Check out this bag that my mom and wife made from old Dunkin Donuts coffee bags

Check out this awesome bad that my mom and wife made from used Dunkin Donuts coffee bags! I have some more pictures over here.

Quotes from my old home page

So my old home page used to have a page with a bunch of really nice quotes on it and I would hate to see them all get lost now that I don't have a good place for them so I figured I would just post them here. So here goes.

The difference between theory and practice, is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
- Richard Moore

The 3 great virtues of a programmer:
Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.
- Larry Wall

The best definition of a gentleman is a man who can play the accordion -- but doesn't.
- Tom Crichton

Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when open.
- Matthias Elter

I might disagree with what you have to say, but I'll defend your right to say it to the death.
- Voltaire

Software is like sex, it is better when it is free.
- Linus Torvalds

People who think they know everything tend to irritate those of us who do.
- Oscar Wilde

Think about how stupid the average person is.
Then realize that half of them are more stupid than that.
- George Carlin

My taste is simple, the best.
- Oscar Wilde

Great minds discuss ideas,
Average minds discuss events,
Small minds discuss people.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Don't take life too seriously, you'll never get out of it alive anyway.
- Elbert Hubbard

Light travels faster than sound.
That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
- Allbert Einstein

The trouble with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it.
- Franklin P. Jones

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
- Albert Einstein

Happiness isn't something you experience, it's something you remember.
- Oscar Levant

God bless the American legal system
A glorious machine that turns stupidity into cold hard cash!
- The Drew Carey Show

Working weeks come to its end, party time is here again.
- Come with me, Depeche Mode

I want to run
I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls
That hold me inside
- Where the streets have no name, U2

Got a letter from the government the other day.
Opened it and read it. It said they were suckers.
- Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos, Public Enemy

It's a small world and it smells funny
I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money
- Vision Thing, Sisters of Mercy

I'm a 21:st century digital boy
I don't know how to live, but I got a lot of toys
- 21:st century digital boy, Bad Religion

When will the world listen to reason?
When will the truth come into season?
I have a feeling it will be a long time.
- It'll be a long time, Offspring

I didn't believe in reincarnation in any of my other lives.
I don't see why I should have to believe in it in this one.
- Strange de Jim

If a man has a strong faith he can indulge in the luxury of skepticism.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm a firm believer in the concept of a ruling class,
especially since I rule.
- The movie "Clerks"

If there's no light at the end of the tunnel, get down there and light the darn thing yourself!
- Lauri Watts

Unix is the most user friendly system I know, the point is the it is really selective about who is indeed its friend.
- Luigi Genoni

It's the mature and adult thing to do!
How does that affect me?
- Seinfeldt

Dates are for having fun and people should use them to get to know each other.
Even boys have something to say if you listen long enough.
- Lynette, age 8

CNNESPNABCBCVTNT, but mostly BS
- Television, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprasy

What did you do yesterday?
I did absolutely nothing and it was everything I thought it would be.
- The movie "Officespace"

I drink to make other people interesting.
- George Jean Nathan

When everybody is out to get you, paranoid just seems like a good idea.
- Woody Allen

How to relate to women:
Treat them like compilers that take simple statements and turn them into big productions.
- Userfriendly

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.
- Frank Zappa

Sure there have been injuries and deaths in boxing,
but none of them serious.
- Boxer Alan Minter

Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
- Dwight Eisenhower

Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.
- R. D. Laing

I'm on a seafood diet.
When I see food I eat it.
- The Drew Carey Show

I'm bi-sexual. Whenever I want sex I have to buy it.
- The movie "Splitting Heirs"

What do you think of western civilization?
I think it would be a good idea.
- Muhatma Gandhi

If you don't know where you are going you are never lost.
- Unknown

If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%?
- Unknown

Acceptance testing: An unsuccessful attempt to find bugs.
- Unknown

Jag spenderade mina pengar på sprit, kvinnor och sång.
Resten slösade jag bort.
(Roughly: I spent my money on women, drinking and singing.
The rest I squandered).
- Unknown Swede

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
- Samuel Butler

Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who don't.
- Unknown

Created a brand new home page

During the last couple of weeks I've decided to beef up on current web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, jQuery and such. I figured a great test case for my new skills would be to remake my own web page and I just put it live this morning. The new page has a hopefully much more contemporary design, uses responsive design and it is a single page web application (Except for the blog part which is still hosted by Blogger).

I also included a few newer photos and updated my about page with things that happened in the last decade. I also took time to update my resume which also hadn't been updated for the last decade. I also have some really cool interactive stuff going on in the resume section. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Got married and am moving to Long Beach

It has been a long time since I made any posts so here is a short update.

First of all I got married to the lovely and beautiful Lisa DuMouchel (Now Lisa Johnson). We met through a common friend while she was living in San Francisco in early 2012. A little bit over a year later we were married on the 4^th of October 2013 at the Saint Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point.

Moving to Long Beach in a couple of days. I'll be sad to leave Laguna Beach, but the new place looks really nice as well. It also have more room for guests if anybody want to visit.

