they provide an awesome API.

Since a few weeks back though the 'awesomeness' has been curbed. Trying out ubuntu at work I realized that something with the network functionality was.. not behaving. At work we have a br0ken internet (as most workplaces do). It's not only NATed and firewalled - we suffer from proxies as well[1]. Now, most of the GNOME desktop (which I really enjoy) can manage this through the System -> Preferences -> Network Proxy settings. But as you might have guessed empathy gleefully ignores this. Retarded.

I'm not sure who to blame - the application or GNOME. It's been included in the desktop as the default IM application for quite some time now (LP bug, GNOME bug) and nobody has stepped up to fix this. For a desktop that aims to be 'better' that's just FAIL. For an application that strives to be integrated into the desktop that's a huge FAIL.

Broken in the sense that the point-to-point metaphor has been broken. I'll admit that my point is a bit stoic and that firewalls can be quite useful - but it still breaks the internet.

why I dislike (most) comercial software

2009-12-27T13:47:00.004+01:00

First I wanted to write "hate" instead of dislike - but that is not the truth. There are plenty of commercial software that I like - but most software vendors give me the creeps.

They're nice and friendly people that (at least most of the time) want to help you using their excellent software. The thing is - most of them have the morals of a used cars salesman. Very few tell you up front how much they are going to charge you; and if they do they usually have an elaborate rebate system that only they know about.

This very thing makes it hard for you - the customer - to carefully sit back and weigh your options.

Sure. All you have to do is contact them and ask for a price. They'll give you an estimate. An estimate?! Yeah.. because they know that when you are asking them you usually don't have all the details right anyway.

This is bull. Why use elaborate licensing schemes? Why not simply state the terms up front so that every one (including your competitors) can see for themselves? Are you that scared that your software will come out looking inferior? Then why should I buy your product in the first place? Oh...

This is the number one reason i like Open Source. I know what I get. If I need help I can ask a skilled consultant that more often than not speak my preferred language - tech!

This is also one of the reasons I don't particularly enjoy Open Source software with a commercial option - they usually try the same crap as the commercial vendors.

I can live with it; but that does not mean I have to like it.

why virtualbox?

2009-10-26T09:54:00.004+01:00

I received some questions about why I switched to VirtualBox from vmWare.
The answer will probably not excite you: it is packaged for ubuntu. What that means is that I automatically get updates to VirtualBox whenever I update the system.

It was no big deal for me - I have no need to interact with others right now; it also helps that VirtualBox is a quite polished product that serves my needs just fine.

ps.
3 days to ubuntu 9.10!
ds.

vboxvfs cache problems

2009-10-20T20:45:00.005+02:00

I really like VirtualBox. It's polished, fast and works just fine for what I do.
One of the things I do is develop web applications and trying out new technologies. So far everything has been great - and they still are - sort of.

I few weeks back I had an 'interesting' CSS cache problem. Firefox just wouldn't invalidate the cache. I didn't think much of it at the time - but the file was actually updated. The thing was - the length of the file was not - giving Firefox gibberish at the end of the CSS file. At the time I blamed Firefox.

Today, however, I found a similar issue with PNG files. I edited a file and.. when I reloaded it in the web browser it just wouldn't update the PNG. I cleared the browser cache, I restarted firefox, I restarted apache on the web server (on the virtual machine) but no - it still wouldn't update. So I tried to unmount the share to the host system (a vboxsf mount) and remounting it. No matter how I tried the guest operatingsystem only gave me protocol errors. So.. I rebooted the virtual machine... and presto! No more old PNG files.

I've googled for similar problems but I only found the problem described on experts exchange (which I won't pay for). So I wonder: Is there anyone out there who has a clue by four to share?

kära sj - wtf?!

2009-09-08T00:17:00.006+02:00

The following is a rant about SJ - Swedens state own railway company.

Jag måste säga att jag aldrig har varit särskilt förtjust i SJs "marknadspriser" (att liknas med en mellanstadie-elevs försök att illustrera tillgång och efterfrågan), det senaste tilltaget med personliga biljetter har många kommenterat bättre. Men nu är läget som det är och eftersom jag vill till Göteborg i november så är det hög tid att boka biljetter.

November är ju ganska långt bort i tiden och vem vet vad som händer i dessa influensa-tider? För att vara på den säkra sidan så vill man kanske beställa tilläggstjänsten återbetalningsskydd - det vill i alla fall jag. Att denna tjänst kostar lite extra pengar är fullt förståeligt (i synnerhet nu när biljetterna är personliga) - det är ju något man vill ha. Men till vilket pris?
För den som inte orkar klicka på bilden:

	Resa	Återbetalningsskydd
Gävle-Göteborg	993 kr	1252kr
Göteborg-Gävle	747 kr	1482kr

Nu tänker vän av ordning att "det måste vara totalpriset de menar". Så är tyvärr icke fallet. Försäkringen är dyrare än själva resan. Visserligen så är det (om jag förstått det rätt) så att i händelse av inställd resa så får man tillbaka det man betalat minus bokningsavgiften (minst 7%). Detta är helt OK för mig.

Vad som inte är OK är att om jag åker så kostar resan mer än dubbelt så mycket pengar. För att överhuvud taget tjäna på att nyttja tjänsten så måste jag ställa in resan. Och gör jag det så är det en ren förlustaffär för mig. Hur tänkte ni nu SJ?

Som om det inte vore illa nog så är det helt omöjligt att använda de kontaktvägar SJ vill att man som kund ska använda. Använder jag deras web-support så har jag aldrig lyckats få något än standardiserade svar om att "Vi har tre typer av biljetter...", de läser inte ens dina frågor (förra gången jag försökte följa upp samma konstighet fick samma ärende samma svar tre gånger). Tack för det SJ! Det är serviceanda!

Frågar du på en station så blir resultatet än mer intressant: "Nehej.. det där låter orimligt. Men OJ! Du har ju rätt!" varpå ärendet rinner ut i sanden.

Telefonvägen är oprövad ska jag tillstå - men jag borde inte behöva gå den vägen 2009.

Snart börjar jag undra om ingen annan förstår det här och om jag är galen - jag menar att någon borde ju ha gjort en grundläggande sanity check?

Lite galen är jag förvisso för jag köpte resan (utan återbetalningsskydd) för jag vill till Göteborg på turnering. Dyrt blir det.

leksand open - day 1

2009-08-12T23:53:00.005+02:00

The first day was dedicated to a san-go tournament (three players per team rengo). We managed to scrape togeather four teams and played a round robin tournament with 45 min absolute time. I was the weakest player on my team - yay!

We managed to win two games and lose the final game. We lost it on time though - so I don't feel to bad about it.

leksand open

2009-08-12T00:58:00.003+02:00

I am now in Leksand for the annual Leksand Open.
Not too many players this year (to bad :() but the venue is really nice.

Tomorrow there is a rengo tournament on the schedule, the actual tournament does not start until thursday. Now it's time to catch some serious sleep :)

just over 24hrs to go :(

2009-07-13T14:18:00.002+02:00

I'm once again in Shanghai - this time just across the street (in an average hotel) to SISU in central Shangahi. We just walked out for dinner - which was quite enjoyable. I'm finding the sweet Shanghai food much easier now. The weather is great (30°C - feels like 36.8, 75% relative humidity) - dark and somewhat cloudy with a slight breeze.

Walking back from the restaurant I was hit by a big clue by four. In Hangzhou I had seen people dancing to tranceish music in the park by the West Lake. Later on I discovered that they weren't hosting a small rave - they were doing some sort of line dancing. Today we saw some elderly women dancing to music in a parking lot. Their routine was something very much like the easier programmes for "Friskis and Svettis" (a social form of workout that's quite popular in Sweden).

The people in Hangzhou might have been younger - but it was really hard to see in the night. This - according to some people - is actually quite common these days. Very nice to see - especially when a few of the people in our group joined in and failed misserably at following their danceroutine :)

In a bit more than 24 hours my flight leaves for Amsterdam and Sweden. I really wish I could stay longer - but I guess there is always next year. I'm not really sure of what to do now. Some people are going out partying - but I don't feel up to it. I'll probably go out and explore the surroundings a bit.

hangzhou - teaching

2009-07-12T09:23:00.006+02:00

I wanted to write something about the teaching here in Hangzhou; since most people are already in "departure mode" this is a good time.

Here in Hangzhou we were first split in two groups "stronger than 3d" and the rest. The strong group played in a round robin league and I and the others were split in two smaller groups that also played round robin tournaments.

On the first day we were overrun by a crowd of small people. The first thing we heard was "Quick! Line up! Three seconds!" and order was restored (temporarily).

Our opponents arrive!

These kids are between 5k and 3d. The little girl in front was just to cute - and very strong at reading. The guy left to her was even stronger I think - but an easier opponent (still impossible to win over though) since he didn't comment on the games as much :)

After every games we would review our games - sometimes with the aid of a teacher; after that the kids wrote down the game record from memory. I was sooo amazed at how they were able to do this. Only after the second week - after one of my games was reviewed in class I realized that maybe they only remembered their games to some extent.. ;-)

The kids teacher. A strong 5d player and a 10p teacher!

After the games the teacher would have prepeared four tsumego (life and death) problems for us to solve by ourselfes.

After lunch there would be a review of a game by a former World Amateur Go Champion (I'm not 100% sure about this information - needs some research).

After the review we have a short break and then we play two more games - followed by four more problems. The kids are noisy (they like belching :), a bit impatient - but that is to be expected. Some of us have more problems with this than others; for instance Johan (who is a bit slow with his games) had an opponent who crawled up on his chair and then faked sleeping :)

Another opponent of him started to be upset at the end of the day and said (according to the translator) "My tummy is flat! I want my hamburger! I want my fries!". He looked quite sad actually...

