Transportation, kid by bike. And the modifications I made.


 

First thing to fix for parental leave is a way to transport myself and the little miss. With a budget of around 10 000 swedish krona I could get a pretty undecent car. However, there are more things to take into account then just what the cost of purchasing. With a car, there is a lot of extras. Gas and insurance just to name two. Other things I’ve been thinking about is environmental impact, and the safety when travelling.

So I went looking for a bike. First I thought about getting a wagon that you attach to the back of your bike, but after looking at other parents transporting their kid like that I thought it looked to insecure and bumpy. And I could not look to see how she was doing while pedalling, not safe at least.

I tried a Christiania bike a while back, the three wheel model. I did not really care for that construction, The microadjusments you make while leaning was impossible, and it was heavy.

Then I found the dutch model, with two wheels. Found a seller close to where I live and went to try it. It was very easy to ride. To bad he only had the electrically assisted version to sell. Long story short, I got one with electrical assist.

After a pretty terrified transportation home via train I am so happy with it. The two older kids live to ride in it and 11year old have driven me around in it.

But to modifications.

* Back mirror: I added a mirror so I can watch traffic trying to pass me.
* Car seat. 7 months is to young to be in the box, and a bike chair is not good enough either. Her neck would get super tired. So I attached a second hand car-seat. And she is facing me so I can see if she is sleeping or if she is bored. I used the straps that came with the seat and baggage fasteners for the other part. I screwed a strip of wood for the chair to lean on and it worked great.
* Sun-block: Just added a bit of sleeping mat as sun blocker.

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Why I don’t have a CV anymore.

Picture by https://www.flickr.com/photos/slgc/

I don’t have a CV anymore.

I stopped several years ago when I joined TAT, mostly because I had a job I liked and did not feel like hunting for a new one, and a little because it takes time to maintain it. And whenI’ve been approached by external agencies wanting to win me over to “the new next big super thing, that I’m totally the correct person for”. Either by recommendation or LinkedIn or this here blog I have refused to provide a CV. I have several reasons for this, and I will list them here in an unordered list, hoping to get more to stop having CV’s and maybe spark some sort of discussion about this. So far every one of my colleagues and friends I’ve talked to have been agreeing with me.

  • The information is already on LinkedIn. I have spent some time to add a lot of information to my profile over at LinkedIn, it contains everything a CV contains anyway.
  • CV’s are old school. Again, why would you want something that’s already available at LinkedIn?
  • Un polite 1. When the second question you get is “can I have your CV” what you really are saying to me is “give me a list of what you have done, I’m not really interested in listening to what you want to do now”. What the second question should be is “What do you want to do?” or “This is how I think you will fit with us.
  • Un polite 2. When a conversation starts with “Can I have your CV” it signals a lot of trust-issues.
  • Bad experiences 1. I met a recruiter once, he talked and talked about what he could do for me, selling it as it was the best thing without any concrete stuff. I answered a lot of questions but it was not until he heard about a technology I worked with 7 years ago that he made a connection to where he wanted me to start. LOL, I had begun that sentence with “I never want to do blah blah blah again”.
  • Bad experience 2. One place where I was working we where told to update our CV’s and send them in, real urgent. Two days after the deadlines there where massive layoffs of those that did not have the correct buzzwords in their CV’s.
  • Bad experience 3. Technology is hard, there are a gazillion technologies and everything is fluid. I understand that it is hard for someone that not works hands on with the technology that it is hard to keep up and understand. But using simple word matching is still not acceptable. Not if you are recruiting techie talent.
  • Being a cog. A CV is begging to be put into a big machine that looks for keywords and you will be nothing more then a cog in that machine. I don not want to be that.
  • Changeable. When I was working as a consultant, my managers usually took my CV and “polished” it, I did not think that was strange at the time, but now I really do. If I write who I am, what I have done, why would that not be awesome enough in it’s own right? If I need to add lipstick and gloss different to wherever I send it, it’s probably not good enough or representative enough of me. So getting a CV should actually scare an employer rather then make them happy.

 

So what do I have instead?

  • I have a LinkedIn, where I provide a lot of the information available in the traditional CV form. It however is static in the sense that I don’t make a special tailored version for anyone.
  • I have my blog, where I post a lot of the things I do with my spare time.

Will I ever make a CV again? I’m not saying that I never ever will make a CV or provide information that way, but the circumstances and the time points against it.

 

 

“in the Mobile Infantry, everybody drops and everybody fights”

That of course is from Robert A. Heinlein’s book Sci-fi/military fiction book Starship Troopers.

If we look away from everything else that is Starship Troopers and focus on just that, the “everybody drops and everybody fights” and the explanation for it. Robert A. Heinlein wrote a page or two about why militaries of old didn’t quite make it. There was a lot of military personell that did nothing military. In the mobile infantry you drop (get shot via space down to the planets surface) and fight. Everyone does this, from the private grunts, to the lieutenants and corporals, generals and the chaplain. There is no slack, everyone knows the core-objective. Now if we’re not out to kill aliens (I’m not) could that philosophy be translated into something else?