I just achieved true Inbox Zero for the first time in over 5 years

For the first time in over 5 years I have achieved true Inbox Zero meaning that I do not have a single message sitting in either my personal or work email inbox. I decided to make a concerted effort to achieve this earlier in the week and after archive over 1500 messages I am done and it feels great!

Removing old inbox messages start getting really easy once you get a couple of months back in your list since very little of that is current any more. It's just that if you never take the time to go through the whole list you never get around to removing this from your inbox and if you have something that is actually important you will have a real hard finding it. In the emails that were over 1 year old I found less than 10 emails in my case that contained information that was still relevant and important. That said I would have a real problem finding that information since it was just sitting around the 1000+ un-filed messages in my inbox.

Now it is just interesting to see how long I can hang on to this.

Dealing with credit report errors

I just realized that my credit report has several errors on it. None of them should reflect my credit, but I just thought I would take some time to fix it. The problems I have is that for some reason there is an extra address that they all think that I live on and also I am apparently according to some of them owning a US company (That also doesn't exist), which is problematic since I am not allowed to operate a company in the US based on my visa.

Trying to deal with this is kafkaesque. First of all Experian just flat out refuse to give me my free annual credit report so there is nothing I can do there for now. They give me a weird error message that refers me to a phone number that when called refers me back to the web page. There is also no place on their web page to either call or email someone about issues. I wish I cared enough to sue, because I am pretty sure what they are doing is illegal... But who has the time.

The other ones actually does work and I have successfully at least lodged a request to remove the address I've never lived at. However the company that they think that I own is nowhere on my credit report for me to even dispute and I have no idea how to get that off there so I guess I am screwed there too.

Will be interesting to see if they will actually modify my report... So far I am not super optimistic.

Why I don't believe in God

I've spent a lot of time both studying and thinking about religion, theology and "the big questions" almost all my life and have come to the conclusion that there probably is no god and I just thought I would share some of my reasoning for coming to this conclusion.

First of all with our current understanding of quantum physics we actually have a pretty consistent idea of how the universe works. Even though it is by no means complete, it does in it contain ideas about how the universe was at one point created out of nothing. It is often referred to as the ultimate free lunch. Granted to understand this discussion it requires a basic understanding of how the universe works, but it isn't really past what most people can get if they are interested in it. I recommend two courses from The Teaching Company. The first one is called Understanding the Universe: An Introduction to Astronomy and the second one is called Particle Physics for Non-Physicists: A Tour of the Microcosmos. So with the knowledge that the universe can exist as we perceive it today without a god. Then the nonexistance of god comes from the application of Occam's razor which roughly states that the simplest solution to a problem is probably the right one.

Another way to come to the same conclusion is to consider that the universe is probably around 4.5 billion years old. Humans have existed in more or less their current form for around 200 thousand years and no currently existing religion has been around for more than maybe 5000 years. Also factor in the size of the known universe and the pretty high likelihood of there being other intelligent life in it. It just seems so unlikely that a deity would go through all that trouble just to start nitpicking about what we eat, how we procreate and what we should think about others (Especially others who don't share our beliefs).

Compare both of these arguments to the likelihood of religion being a human invention to help people to cope with the fear of dying, relatives passing away or an otherwise unfair lot in life. Then there are also the huge benefits that seem to generally be bestowed upon those that successfully start or become the leader of religions. And you also have the benefit that in most countries religions are not even taxed on their earnings or holdings. So if you are interested in being wealthy or to have power religion seems to be a great business to be in.

This does not mean that I think that people who have come to different conclusions for these questions than me are stupid. These questions are almost by definition ineffable and unknowable. However given the fact that most people does seem to inherit their religion from their parents, it seem like they don't think that much about the alternatives.

Probably my last flight with United Airlines

Just had what I am guessing will be my last flight with United Airlines tonight. Now I've had worse experiences flying before but I can't really recall that I have ever had one where the airline in charge contributed so much to the whole experience of awfulness.

I was supposed to leave from San Francisco Airport at 7:37pm this evening. The flight started out being marked as about one hour late. That's OK delays happens, it does get tricky though since you are not allowed to land flights after 11pm at Santa Ana Airport so if you get too delayed you will be diverted to LAX. As our delay started getting closer to that deadline I started getting a bit nervous.

However United fixed this by switching a flight leaving in the gate next to ours leaving for LAX a few minutes before us so that we would make the deadline to land at Santa Ana. Great solution! Everybody boards the plane and we are good to go, only a little bit more than an hour late.

Here is where everything goes wrong. The brilliant people at United had forgot that there is one guy quite important to fly a plane. The pilot! There wasn't one that could fly our plane. In the end we ended up sitting on the plan waiting for a pilot to show up until after 11pm before we could start our by then flight to LAX. So not only did they delay the flight originally heading to LAX so that we could go, because they didn't realize that an airplane needs a pilot nobody got to go. Although I did see the LAX flight taxi off long before us, I guess they remembered to bring a pilot.