The little girl in the first picture moved my stones during the games - when I moved it back she moved it again. Then I tried to look a bit mad and moved it back.. she sighed, shrugged and twenty moves after that I was forced to resign xD

Since most people doing the teaching weren't very proficient in the english language we had a lot of help from our translators (who sometimes also act as teachers).

Ying translating for our teacher.

I think our translators deserve a special mentioning; they do an awesome job - and not only in class but whenever we want to do some weird touristy thing :) How they put up with us I don't know - but they really helped making our stay here in china enjoyable. Thank you Jenny, Luke, Leaves, Nikolas, Tam and Ying!

hangzhou - chinese weiqi league

2009-07-07T07:40:00.013+02:00

On Saturday the hotel we are staying at hosted a match in the Chinese Weiqi league (go league) - Hangzhou Supor (cookware company) vs Shanghai China Mobile.

For the first ten minutes we were allowed inside the room they played in to walk around and take pictures! How incredible is that?? It far exceeded my expectations of this trip!

Wang Tao(3d) vs Liu Shizhen(7d) [sgf]

Wang Lei(6d) vs Qiu Jun(8d) [sgf]

Liu Xing(7d) vs Hu Yaoyu(8d) [sgf]

During the game we replayed three of the games and tried to think of what the next move could be. We did surprisingly well except for some quite genious moves (for instance move 68 in Liu Xing vs Hu Yaoyu - wow!). It was a lot of work and quite tiring - but very entertaining!

In the afternoon someone really smart reviewed Liu Xing vs Hu Yaoyu for us (or at least as far as the game had come by that time). It was very interesting - but the variations and calculations in the fuseki were a bit overwhelming for me.

Luke and "Someone really smart" explaingin the game to us

After that we where free to do whatever we wanted. After hiking a bit around west lake we came back to the hotel and found out that Fredrik was playing beer go with some professionals.

We found a big part of our group in a hotel room watching Fredrik playing Liu Xing and later Wang Lei (both of the Hangzhou team). It was a bit awe inspiring to sit in the same room and watch Fredrik take 3 and four stones and stil not manageing to win a game :)

The day after when I was looking for the results (I had not heard all the results by then) I found this article on tom (translation) and it seems to me that it actually mentions our visiting group :)
I also found the complete results with the accompanying sgf files here - if somebody by chance would be interested. The game ended 4-0 to Hangzhou!

ps. I'm really sorry if I messed up any names, games and pictures! ds.

hangzhou - west lake

2009-07-05T07:43:00.003+02:00

The first day we were here was a day off. Max and I headed downtown to shop eat and have a look at West lake. After a nice lunch at pizza hut we headed down to west lake to see what all the fuss was about.

At first it seemed like any park near a lake. There were people performing, people walking around enjoying the sea breeze (oh how lovely after the stuffy Shanghai weather!). We saw a lot of statues of heroes and historic figures all over the place - something I later learned this place is famous for.

After we got as far as the Bai causeway we were quite thrilled by the scenery and the nice lake breeze. By chance we stumpled upon an entrance to a beautiful park that had steep paths leading up the hill. I think we walked around enjoying the scenery for well over two hours just on Solitary Hill.

hangzhou - this is where we stay

2009-07-05T05:31:00.012+02:00

First off - sorry for not writing for some time - I've been to tired or busy doing something else.

We've been in Hangzhou for one week now. This place is incredible. You just have to experience it yourself. I'm not necessarily talking about the place we are staying at - the whole city is incredible, especially the area around the West lake.

I'll write more about the west lake, but for now I'll write something about the place we stay at - Hangzhou Tianyuan Tower Hotel (right side).

The hotel is 34 for stories high - the 34th floor being the big rotating go stone on the top of the building which is home to - you guessed it - a restaurant.

What you probably do NOT guess is that the three buildings you see closest to the camera (the buildings to the left and right of the hotel) belong to the Hangzhou go association. Yup. That's correct. This towns go association owns a hotel. A good one at that (I've read reviews giving it 4-5 stars).

Having a go association owning a building like this leaves its marks. The rotating stone at the top of the building is not the only thing. Outside you see some other tell tale signs...

Even the lobby has an interesting detail..
We jokingly said that this was the entrance test if you were worthy to stay at this hotel when we first saw it :)

The only "downside" to this place is that it is built in a new part of the city dubed to be the new financial centre of Hangzhou. At the moment this means that we basically live in the middle of nowhere. The hotel is surrounded by nice new apartment buildings with almost no one living in them - a ghost town. A cab ride down town takes 20min (which is really not that bad in comparison to where we stayed in Shanghai).

Sometimes it is a bit hard to get a cab that even knows about this address - but I don't mind. It just means this is a really peaceful part of Hangzhou.

The hotel is located just at the side of Yangtze river and there is a nice boardwalk along it with a café or two.
It looks really nice at night time - I'll try to get a picture or two some day.

One of the nice things about the hotel being located here is that you can spend hours watching barges going up/down river with different types of cargo. During lunchtime the river is quite busy so it is nice to watch the barges from the 34th floor restaurant.

About the restaurants.. there are several ones in these buildings - a lot of them have a go at western cuisine. It is.. interesting :) They get some of the flavours wrong and they sometimes serve quite strange things to you - and usually it takes such a long time for you to get the food that it will be lukewarm at best.

One thing we've done a lot is sitting in the hotel bar and order food and drinks. The people here are not used to work like this. If you order food a waiter comes down from the top floor with your food and hands it off to the bartender. When the bartender finds the time he walks over to you with the food. Why doesn't the waiter just give me the food directly? The reason seems to be that this is not his job. He is not instructed to do this and thus the service will suffer because he does not take an initiative to improve on this.

The bartenders also have quirks. For instance - if you order ten long island ice teas he does not pour up the different spirits in each glass and proceeds to the next one. Oh noo.. he completes one drink and then starts all over.. I guess they either are scared to break the routine or are never ever facing the same load a bartender in the west would.

SISU campus area

2009-06-28T18:11:00.010+02:00

The last two days have been pretty uninteresting and to save you guys from boring reports on what we've done I thought I should write something about the place we have been staying.

We're staying at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) in Songjiang, Shanghai. The place is rather new - about 10 years old and it was built as an expansion of SISU in central Shanghai.

The place is HUGE (53.3 hectares). I've been told that about 4000 students go here and that is not much considering the size of the place. It seems somehow strange that in the middle of a crowded city there is a closed off area with huge beautiful parks and very big buildings. Even more so now that most of the students have left the campus area (their last finals where last friday).

The first thing you see (depending on what entrance you use) is the HUGE library building.The whole campus is surounded by big parks and small rivers. And outside of that there are sport and recriation areas; outside of that there are gardens used to (i belive) grow food for the campus canteen.
All over campus there are small mushrooms sculptures
that are really speakers and echo music or messages all over camp.

There are several intersting buildings on campus (apart from the library of course), mainly the eastern languages institution
and the russian language institution. I've heard that the gold onion ontop of the russian language institution required 15kg of gold.. don't know if that's true though.The english studies language department (incidently shot from the bridge over to the SISU mini villa area) with the library in the background.
The villa area where we stayed..I really can't express how wonderful this campus area is. I really hope that we go back here if I decide to go on this trip again. It has been a blast staying here. I almost feel a bit sad that we are heading for Hangzhou tomorrow.. almost :)

day 12 - very tired

2009-06-26T17:55:00.006+02:00

The weather was rather nice today. Thunder and lightening mixed with rain - and a very nice temperature :)

Class today was hard. A lot of hard life and death problems and endless variations of a trick play. In the afternoon I played Jan again and this time I won - but my game is still quite off. To tired to write more now so I'll leave it at that.

Two problems above - black to kill. The right problem is easy - the left is a bit more difficult..

day 11 - first loss against student

2009-06-25T18:12:00.003+02:00

This morning we studied thickness problems. Quite interesting and I learned a lot - now I hope that I'll remember it. Judy held the best lesson so far. Luke is better at english but Judy explains really well.

Before lunch we played one color go and I beat Max again - much to his dismay.. ;)
I had a really bad start though and I was not feeling comfortable at all in the game.

After a quite substantial lunch and a long walk in the heat (well above 35 degrees) we returned for the afternoon class. I finally played Jan but I had a really uncomfortable start. I screwed up with a huge missread in the beginning and after that I continued with failing to killing a big group. I was in overplay mode most of the game trying to catch up. After a lot of trickery and quite successful fighting I ended up 1.5pts behind. The review was interesting - I could explain all my mistakes and how I should have played except for the first reading mistake that still eluded me. Very uncommon for me.

After class we I played a few games in the social room beofre heading out to dinner. Quite a few of the professional players joined us and afterwards they came back with us and teased Michael with tsumegos. Everytime Michael tried a move one of the professionals frowned and said "Naïve!" or "To naïve!". Very intersting to see. Late I found out that they were betting on beers... wich later on turned into whisky. Right now the professional is still concious but it will be interesting to see how this ends :)

The chinese really get drunk fast compared to us europeans.

edit: Later on he proceeded to go on shouting "I am high mountain, you know!" and "To weak!" constantly while playing games. It was a small miracle that he managed to show up for class this morning ;-)

day 10 - carpenters square and students

2009-06-24T16:39:00.002+02:00

In todays morning class we started with studying variations of carpenters square and situations from where it can arise. Actually we were going to discuss the attachment under the 4-4 stone but we digressed a bit :)

After lunch I played Max in two games. Won both but the second game was quite close and I had to try with some trickery to win. I managed to find a pretty sweet sequence that threatened to give a dead group an eye - but that was just a cover for setting up another sequence that aimed to cut through and connect or kill another group. It worked like a charm :)

Unfortunatly I actually laughed out loud when Max showed his disappointment of beeing tricked - seems I've overcome my bad loser style but not my bad winner style; an area where I need to improve.

