DrPeppar: oktober 2003 Archives

Today was packing day, or should I say, Johanna preparing to pack everything for me for my second trip next week. Tomorrow morning I am heading out to Boden for a 1.5 day department meeting. To be honest I am not really looking forward to it. I don't know how many such meetings I have attended over the last 9 years but it feels that they do not lead to anything. Yes, yes I know. It is everybody's responsibility to make something out of it but at the same time we all have so many other things to do so the ones without a clear deadline or a clear responsible person tend to vaporize. My taxi for the airport leaves at 18.00 on Tuesday and I guess I will get back from Boden around 15.00 which leaves me a few hours for the last packing.

Tovah has reached the age when she wants to play more advanced games. It started out me and here playing the Disney Racing Tour which means that she sits in my lap and I drive. Earlier this week I grew tired of that game and thought that we should try something more in my taste. Need for Speed 2. Great game and very addictive. Even without Tovah. I haven't really wasted time on computer games since August 2000 when I stopped playing Mafia. A friend told me back then that I should focus on my daughter instead of computer games. So I did :-) I always listen friends (well not always ;-). I just cannot make that BMW M5 make it around under 1:55. My record is 1:55:20. Humph.

My application for associate professor has still not been handled, at least I haven't heard anything on the issue from Jerker. Mailed him earlier this week but as usual I didn't receive any answer. How can I make him do anything on the issue. When I ask he just says he is sorry and he hasn't had the time. Perhaps I should talk with the dean about it? Before Jerker becomes the dean that is. The whole issue makes my angry and it all turns into negative energy for me which in turn comes out in anger.

Just got an email that some "lost" money has been recovered in one of my projects which means that the division will get another 250K this year and we will end up on a strong plus again. Always nice to have a positive balance sheet at the end of the year, as we have had since 1999 when I took over the division. Congratulations to us :-)

Mikael Drugge celebrated his birthday yesterday. Congratulations!! He is one of my young promising graduate students.

I have been up way to late the last two nights so today I am heading for bed early. Have to get up at 0700 tomorrow!

Good night and sleep tight!

Ps. If anybody in Luleå need anything from San Francisco then this might be a good time to tell me!

It has been a long quiet week on this Blog. I haven't been able to find myself in writing mood, it just hasn't felt right.

Tomorrow I am meeting with Jerker to discuss what I hopefully will feel after the meeting is OUR joint plans for the Media Technology division. As I wrote before I have gotten the feeling that he has totally put me aside and he feels that it is his responsibility to solve this, not mine. Also, it is now clear that he is leaving as prefect as soon as possible to attack the next step on his ladder as dean of the technical faculty. One possible candidate is Thomas, the current pro-prefect for Systemteknik and head of the control group division. I am a bit divided in how I feel about if Thomas will be good on that position or not. He is a very listening person while at the same time he can be very black and white. He is unfortunately not very pragmatic, very much the same way as the previous prefect, Bengt. Anyhow, the meeting with Jerker has been on my mind all weekend unfortunately.

During the week I have had the honour of attending another part of my management course and I had a very good interview with Sören. One conclusion is (it comes back over and over again) that I shouldn't be afraid of conflicts, both in positive and negative meaning.

Tuesday evening our 18-group (the management course participants) plus the PMI coaches were all invited to Britta's huge house. It is an old transformer building build about 100 years ago. It is three stories high and the top floor is just one large room with over 5 meters in ceiling height and the room is over 100 m². This was one of the most beautiful houses I have ever seen!! I have tons of photos but I haven't had the will to put them online yet. The party was very nice indeed even if the not the whole group came. It was also Sören's 41:st birthday. Congratulations my friend!! Freddie was there in spirit and I really missed him not being there. He had been part of all our earlier sessions and it felt wrong when he wasn't there.

This Sunday I spent almost entirely with Tovah. We played two Mulle Meck games, building houses and cars and the latter was of the two my favorite. A bit to advanced for Tovah to play on her own but I enjoyed it and Tovah enjoyed being there with me :-) We also went for a magic story time at the Norrbotten's Museum. 45 minutes of interactive store telling and Tovah got to play one of the main leads. I think she thought it was a bit scary to be up there because she didn't really understand what she was supposed to do. Bruno, the magician was very good and entertaining for both young and old.

By the way, we have cancelled our winter vacation to the Phi-Phi islands because we thought it was to expensive. We will take a cheaper trip during the winter instead. Perhaps Madeira again? I really enjoyed it there. Or perhaps just a cheap trip to the Canary islands?! We'll see....

Yesterday I played with setting up a new router for my Tele2 connection with automatic Tele2 login, firewall, NAT gateway, dynamic DNS etc. etc. It took some time to learn everything but I now have a fully working gateway and during the week I will migrate some of the computers to test how it works "in production". There is nothing wrong with the bandwidth (about 10Mbps down and 8-9 Mbps up towards LTU).

I also found a new great gadget blog, Gizmodo (yes I am a gadget maniac even though it is not as important to me anymore).

It feels good to write again, I don't know why I stop when I feel down. It is just the same with my physical training. As soon as I feel infirm I stop training, but I know that if I train I will feel better. I just have to push myself harder. This weekend I have cycled about 20 Km in two days which at least something but way to little for me to get that good being feeling about myself.

I saw the Hulk earlier this week and it was very good actually, at least the second part. Also finished 24 season 2 last week and I am really looking forward to season 3 which starts in two weeks in the US. Haven't decided yet if I want to wait until the whole series has been aired and then watch it in condensed form (as I did with series 2) or see each episode directly as they "leak" out on the net. The one that lives will see :-) I highly recommend this to anybody that enjoys action movies. During the whole season 2 I only felt one episode being "series boring" and that is a very good grade coming from me regarding a TV series!!

Book wise I have finished the trilogy about Arn, the Temple Knight and I am now in the middle of the fourth book in that series, the Arn Heritage. I enjoyed the three first books very much but the fourth feels from time to time more like a history facts book than a novel.

Well, it is time for another night in bed with the lovely wife. Good night, sleep tight and don't let the bedbugs bite!

I have had a bad cold since Tuesday, running nose, fever and a hurting throat. Thursday afternoon I thought I was well again but that was a mistake :-( It is now Sunday morning and I am watching Tovah TV with guess who, Tovah. Blä for colds.

Since I announced to my boss that I was leaving he has been avoiding me and although he hasn't told me yet he is planning to replace me as division head before I leave. I wanted to work together with him on solving this for the best but he doesn't seem agree with that. When we last talked about it we agreed on that business would go on as usual but along the way he apparently has changed his mind. By the way, he announced two days ago that he was leaving as prefect for a new job as dean of the technical faculty. He will leave at the latest January 1:st 2004. By the way, it has now been 6 months since he promised to take care of my associate professor application. A few weeks ago he admitted that he was ashamed that he hadn't done anything about this and that he would take care of it as soon as possible. It seems like I will never get that degree....

During the week I got the fiber working via Tele2....My guess about that it was a new subnetwork and the routing was wrong was correct. It only took about 10 emails and 4 phone calls to convince Tele2 and in the end LuNet was the ones to fix it.