During our over 2 hours of waiting to take off we were offered a whole glass of water as refreshment. Not only that but there was also nothing to eat or drink even available for purchase. We did have the option to leave the plane and buy things in the terminal and we were assured that we would be let on board the flight again if we wanted to. However several people that heeded this advice unfortunately came back to discover that their seats on the flight had already been given to other passengers.

Also amazing to me was that nobody who was working at United had any information on what was going on. I also realized to my amazement that apparently on this flight the crew on the plane had absolutely no way of communicating with the ground crew so they did not know anything about what was going on. You would think a commercial airline would have some sort of radio or even telephone to talk to someone who knows what was going on. United also had no idea on such basic things as if the parking lot at Santa Ana would be open (Not an unreasonable question given that we would arrive over 2 hours after the airport had closed) or how we would be shuttled from LAX to Santa Ana. Nor did they have any interest in trying to help anybody out with actually trying to find out any information. Granted given that the crew didn't seem to have access to either a radio or a phone I can understand how that would be difficult.

In the end I got to Santa Ana roughly 4 hours late after the bus ride from LAX and got home at around 2am. Awesome since I have a meeting at 6am in the morning. My girlfriend has kept saying that United airlines suck (Something that becomes funnier given that she actually works for them right now) but I didn't think it could be this bad. Should teach me to listen to her in the future

How I saved over $70 per month on my phone bill while increasing service

Today I finally cancelled all of my AT&T service as I am switching to StraightTalk. By doing this switch I am still on the AT&T network. My phone bill went down from $114 to $42 per month and I now have true unlimited calling, texting and data with tethering (Before I only had unlimited data). Another feature with my new account is that, since it is prepaid, I can just stop paying it when I go home to Sweden for 6 weeks and then reactivate it when I get back saving even more money.

I've been increasingly frustrated with AT&T lately. First of all there is the whole issue with throttling unlimited data. I was also upset when I realized that they are effectively condoning theft of phones by refusing to block stolen phones on their network (My iPhone 4S was stolen after I had had it for less than a week).

StraightTalk is an MVNO which means that it is a cell phone operator without their own network. What makes them different than the other MVNO:s in the US is that they allow you to "bring your own device". The devices you can buy that are actually paired with the service are kind of crappy, but since I can buy an unlocked phone and use it on their service that isn't a problem. Granted a good unlocked phone usually costs around $700 instead of the $200 you pay on a normal carrier with a 2 year lock in, but given how much cheaper it is per month I can buy a new phone every 8 months and still come out spending less money on StraightTalk than I did on AT&T upgrading once every two years. The phone you get for $700 is also a much better phone than you would ever get buying it through your carrier since it doesn't have any of the restrictions and bloatware that the carriers always insist is put on the phone before they allow it (For instance free tethering is a standard feature on unlocked phones, something the carrier will usually charge you a lot of money per month for). I also never bought my phones through AT&T anyway except for the iPhone since I generally want to be able to use my phone with my Swedish SIM when I go home, so for me it is just a pure win.

Learning to sail in the Grenadines

I just recently went on a two week vacation/adventure to St. Lucia and the Grenadines during which I also learned how to sail a 40 feet Catamaran.

I went on this trip with my girlfriend Lisa DuMouchel (The whole thing was originally her idea) and also joining us was Omar El-Kikhia. The goal of the trip was to attend a one week long sailing course with Barefoot Offshore Sailing School in St. Vincent (The largest island in the Grenadine island group.

First of all the pictures from the trip is available on my Google+ account (All 655 of them). I'm sorry but you will need to sign up to Google+ to be able to see it (If you want to know why read this previous post explaining why it's a bad idea to keep your photos on Facebook).

We started the trip by spending 2 days in St. Lucia and just relaxing except for one day that we went zip lining in the jungle. After that we continued on a puddle jumper down to St. Vincent where we spent one night before we got on the boat which would be our home during the next week.

With us on the boat was also a couple we did not know before hand and our teacher. Before we got on the boat we also took our first written exam for the ASA-101 certification. After that our days were pretty similar in that we got up, had an hour or two of class and something to eat. Then we sailed for a couple of hours. After putting down anchor and having a refreshing swim (And perhaps a refreshing beverage) we had another hour or two of class and finally went out and had dinner or cooked on the boat. Because of our schedule we didn't have much time to do a lot of other activities like scuba diving or paddle boarding, but now that we can rent our own boat that will just have to be next time!

Some highlights of the trip was the snorkeling in the Tobago Cays, the breakfast on Petite St. Vincent and also the improvised barbecue also in the Tobago Cays. The last barbecue was interesting since it is a nature reserve so there are no houses there. You have to bring your own cutlery and drink and then you buy the food that some guys cook for you there. Also pretty much wherever you went you were greeted with magnificent vistas and views.