After class we had visitors from the SISU swedish programme. They had studied swedish for two years and they spoke swedish quite well :) They were heading off for a one month trip to sweden next week and wanted to ask a few questions and exercise their swedish.

Today the weather was quite nice - the temperature stayed below 30 all day (at least that would be my guess). I also managed to get laundry done; surprisingly easy and not to complicated dispite the language obstacle. A bag with laundry and a bag of washingpowder is quite selfexplainatory, I guess :)

day 9 - in the center of shanghai

2009-06-23T18:04:00.008+02:00

Today I was woken up by Jaxon who knocked on my door. I had ten minutes to get ready if I wanted to join some people heading in to Shanghai to by some books and visit the tv tower.

I stumbled out of bed and met up with Jaxon, Johan, Johanna, Leaf and Max. Then we headed to the train and after about an hour we were in central shanghai. First we had lunch (I had some wickedly spicy noodles and som iced tea). Then we walked to a small book store - it was only seven stories high. Gosh.

In the bookstore we first started looking for go books. Most of us bought a few and Johan painfully managed to buy something short of 20 books. During that time the others had toured the rest of the bookstore and bought some other nice stuff. Buying things in stores here can be somewhat cumbersome. First you get a receipt from the clerk of the area the book is in. Then you go to the cash register and pay where they stamp the first receipt and give you yet another receipt. Then you can go back to the first clerk and get your books. Really simple.

After that we tried to get a cab and head for oriental pearl tv tower. It was quite a hassle and we failed to get there two times; but in the end we managed to get there. The fee for going up (all the way in) the tower was quite expensive by chinese standars - 150 yuan - but in case you wonder it is well worth the money.The tower is 468m high and you can go as far as 350 meters up. The view is spectacular and you start to understand how huge this city is when you realize that you can't even see where the city ends.

After that we headed off to the "Big brand mall" which was - in case you wonder - seven stories high and extremely expensive. The restaurants were ok though. We had a very nice dinner in a place I can't even begin to pronounce. After that we headed back - very tired.When we got back there were a lot of professional players playing in the social room. I tried to watch a couple of games but I was so tired that I gave up. Max taught Johanna how to play.

Now I'll have a quick shower and head off to bed.

day 7 - a slow day

2009-06-22T06:10:00.004+02:00

Yesterday was the hotest day so far and today it was yet another record. Even if the temperature droped somewhat after lunch the air was extremely humid. The heat is still bearable though. Class today was excellent even if I had a horrible game with Nikolaj - I played out a prepared sequence but the wrong one; so embarrassing.

After class I walked back home and took a shower and rested some. It was much needed in this heat and I felt much better afterwards. I really love air conditioning - it's addictive over here.

The evening was mostly spent idling and listening to stories from the people that came back late this morning. Charlie was feeling really sick. Charlie also managed to have the most spectacular story. He managed to get a cab to drive him from central Shanghai to Songjiang very drunk and without any money. I would never have managed that I think :)

about the teaching

2009-06-22T05:15:00.012+02:00

Mattias asked me to write something about the teaching - so here goes.

Every day we have class we go here and enter rooms that are situated under the bleachers. The dan players have one room and the kyu players (where I belong) have another.

Nikolaj reviewing Jan and Maxs game

We have different teachers most of the time and so far all the days have followed a similar pattern. Before lunch we do some problems (life and death, joseki, fuseki, direction) and discus basic principles. After lunch we play a game and review it. Usually I try to play a few games since we usually have to wait for Johans game to finish :)

Jan waiting for Johan to make a move

So far it has been somewhat boring for me. I've known most variations but on the other hand there is always something new and repetition can't be a bad thing. The problems however.. either I get the coordinates wrong or I fail reading it out. If I don't do any of those mistakes I get "oh, it is ok - but there is better!" :D

Luke reviewing a game

My games have gone really well - at least I keep winning them. But when I play the teachers I get beaten up badly. They are really strong and are so good at spotting weaknesses. I haven't even made it to the endgame yet :D

day 6 - good times in shanghai

2009-06-21T12:03:00.009+02:00

Today we had a small adventure planned. First we had morning class and then we headed off to central Shanghai for karaoke, hot pot and fun.

Already when we headed off to class we could tell that today would be challanging - the temperature was well above 30 degrees and the air was very humid. While walking to class I managed to soak my t-shirt in sweat - and that's only a 15 min (very slow) walk. It wasn't that uncomfortable - but it is not that pleasant to spend a day in sweaty clothes.

After class we got on a bus. Buses are cheap, air conditioned and extremely crowded. I still don't understand how all 19 of us managed to get on to the same bus. After the bus we took the subway (that travels over ground out here) into Shanghai. It took about 50 minutes and it was a very nice experience. Clean, fast, air conditioned and (at least not at first) not to crowded. In central Shanghai - however - you had to shoe horn your self on to the subway. Two subway rides later we were near our destination. A 10 min walk later we were at the karaoke place. It was HUGE. And the room Michael had rented for us could easily have suited twice as many.

Karaoke - I soon found out - is not my cup of tea. I knew I had issues with false singing - but I didn't quite think it would be that bad.. :) A couple of beers made it endurable - but it was still horrible to listen to some of the participants. Most people had a great time though and that's what counts! Instead I sat and watched a poker game. Some of the participants are good poker players and I look forward to try them out in a friendly game some time.

After the karaoke we took the subway to another part of the city where Sun Yuan treated us to hot pot with kung fu noodles!
This was more to my liking. I had never had hot pot like this before. I had some Korean version a few years ago but it was entierly different. Hot pot is basicly like fondue with a spicy and a mild soup to cook your food in. There were assorted meats, vegetables, fish and unidentifieable foods to try. Everything was very excellent.

I rather like this social way of eating and it is not as heavy as fondue would normaly be. An interesting part of the experience was mixing your own dip sauce out of a table of ingredients. Even though there were english translations on the signs of the ingredients it was not always so helpful; for instance "mystery sauce" was not that easy to guess what it could be.

The kung fu noodles where made by a man walking around doing kung fu like moves and swinging noodles all over the place. It was quite spectacular even though he broke the noodles a couple of times :)

During dinner we also scared the poor Chinese people with swedish drinking songs and "små grodorna" with acompaning "dance" around the table...

Even though we embarrased ourselves i really enjoyed the hot pot. Not only did it taste good - the service was unlike anything I've ever seen before; this was probably a very good restaurant. A memmory for life. Thank you Sun Yuan.

After that we headed to a bar nearby for some go playing and drinks, however - by now I was to tired to enjoy it much and soon after that a couple of us took a cab back home. Some partied all night and made it back to the campus only quite late the morning after - needles to say they didn't participate much in the classes the day after ;)

day 4-5

2009-06-21T12:02:00.001+02:00

Not much exiting happened during these days. Classes, some shopping and a failed attempt to order stuff at a restaurant. We thought we ordered a plate of bbq stuff - but actually we only ordered one stick with meat on it each... and then a couple of bowls of stone bowl rice (rice, egg, cucumber, sprouts and a hot chili sauce). At least the beer and rice was good :)

day 3 -

2009-06-18T16:05:00.003+02:00

I slept well after watching some strange Chinese comedy about someone having big problems commiting to his girlfriend and marrying her. I don't remember how it ended but it put me well to sleep :)

Unfortunately we misunderstood how to get breakfast but it was not such a big deal. We bought ice tea (which is lovely here by the way - not as sweet as in Europe) and headed off to the teaching area which was situated under the bleachers of the sports arena. Today's training was quite basic - but still we managed to trip up on things. The teacher is very patient - almost a bit to nice (unless you play him). After a morning of life/death and invasions we headed off to the campus cafeteria for lunch.

Lunch was.. interesting :)
Nothing tasted bad, some of it tasted really good even, but the texture of some of the dishes were.. strange. I particularly liked a omelette in tomato soup which.. er.. had a nice taste but felt a bit like a sponge in the mouth. Some boiled sprouts were excellent.
One dish was made out of beef and potatoes. It tasted a lot like beef with onions but for some reason chinese food seems to almost always contain tiny pieces (or not so tiny) of bone. Hard to eat comfortably - but it still tastes good. The tofu on the other hand was not so good. Some people did really not care for the food at all.

After lunch we played and reviewed one game. I and Max played the teacher. I did not do to bad - but in the end he totally destroyed me after a reading mistake on my part. The game was interesting to me - not so much for the review - but because I immediately saw what went wrong and it was not to hard to understand why.

After class some people played basketball while most of us went back to rest in our rooms before heading out to dinner. This time we headed for a restaurant that supposedly served very spicy food. It wasn't that spicy at all - but the restaurant was a bit weird. Some students were having some sort of farewell party for students heading of to France. They were very loud and 'drunk'. The restaurant was situated in some sort of "mall" type house that was very run down. It was also pretty dirty. The restaurant was ok though and the food was excellent. The noodle soup was wonderful and there was some sort of eggplant stew that was awesome.

After dinner we headed back to the social room for beer, beer go, go and watching beer go. It was a very nice evening all in all and it was almost pleasant outside when I walked back to my room. Now it is time to try to catch some sleep. Classes start in seven hours..

day 2 - friendly faces

2009-06-18T14:28:00.004+02:00

Back at the airport there seemed to be something wrong with the telephones. A nice woman at the Korean Airlines told me she'd call for someone to repair them - but she couldn't let me use their phone. So I was stuck at the airport for a couple of more hours. I tried to withdraw money from an ATM; which worriedly also failed. I got myself a bottle of water and joined the people waiting for the early flights.

