First Photo Assignment

I've dabbled around with photography for a bit on my free time for a while now. Last weekend I had my first real assignment. Well there was this one time when I shot some promo material for a company a long time ago but that doesn't count. With my new camera in hand I set out to take the first real pictures with it and have a go at wedding photography while I was at it.

The wedding was a good friend of him from mine named Ivan. His wedding was very much a Stockholm summer wedding inspired by the region and their personalities.

My shots depict the wedding preparations and despite I made a lot of mistakes, used a lot of less than perfect settings some pictures turned out OK none the less. For a first session with the camera I'd giving myself the big stamp of approval. After all I only had about 20 minutes to get to know the camera.

Naturally the starting settings as ISO, aperture and some program specifics were way off for the couple of first shot. It was quite interesting to see the chronological changes for the first 20 shots where I adjusted the settings after every picture.

Something that was vary nice for this event was that I was shooting with my dad. As we could purposely choose differing lenses we could build a much more complete and varied visualisation of oru surroundings then one photographer working alone.

The result was quite nice. In fact it was good enough for my dad to suggest we start a photo business together. Coming from my dad, that's a very nice compliment. Probably the best one I've ever had =D

Photo vs Video

The camera or the camera? I know it's not a dilemma most people face but I do. I often struggle with the choice of camera. Mostly weather to take pictures or to film. They both have their benefits and definitivily appeal to somewhat different sides of me.

The downside of using the video camera is that is usually takes a lot of time and footage to make something decent and even more time and planning to make something great. At least with a normal camera (in my case a Nikon D700) one can usually just pay attention and wait for those good moments to pop up.

I'd really like to get better at both Photography and Film but it just takes to much time to do both at the same time. Well at least without taking pictures and filming being the main focus. After all for me the primary thing is usually doing something else and just having the opportunity to snap a few shots. Now if those shots happen to be good that's totally a nice bonus.

Come to think of it, I've only ever been on a pure photographic mission. It was the Jungles of Sumatra and we where trying to get a few good clicks on some orangutans. Other than that there's been a few times I've been out purely to grab a few shots but not really as a real mission so to say.

This weekend was the last sailing trip with the long-ship Helgaholm and I figured I'd give just snapping a few frames the primary seat. I did bring a video camera but only pickled it up once. Not wanting to bring a lot of lenses due to my weight and size limiting mind set for adventure I went with a zoom lens. Something I think is fine these days. Yeah sure fixed lenses do get better Images, but not that much better warranting hauling around a lot of extra weight and the time changing lenses and/or cameras.

It was a short two day trip. But two days was enough to give me a cold. Coming back from the tropics less than 24h before departure, rain, wind, jet-lagged and sleep deprivation KOed my immune system. Still if was a real nice trip with a mix of all kinds of weather. Sun, Rain, Wind, in other words a typical Swedish summer. The crayfish where amazing and it was a good thing everyone brought lots and lots of extras as I did not have time to go procure food after arrival. In fact "bosö båtklubb" (or Bosö Boat Club) had gotten a whole lot of extra craw fish making the crawdads more than plentiful. Me likey very much =D

The Five Days of Crayfish

Crayfish season is coming up again in a few weeks. I however happened to get invited to a pre pre-crayfish party. Being me and having awesome friends, we decided to go by Kayak and adventure.

The plan was to kayak for three days hit the party just in time and kayak back. It did not go quite as planned though. It turned out to be a hell of a chill out place and thus we decided to establish base camp.

Using Karolinska Institutets (KI) place in the Archipelago we did daily trips by kayak in the archipelago. Rock Climbing, Fishing, Kayaking and the occasional crawdad was achieved.

I strongly recommend kayaking the in the inner archipelago of Stockholm. It's a great way to get to know the land and waters which make up Stockholm and have contributed to what the area is today. In my opinion it might be the most beautiful archipelago around.

There were more than a few homely culinary treats out in our back yard. Fresh berries really helped give the pancakes that little extra touch. Who in their right mind can fail to appreciate fresh pancakes, ice cream, whip cream and fresh berries? Oh and so the pancakes here are the thin ones, the ones Americans call crepes, The original pancakes :p

Ending every night with a fire is more or less the rule out in our summer life style. Although "Danger Mouse" and associates had a fascination for huge fires we all escaped unharmed, something the leftovers from the burnt down sauna did not.