Another highlight was of course learning to sail and in the end for me and my friends it went great and we all got our planned certifications (ASA-101, ASA-103, ASA-104, ASA-114). The two people we didn't know before hand it didn't go that great for. In the end they managed to get one certification each, but I have to say that they simply didn't get it and I shudder at the thought of them actually taking a boat out by themselves because they would be a danger to both themselves and others if they did so (But fortunately they didn't get enough certifications to do so, so the oceans are safe for now). I also managed to completely avoid getting sea sick even without taking any medication, although some other people in our company were not so lucky.

If there is one thing to complain about it would be the general level of service that you got anywhere you went. People were not rude or not nice, they were. It is just that everything went so slow. Something that is sort of acceptable when you are on vacation but if not I would have gone ballistic at some point during these weeks. Overall though this has been one of the best vacations I've ever been on and I recommend anybody to do it.

Coming back we spent another 2 days on St Lucia at a working Cocoa plantation which was really relaxing except for the one night when our entire hotel room got invaded by ants (We in the end got a new room fortunately).

Next step is to rent a boat and sail around without a guide with some friends. Let me know if you are interested in joining me! It's going to be a blast.

How I digitized my life

As a follow up to the previous post explaining why it's a good idea to digitize your life I figured I would follow that up with how I've digitized my life.

• Mail - I just use Google Mail. It's simply the best solution out there as far as I can tell. I now have over 100k emails archived and I can search all of it in the blink of an eye. You just can beat it. Also if you signed up for extra storage before they introduced Google Drive they provided you with 20GB of storage that is shared over all the Google services (Google Drive, Picasa, Google+, Mail, Docs etc...)for $5 a year. As long as you are grand fathered in it seems that you get to keep that price which is quite simply unbeatable.
• Photos - I use Google+ and Picasa. These are basically just two different interfaces to the same underlying service. First of all since Google already knows everything about me already since they have all my mails I don't think them having my photos will reveal much more about me. It allows me to download full resolution versions of the photos and it also allows you easy access to download the entire blob of all your photos as an archive should I ever want to leave. Finally with the combination of the two online interfaces, the Android Google+ app and the desktop Picasa application any kind of administration of my thousands of photos are always a snap. Finally for the love of god get a phone with a decent camera if you use your phone camera a lot!
• Computer Backups - As I mentioned in my preivous post I use Crashplan. They are very cheap, have a Linux, OSX & Windows clients and provides unlimited storage (I currently back up around 10TB of storage to them). They also provide backup sets with different priorities so that your important stuff is always up to date if somehow it gets a bit behind on the backup.
• Password Management - I use Lastpass. It is a really nice solution that also integrates right into the browser even on Android. It is also completely "trust no one" where no unencrypted data ever leaves your system (Lastpass themselves are not able to look at your data at any point during them providing you their service). It's free except for when you want to use it on mobile devices and then I think they charge something like $12 per year. If you are interested in a technical deep dive into how Lastpass works check out this Security Now episode.
• Books - This is a tricky one because no matter what you chose you will be locked into one vendor and switching to another one will most likely mean that you will no longer have access to your old books. I decided to go with the Amazon Kindle. The reason being that first of all they are really good at being available on any conceivable platform. Doesn't matter if it is PC, Android, iOS, Metro or whatever else you can think of. Chances are there is a Kindle application for it. Their app is also really good on any platform and Amazon seems unlikely to go away anytime soon. They also seem to have the largest catalog of books compared to any of their competitors from what I've seen. Finally their dedicated hardware is dirt cheap and really, really good!
• International Calling - I use either Google Voice or Skype. Skype I use mainly for it's video calling which is really neat. Google Voice though is a really cool service that integrates seamlessly into your Android phone and provides you free texting to any US phone number and also ridiculously cheap international calling (Way cheaper than Skype when calling real numbers).
• Address Book I use the one provided by Google. It integrates nicely with GMail, Android & Google Voice. It also works fine with iOS devices for those so inclined.
• Cloud Storage I use Google Drive. They have all the features I need and with the $5/year for 25GB deal I have nobody will be able to touch them on price. Also this service haven't suffered any of the embarrassing security issues that Dropbox have been plagued with.
• Blogging - I use Blogger for blogging. It's a nice platform that is still actively developed and since I use Google for my photos it integrates nicely with Blogger. I also find it a lot easier to use than for instance WordPress.
• Online Presence - I use About.me to catalog all the services that I use and which you can get hold of me on.
• Music, TV & Movies - I've actually rolled my own. It is based on XBMC and Google Jukebox and has been an ongoing project that I first started working on all the way back in 1995. The one feature that this system has that no other service I have seen has is a unique listening history analysis that is used to generate random play lists based on music that I am currently in to. That is what is used to generate my monthly media charts. It all runs off of a server that I have that runs dual redundancy RAID-6 and for the really important stuff runs mirroring on top of that.
• Mobile Music - Here I have also rolled my own. Currently I only support Android since that is what I use. It supports both streaming and offline playing with delayed syncing of listening history to my home system and also allows me to stream or play offline all my podcasts, lectures and audio books. I currently don't support streaming my TV & movies, but I am plan on adding that soon.
• Music Recommendations - I use Last.FM. I have set up my own music system to "scrobble" to Last.FM so that it will give me recommendations on new music based on what I am currently listening to on my own music system. Every once in a while I also listen to Pandora, but it is getting less and less as I am moving over to Last.FM.
• News Reading - I use Google Reader. This is just a basic RSS reader, but it has a ready nice interface and it's basically the only way I currently read stuff online. I hardly never just open a website and browse it's contents unless I am looking for something specific anymore.
• Project Management - For my private projects I use Pivotal Tracker. It's an awesome service in general and as long as there is only one collaborator it is free.
• Revision handling - For source code I use Git in combination with BitBucket. I recently upgraded to this from Subversion and it is so much better, even if in my case I don't have a distributed environment and only have one contributor to my projects.
• Service Backups - I need these since I don't trust any of the cloud services that I use (Not because they are bad, just because I am paranoid). I have backups of all my important services using Backupify except for Lastpass and Google Drive. They had some problems when I got started with the sheer size of my GMail account, but the problems seem to have been worked out now. Depending on the size of what you want backed up they are either free or relatively cheap.
• Health & Fitness - First off I have a WiFi enabled Withings Body Scale that automatically graphs your weight and body fat on a web page as you weigh yourself on it. It also has ton of apps to show it (My TV even has an app that can show it). I then use Endomondo to most of my exercise although I am evaluating possibly switching over to RunKeeper. Both services have really nice smart phone apps and they also both integrate with my scale so you can graph your weight and exercise in the same chart. I've also considered using a Bodybugg. It seems really cool but I don't want to sit down and start counting the calories in everything I eat (I also don't really care for having another monthly fee).
• Personal Finances - I use Mint which is a really nice and easy to use service that allows you to see how much money you are spending and earning and even though I have quite complicated finances I haven't found a single US financial institution that I use that they don't support. It also allows you to set up a budget and has tons of other features that I am not using. Even better the service is completely free. Another nice site is Credit Karma that will give you your credit score as often as you like for free. Also the site Quizzle will give you your complete credit report twice a year for free with no credit card required. Finally I do my taxes using the online version of TurboTax.
• Online Automation - Something that is becoming more important as there are more and more services you might want to have a presence on for instance Google+, Facebook and Twitter. In my case whenever I post something on my blog I want it to show up everywhere. For this I use the really cool site IFTTT which stands for If This Then That. It's just a simple way of setting up triggers and actions that should happen when they are triggered.