The temperature inside was very nice and they even turned of the lights so I got some more sleep. When I woke up again I took a tour of the departure hall again and walked around. Looked at the maglev train (I hope I get the opportunity to take a ride one day) and found the ATM in the departure hall with a christmas lights around the slot where you would put in your card. Hmm.. those weren't there the last time. I tried to use it again and this time it worked! Hallelujah!

I immediately bought some toothpaste and a toothbrush and proceeded to the mens room and brushed my teeth. This was the best experience so far in China! :)

When I got out of the mens room I saw people working on the phones. Yes! Meanwhile I walked to the cafeteria downstairs that had opened by now (06.05 local time) and bought myself some beef flavoured noodles and some ice coffe to keep me going. When I had finished I could reach Michael Yao who instructed me on how to get over to the International Studies University.

I got a cab (this time it smelled really good - but on the other hand the cabdriver could probably kill people with his breath. The cab ride was quite long - over two hours and the cab driver didn't really know the area well so we had to stop and ask a lot of people over and over again. But soon I could meet up with one of the organisers. Lovely!

It was nice to see everybody and they had a lot of grief to give me (he he). I arrived just in time for the opening ceremony. There were a few people from the university - the principal, the director, the university go club president, some teachers and some professionals. They all introduced themselves and some gave a speech. I especially liked the university go club presidents speech since it was so passionate. Then we all made short introductions of ourselves. After that there was a short break for a photo session.

Before we headed of to lunch I tried to get a hold of a phone to call back home - but people seemed to have the same difficulties as I had had. We were going out and go shoping for local SIM-cards later.

The lunch was long and filled of strange dishes that I've never seen before. A lot of it was giblets. Most of it tasted very good. Once it was over we headed down town for some light shoping. It turned out that my phone has a problem with other SIM-cards and it was probably locked to Telia. Really bad since I deliberately payed full price to avoid that. Well well.. to bad.

After that we went back and hung out in the designated social house. There I could finaly have some internet access and write my poor father some e-mails and tell him that I had arrived safely. Shortly after that we went shoping for clothes and supplies at a local mall. Some needed clothes for a friendly soccer game against two university teams while others - like me - just bought stuff.

When we returned to the campus area four more people had turned up and we had a short tour of the campus. After that it was time to watch the soccer game. We bought some beer, watched, went back to the social house and had some more beer. Played a few games. I got the keys to my room and then we headed out for dinner. The three best things this day was:

Brushing my teeth
Taking a shower
New underwear

day 1 - more new experiences than I expected

2009-06-18T07:12:00.005+02:00

I arrived at Shanghai (Padong airport) at around 10.30 local time. We were greeted with people in white bio suits (sadly not the pressurised ones) armed with a curious instrument that seemed to be four lasers and a camera. The instrument was aimed at every ones forehead and 20 min later we were declared 'good to go'.

During the flight everyone received a health declaration to fill in before we landed. I hesitated for quite some time to check the box for a sore throat - thinking of how much of a hassle this could possible turn into. But how much hassle could a sore throat be? Quite a lot it turns out :)

When arriving at the health declaration station I was immediately taken aside and had another identical - but in chinese - form filled out and my temperature taken. No fever of course - but they still asked me to sit down a minute for further instructions. Then we were taken downstairs without any explanation. Time passed and we who sat there (I, a Norwegian, Dutch, two Chinese and a chinese-japanese girl) had a lot of time to get to know each other. We talked quite a bit with the officials who were kind and had a passable English. They also seemed to have a few answers for us (finally).

I had to borrow the nice Norwegian mans cellphone - my own did not seem to work in China (still don't) for some reason. I managed to inform my travel company - but as of now I still havent managed to tell my family or the people arranging the trip. A bit of a bummer - but I guess it will sort itself out. But back to the story.

After a long wait (maybe two hours) we were transported to a hospital - in an ambulance; with the bluelights on! At least we got there fast and experienced some roads that was in dire need of fixing. At the hospital we where ushered out and to the entrance. There some sort of discussion ensued between the airport/ambulance people and the hospital staff. It took about 45 min - but at least it was entertaining :)

The bad news about the hospital is that my English far exceeded the staffs english. It was quite a hassle to even get some water to drink. They took my temperature, blood pressure and withdrew some blood. When the blood was drawn I was a bit worried that they were going to look at my white blood cell count which would usually (sadly for me) be at least a bit high (or very high) and thus I tried to explain that I had rheumatoid arthritis to no avail. Instead the woman took a culture from my right sinus - didn't feel as bad as I remembered. They know their stuff :)

Some two hours later I was informed to not be afraid (which I - believe it or not - was not) and that they were awaiting the results from my blood tests. This guy seemed to be a lot better at English; but medical English was not his strong suite. He did however manage to tell me that they were taking DNA tests for H1N1 (which I was hoping for). As a pure bonus I managed to get some bottled water and some much missed toilet paper.

Now, as I'm writing this I've spent some time watching the people outside. I am the only person in my room and there is not a lot to do. As a bonus I've seen westerners leave by cab (Yay! Hope! ;) and a cop that really likes to argue with people. I still have 3,5 hrs to kill before I can expect the tests to be done so I'll continue wathcing the cop - and now with some food!

When I left the plane I decided to leave the book by Ian M. Banks at the seat - not my cup of tea really. But now I regret that mistake - I don't think I've been this bored for quite some time.

Update (from day 3)
I ran out of power - but it seems I actually don't even need an adapter for ungrounded power over here..

Anyway - later on I met with a nice doctor from CDC (Center for Decease Control) who understood me quite well and also saved me from having to take some frightening looking medicine that I was ordered to start taking the next day. I was also told that I would probably be able to leave at "two o'clock tomorrow". Well.. as you guess this did not mean what I thought - it meant two o'clock at night.

I managed to catch some four hour of solid sleep before I was woken up and abruptly told to go with the words "You go now. Taxi wait. Hurry." It turned out that it was impossible to get anyone to understand that I needed to use a phone in order to know where to go and to have someone meet me at the university adress. Luckily I had spent some thought on this situation as a "worst case" and I decided to fall back on this plan quite fast since they really like to argue.. I told them that I wanted to return to Padong airport. They understood Padong - but not airport. The cab driver understood though and said "Back to America". I didn't argue and said "Yes!".
The cab smelled awfully bad but at least this time I saw something of Shanghai.

in china

2009-06-18T07:06:00.002+02:00

I'm currenty on a go trip in china and will thus try to post some bits on my experiences here. I never seem to manage to bring the right equipment to places where I have internet access so images will have to wait for a while.

I hope some of it will interest you :)

insanity

2009-05-06T20:02:00.000+02:00

Holy crap!

more mono goodness

2009-04-20T23:08:00.003+02:00

Lately a lot of code related to the .NET-framework has been released under Ms-PL by Microsoft. Not to long ago there was the ASP.NET MVC framework and now CCI. All of this makes it easier for mono to play catch up with Microsoft.

Being an old M$-basher (I'd like to think that I've put my zealot hat on the shelf) it took a surprisingly short time for me to come to grips with how much I enjoy the .NET framework in general and C# in particular. I liked what I saw and when moonlight came along I was hooked on the concept.

I've only written two applications in C# so far - and only one for use in a Windows environment. Implemented a quite capable application monitoring application in two lunchbreaks - I enjoyed that experience a lot. So here is for hoping that more poeple stop bashing mono (the gnote note) and for a wider adoptation.

/Mono fanboy

what powerpoint taught me about go

2009-04-19T13:37:00.008+02:00

I've been following a couple of blogs that deal with presentation for over a year. Every now and then small golden nuggets trickle by. Today was such a day.

My favourite blogger of that genre (as well as writer) is Garr Reynolds had a post today in reply to one of his readers on how he could say that a technically not so good presentation could be his favourit one. In essense his reply is this:

"In Zen we put emphasis on demeanor, or behavior. By behavior we do not mean a particular way that you ought to behave, but rather the natural expression of yourself. We emphasize straightforwardness. You should be true to your feelings, and to your mind, expressing yourself without any reservations. This helps the listener to understand more easily."

— Shunryu Suzuki

Which, is very true. It is very easy to overlook this and it is soooo important. Failing to do just this simple thing will make you distance yourself from the subject and you will be passing on a contrived feeling to the audience.

A presentation is somehting far more than just some good slides and a well rehearsed mono-/dialougue. It is all that plus the deliverance plus how natural it is for you to present this.

This is very true for go players as well. You have to be well rehearsed (training, well rested, healthy). You must be able to do a good delivery (beeing competitive) and you have to be able to behave naturally (relate well to the situation, play in a normal fashion).

I got this idea from the very same blog post where Garr links to someone who attended a seminar of his wich is well worth reading: "What powerpoint taught me about martial arts". Everything in that blog post works for go as well. Zen seems to do the trick, as always ;-)

on community

2009-03-17T11:33:00.004+01:00

I found this intriguing truth while sifting through Planet Ubuntu, it is really nice - and true:

I think you fail to realize that transitioning to any Flavor of Linux it comes with a community. This average user mom finds the community aspect of the transition fascinating. Who gets an operating system be it Windows or Mac and doesn't learn about it. (Where are those communities?, Where were they when I transitioned).

The quote is from a series of blog posts on how an average user mom tries Linux. The blog posts vary in quality but on the whole it is an interesting read.

itSMF spring conference

2009-03-14T20:26:00.004+01:00

Phew. This ended up quite a bit longer than I thought.

