Travel: 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!

On Tuesday I am leaving for San Francisco. I will be attending the Multimedia 2003 conference in San Francisco, or actually the conference is in Berkeley but the restaurants are better in San Francisco and it only takes 15 minutes to get there with the Bart. I will be gone until November 10.

Monday and Tuesday I will spend in Boden with the Systemteknik department. The main issue is obviously how to handle the problem of to few students.

November 18-21 I had planned to attend the Microsoft Research Academic Days: Security in Distributed Systems but I figured it will take to much time. Microsoft would actually pay for the trip and the housing. Quite generous of them, right? The topic wasn't perfectly right for me though.

Tomorrow is the exam in SMD151. 110 students and the following exams I have to correct. Fun fun fun. That will have to wait until I get back from the States.

With all the other short trips planned for November, if I had attended the Microsoft Research thing then I would have had 6 working days in Luleå during November!

Finished reading Grisham's latest, The King of Torts yesterday. A VERY good book which I recommend to everybody. I continued with Clancy's latest, The Teeth of the Tiger. Not much happening yet but it is a Clancy.

The snow has hit Luleå. It is white outside. White is nice but unfortunately I cannot ride my bike during the winter :-( I need my training or else I will get fat as a pig and totally restless. Today I went for a fast walk. It was only 35 minutes but when I got back I felt really pepped up. What a difference some exercise can do. I need more endorphins, what a great drug it is.

During last weekend I switched over to using my fiber instead of my ADSL and during the day it works splendidly but during the evening (between 16.00 and 24.00) and totally flakes out with high delay. It is still usable but rather bad. Throughput is OK but you get very high delay getting into Tele2's core network. Support say that they have ordered new hardware but hasn't given me any dates on when the problem will be fixed. When the network is not loaded I get over 10Mbps between my home and the university. Hmm, I just checked and tonight it seems OK. Might they have upgraded today or is it not used as heavily this evening? We will see... Besides the longer delay in the network it works very good. Stable and good. Hopefully the local peering will get set up during the winter and then we will get real banded out to the rest of the world by going via SUNET (what I cannot do that? ;-) I don't know if I need that though. Tele2's world Internet access seems rather good. Anyhow the whole deal is much cheaper than my Telia company ADSL.

No, now I have to get my attention back to the movie, Ghost of Mars.

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!