Sällskapsresan - På Tur

This weekend I had a true Sällskapsresan like experience as we headed north for a mini expedition of hiking in the Swedish "wilderness". first of all It might be good for me to explain the concept of sällskapsresan. It's  a classic series of movies written, directed and starred my the Swedish icon Lasse Åberg. The movies all star a quite geeky and a bit lost guy who is not always in touch with the times.
Read more about the original movie here. there are however several follow ups and the one called snow roller is definitively my favorite.

Our mission this weekend was to climb Sweden's tallest mountain, Kebnekaise. Despite only bolstering a 2102 meter rise above sea level it's trickier to climb than one might think due to fickle weather and that it's way into the polar region. There are two essential ways of getting to the top. The west route and the east route. Taking the west one is the technically easier alternative but also more physically demanding, while the east path heads over a nice glacier and sport a short stretch of climbing. I'ts about the easiest climbing one can think of and would most likely be a French 3 on the free climbing scale (basically a ladder or a stair). We aimed for the est path, booked a guide and got ready to get up. After walking up by, not the alarms, but by the wind pounding the canvas over our heads, I had my suspicions. Although out alpine tent managed just fine in the wind it was soon made clear to us that the wind might be a bit rough. Estimating it to be around 15 m/s we figured we'd give it a go. The guide disagreed.

The wind was in fact 25 m/s. It was cloudy and snowing. Although hoping for better weather throughout the day and night so that we might see the top, no such luck was to be found.
The back up plan was walking around in the area, taking in the sites and enjoying trading stories with other hikers. All in all a quite leisurely time spent.

I learned and relearned a lot from this trip and I think it was a great refresher for my trekking experiences. After three days and 54 kilometers my muscles are remarkably ok considering I haven't exercised trekking or any serious attempt at running in years. What I felt was a problem physically was my endurance, my tendons (particularly my paterllar tendon) and my ankles.

On my way up I had just thrown the stuff I could fin on very short notice and some extra stuff that I had managed to get on the way, resulting in a extremely poorly packed backpack and plastic bags. Having struck camp I finally managed to fix this and the rest of the walk was quite different in terms of weight and comfortability of my backpack.
I'm a bit interested in going again as we never hit the top but I might be even more interested in doing it winter time.

during our time in the region we realized me and Stefan where quite like the main characters in sällskapsresan. Stefan sporting shorts and knee socks was obviously playing Stig and me wearing my colorful clothing, taking about gadgets, and to random people, took on the role of Ole, despite not being Norwegian. We even added an excited Brit to our party, Snowroller style. We met him on our way up to the fjällstationen (alpine station) and he was the only party we did not overtake trekking up there. I think he was the most stoked about climbing the mountain of all the people in the region. As this Scotsman was as hindered as we were from climbing we ended up sharing a few cold ones instead which was not at all a bad way to go when you can't trek.

Them Were Some Hard Balls to Crack

As the the peeps in the Big Bang Theory we are a bunch of over educated boys gone.. older. So we decided to  have a go at playing war again, just like kids. In other words it was Paintball time.

Seven of us made it there through the hardships of being far away out in the woods outside of Stockholm. These where however seven damn brave samurai. Yup, damn right we were.

Realizing we where playing pros with pro guns and shit it was a bit more scary, but we had a blast anyway.
Besides it was a good opportunity to try out my new GoPro mounts. Sadly I have no other fast way to mix my footage than using MS live movie maker which keeps messing and bugging out.

Sadly I have no other fast way to mix my footage than using MS live movie maker which keeps messing and bugging out.

The evening was rounded off with some nice Indian Food with birthday boy Stefan who I think might be hurting the most of all of us. So it was almost like an Indonesian style birthday event, except for the cake.

Bouldering Getaway

This weekend we focus on some more physical activities. The name of the game is bouldering. Bouldering is a part of the general sport of rock climbing. What makes bouldering bouldering is that one only climbs lesser heights and without the aid of ropes.