One common thread you might notice is how I have basically signed my life away to Google. This is true, but even if all of Google went down tomorrow due to my service backup I would still keep all of my data even if it would be a serious pain in the ass trying to set everything back up again. The key is that there should never be a single point of failure that can cause any loss of data except for the very recent stuff not yet duplicated.

Also you might notice that Facebook is not in the list for anything. I obviously use Facebook, but because of their tendency to try their best to lock you and your data in I don't really trust it with anything really important. I just don't trust that the data will be there in 20 years from now and they don't provide me with any easy functionality for getting the raw data out of it in case I would need to at some point. Photo's being a perfect example where as far as I know there is no way to get the photo back in the original resolution at all after being posted even for the person who posted the photo.

Also one thing that is important is that you actively use your services so that if something happens to a service you try to move to a new service as fast as possible. Usually there is some sort of migration solution available if a service is sunset, but the longer you wait the less likely it is that this is still available and working if you don't jump on it as soon as possible.

Digitizing your life to protect the things you treasure

Digitizing your life can actually help you protect the things in your life you think is important. I've often found myself to be a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to "going digital". Doesn't really matter in what way you mean this. For music I went digital around 1995, photography 1998, movies around 2000, TV around 2003 and finally books around 2007. I also started archiving all the emails I sent in 1998 and finally all the emails I receive in 2009. There are several advantages to having the things in your life that are important in digital form compared to keeping a book shelf with CD:s, DVD:s, photo albums.

First of all I always have access to everything important wherever I am. I can look at all the photos I've ever taken whenever I want to. Listen to all my music, have access to tons of books I've purchased, look up any correspondence I've had. All I need is my phone and some cell phone coverage. Especially for books this is extremely nice since bringing a couple of books when you travel can fill up your carry on pretty fast.

Assuming you take proper precautions there is no single point of failure that can rob you of your memories. If you have physical items it is hard and expensive to ensure you have two copies of everything and it takes a lot of space to store it. In digital form having backups is virtually free these days. Currently few things less than the entire fall of civilization as we know it would cause me to lose any of my stuff while anything physical I have is in constant danger of even just a simple robbery, earthquake, forest fire or flooding. I use Crashplan to make a full backup of everything I have in digital form that is important. It is very affordable and has a lot of really neat features. I also recommend using some sort of RAID if possible on any kind of server you use (I use RAID6 with dual redundancy). You should probably if possible try to avoid using single external drives to store important stuff since the way these drives are usually moved around seem to cause them to fail more often than regular drives.

