anksil's Corner

I don't often remember my dreams, but I had a pretty vivid, weird nightmare shortly before waking up this morning. The fact that I remembered it may have been down to the benzodiazepines I'd taken - I really needed to catch up on sleep, and my sleep quality is pretty crap at best.

At any rate, I dreamt that I woke up in what appeared to be my bed, in what superficially looked like my apartment. However, a look outside revealed that I was on the ground floor (I live on the fifth floor in real life) in an area I wasn't familiar with. People were milling about outside but seemed to ignore me.

I went into the bathroom, and found there was a naked, dead man (apparently intact, but I wasn't inclined to examine the corpse more closely) slung over the shower curtain rail above the bathtub. My real apartment doesn't have a tub, just a shower cubicle, but this place seemed to have an odd (at least for this part of the world) room which was dedicated to just the bathtub, and the room with the toilet was inside of the room with the bath.

The last thing I remember was hearing noises from within the room with the toilet, then thinking "oh shit, whoever killed that guy is still here, I've got to get out of here". Then I woke up.

Kind of strange. I wonder if it has any significance, or if it's just down to all the crime fiction I've been reading lately.

It just occurred to me that RPM (revolutions per minute) is a misused unit.

It should actually be used to measure the political instability of a country. Of course, used like that, 1 RPM is a huge unit, so more commonly you would use micro-RPM and milli-RPM.

I'm not sure how to calculate that properly. First you have to define exactly what a 'revolution' is, and you also need to figure out what timespan to calculate it over.

The last thing in my country of residence that was unambiguously a revolution was in 1809, it seems at a casual glance. Or possibly 1772 if you don't want to count the counter-revolution that deposed the absolute monarch. At any rate, assuming 1809, and sloppily counting 365 days per year, 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour, we get a little over 9.5 nano-RPM over the timespan of 1809-present.

I expect many places in South America and Africa would get figures many orders of magnitude higher.

On another note, talking to various friends I've seen more signs that the woman I mentioned in my previous post (NB: not ladynoid!) is less than stable. I only wish I'd talked to them earlier.

So apparently some affectionate words from me when I'd had more than one bottle's worth of champagne a couple of hours into the new year, plus the implied promise (which I'd kept) of commitment within that virtual world, is enough to assume I am also committed to someone in real life - when we've known each other for what? Six weeks? Never met in real life, talked on Skype once, and barely knew each other really.

I TOLD her about my plans for next month. At least twice. That night I went "You do know about my plans in TX in February, right?" She went "yes", so I said "Good. Just making sure you know about everything that might affect us." and she apparently didn't feel the need to bring it up again.

Well, until the person I'm visiting next month turned up in this virtual world, inadvertently pushed all her jealousy buttons, and things went boom because of the presumption of real-life commitment.

I suppose my crime is in trying to apply logic and reasoning to emotions. I really don't appreciate being called 'sick' for continuing on exactly the course I'd already clearly declared I would be following.

Oh well. Good riddance - with such different views on what was going on between us, it was probably just a matter of time before things broke down, anyhow.

Whee. That's another Christmas finished. (Hereabouts Christmas mainly takes place on the Eve, not Christmas Day, if you were wondering.)

This year's present harvest:

* cigars - yum!
* a new USB headset, seems comfier than the old one
* chocolate
* a couple of books

Not comparable to the mountains of presents I used to get as a kid, but I really don't mind. I guess I'm getting old; these days I appreciate Christmas mostly for the company, food and drink. :) And the drink was plentiful enough last night, though nothing too extreme.

I guess I should give the old liver a rest now so it's ready for New Year's. I'm taking the train back to the capital tomorrow. It's been good to get out of the big city for a while, but still it'll be nice to get back home.

Dad and family came and visited mom yesterday for Christmas, and his GF and her daughter unsurprisingly found Eskil very cute. He got all the attention he could wish for, probably enough to tide him over for several weeks. :)

Bleh. So as usual, I absolutely suck at updating this thing. :D I've switched jobs again since the last post - started the new one in July. It seems a good deal saner than the last two, so far. The pay could be a bit better, but hey, it's enough to keep me in beer and toys - and an environment that doesn't drive me nuts is worth more than almost any amount of money.

I also like their tastes in gifts and entertainment for the staff. Monday night, we went out to Fjäderholmarnas Krog for Christmas dinner - VERY nice. Then later on, everyone got two bottles of wine (an Austrian white wine and a French Bordeaux). I'll take this over any number of silly team-breaking exercises my previous two employers arranged!