Getting back into the Stockholm scene I decided to get into this sport which has seen a high increase in popularity during the last few years. After all it's like this almost valid excuse to climb trees and be a kid again ;)

I've engaged in bouldering for about two and a half month or so now after getting back and I've finally gotten to the level where I don't fall down on everything. Yay!
After our usually sauna time after hanging upside down Stefan told us about the cool spots on Åland that we could climb.
Åland is technically a part of Finland but they speaks Swedish and actually wanted to belong to Sweden back in the day when the decision was made.
Ok, lets go! I replied and so we arranged to go two weekends after or so.

Getting to Åland is quite simple and one can just take the ferry over from a number of locations.To find some good info just check out Ålands tourist office. To find more specifics about bouldering spots take a look at 27crags.com

The bouldering was fantastic and it's was an awesome weekend. I recommend this to anyone that likes rock climbing and nature.

Career Change

Thinking a bit about what I want to do in the future and what I want to learn at the moment I weighed my options. Naturally I had to think about it visually.
Before that I should note my experience so far in CPI.
First of all Having worked in the field for short time and during that time having been in charge o one of the more complex and daunting projects I have learned a lot. Starting off from my tests they estimated I was on the level of a professional with five years in the industry. I´m not sure I agree with those assessments but I have developed a lot during this time. Although I still have plenty and then some to learn, I feel I could do this job for any company at this point.

To decide where to go I had to decide what I wanted. I started by identifying my primarily values at a workplace. Then I continued by approximation what each company and career or careers within that company could bring in terms of those values.
I did this estimation over a time span of 15 months.

The values I decided to list where:


Development Potential
How much I can still develop within this field at this point
Economic Conditions
Pay and other economical benefits
Flexible Working hours
How and when I have to work.
International Opportunities
The possibility or obligation to work abroad
Networking
The possibility to improve my professional network
Rate of Learning
How much I will learn per time unit
Skills Development
How many and what skills I may develop
Training
How much time the company will spend training me
Vacation
Vacation time and vacation benefits
Work Environment
Administration, management, co-workers and other soft values


Lets start with the value division of each company for me.

Moving on to Specific values over time we find this:

By summarizing the total of these values and displaying them over time we can clearly see what company that can provide me with better long term situation.

Graphics don't lie :p
I start in September.

Midsummer

Swedes have for a long time been sea farers. I guess the vast costal area of the Atlantic coast and the Baltic Sea would do that to a culture. It´s something that´s been an essential means of communication and trade and today, spending time on the sea is a much treasured pass time. I was lucky enough to be dragged out on one of these trips. It was not my first one by all means. In fact growing up I have a brief stint as a sea scout. Something I was actually kicked out of. I was not always a little rule following, well-mannered little boy, as one might have guessed :p . This trip would hovever prove to be a little bit different and the ship would be just a little bit different too.  It turned out to be a mideval long ship, a square rigged boat much to my liking. You can read more about her at helgahom.se

Taking her out in the archipelago has been more fun that my other time spent on the ocean and it gives a feeling closer to nature and also closer to what man must have felt a long long time ago exploring and ruling this part of the ocean. Maybe it´s in my blood. After all my roots are from two great arcipellagos, one freezing cold and one searing hot.

Midsummer or the summer solstice celebrations goes back a long, long time and is one the more treasured holidays in Sweden. It´s the day when the most babies are made, the most alcohol is consumed and the most heden frog dances are danced around a giant fallos symbol. Yes you read that right. Celebrating midsummer on one of the many island in is probably as Swedish as one can get. Feeling I should go one step further in my quest to re-explore Stockholm and Sweden I decided to do it with the Helga Holm crew and a few good friends of mine on the Viking to Medieval remnants of the city of Birka. Birka is a lost city that has been found on Björkö in Mälaren. It was most likely whipped out in a great battle according to the theories. It has however become a place of excavation and some attempts to recreate old housing and the feeling of living in those days. If you have the time, take a day and check out some Viking history.

Needless to say I enjoyed another good midsummer, stuffing my face full of food and drink. 