I’m obviously thinking about big corporations, and medium sized too. How come that companies get bloated so quickly, and that the core is lost. Think about it, really think about it. What if the place you worked at, every single employee worked towards the same goal. Maybe not all the time, but most of the time. Could you run a company like that? (startups and small companies can). Could you run a whole society like that (I do not think we should). Could you run the civic functions like that? If we tried it, would it kill of bureaucracy?

Battery starve guitar effect pedal

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Last night, I made a starve pedal. It’s not a pedal in itself, it’s a gadget that removes power from another pedal, thus making it go all “dying battery”. This can lead to sounds that is useful. It can also lead to just silence. Results may vary. This version of the pedal has power in/out and two potentiometers chained. One is 10k and the other is 1k. I use the bigger pot to dial in the general area of where the fun sound is, and the 1k to fine-tune.

Someone will be delighted for christmas

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Why? because in this, the second of cold’s in a very short time. I strayed from watching TV (marathon style) and glued together a lamp.

I used an old light fixture that was from a lamp that got smashed some time ago.
Then a bunch of wood sticks and glue.

Took me a while, but I’m sick and thus a bit slow in the head so I don’t need that much stimulus right now.

Anyway, it’s sort of pretty, and you can put stuff on it. And I will probably give it away as a christmas present. I’m thinking of making all the christmas presents this year. It’s not that I don’t have the money, it’s just that I’m cheap.

 

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This is the base of the lamp. nothing fancy, I just glued it all together.

Vetinari Clock Rock

Lord Vetinari also has a strange clock in his waiting-room. While it does keep completely accurate time overall, it sometimes ticks and tocks out of sync (example: “tick, tock… ticktocktick, tock…”) and occasionally misses a tick or tock altogether, which has the net effect of turning one’s brain “into a sort of porridge”.

That is from the discworld books by Terry Pratchet. Ofcourse the nice guy’s over at akafugu made this into reality, and sells it, in a kit. http://www.akafugu.jp/posts/products/vetinariclock/

I had to buy one, and one thing lead to another and I bought three. This is what they sound together, with a bit of extra instruments added, and a lot of moving things around in time so that they swing.

I hope you enjoy this, I enjoyed making it.

Why in the world is my bathroom door gray?

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My bathroom door is gray, all the other doors are white. In this blogaticle I will try to answer the question posted in the title: “Why in the world is my bathroom door gray?”

During my travel for truth I found out that there are two answers. One that is short, and one that is almost lengthy. Let’s start with the lengthy one.

Every other door on that level of my house is white. The door to the stairs down the basement and the door that leads to the tv-room and the door that’s to the wardrobe-closet and the door to the hall. Except the door to the tv-room and the hall these are doors we want guest’s to avoid. The basement stairs are steep and there is really nothing to see down there, when the kids have friends over that needs to go to the loo, we dont want them to fall down stairs, possibly soiling themselves at the same time. The wardrobe-closet, there is a lot of stuff there, but they are mostly there to be stored. So how do explain which door is to the toilet, so easy that a child that really needs to go can find it directly. We tried instructions, but never managed to get them clear enough. We tried putting up discreet signs that had the word “WC” on them. Still no gold cigar. So I painted the door gray. It’s totally different from all the other doors. The directions are easy to give.
“-I need to use the toilet”
“-Gray door”
“-KTHANKXBIE!”
Pretty lengthy answer, could have been a lot longer. But it’s long compared to the short answer: There was gray paint in the canister labeled with white.

 

Berlin, Germany, I was there.

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So me, the wife and the kids drove down to Berlin, Germany, Europe. We stayed at a shitty hotel that could have been nice, but the prostitutes and the rude staff kind of ruined it for us. Driving down was awesome. We took a lot of bridges and one boat. Berlin is a nice town to drive in. Everyone is super friendly and has lots of patience. Another thing you need is a sticker for your car that say it’s environmental. If you dont have it you might be fined 40 eur per day inside the city limits of Berlin. I did not get caught even once. Mohahaha. Also we took the u-bahn a lot. The U-Bahn is great. I wish we had one in Eslöv. The food in Berlin was wishy washy, until we found the gay-housing area two blocks from our hotel. There every restaurant where great. And there where no prostitutes there. We saw a lot of sights in Berlin. I was at the curry wurst museum. I like Curry-Wurst. I did not buy a single thing to circuit-bend or play on. But I got a super-ugly Hawaiian shirt at urban outfitters. And KaDeWe whoops every other shopping mall I’ve ever been to. My kids discovered crepes. They had a lot of them. I bought fabric made sauerkraut saft. Horay. I broke a phone at Starbucks at checkpoint-charlie. At least Starbucks is consistent in it’s coffe-making. The zoo we where at was nice, but the cages where to small. The first museum we went to was awesome. Wish I would remember it’s name. We also went to the zeppeling hangar that they built a tropical island inside. The name of the place is called tropical-island.de that was ok. but Staakow RULED.

End of mind-stream. Soon some semi-regular stuff.