Last Tuesday I, and two colleagues, had the opportunity to visit itSMFs yearly spring conference for one day. I feel it's a real privilege to have the opportunity to go there. You can usually grab something useful from every talk and then the dinner party (which we sadly missed this year) is where you have a great opportunity to talk and network with other people (who at that stage usually are 'socially lubricated' and more frank about their own situation :)

This year I really wish some of my bosses had gone instead of me. I'd payed the fee myself if it would have helped. The theme of this years conference was 'Engagement and involvement' and it was mostly geared towards managers and executives (I think). I liked what I saw.

The first talk, by Paul Wilkinson (coauthor of ABC of ITC) on Attitude, Behavior and Culture. At first I laughed at a lot of his examples. But as the talk went on the laughing sort of got stuck in the audiences throat - mine as well. The talk was amazing. I wish I had it on tape. The key theme was how and why we usually fail by failing to adress the ABC areas. He illustrated everything with good examples from the real world.

The other sessions I attended varied a bit in quality.

Ola Westergaard held a talk on "success or collapse with ITIL". The talk was good, but it was at a very basic level and it could have done with a testrun (at least). He ran overtime (with not to many questions) and still had a lot of material to cover...

Svante Brehmer (BiTA) and Johanna Ward (Alecta) talked on their implementation of release management at Alecta. The talk had a lot of interesting points, but Johanna Ward lacked quite a bit in experience as a speaker. This talk was also pretty badly timed. The talk itself seemed to be something you report to management and not so much a conference talk. It was a bit erratic. There were lots of good things though. If they had recoreded themselves and looked critically at the talk they probably would have changed the outline of the talk for the better. Still a good talk.

Then I attended a most incredible talk by Peter Hero (SSO Consulting) on "The interests of customers, the owners and employees - experiences from Nordea". The slides were horrible but the talk was simply amazing. It focused a lot on the relation between managers and employees. He also had a most interesting part on ROI on employees. If I had the money I'd hire this guy in a jiffy.

The last talk we saw was also jaw dropping. It covered everything you need to know of management in one hour. I kid you not. One hour. Of course it does not have time to be thorough, but still... Gosh.
The speaker was Bo Hilding (Academic House) and this gem of well structured and well timed speak was "Leading in change". Not only did he manage to explain how to do things, stress what is most important. He also flatly explained what my management does wrong and why it does not work. Ok, yet again, not in depth and you had to read between the lines - but this talk was amazing. I learned so much and got so excited that I've still not managed to calm down. He really shook my brain - in a good way.

A thing that came to me on the train ride home was that there was a common theme in all the talks. It was not clear. It was not obvious and most likely not intended. Meassure. Meassure as soon as you can and think about what you are meassuring.

so amazing, so illegal

2009-03-14T14:34:00.003+01:00

I saw this JAW-dropping montage of youtube clips.
If you still think there is no artistic merit to sampling you need to watch this.

It is also very (I'd say surprisingly even) interesting to watch the clips directly on youtube (just search for 'kutiman'). If you click the 'more' link you can see references to the youtube clips used in the montage.

Of what I've seen so far I've most enjoyed track 1, 3, 6 and 7. Didn't like the flute in track 7 though.

swedish talk on rdf

2009-03-08T13:10:00.006+01:00

Since the hamster wheel at work is starting to slow down I've conjured the energy to start trimming my read/watch list. Today I took the time to watch an old Upplysning on RDF by Staffan Malmgren.

Being a long time fan of lagen.nu (made by Staffan) I just had to watch it. Having some prior knowledge of RDF it wasn't stuffed with new things - but I did learn something and the lecture was good.

The most interesting thing mentioned - at least to me - was the DBp e dia project. Browsing DBpedias website I was quite smitten with how much potential there is in this project. It also gave me a better understanding of the current RDF discussions in the various desktop search engine projects (Beagle and Tracker).

I wish more people in the IT buissness had a better understanding of RDF.

tsumego flashback

2009-03-01T01:09:00.005+01:00

This is probably not to hard - there are very few possibilities to begin with :)

Still, it always feels rewarding when you suddenly remember a tsumego you solved and you get a good result. This happened today. In the game the lower group was dead.

Black to connect the three groups.
The group on the right can be considered alive.

västerås open

2009-02-28T15:37:00.005+01:00

Last weekend i traveled to Västerås in order to participate in the annual Västerås Open. I have mixed feelings for this tournament. The Västerås go club always arrange their tournaments in an outstanding way. It was the first tournament I ever went to actually. I lost all of my games that first time and I've never played well in that tournament since. This is, of course, psychological and has nothing to do with the actual event. Howeever, on the plus side - improving the strength of my psyche is the main reason I like playing in tournaments.

I travelled by train on the friday before the tournament so I would be well rested when the tournament started. I ran into Charlie and Sofia waiting for the train from Uppsala to Västerås. Very nice with travel company :)
I had a rather different room at the hotel I usually stay at. Nice, but very big and the floor was cold as ice.

The first game on the first day was a big disaster. I don't know what happened.
I missplayed a stone in the fuseki, worked hard at calming down (since it wasn't that dramatic). Shortly after I misread a sequence and managed to give black a huge corner. Nothing left to do but go all out or resign. I opted for an all out atempt and did quite well too.

Just as I was going to take the lead I did a horrible mistake and played the wrong sequence out first ("Both are sente - what could go wrong?!"). The window of oportunity was gone. I had no option but to resign. Not only was I feeling low since the tournament started out badly, I heard that I had been taunted afterwards too. A bit rich considering I almost managed to turn the game around. So I got really angry. Long story short - I won all the following games. Easilly. I also had a bit of bad luck with the game matching so I mostly played weak players. My last game was sort of interesting in one aspect though. I killed almost everything my oponent had. Even a bad headache could not weaken my determination.

In conclusion I am really happy with the tournament. I did not do that bad and I also managed to come back after a bad start. Yay!

the machiavellian hampster wheel

2009-02-18T23:00:00.004+01:00

Work has been gruesome lately. Issues with SLM, Capacity and consultants.

The last couple of weeks we've been going nowhere fast. Instead of getting anywhere (at all) we've been caught up fighting upper management. There have been formal issues, priority issues, information issues, tactile issues and - not to be forgotten - stupid issues. It has been bad.

There has been a lot of rattling of chains and troop movements, but we're still in the same darn spot.

I won't go into details, but I've learned two things

Consultants in upper management sucks
If change (with people, not ITIL) is going easy you're probably doing it wrong

It is very frustrating. I hope this is the end of it, but I fear that some of the issues we've brought into the daylight has caused a rapture somewhere in the fabric. It will take a lot of collaboration (that is currently not happening) to get this in order.

On the plus side, our ITIL project is really starting to get moving now. Expectations are high and more and more people are jumping on the ITIL bandwagon :)

This weekend there is a tournament in Västerås, I am really looking forward to some nice distractions :)

jusandan

2009-01-14T11:30:00.006+01:00

Last weekend I traveled to Stockholm in order to participate in the Jusandan tournament.
It was a lot of fun to see that quite a few players had returned to the scene after EGC in Leksand last summer; there were also a few new players that showed up. Nice.

Had three wins out of five games - passable. The games I won were pretty easy though, so I could be happier. The first game I lost was to Mikael Eriksson. It was a good game and I did a good job both tactically and in reading - I am really happy with how I played that game. Towards the end game I was ahead by some 15 points (with conservative counting) - all I had to do was to not make any big mistakes. One of his groups was rather weak so I decided to poke at it. I almost had it killed but opted not to risk something with a big ko. Instead I reached for some 15 pts on the side of that group. As a consequence my group got weak (from not playing the ko) and due to another greedy move it died. Bother.

The other game I lost (against Mattias Sörlin) was a fair loss. Made two fuseki mistakes (not like me - especially not against Mattias) and proceded to create two weak groups early in the game. I had a chance to fight back when Mattias missed an oportunity to end the game quickly and punished a big dragon but it survived with two 1pt eyes.
Actually I deliberatly let it live, but it was a missjudgment. I needed to play out two other sequnces after that fight, but I misscalculated the first sequence and ended in gote. After that the game was lost - but I still played on with little hope of using some aji and manage a win, but it never happened. Bother.
I'm a bit unsure, but during the game it felt a bit like I was toyed with. Mattias missed several opurtunities to punish me, and in the beginning he opted not to kill a group (I can't imagine him unable to read it out).

Aaanyway. Besides losing the only two interesting games, it was a lot of fun. I'm already looking forward to next competition. Not sure if it will be Västerås Open or Takapotku, but I'm leaning towards Takapotku, it was such a nice tournament last year! :)

column store databases

2009-01-04T00:35:00.004+01:00

Early this year i saw this nice google presentation on MonetDB/X100 by Peter Boncz. Really interesting and I tried to provoke some interest from some of my colleagues and friends. The most responsive comment was something along the lines of "well.. that will at most be hot air".

It turns out that column store databases was the bees knees in the commercial world this year - not that I could tell back then.

food

2008-12-26T23:43:00.005+01:00

As usual this season brings a lot of eating to most of us.
There are still a few dinner plans in the works, but I thought I should jot down a few notes on the completed ones..

the day before christmas
.. a couple of friends - as per usual - met up in my student nations pub to have a small snack. In the dawn of time this snack consisted of glühwhine and pfefferkuchen and then evolved into cheese, crackers, pfefferkuchen and some nice wine. This snack derailed a few years back and is now a (at least) three course dinner. The last couple of years the first and third course have been standardized. For starters we have oysters with caviar and champagne, then a main course (usually lamb) and then a small orgy in cheese and satuernes or eiswein.