Workload

The workload has been increasing rapidly and I now deal with four major tasks at work. One of these has been the first contact with CPI in a lean environment. Something that has been tricky to say the least. Not having much experience as a tech writer it´s been challenging working with a project that changes direction every week and getting larger and larger by the day. However it´s my project and I´ll be dammed if I can´t make the end result be, acceptable. By that I mean be outstanding from someone with my limited experience. Working towards telecom one might guess what companies I write for in Sweden. The most challenging task aside from getting the right technical information in time has been starting working with the range of the client’s tools and accesses. These two factors can probably take up to 50% of my time on projects. I guess there is just one thing one can do about it. Be a bit of a bitch and get in people’s faces until stuff happens. Usually literally getting into peoples face is the best way. Always arm yourself with a good smile and people skills though. Swedes and I think people in general have a real hard time saying no to people face to face when they think it´s a reasonable request.
I think to manage technical writing fast one needs two things: a good feel for structure and a way with technology or academia. One does not need to understand everything and this is where the shoe needs to fit. I think understanding is superfluous at times as a tech writer. It is great to understand, but it´s not always feasible to understand everything for every project. The important thing is to understand enough. I guess this takes one to the old dilemma of the good enough concept.
My approach is much like one would to back in school. Look at examples, analyze and re-engineer. Trying to divide your way of describing things in modules that has been proved to work will minimize chances of getting things wrong and also your creativeness. Then again how creative is a tech writer supposed to be?
It will be interesting to see how a dyslectic like me will fare throughout this project. So far all feedback has been over expectations. If I can manage my projects and my time here with good or great reviews I think I´ll give myself a pat on the back and determining I can do writing as a profession, with a little help from the spell check function and lots of read troughs ;) 

Business Man

Getting a Job

Getting a job was an interesting process of writing CVs, Cover letters and such. I finally decided to try something I never really thought I´d try. Writing. In my case, technical writing. Having taken one of those courses in technical writing back in school I figured it might be fun using my engineering background to land me a job in writing. I realized it´s a bit of a niched market in Stockholm, at least as a consultant.
In the end I ended up mainly talking to two companies, Semcon and Sigma Kudos, two companies in the same field with slightly different approaches to hiring. Semcon seems to focus more on having some kind of certified education in technical writing as its main method of measuring skill. Sigma Kudos uses a writing test as its main method of measuring skill.


I ended up with Sigma Kudos. Mostly because of chance, I think. The recruitment process went quite swiftly and I was soon on my first assignment as a technical writer.
The first few days I had time to lunge around the office for a bit while going through and online self-training videos and what not. I think this was just about my only real opportunity to admire the view from the 27^th floor. This might not sound that high but in Sweden where the skyscrapers are the dwarfish copies of large city ones the view is great. Turning around I had a 270 degree view of the horizon in the Swedish Silicon Valley (Kista). An interesting note on the name Kista is that it literally means coffin if pronounced, just as it is written. For some reason we don´t do that in this specific instance.
The reason I had a bit of lounge time would turn out to be that the work load was too high for anyone to give me a proper introduction. Something I would get my piece of as well.Somehow I feel like drunkenly singing the business man song in broken English with one of my Japanese friends right now. This is after all a bit of change in my life as a full time traveler.

Shrooms

Mushrooms. Magic and delicious but preferably not at the same time. In fact the one and only time I had the magic version was by mistake at the young age of 17. The path there was paved by a many a flavorful meal of the non magic version. Fungi might not sound that tasty but mushrooms can definitively be. A fleshy fruit like body floating slightly above the ground it can truly gold a flora or rich flavor.

"flugsvamp" or Amanita muscaria, A Viking beserker pill

In Sweden we have a long tradition of eating mushrooms. And not only for taste and nourishment. It was a common practice to consume "flugsvamp" or Amanita muscaria a poisonous one that can put the consumer one step closer to a battle rage or a drunken state which was harnessed before and during battles for my Viking ancestry.
These days we pick mostly other mushrooms. One favorite and delicacy is the "kantarell" or chanterelle. quickly pan fried in butter and maybe cream is probably my favorite way of preparing it. It is truly a challenge not gobbling it down too fast as it's soo rich and tasty. The season for picking is throughout autumn and preferably after a wet summer and autumn. Picking it is itself a nice way of spending a Swedish autumn day. Walking along in the Forrest teeming with color with some friends or family has long been a  tradition of most real Swedish people.