I'm at my mom's house since yesterday - will be spending Christmas here and at my dad's place. The cats pounced me, cuddly as usual, as soon as I came in through the door.

The train was full, as expected... good thing I made my reservations well in advance. I'll be heading back to the capital on Wednesday, then working for two days before I have four days off around New Year's - whee!

Finding presents for everyone was not easy. I left it a bit later than usual this year, but it got sorted out in the end. Taking part in the Christmas rush in central Stockholm during the last week before Christmas was not my idea of fun, though.

Sigh. It's great that my new employer is so anxious to send new-hires on courses, but perhaps they should slow down and be a bit more thorough about it.

Compressing a course designed for three or four days into two and assigning a woman who, while knowledgeable, is quite inexperienced as an instructor, to it does not make for good learning. Particularly when the course involves fairly advanced financial concepts that many of the attendees are not familiar with...

The course had a prerequisite "intro" course, but it seems nobody checked whether everyone had taken that or had equivalent knowledge before signing us up. Most attendees seemed to just resign to being confused after a while.

I don't really blame the instructor; I'm sure she did the best she could under the circumstances. I doubt I'd do a better job under that kind of stress.

Oh well. The last course I attended was considerably better. I hope the same can be said for the next one, in nearly two weeks' time.

This morning I went to a dentist for the first time since... must be 2002 at best. The verdict wasn't really especially bad under those circumstances, I suppose - during the dentist-free time I've been careful about brushing my teeth but not paid much attention to them otherwise.

Plenty of tartar which was polished away, of course. And gingivitis, causing preaching about flossing and demonstrations of this. I suppose I'd best heed the advice; certainly beats having the gingivitis develop into worse stuff.

I left the dentist's office minus a fair bit of blood (my gums were more sensitive than I thought, seemingly...) and with some flossing/inter-tooth-gap-brushing devices plus an 880 SEK (125 USD, 96 EUR) bill, but at least a pleased feeling at not having turned out to have any cavities.

I proceeded to laze about for a few hours before it was time to head down to the harbour for some work. No, I'm not a dockworker, I'm a lazy IT person who monitors financial systems. So yeah, it's been a loooong day.

EDIT: Oh, and for the curious, there are pics from my stay in Romania at:

http://churt-lyne.dyndns.org/~niklas/pics/

in the "brasov" and "sinaia" directories.

Aaand today was my last day at work.

Whatever criticism one might have of their organisation and internal politics, my now-ex-employer does know how to say goodbye in style. Champagne, flowers, and a gift card for a local bath/spa place. Made my day, it did.

Tomorrow morning it's off to the airport to spend Christmas in Romania; should be interesting, and rather different from what I'm used to. I've carefully packed my luggage so all containers of fluid are in the check-in luggage given the current security insanity. I'm flying via Budapest as Sweden has no direct flights to Bucharest.

Okay, so I suck at updating this. I guess it'll just have to be an off-and-on thing.

I've been sick of my job for a while. Partly I just don't think I have the right kind of personality to work in the form of projects, but the company is a complete mess. Various people in key positions don't seem to realise that the style of work that applied when the company was tiny, no longer does when you have about 120 employees. There are serious deficiencies in communication and organisation.

I've complained about it at various times as have co-workers, but nobody who's in a position to do anything about it will listen. So I started looking at alternative work.

Finally, I got offered a monitoring/support position Tuesday at a company that develops and runs financial systems. I handed in my resignation yesterday to the surprise of my boss, and negotiated my notice period down so Dec 21 will be my last day. (Yes, we have LONG notice periods here.) I'll be starting the new job Jan 2, should be good.

Bloody hell. So I went back to work after a well-deserved vacation. Early in the week my boss approaches me and informs me that he wants me to head an effort to improve the quality of our software. I spend a couple of days drawing up plans and adjusting them according to the boss's input. Later on, a co-worker who runs the lab to a great extent approached me and asked me about the plans I was drawing up.

Just a few sentences into my explanation, he goes ballistic and runs off to grab the boss, informing him in no uncertain terms that he's barking up the wrong tree. He goes on to tell me his idea of how the effort should be implemented, and makes a very convincing argument for it. Coincidentally, his idea bears a great deal of resemblance to what I originally proposed.

So now I get to redo all the plans over again, "preferrably in an even more ambitious manner". Over two days of work wasted because the boss couldn't bloody explain the purpose of what he wanted me to do, and because he has no clue what's actually going on. Sigh.

No, it's not my fault, but it's still bleeding aggravating...