This years dinner was no exception. The main course was lambfilets with a amarone cheese melted on top served with a gremolata of red beats, carrots and chestnutpumpkin with rosemary and garlic. Very nice - but the amarone cheese was not for me (it made my tastebuds go into overload and everything tasted a bit like electricity).
You might see why people sometimes travel from other countries to attend this small traditional 'snack' :)

christmas dinner
As usual these days we had christmas dinner at my sisters place. Very nice as usual. Annikas mustard is to die for. Fathers cured salmon was a bit peppery though. All in all what you'd probably expect - and of course this was toped with a slightly smaller orgy of cheese and saturens :)

christmasday dinner
This years christmas day dinner was held today instead of on christmas day due to some minor troubles with my sisters health (nothing major at all). We could all do with a break so it was a good thing :)

We had turkey as usual - but this time the turkey had a slight taste of clementines wich worked very well.
For desert we had pannacotta as usual - but I totally failed this time and it was very runny :(

lessons learned

2008-12-21T15:15:00.003+01:00

Yay! Vacation!

Last Friday a madly intensive period ended at work. We've just sent out the first draft of this years SLAs to our customers. Phew.

It was a lot of work because:

It was the first time we did this
It was the first time our customers did this
We royally screwed up when estimating the required time

It really did not help that we had to revise our plan several times due to

Customers answers varied a lot on depth
Customers failed to answer at all
Customers did not want to cooperate

Truth be told - I'm not sure I would even want to call the documents sent out for review SLAs at all (and I have an unpleasant felling that some of our customers will see this).

One very good thing came out of all this hoopla for nothing though. A few people started to understand how painstakingly slow this is if you don't have SLR discussions in a continous manor. It seems hard, if not impossible to do this at the same time you draw up your agreements. I think the time needed to write the SLAs will decrease as our SLA template evolves and the customers learn how to do this (some are already doing this surprisingly well). A lot of the information that we want to be made available (in order to make things a bit more transparent) - such as external contract details and such - will probably need a bit of time to materialize; after that things will go much faster.

Next time we need to educate our customers better. We actually went about doing this but it is blatantly obvious that the customers did not really get what we were trying to explain. We'll have to improve big time in that area.

After this years winter vacation we'll have to start working on the end of the SLA dialog. Then we have to start the race to improve this until next time. It will be hard. Here's a short list of things we've noticed that we need to do:

Improve/redo our pricemodels
Create a Service Catalog (Well..)
Regroup a couple of maintainance areas
Have a communication plan
Rethink our service architecture (mostly my opinion)

A couple of those are worrying me a bit. Trying to do SLAs without a service catalog, let alone ITIL, has been.. interesting. The fact that my beloved leaders think that this will be in place by Q1 next year scares me a bit. We'll have something alright, but will it be good enough to use? I sure hope so...

There are few, if any, who share my worries about how services differ from maintainance objects. Right now we have a unhealthy mixture of services and technologies in our maintainance objects. I don't really think that our maintainance structure is in conflict with ITIL, it is just that we use our maintainance structre in a bad way. I've been fighting a few of these issues over the past year - with some help in some areas. There has been little, if any, progress though :(

why php sucks nr 37682

2008-11-26T00:21:00.004+01:00

Over the years I've come to do most of my programming in php.
This is not by choice - rather convenience and lack of choice.
I've never really gotten along with its quirks - most of them stem from the mixed types.

Yesterday, while writing a parser for goblins xml files (a story in itself) I realized that something in the decorator class I had just written bit me in the ass.

It was simple enough. I knew instantly where the problem was located and the code that somehow failed tried to see if a string ($str) ended in ".5":

$str = "150";
if( substr( strrev( $str ), 0, 2 ) == "5." ) {
// Do stuff..
} else {
// Do other stuff..
}

Do you see it?
Really? You don't?!

A hint might be that php is very eager to help you with type casting. This is one of those times it really isn't helpful.
What it actually does is this:

$str = "150";
// Reverse the string - strrev
$str = "051";
// Take substring of length 2 from index 0
$str = "05";
// Convert 05 to an integer
$str = 5;
$str2 = "5.";
// Convert "5." to an integer - leave out surplus characters
$str2 = 5;
// Compare the variables...
$str == $str2;

Yep. That's it. php proudly declared that "05" is the same thing as "5.".
The solution is to not be lazy and use proper indexing or use strcmp().

google goodness

2008-11-14T13:29:00.012+01:00

Taking a few minutes off from fighting the ITIL wars I dug a bit into my number one "work problem" - Google calendar sync (which is awesome btw) is annoying me.

When syncing it complained that it could not connect to an LDAP source. The reason for taking that detour was me having this thought:

Why does it complain about LDAP when outlook uses MAPI to talk to Exchange?

This might be obvious to some of you - but for a linux geek like myself these sort of thoughts are way out of bounds. The fact that I even knew about this - on some level - is a bit amazing[1] (at least to me).

So... I dove into my outlook account settings. Lo and behold. There was a LDAP source. I tried to ping it. I tried to connect to it. I even looked for the DNS records of it. It is no more. Dang.

I took a trip to the responsible people and asked a few questions - it was a known problem that should be fixed already. Interesting. Everyone I've talked to (not an extensive sample, but still) has the same configuration; they didn't know about it because most of the time it is a non issue. Hooray for verification.

I removed the LDAP source and the sun shined, rainbow appeared and birds sang. It was wonderful. The calendar sync went really fast too :)

1 - I've spent far to much time around the Samba project a few years back. Knowing about this should be attributed to the inflamed Samba vs Samba TNG flame wars.

book meme

2008-11-12T11:06:00.003+01:00

I'm sorry, but I was prompted to do this:

Grab the nearest book
Open it to page 56
Find the 5th sentence
Post the text of that sentence in your blog with these instructions.

The result (from Service Design)
Estimate the effort to perform the configuration.

releived

2008-11-07T22:49:00.003+01:00

Yes!
We got something done. We actually managed to produce a SLA that everyone could agree on. By everyone I mean the IT-people. The lawyers and marketing people are - of course - still hassling each other. Hopefully they won't cause to much of a problem (oh $DEITY, this will bite me in the a**).

It is almost a bit ridiculous - but most of the actions that need to be taken to deliver the quality defined in the SLA are also moving forward. Amazing.
The big shocker is that once the small things started to happen the attitude shifted a bit towards "yes, we can!"; people have even started coming with good suggestions. I've had a huge smile on my face since yesterday :)

There are a couple of big items to cross off the list before I can leave this behind me. I learned a lot.

On a totally unrelated note I also got to show off my bad ass command line kung fu grip a few days ago. It is good to be the geek - occasionally ;-)

bits and pieces

2008-11-02T16:35:00.004+01:00

Intrepid Ibex
Installed Intrepid Ibex yesterday. It went very smoothly. Only regression is that my laptops webcam stopped working. I can live with that.

Mono at PDC
Miguel de Icaza held an interesting presentation on mono and .NET at PDC this year. Nice to see him give an official talk this year :)

I really like the demos of gsharp and how you can attach it to a running process. There are, of course, security concerns with this newfound power - but OMG! These sort of tools brings a lot of power to people who do troubleshooting.

The blockbuster demo of the talk would have to be Unity3D though. God damnit. Awezome stuff!

What intrigued me the most though was the little bit about how the API can be shaped. Heavy stuff!

Channel 9 wmv

Killing good ideas

This article is something I'd like to make a couple of people read. Very much worth a read; even a bit of afterthought.

It is about killing good ideas. I've never seen it in black and white like this before. While short and a bit off focus it manages to describe the case well. The only sad part is that it attributes Steve Jobs whom I don't like. He is a heck of a business man though.

söderfors

2008-11-01T15:00:00.012+01:00

After a hectic start of the day (wednesday) I and my collegeus escaped the everyday work in order to have time to focus on various important ITIL-related topics. We hoped into cars and headed to Söderfors Herrgård.
Söderfors is situated close to the border between Uppland and Gästrikland. It is an old Walloon iron industry town that had the main purpose of producing anchors for the fleet of sweden. The size of the town was actually somewhat bigger than we expected. Apparently there is still some industrial steel production there.

View Larger Map
The service varied quite a bit. On an overall average it was a very nice place to spend a couple of days and we got a lot of work done. I can't really cover all we did in the blog, but the most important thing was that we finally got our policy documents in a somewhat acceptable state. There's still some polish needed, but they should soon be ready to see the light of day!

when push comes to shove

2008-10-28T21:32:00.002+01:00

I've been hard at work the last couple of weeks gearing up for persuading my employer to make a shift in paradigm - to raise the bar of the services we deliver. Hard work, but I was well prepared. Or so I thought.

The jump is not very far - really - it is something that in my opinion should already have been worked out for our current internal customers.

Since I thought I had enough power to get the bolder moving up the hill I went to work. Cleared it with my boss. Spoke to people. Gathered the essential information and finally got the issue onto the agenda. Started to work out a presentation to describe the situation.

Looking back now I probably overworked it. I wanted to get this done so badly that I missed to take a step back and take in the overall view. I forgot to take a couple of things into account. Things that were important but yet so obvious to me that it didn't occur to me that others might not see the same things I see.

Although the presentation went OK, I had to spend most of today trying to rectify some of the things that weren't received that well at the meeting. In fact - it took me the better part of the day to realize what had went wrong.

Next time I need to sleep more and work less before the presentation so that I can take the time to review the situation with a clear mind.

service impact management

2008-10-24T21:58:00.012+02:00

This week I've attended a Service Impact Manager (SIM) course.
SIM, for those who don't know what it is, is a tool that merges events with knowledge of how the service is designed. This makes it easier to understand how important an alarm event (e.g. is the service we deliver down if one of the webservers stops responding).

