Awesomeness and a broken finger
February 5th, 2010 09:10 by xinit (hide)
Sorry, I'm a bad blogger. I promised a lot of people to blog about my move to Sweden, but I haven't. And since I still don't have a mobile phone subscription, I can't use twitter as I used to, every moment of the day. The short version is in the title: Sweden is awesome and I broke a finger.
The somewhat longer version is that life is great here. Me and Kasia are doing great; I'm having such a great time being with her. Work is great too. I'm doing pretty cool stuff, both coding and tinkering with networks and unix systems to squeeze out every possibility to get even better performance. We're currently serving 50 million ads a day (and yes, online ads.. I sold my soul) with just a hand full of servers, running a Ruby application. The team I'm working with consists of only smart an experienced people, which makes it even better. I'm learning every day.
My Swedish isn't really great yet. I've signed up for a course, but I have to wait some months to start, since it's fully booked. In the mean time I'm doing some Rosetta Stone, but not so much. I hear a lot of Swedish at work, but everybody speaks English, so there is no real need to speak Swedish. Reading is not so hard, since there are a lot of commonalities with Dutch, but speaking is a lot more difficult. However, I had a small breakthrough yesterday, when I went to the hairdresser. She doesn't speak English, so I was forced to speak Swedish and I had an actual (and pretty decent) conversation with her! I guess it's all about not being shy and just try.
Swedes are friendly people and very modest. Business is somewhat different than in the Netherlands. For example, meetings are different. In the Netherlands, often people go into a meeting with a goal. Decisions should be made. A general consensus is OK, but there should be a result after a meeting. Here it's different. Meetings are for listening to people and talk about the stuff that needs attention, but decisions are made at the coffee machine. I read some articles about this and some said that Swedish mentality is closer to the way people do business in Belgium, but I'm not sure. Belgians seem far more hierarchical; one person is the boss. Here, it's more about compromises and talking.
Some people asked me if Sweden is expensive. I guess it can be, but apart from the alcohol, it feels a bit like the Netherlands. Of course my salary is in Swedish Kronor, so it's harder to compare, but I don't really have the feeling that products are that more expensive here. I must admit that I'm not very price aware, so it's more a gut feeling. VAT is higher; 25% and 12% instead of 19% and 6%, but I guess you get a lot back from that. Alcohol is excessively expensive though. Half a liter (note to Wayne: "I'm sorry sir, I don't know what a liter is") of beer costs roughly Euro 6,50 in a bar and a Mojito is roughly Euro 13,-. Next to that, you can't buy wine or (normal) beer in the supermarket. There is only one company that sells alcohol and it's run by the government and there a bottle of beer is about Euro 1,50. In the supermarket you can buy 3.5% vol. beer, but that just tastes like water.
But you get a lot back for the stuff you pay. Public transport is good. I think it's better than in the Netherlands. Metro runs pretty much on time (in the Dutch meaning of the word) and often. Swedes tend to have a thing for time. If the metro is 3 minutes late, it's late. 13 past the hour isn't a quarter past, it's 13 past. Interesting difference.
Another thing you get is health care. Paying for that is done through taxes, directly. Not through strange systems with insurance companies. If you need health care, you will get it. Everybody is equal. The first 900 kr (90 euro's) per year, you'll have to pay by yourself, and then it's free for 365 days.
How do I know this? Experience. 3 weeks ago I broke my right ring finger. I went snow boarding with a friend and at the beginning of the first run, I touched the ground with my hand while trying to keep balance. It hurt, but I thought that it would be just a contusion. It wasn't even a cool crash or anything and I had been standing on my board for only 5 seconds. I went to the first aid at the slope to have it checked, but the guy there said it was probably only a contusion and that it was just a little bit swollen. so, I continued boarding for a couple of hours. My finger turned blue and purple the next day, but when the swelling disappeared after a couple of days. I still couldn't move it and it still hurt, so I decided to see a doctor and after some x-rays it turned out to be broken. At the hospital, I got a cast that is coming off today. I'm actually sitting at the hospital while writing this piece. I just had x-rays and I have a doctors appointment in an hour. Hope it healed a bit and that they'll take off the cast, because it's really uncomfortable and typing is pretty hard.
I'll try to make some more time in the future to blog and I hope I can get a mobile subscription soon, so I'm able to be online a bit more. But I'm alright!
Charlatans
February 2nd, 2010 09:14 by Wi11ow (hide)
This morning I got quite pissed off by an article I read in Sp!ts. After a report in the dutch TV programme Zembla about how medium Char Margolis (apparently only known in the Netherlands) uses cold reading to ’speak to the dead’, it would seem that she’s back for more. This time she talks to victims of several disasters to get them in touch with their dead relatives. As remarked in Sp!ts, apparently people forget very easily. Wasn’t it already established that she’s a fraud?
Char is not the only person fooling us Dutch people. We have another Uri Geller show coming up and then there is Derek Ogilvie. I have to be ashamed of myself and say that even I believed that guy for a while, until I remembered Char and the Zembla report. I wondered if similar reports exist about Derek Ogilvie, and indeed they do. In a blog post by a spectator of his show the skepticism is quite clear. But this guy is better than Char. Cut the scenes for his shows right and you have a guy who knows that the wallpaper in the second room to your left on the first floor has been torn apart.
But all they do is guess. James Randi, the guy who’s trying to uncover all these frauds, tested Ogilvie and he only got 1 out of 20 tests right. Randi has a reward worth US $1,000,000 for the first person to pass his test. He has yet to meet the first person to pull it off.
So we know all of this. We know Uri Geller, Char and Derek Ogilvie have all been unmasked. So why do we still believe them? Why do the networks and these clowns still make money out of emotional people who are willing to believe anything? The answer to that is the same as the answer to why religion exists. It soothes people, they’re lured into a false sense of security. Your loved one is with you, don’t worry. What is his name? Oh is it a she? Does the name start with an R, E, or a T? Tina? Oh no of course, I meant to say Caroline. She’s with you. And she says you should give me more money.
What are we up to?
February 1st, 2010 23:54 by exel (hide)
Our site has remained dormant for quite a while and we get the occasional visitor on the irc channel poking us with a stick to check for rigor mortis. It’s not that bad, actually. We’re very close to a 1.0 release, code-wise, and have been for quite a while. But the devil is in the details and the details are definitely in the packages. When we started the project, Debian 4 and CentOS 4 were sensible stable targets. Obviously, they’re not anymore. So our first effort into getting ready for a testable pre-1.0 branch is to pick up whatever pile of paperclips and rubber bands we used to autobuild the packages for both these platforms and re-adopt the contraption to work with their newer distro brethern, CentOS 5 and Debian 5.
The whole operation of converting to newer distros turned out to be a tremendous pain, basically leaving us at square one packaging-wise. At that point we decided to concentrate resources even further and focus first on Debian 5 as a target for OpenPanel. Right now we’re getting help from Tomas Šiaulys who is kicking the builds into submission. If you’re not afraid of a compiler and know a bit about packaging, perhaps you could help out as well. Drop by in #openpanel on the oftc irc network and ask around. We could also use a couple of CSS/javascript people to take a look at any dangling issues in that department.
Speaking of the GUI, it has become quite a magical environment. Widgets respond correctly to keyboard commands and focus events. We’ve been paying a lot of attention to little details. The look has been completely refreshed from the alpha release, following a more modern layout style. The GUI also scales with the browser vertically, leaving less screen real estate wasted:
A precise E.T.A. for the public release is hard to give. We’ll try to post more frequent updates as the 1.0 target approaches. Thanks for hanging on.