Most physical items except for mail, photo albums and books need some sort of technology to play it and lets face it, that hardware is not going to be around forever. Does anybody even have a cassette tape player, VCR or vinyl record player? I don't, and I lost a lot of both music, movies and TV shows with their passing. That said the same problem exists with going digital though unless you take precautions. For instance anything proprietary will most likely not be around in the long run. I seriously doubt that you will be able to play anything you buy today on iTunes in 50 years as an example. However if you keep to open formats or make sure you strip away any DRM from anything you buy you should probably be fine. As long as there is an open source implementation to play the format you can be pretty sure it will still be playable while there is anybody still using it. As an example you can still play SID music (Commodore 64 game soundtracks), I doubt anybody has used that format in the last 20 years.

If you use any internet services (Photos is a good example of where this makes a lot of sense) you definitely have a problem of obsolescence there too but you can mitigate this danger by making sure that you first of all choose a service that allows you to easily export all your data in case you wish to move it. Also make sure you have a backup of your data. As an example I use Google+/Picasa to do all my photos and then use Backupify to back them up in case something goes wrong. A service that you absolutely should not use to handle your photos is Facebook. With this service there is no way to get your photos back in original size after you have posted it. Also you have their questionable track record on privacy to consider.

Do you know how fast you can read?

Staples has put together this really cool test to see how fast you are reading. It's technically a marketing scheme to sell E-readers, but who cares? I was surprised to see that I apparently read around twice as fast as the national US average with around 535 words per minute which surprised me because I've always considered myself a slow reader.

Go and check out the test it only takes a few seconds.

How much are you worth to Facebook?

This is a really cool site where you answer a couple of questions and they will estimate roughly how much you are worth to Facebook in their upcoming IPO at the end of this week.

I'm apparently worth roughly $67 dollars to them.

Going to start being a bit more active online

I'm doing an experiment with my online presence. I'm going to try to be a bit more active with my blog (Last post was in 2009 which is ridiculous). I don't think it will be that big of a change for me given that I was already usually emailing links I found interesting to people. I will just post them here instead from now on until I get tired of it.

Also as part of this I've spend a little while to set up so that whenever I post something on my blog here it should also be posted to Facebook, Twitter and also Google+. I've also added some connections to also share my media center automatically generated top-list with the world (Although I'm sure nobody cares).

All of this is handled by using some clever magic on IFTTT.com, a really cool site for automating stuff happening to you online. IFTTT is short for If This Then That and basically it allows you to define triggers and then an action that should be performed if triggered. As an example I have a rule for when I post here it should also duplicate that post on Facebook & Twitter.

Another week another Apple problem

Just have to share as a follow up to my latest post on not liking Macs. Yesterday my Mac broke down again. This time it unfortunately seems like it wasn't something easy that they could fix in the store.

Last time I was actually quite impressed by the couple of hours of turnaround that the Apple Store had to fix it. This was about what I expected from a major computer manufacturer and definately in line with what you get from for instance Lenovo or Dell.

This time around I was not that lucky and I was told they needed to ship the computer off to a separate repair facility and that it would take 1.5 to 2 weeks. This brings the level of service down to around what I got when I bought a laptop from Discount Laptops. They were great value, but as always (as long as you don't buy Apple) you get what you pay for.

Why I hate Mac & OSX

I already wrote one article on why I don't like Mac computers or the OSX operating system. However, the last one was written before I had really used it that much. I have now been forced to use a Mac computer quite a lot because the iPhone SDK is only available for Mac computers and I have been playing around with that a lot lately.

The computer I have been using is a Macbook Air, which is supposedly pretty much a top of the line model when it comes to laptops. When I got it I got a lot of excited Mac users telling me to just give it a few weeks and I would come to love it. It's now been about 5 months and I can with certainty say that it is definitely the worst computer I've owned in the last couple of years. So here goes explaining why.

Hardware

First of all the most obvious flaw which is the track pad with just one button. It baffles me how anybody could be so stupid that when they had designed an operating system such as OSX which is so obviously made for two mouse buttons and then build the computers with just one button. With that I mean that there are tons of functionality in every application you can think of that is only accessible through the CTRL+Click context menu. On desktops you at least have an option to enable two mouse buttons, but it seems on laptops you have no such luck.

Next thing that annoys me immensely is that Apple have removed a bunch of very useful keys from the keyboard. The ones most obvious to me is PageUp, PageDown, Home and End. All keys which you as a coder use a lot. Granted I have the really small laptop, but even the 17" Macbook Pro still doesn't have those keys.

That brings me to the other problem with the keyboard. Mac computers have no less than 5 modifier keys. Granted Windows machine have basically the same set of modifier keys. The difference is that on Windows two of them are use very sparingly. On Mac you use all 5 modifier keys and a dizzying array of combinations. They have also tied up all the function keys with rarely used OS functionality so that when you are in X-Code for instance instead of using something easy like F8 for step you are forced to resort to Command+Shift+O.