The answer, of course, depends on how the service is designed. If there is some sort of webserver clustering available the provided service might still be just fine. In that case the system can know that it does not have to rate any automatically generated incident as very important. This is, in essence, what SIM does.

It is very nice to have a way to have this combined with the ability to open and resolve incidents automatically, but it is not the primary goal. The thing is that having a way to relate events to knowledge of how the service is designed is that we can disregard unimportant alarms. For instance it is not so important to know that the webserver does not respond if the computer it runs on is down - the odds that the webserver starts responding once the computer comes on line again are pretty good ;-) People who have to respond to alarms can tell you how wonderful this is.
So, in theory this is a pretty good thing. The problem is that reality reveals its uggly face. Apparently the developers of the various BMC applications do not play nice togeather. In fact, they don't even seem to be able to communicate at all. The integration between the SIM and BEM parts seems to go pretty well hand in hand (as far as I can tell), but the integration with the CMDB could benefit from some tender loving.

For instance there is a problem when SIM tries to update the impact relationships to the CMDB (i.e. reconcile the SIM and Asset datasets). Sometimes there are problems (conflicts and broken constraints) when the modell is published to CMDB. It would of course be handy if SIM could detect this as well, but the minimum should be that it at least realize that something went wrong with the publication to begin with. Instead it just says that the update went fine. Viewing the model in the impact explorer reveals that something isn't as it should be and when you revert to the command line you see clearly that there were problems with some commits.

Secondly there is a stop button that acutally does not do anything except in the GUI. The publication still goes on. I guess this is probably a shortcomming with the CMDB API. Maybe it does not provide support for atomic operations.

Thirdly I frequently ran into troubles with redundant relations that were created. Maybe that is a case of me being rather new to the tool, but at some point most of the participants that actually went through the trouble of validating the reconciliation in the Asset Dataset saw this.

Another issue is that the right to publication is mandated by having access to the Service Model Editor. It would be better if there was a way to grant access or to have an approval point. Maybe it would even be preferable to have the publication go through change? I don't know.

Maybe my opinions are a bit tainted from the course. The teacher was a bit hard to understand at times and the image we used for the labs was.. well.. not the best one I've seen..

tomboy for windows

2008-10-20T17:24:00.007+02:00

Wohooo!!!

Finally there is a useable release of Tomboy for windows. Of course it crashed just as I typed that :)
But I won't let it rain on my parade - this is something I've wanted for a really long time.
Now I can spend my nights longing for a working sync mechanism worthy of the 21st century...

bored now

2008-10-12T00:05:00.002+02:00

I really need to start doing something new on my spare time.
Preferably something social. The question is what.

I thought of taking an Italian cooking class - but I was too late. Should probably think less and act more next time I think of something.

one more week of nothing

2008-10-12T00:01:00.005+02:00

Things that got done this week:

Tele conference with Skatteverket
Some more insights into the cadastre information system
Finally, some progress on the architecture for our ITSM/Atrium services

Things that did not get done this week:

Lots...

this week

2008-09-26T21:41:00.004+02:00

Work this week has been really hard to chew through. Partly - I guess - because of my cold (still hanging in there by the way) but also many people walking in/out of my office constantly interrupting me.

Work on SLA for three bundled services towards the IRS progressed somewhat but was somewhat thwarted by the other (internal) party underestimating the amount of work at this stage; also - I could have been better prepared.
I also spent some time writing up an explanation on what services are and how they are built. Some thought into what to do in order to improve our situation has gone into that document as well - but I'll add more later.

Most work was geared towards gathering and auditing system maps; it really picked up speed and today I was literally covered in information. Heavy stuff that really is not alleviated by the fact that some people are avoiding work - two huge areas are basically left for me to handle on my own - it will consume less of my time and energy. Had the first draft done today. Yay me! Boo others.

The week ended on a good note though - cake! Not only that - there finally seems to be someone working on an architecture for application logging (in order to integrate better with our BMC products). Finally!
There appears to be some slight differences in our view on the problem - but hey. I'm not picky if I don't have to do it myself! :D

gief!

2008-09-25T13:32:00.004+02:00

Joel Spolsky just blogged about this:What it is supposed to be?

Power strip
Network Hub
USB Hub

It is mountable on your desk and it does not exist (AFAIK). I want it. Yesterday. Also I'd like to have the option to add a phone socket if needed. Something like that would do mirracles for the hornets nest that is attached to my desk.

so tired

2008-09-21T19:16:00.004+02:00

I'm on the train, heading home, from Linköping trying desperately not to fall asleep. It was a nice tournament (as always - Lingo knows how to throw a good tourney).

I did OK, 2/5 wins - last game was a disaster; totally missed that one of my groups was dead and went for an über kill, risking a lot of points, that I wouldn't have attempted otherwise. Also suffering from the Deadly Man Flu didn't help. Hopefully I'll not be to ill tomorrow - would be a shame to miss work.

All wasn't bad though. One game was very good and I would probably have one if I hadn't been too greedy. That game and another one made me realize that I need to work on my cool when the game gets decisive. I tend to give in to hübris and shout out "there can be only one" and shortly afterwards lose my head. Embarrassing. At least the second time in two days. I like that a whole lot more than what I hade to focus on before though :) Next time moh, next time... mwahaha!

itil certification

2008-09-11T22:49:00.006+02:00

Right, so the ITIL certification was a breeze. It seems I spent a bit of angst for nothing. Could have done better though - 36/40 ain't bad - but the errors were not particularly related to ITIL; more specifically I botched the general process and model questions.
That said - I'm really happy I didn't flunk the exam :)

After I endured the journey home and met a coworker for beer^h^h^h^hdinner. We decided to pay Bistro Nord a visit after having talked about it for half a year. Damn. This place was good. Not only do they actually cook your meat the way you ask for - they do everything well.

The service was top notch - maybe a bit quiet in the beginning.
The food was very good - no sauce bearnaise in sight[0]!
The staff was very well educated - or at the very least making great efforts in that direction.
Their selection of beverages was pretty good. They didn't seem to try and overdo it too much and they still managed to have a good sortiment for most types of customers.

And OMFG! They have sautern wines. I'd like to stress the plural here. They knew something about it, probably more than I do actually. They even recommended it for my desert. I honestly did not think it would match my apple tartlette so I thought I'll order some just to reward their (obviously) excellent taste in wines :)
Lo and behold - it worked very well with the desert. Not fantastically well - but more than good enough.

Did I mention that they had sautern wines?!
I am so going there again.

0 - You have to live in Gävle to understand this.
Not having sauce bearnaise on the menu here is virtually the same thing as committing bankruptcy

fun and disappointment

2008-09-10T23:29:00.004+02:00

After class today I visited Stockholm Go Club for a nice game or two. It's been a while since I last visited Dragons Lair - but it was actually better than I remembered it. I played with booli and gims - won both games so I had a great time ;)

I decided to take a walk back while looking for restaurants - unfortunately I had left my umbrella at the hotel so I got completely drenched in the autumn rain. Not wanting to sit in uncomfortable wet trousers I opted for the hotel restaurant so that I first could change trousers.

This, at first glance, seemed like a good idea. After all - I still had some homework to do.

First - I can't get someone to seat me. Very strange since there were quite a few empty tables.

Secondly - just after being seated and having ordered the people behind me get noisy and starts to violently complain that it is unbelivable that it would take 40 minutes for a f*cking hamburer. I agree - especially since we were - at most - 10 people in the restaurant.

Thirdly - I get my food and it looks more like a sallad than anything else. I ordered a steam cooked salmon. The fish - which was probably chum salmon - was horribly overcooked. By now the angry people also received their food but they left - angry - at the sight of it. I was in a hurry so I decided not to make a fuss of it. but the poor waitress saw from my facial expression that something was wrong. I asked for another piece of "salmon".
When I finally get it the vegetables taste funny, the noodles are completely ruined. The reason for the overcooked salmon turned out to be that they obviously served frosen fish. Holy crap. The inside was basicly raw while the outside was dry. Fuckers.

I opted to not make a fuss of it and eat some of it and go up to my room and do my homework. I get so damn angry if I start complaining about the food and it would probably not make the studying this night any easier. I'll defenitly tell them tomorrow. Complete and utter wankers like these should never be able to run a kitchen. I mean - holy crap - does the hotell management not to quality control at all?

The hotell, by the way, is Scandic hotel at Norra bantorget (Wallingatan/Drottninggatan). I'd stay clear if possible. Damnit. Now I am angry - better take a walk...

in stockholm

2008-09-10T23:23:00.002+02:00

I'm in Stockholm since tuesday for a ITIL-foundation (v. 3) class.
It certainly is interesting to see how our ITIL adaptaion - based on v. 2 - map to v. 3. It is not surprising since we indeed have looked in the general direction of v. 3, but we have not studied it.

Not only does it match some of our quirks - but it also match our internal IT-program in a somewhat creepy way :)

The class is good - although I must admit having some trouble with Service Strategy. Not too accustomed to thinking about these things - but it seems to be comming along.

back in the saddle

2008-09-08T00:24:00.003+02:00

After long periods of unenjoyable coding (some work, some hobby) some of my long standing projects finally started moving again. This - of course - after starting a partial rewrite of the code I was working on and disliked.

I love that I can afford to spend time on the core parts of the code without feeling a need to push forward and present results. I'm not going to talk to much about what I am doing - but the first step just started to work in a usable way.

One thing I notice is how much I love working iteratively. I'll probably never try to write code in the waterfall fashion again. Coding is so much more fun when you see the code evolve into something increasingly useful.