At least it's the weekend now. I've started relaxing with the aid of a Branik fresh out of the fridge...

Gha, I'm feeling sluggish today. Back to work after vacation - it's always like this, I suppose.

I've had a heck of a time trying to get my brain up and running so I can be somewhat productive. I'm working on it using the time-honoured cure of plenty of coffee, but that has its downsides, and takes a while to kick in too.

I'm sure it doesn't help that as usual my schedule got all messed up during my time off. I did get a reasonable amount of sleep last night, but I think the sudden schedule change is still messing with me a little.

Oh well. At least the office is fairly empty, this being prime vacationing time around here. A lot of people spend most of their 25-30 yearly vacation days on taking all of July off; I've split it up a bit this year and only had the first half of the month off, since I had some time off earlier this year to go see friends in London, and want to save some time off for Christmastime as well...

I like it when it's quiet around here - at least that makes it somewhat easier to focus, even if I sometimes fail anyhow. ;) The selection of reasonable-priced lunches is pleasant to come back to, as well... I had some lovely chicken tikka masala today. I love what they do with the sauce.

By the way, I recommend Jonathan Coulton's "Code Monkey" if you're not familiar with it. You can listen to it at http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songs , or buy it for one US dollar. Musically it's pretty mainstream and I don't think its appeal is restricted to techies, even if it describes a techie's life. Coulton's pretty cool overall, and it's impressive that he can pretty much put out one good song per week.

But now I've got to figure out what's up with this blasted testing script failing. Over and out.

I just finished reading "Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry" by B.S. Johnson.

(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811209547/qid=1152733531/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-1762521-4941561?s=books&v=glance&n=283155)

It's quite an amusing little novel about a clerk in London, who learns double-entry bookkeeping and then begins setting up his own, where he sets up debits for perceived slights against him by society, and credits for his efforts at getting back for them. It's quite twisted in some ways and full of black humour.

The only real disappointment was the latter part of the book, where Christie seems to go overboard; he does things like blow up a tax office, and doesn't stop there, but pours cyanide into a water reservoir, killing about 20,000 people. I think that's taking the theme a bit far...

Also, the ending is perhaps a little clumsily handled - Christie conveniently dies of cancer so Johnson can wrap the story up. Still, it's a fun read.

Well, there we go. I have an LJ again, for the first time in years. I haven't managed to keep up journalling in the past, but we'll see - maybe this time will be different. :)

Having a lazy week. On Monday I go back to the office, after having had two weeks off. Last week I spent hanging out with my parents out west where I used to live; I got back to the big (well, by local standards) city a couple of days ago. It's always nice to see the family and my two beloved kitties. In the sweltering heat (again, by local standards; it's about 30 C/86 F - not much to some, I know, but stuns most locals into lethargy), we didn't get up to too much, but we did go see Läckö Castle and wandered around Lysekil some.

I also saw Chicken Run (which I didn't see when it came out, but it was definitely worth it) and Wallace & Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. Aardman really does some cool stuff...

I think I drank alcohol every day of last week, so I should probably give the ol' liver a rest now. It's not like I got falling down drunk or anything, but I certainly indulged some - especially at my dad's place. He's generous with the single malt. :)

Seems SJ (the main operator on the railways here, though it has a number of competitors in these deregulated days) are doing their best to shoot themselves in the foot reputation-wise. I was relatively lucky in that at least I got down there and back up there without any real problems, but the new X40 double-decker trains they've introduced have been a complete fiasco. I rode one on the way down - it wasn't so bad in itself, but it certainly had all the problems I'd heard about. No catering on board except for a vending machine, which was broken. So was the coffee machine. Thankfully I was prepared and had stocked up on food and water before leaving Stockholm.

A day or two after that trip, SJ announced they were taking this train type off the Stockholm-Gothenburg services because they were just having too many problems with them. The services used to be run with old-style locomotive-hauled trainsets, which worked much better and had proper catering aboard... but they've altered the timetables to reflect the speed of the new trains, meaning they can't just put the loco trains in again. Apparently they've scrounged up other trainsets that can handle the timetable, and they seem to have fewer problems, but still no catering... bleh.

On the way up I took an X2000 (high-speed tilting train) instead, which was nicer. Catering, as well as complimentary WiFi internet access on the way up. But people taking a night train from Malmö to Stockholm via Gothenburg were not quite so lucky - see this news story: http://www.thelocal.se/article.php?ID=4288

I sincerely hope they'll go over their procedures before another screwup like this happens...