Lets move on to the screen which compared to what I am used to really sucks. The resolution is simply atrocious. True I opted for the smallest version of laptop and I expect a smaller resolution, but the problem applies to all the models of their laptop line. If you go with something else than Mac you can get 1920x1280 resolution on a 15.4" screen but with Mac you need to go all the way to the ridiculously sized 17" model to get the screen size.

Finally lets go on to build quality. You would think that since Apple computers are so much more expensive than their PC counterparts you would get good build quality. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. My Air broke within about one month which is a record even for me. Granted fixing it was easy and fast, but that is usually the case with any named brand as long as you go for the on-site warranty.

Software

I usually don't have a big problem moving between different computer platforms. I've been on Gnome, KDE most kinds of Windows and even though I might have grumbled in a few weeks I'm usually OK with it. Not so with OSX, it is simply too badly designed for me to get used to.

First of all the whole application/window separation where each application can have zero or more windows. You use one keyboard combination to switch between windows and one keyboard combination to switch between windows within the application. You also have a menu bar that isn't attached to the windows they are attached to. This setup might be acceptable for a non power user which only uses a web browser or one application doing a specific task. For a software developer it sucks. When you develop something in X-Code you will always have one editor window, one debugger console, one document window within that application. Then you have one application for the interface designer and finally one window for the iPhone simulator. So whenever you are going to another window you have to figure out which application you need first and then switch to the correct window. In Windows or Linux you have one list with all your windows and navigation is just much faster and more convenient.

Secondly also in regards to window handling is the fact that you can't maximize windows. All window systems I've seen (Including the ones that predate the original Mac OS) all have a maximize button and I can't imagine who decided that you didn't need that. There is an "optimize size" button, but for some reason the optimal size for a web browser for instance is not the whole screen.

You'd think with it's much touted BSD roots that OSX would play nice with X-Windows applications from Linux and the like. For some reason this is not the case. GIMP and Blender for instance works much worse on OSX than they do on Windows. In Blender you have weird painting artifacts and in GIMP there is a problem that whenever you click in another window you have to click twice for the click to be recognized.

Sort of incidental, but I just installed Snow Leopard yesterday and their progress meter is if possible even more inaccurate than the Microsoft one when installing Windows. During the period of 1 hour it went from 42 minutes remaining to 39 minutes remaining. After that I went out to a pub and didn't get back until 4 hours later and then it was actually finished.

Since what I do on the Mac is software development it is inevitable to compare X-Code with Visual Studio (And also Eclipse, but they are pretty similar so I will stick with Visual Studio).

• In Visual Studio you have everything you need in one easy to access window and it changes the layout automatically to include stuff you might need through different stages of the development cycle. In X-Code everything is spread out in a gazillion different windows and if you want to look at different things when coding and debugging it's up to you to move stuff around.
• X-Code doesn't remember watches between different debug sessions. Debugging anything complex is ridiculously complicated. The only way that works kind of OK is the text based GDB prompt.
• As far as I have managed to figure out you can't inspect the contents of an array at all without looking at the individual items.
• Very mouse centric in it's user interface which is something you strive to avoid when working with code. I still haven't figured out which keyboard combination switches the file you look at in the editor without using the mouse.
• X-Code is incredibly buggy (Even compared to Visual Studio). I have to restart it and even the entire computer all the time when it stops working (Especially the debugger).

Company

Just have to write a little bit about Apple's support. I've actually really tried to figure out how to use the Mac in a reasonable way so I have been visiting the incredibly ineptly named "Genius Bar" in the Apple Store a bunch of times and have also had some contact with support in regards to their developer program. Granted, when my computer was actually broken they did fix it pretty fast and hassle free but apart from that their support sucks!

• I asked them about how you maximize a window and a guy seriously told me that yes, you can do that. No problem and then showed me how to use the mouse to resize the window to cover the entire screen.
• When I was asking them about if there was a laptop with a PageUp/PageDown key they asked me why in gods name I needed to do that (Which is funny because their desktop keyboard still have the keys)?
• It took the apple developer program almost 3 months to approve my membership. The problem was that instead of using the phone number I provided in my application to call me back they looked it up at PRV (The official records agency in Sweden) and found another phone number and used that to try to contact me. The problem is that that phone number has not been connected for over 5 years now. And with that they stopped and didn't even try the number I actually provided in the application. Even better is that though I contacted them several times through email all I got back was "in progress of reviewing your application" and not a peep about they not being able to get hold of me. Not until a friend of mine provided me with a customer support phone number (Which isn't listed on their web site) and a 30 minute yelling match with the customer service representative did they agree to try a working number.
• It's not been over 3 weeks for Apple to approve my first application submission. Which incidentally is a lot longer than it took to write the app.
• Apple is the only company I know of in the US who require a signature to their packages when you order something from their website. You can get around it by signing a waiver, but that requires me to have a printer. You'd think Apply would assume people having a job and not being able to sign for packages in the middle of the day. I don't why they insist on this, I've had much more expensive stuff delivered without signatures from other companies.