Too bad I'm stuck with PHP though - when will web hosting companies start to support more useful languages like python, ruby or mono? I still dream that pike will become a language that is commonly known - but that is not very likely to happen after the all ever increasing hoard of .NET developers.

After this I think I need a break from the web programming. It is so teadious.
Maybe I'll start looking into Silverlight/Moonlight. That platform is just to cute. At first I didn't really care for that yucky XAML glue, but once I wrapped my head around the conceptual ideas of Silverlight I was instantly starstruck and I even came to like XAML. XML is still a bit yucky to deal with as a human being though...

all work and no play

2008-09-04T00:54:00.005+02:00

Work has been dominating my lucent(?) time for the past two weeks.
Not only am I totally bogged down with a lot of fundamental process work, I am also trying to manage the effort to prepare documentation for the CMDB which rather "unluckily" coincides with a lot of SLA work. How convenient. Not. Yet fun somehow...

It is natural that I am part of all this - however - it is a bit too much when you spend all day attending a BMC Asset administration course. This really put my poor scheduling habits to the test. Ultimately - I think - the last part is very good for me ;-)

The BMC course is (as always) pretty nice while staying clear of most of what interests me (which is also probably a good thing). I still managed to get a better understanding of some of the quirks of the ITSM Foundation stuff. Today the teacher spiced things up with informing us that SRM does not - in fact - integreate with Asset directly.

This is pure crap.
In clear text this means that there needs to be manual intervention for all SRQs since SRM only generates work orders, change requests and incidents. Jeesus.
I am certainly going to move for a strong complaint on this very strange design descision.

2008-08-27T10:08:00.006+02:00

This really entertained me.

I'd recommend anyone who has ambitions to have (or has) a leadership role to read this.
You'd might think that "this does not apply to what I want to do", but then you'd be missing the point.

The point is how social and market norms interact and that is priceless knowledge. It really does not matter if you come from a non profit background or a commercial background. It is still the same.

fundraising

2008-08-26T10:07:00.004+02:00

Having tried to do fundraising for quite a few years with marginal success (the fundraising I tried to do for European Go Congress failed misserable - luckily Henric did a little better) I find this blog post enlightening.

In short:

Give a potential sponsor the feeling of beeing on the winning team
Show what you can do for the money you are asking for
Explain quickly how this helps the company
Make it easy to donate money - and make it accessable!

lagen.nu

2008-08-25T10:56:00.003+02:00

Staffan Malmgren just told the world that the soon to be next version of lagen.nu can be seen at http://ferenda.lagen.nu. The main difference to the user will be the addition of Swedish law case summaries (yay!).

Behind the seen lies, however, the complete awezomeness. The code behind the site is now Open Source and distributed under the BSD license. I haven't looked at it, but from what I know from various fora you should probably take a peek if you do any web information related work.

ok, so maybe it is not a complete surprise

2008-08-22T22:32:00.006+02:00

From the list of registered players for Linköping Open:
I guess congratulations are in order! :)
It was sort of expected from reading one of girlwings blog entry in Leksand, but the part that read "registering to get married" threw me off - so sorry for not mentioning anything before.

*rewinds time and throws some virtual rice*

mackmyra distillery

2008-08-22T21:50:00.007+02:00

Joerg, one of our consultants (whom we've grown very fond of), completed his project and is heading back home for some vacation and an expected paternity leave. With him being very interested to see mackmyra distellry it seemed like a good idea to have a small celebration there.
So after a presentation on the deliverables of two project stages at work we headed out to mackmyra for a whiskey tasting!

I didn't learn that much except that I should probably stop buying sherry cask whisky :)

The surroundings are nice and the tasting and was well prepared. I did not like that the girl who led the tasting insisted on interrupting all the time with stories and information. It really was to much when we took a break from the tasting and visited the distillery. It would have been much better if these parts had been separated.

Afterwards we headed off to a pub in Gävle - the Bishops Arms. Overall I had a very nice and pleasant evening.

.. and that concludes this week

2008-08-22T20:43:00.008+02:00

Apparently this week did not deliver on the "end of the world as we know it" part. Instead it keeps simmering on. Some progress has been made though - our department manager had a meeting with some people of the concerned party in question after which he seems to have developed an understanding of our position.

Two of our stages have been officially delivered. There is "some remaining work", but it is mostly tweaking of the AIE (a big surprise - not). There is a lot more work to do with our IT-operations stage so it would not be fair to say that it has completed (it is not scheduled to have reached completion yet either) but the foundation has been laid. At the presentation we had yesterday I actually saw the BEM tool for the first time - it was actually pretty impressive and it really changed my thoughts on the future direction of the surveillance/monitoring. What changed my views on BEM was mostly how good the integration was.

Today we also completed the first internal draft for the change management policy - being co-author I might be slightly partial when I say that it is complete and utter awesomeness. Our first SLA meeting with a customer was completed as well. Some hiccups but overall a very pleasant experience for both us and the customer (I think). I liked that the customer understood our approach well - they were even a bit impressed although scared about our high ambitions. Finally the release management policy work started as well. The complexity of actually finalizing a policy quickly dawned on our project manager :)

I'll probably post something on our/my views on how to write a policy later on - it is a straining but rewarding work.

Last but not least - our SCRUMish approach has kicked off and although the process needs to be tightened a bit it is a good start.

oh dear

2008-08-20T20:57:00.003+02:00

Words fail to describe the EPIC FAIL that cacert has applied to its credibility.

dbslayer

2008-08-17T22:33:00.006+02:00

How nerdy am I?
Well - for a good clean measure you can try what I spent the last 30 min. doing - I read about and tried out dbslayer. It is very cool.

I came across this article about a dbslayer implementation for cherokee and I just had to read more. dbslayer really has a limited coolness factor - but the idea is clean and simple.

dbslayer is basically a JSON DB-layer that does connection pooling to one or more MySQL backend servers. It supposedly also does failover when one backend goes down - I havent looked into that though. In laymans terms - it should scale well.

first week at work

2008-08-17T17:43:00.005+02:00

I was a bit concerned with starting to work shortly after the EGC; maybee I would be to tired?
Well, as it turns out - It was pretty much no problem. Work was such a breeze compared to the EGC - at least for the first few days.

I usually keep a lot of information in my head and the first thing I realized last monday was "oh crap! what was it I was doing when I left for vacation!??". After panicing for a few minutes, looking at what files I altered most recently our project leader - Tobbe - walked in and asked a few questions. Without thinking I said "before I went on vacation I sent you an email with the latest... updates on.. what has happened while everyone was away". Oh crap. How smart am I? Obviously a LOT smarter than I give myself credit for - to bad my memmory isn't quite "there" yet :)

The beginning of the week went fairly well although the efficency might not have been at 100% yet.
On wednesday though.. all hell broke lose. I still do not why but phrases like "3rd world war", "impending doom", "you should be scared" has been thrown around. I am not very scared though. Even though I was at the meeting where the world as we know it, supposedly, ended I am still not sure what people are so upset about. We were only four people at that meeting and I did 30% of the talking - I should know. I think.

Apparently we are at red alert right now, preparing to do battle and I'm pretty sure that no one completely understands why. There are plausible theories about why but they have very little to with facts and only some could be politics. The major part would have to be built up tension of some sort.

I can't help feeling excited. This is all very new to me and not at all what I expected working life to be like. It is 100% unproductive and it only generates heat. This is exactly what our team is trying to prevent. I've got my asbestos suit on and I'm packing facts - wish me luck.

back from egc

2008-08-17T17:00:00.008+02:00

I had planed to write some blog posts during egc; that is actually why I started this blog in the first place. That, of course, did not happen. It turns out that running a tournament is a lot of work. I am also not 18 anymore, nor as fit as I was five years ago. To summarize - i worked a lot (not as much as I feel I should have), a slept a little, I ate some food and spent almost no money.

Running a congress is interesting though - especially with some of my earlier knowledge and concern for how we (not) organized ourselves. Some things I anticipated happened and some did not. I guess Carin - one of the organizers - saved all our sorry asses at several points. Her endurance and patience is envious.

Martina also did a heck of a job organizing the organizers. I honestly did not expect this to happen at all. A lot of kudos to her for doing that. I think she learned a lot from it and it will probably do her a lot of good in her future career (I remember her saying something about wanting to try out the project manager role) - especially if she heeds some of the mistakes that our organization as a whole made and some of the less misstakes that were made during the congress. If you want to do project management there is really no substitute for the real deal and dealing with projects like the EGC really sets you up for most of the general pitfalls.

Leif, as the swedish go federation treassurer, had quite a bit of pressure on him for the last year or so. I won't go into details but if he came out of the EGC-project with his sanity preserved I am not only amazed but proud to know him. He has done A LOT for swedish go the last year and that is mostly through learning to say NO with an increasingly firmness in his voice. He has really growed as a person. Interesting.

I might be crazy, but in hindsight, I'd like to do this again someday; only this time with a bigger "staff" and perhaps some different people in different places. Personally I'd also prefer some different circumstances (waiting for surgery, out of a job, starting a new job) and with a (preferably) bigger budget ;-)

In conclusion: EGC greatly exceeded my expectations. I wish I had contributed more. A lot of people did extrodinary things but Carin, Martina and Leif deserves a hug and a beverage of their choice when you see them in a pub next time.

i thought i was well prepared...

2008-07-25T01:51:00.000+02:00

.. and hopefully I am now.

Bags are packed (why are there always room missing for a few things?).
Trash has been taken out.
Not loving my ISP (having routing issues).
I am very tired.

Hopefully I'll be on the train at 08.09 heading for Leksand!