Stockholm Afternoons

From the left: Anders my good friend and equally geeky boardgamer, Eva my mom trying out Dixit for the first time

As someone might have discovered reading about my Stockholm nights I'm quite the nerd coming back home. This is the cold truth of is. I am a nerd but not only a gaming nerd. My maybe bigger passion is board games and there are few more enjoyable things than enjoying an evening of board games with friends. Oh chess and monopoly might pop up for you right now but this is not the case. Nor is it "fia med knuff" for Swedish people. Board games are much more diverse and complicated than this. To check out a few good ones one can visit http://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame . The games we played where Dixit and Power Grid. Two very nice games.

Although powergrid might be even more fun on 4 people instead of 3 as we played it. Dixit worked well on 4 people. this even despite the different gaming experience we had.
Autumn nights when the rain if coming down and the wet darkness is creeping in around the cute little Swedish houses board-games are a excellent pass time.

Stockholm Nights

After a short visit back home I'm now back to writing and traveling. Sort of. I realized that although Stockholm feels very much like my home town I'm  not really in touch with what others have seen and done in Stockholm. Sure the girls are nice and the city beautiful. There are so many other sides to my Stockholm though. Skipping the first fever ridden day of my home coming I'll share my second fever ridden night instead. Mind you that I'm not talking about some phenomenon like Stockholm feaver but an actual getting sick fever.
After being gone for a while the first thing that popes into ones mind is meeting up with friends and doing something really quaint. So we decided to do something we all had grown up with. Yup that's right a Gibb, a Haxx or a LAN gaming night as it is also called. This is when you chill out together and play computer games. A tradition starting early for me growing up in the suburbs of Stockholm. Growing up we used to haul our old stationary gaming machines of differing caliber over to each others houses or some communal building we had access too. A couple of times I think we even got some locale sponsored by our municipality.
Growing older and as laptops got more powerful an office or a lecture hall where the new spots of gaming and fiddling around with computers. Now although we could most likely scramble a few gaming machines we go old school and visited a gaming cafe to do our gaming. Being a bit older it's nice not to have to deal with the hassle of distributing all the games and such and making sure every machine works and all.

Although the more typical clientele of an internet cafe like inferno online are considerably younger than us we figured we'd have a great time anyway. Besides we'd probably kick ass with these kids anyway. Yup that's right we probably would. We're not your ordinary bunch of old school gamers. Having an previously no1 ladder ranked FFA WC3 player, a old national team captain in dota, ladder ranked no1 in 2v2 at SC2, previous QA lead at DICE, game designers and game development entrepreneurs and with more random remarks within the gaming world our bunch of peeps still managed to keep it civilized and all just for fun. I do guess we are getting older though since people started to drop off around 2am instead of the 8am customary retreat time.  Despite this and a few technical issues we still managed to play a list or recommended games.

• WC3 TFT dota
• Q2
• L4D2
• CS 1.6
• SC1

I guess reading this list does reflect on the fact that we are a bit old school. Still we had a good time and I recommend you to have a go at it while in Stockholm Sweden. After all we do host the largest LAN parties in the world and have a very very strong gaming culture.

The mark of home, "uteservering"

There are few times I miss my native Stockholm. Summer time is one of those times when I consider it to be a world class destination for awesomeness. A warm, clean city on water rivaling any city in the world in terms of beauty. Ice free and light all 24h of the day. Beautiful women walking around and fantastic beers served in our "uteserveingar" or outdoors chill-out places and cafes.
Just having a cold one, enjoying the warmth, the sun and maybe the company even is truly a treasure of back home.
Finding these places abroad makes me smile and feel like I'm home, almost. At least if you combine it with Ikea and some crispbread it's just as home. In KL the outdoor chill paces serving good beer are few in comparison. It could have something to do with the air conditioning addiction being extensively spread through the ranks of Asian citizens. There are however some. So all you swedes out there that are just like me don't despair. Get a beer and relax in KL