Epitet of a diet

Some of you might know that I was diagnosed with high cholesterol about 6 months ago when I for the first time since I joined the military (Which was in 1991). I have to admit that I was actually pleasantly surprised that my doctor suggested that I would try first with changing my diet to try to fix it. My impression of the US medical culture has been that if there is a pill to fix it that is what you reach for first.

So I met up with a dietitian that described which diet I was supposed to follow. The first question pretty much everyone has asked about it is what it is called, and I honestly don't know the name of it but it seems to be pretty similar to the GI diet. Interestingly enough I was not supposed to lose weight with the diet I got, instead it was intended to increase my metabolism which should then lower my Cholesterol. In combination with the diet I was also supposed to increase my exercise. Not much though, I was already pretty good on that account.

Also in the diet was the notion that I had to eat at least once every 3 hours. To be honest I have never eaten as much as I did during this diet in my entire life. It was actually pretty weird to just never be hungry, to the point where I started missing it. I also needed to make sure I drank a lot of water. Actually a ridiculous amount of water. About a gallon a day in fact. Have to admit I hated running to the bathroom all the time. I also almost completely stopped drinking during this period (Alcohol, and beer in particular apparently has a lot of carbohydrates in it). I did end up drinking at three parties that were already planned before the diet started though.

So how did it all work out. I started out with a total cholesterol of 265 and LDL (Bad cholesterol) at 198. After the diet at which point I had also for some reason lost almost 5kg (10 pounds) I had another cholesterol test. I just recently finally learned the result of the test and my new total cholesterol is now 158 and the LDL is 101. According to this cholesterol range chart I went from High to Very Good.

Of course, after the diet was over I went home to Sweden and ate like a total pig. You just have to have a lot of pizza and Sibylla burgers when you are home there. Now I intend to settle down to somewhere in the middle between the diet and my normal life and hopefully that way still live great and have a good cholesterol level.

Went to Chicago for a weekend

I went to Chicago for a weekend in January taking a short break from my Sweden trip. It might seem weird to some of you but the reason was pretty simple. I met a new girl right before I left and it just seemed like seven weeks was a little bit too long. So we discussed it and met somewhere in the middle (Actually Newfoundland would be in the middle, but none of us wanted to go there).

This article was supposed to be longer, but I apparently forgot to write it.

First brush with Mac OS X

The Apple juggernaut seems unstoppable these days and where ever I turn I seem to run into people asking me why I'm not running a Mac. That said a few days ago I had the opportunity to work for a little bit with an iMac by myself. I had a very simple task at hand. I needed to print a couple of flight itineraries that I had in an web mail account. Here are my impressions that I came away with.

First of all there is that whole bull shit mantra that "Mac always works". First Firefox locked up on me within 5 minutes and then Safari locked up after a little while after that. My problem is that I don't know how to kill an app on OS X so after the last of them locked up I was effectively done. I have way better mileage with browsing on Windows than this regardless if I use Firefox, IE or Chrome.

I really hate the whole menu at the top of the screen thing they have going on Mac. I'm sure in some ways you probably get used to it, but I also dislike it on a philosophical level. The problem with it is as your screen starts to fill up with documents it is very disconcerting to have the menu end up sometimes far from your actual document. I also dislike the fact that the menu has a mixture of global and application items. I also don't like the buttons on the left hand side of the window without icons in them. I'm sure you learn this, but which of red, green and yellow means maximize window. Perhaps it's me, but it just isn't obvious in my mind.

Also very annoying is that Mac doesn't remember your last used print settings. Every time I tried to print something the page size was reset to a CD sleeve (Which I'm sure is something that Johansson had set up somewhere). On any other modern OS the print dialog simply remembers what the last settings you entered in the print dialog was.

Then there is the issue with the mouse. I can see that one mouse button can be easier to use for a novice. But the way they have apparently done it on an iMac is that it looks like there is only one button, but you can still press it as a right and left mouse button (And have different actions occur). That is just plain retarded, and how can that possibly be construed as simpler?

Also, during the entire time I was using the computer there was also this weird quiet chirping sound coming from it. I assumed that it had to do with IM or something like that. However when I asked him about it he didn't know either, but he guessed it was a problem with having too many USB devices connected to the computer. User friendly indeed!

Finally I have the number one gripe with this whole mess. The keyboard layout! What the hell kind of idiot decided that the Swedish layout of the keyboard shouldn't match what is actually printed on the keys (It was a Swedish keyboard)? I could never figure out how you got a '@' character on the Swedish keyboard. It was printed as being on the equivalent of AltGR+'2' which is the same as a "normal" keyboard. However, that didn't work. In the end I had to switch to an English layout for this one character. I later learned from Johansson learned that it was located on something like AltGR+'ä'.

Before I did this I had basically always thought Mac's had kind of cool hardware (Off course except for the glide point which would just have to go) and the slick UI based off of a unix kernel appealed to me too and that I would probably have liked running it as long as I could for work. Now I know not to believe the hype and when I don't have to run Windows anymore I'll be switching back to Linux.