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.

Trekking Prepp

I haven't been hiking in a long long time and so when we booked our trip up north to climb Sweden's tallest mountain, Kebnekaise, I was stoked.
I soon realize that I was firstly way out of shape for hiking and secondly that my gear might me equally out of shape.

This is what I planend to bring:

Clothing and Footwear

• Rain Gear
• Underwear
• First Layer/Second Layer
• Second/Third Layer
• Third/Shell Layer
• Hat and Gloves
• 1st layer socks
• 2nd layer socks
• Short Pants or climbing pants
• Hiking Boots
• Rock climbing Shoes

Shelter

• Ground sheet
• Sleeping Bag
• Hygiene Bag
• Alpine Tent

Cooking and Hygene

• Water bottle/Hydration System
• Thermos
• Portable Kitchen
• Cooking Fuel

Tools

• Sharp Knife
• Multi-Tools
• Lights

Safety

• Sun Glasses
• Tape
• Sun Screen
• Med pack

The Gadgets

• GoPro Camera
• Lumia 800, Smart Phone 
• Nikon D200
• Sony HDR CX-180

This is what I forgot to bring or did not have time to find:

• Sun Glasses (can't find mine)
• Tape (forgot)
• Sun Screen (Not a priority)
• First Aid (don't have one)
• Multi tool (I got my knife)
• Lights (not a priority as it's light all night and day)
• Water bottle/hydration system (frustrated over not finding any of my systems. I would have liked to bring my camel-back system.)
• cooking fuel (no time)
• ground sheet (can't find it)
• gloves
• Salt, pepper and spices

I also noticed I might need:

• Utensils
• Washing equipment
• Mosquito repellent
• Lighter

Since I have a few hours during work today and also between work and catching the train I'll try to get these items in the following order of importance:

1. Water bottle
2. Utensils
3. Mosquito repellent
4. Ground sheet
5. Lighter
6. Washing equipment
7. Gloves

I'll outsource the cooking fuel to Stefan ;)

I'll let you know how the trip went.

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.

Post Mortem from Technical Writing in a Surprise Lean/Agile Environment

Not too long ago I was assigned the task to write the documentation for this new product. although slightly bigger than the standard document size in my field I did no think it would be a big issue tackling the task.

I would be gravely proven wrong. In fact this project would grow and eat up all my time leaving my looking like a question mark a whole bunch of times.

The main reason the this project came to be more complicated that is should have been was in my opinion these factors.


Inconsistent Project Directions from customer
The documentation type, quality and target audience requirements kept changing for about half the project.


Not knowing what type of work process the customer used
Previously not dealing with lean/agile methods for this customer, not knowing they started using this for this team made previous processes quite inadequate.


Previous projects of this type did not follow the guidelines
In addition to creating new documentation it was later added to merge similar projects not following the specified requirements into this project.


Time Constraint
This was all done with a very short time frame. I believe it was the fasted up to date for our customer.



This in turn lead to a series of problems. I have listed the ones I found to be the most time and energy consuming below.

This Specific Project

• Not knowing the project used lean/agile methods of working
• Having my assignment description changed
• Doubting all information channels
• Not being on site
• Inconsistency in input documents

Agile/Lean

• Not attending daily project meetings
• Working with off shore assets
• Doubting all information channels
• Weekly changes due to the scrum iterations

I'll try to illustrate by showing where my time went at first.

When I realized that they where working in a lean environment with daily project meetings. I started attending them and changed my approach. I found out that information flow to follow and somewhat decided on one of the order requirements. As a result my time could be spent somewhat differently.

Looking at the purple section which shows the time where I can actually produce content one can instantly see a huge increase in time spent (This is a good thing). Freeing up time from getting the right information made and instructions made it at all possible to finish this project although many a late night was required.

From this experience I take some lessons learned with me for future projects. Some are general issues that

Lessons Learned

• Know how your team is working
• Attending daily project meetings
• Work flow focus
• Review Process
• Communications in and outside the team
• Workload
• Identifying and contacting SMEs
• Identifying project goals and project type early
• Identify document type
• Who is the target audience
• Key points to cover
• Document style

Let me know if you have any ideas or opinions on this.

Where Life Takes You

Not too long ago I won a design challenge for designing user interfaces and user experiences for mobile applications. It all started with a buddy of mine recommending me to come. It was a get together organized by an IT solutions and management company (which will be left un-named for now) in the style I myself usually would organize back when I walked the corridors of academia more determined to study.

I was happy with my prize of a new cell phone and the chance to get some programming help to realize our application. An application I fare might dissipate to non-completion as it needs a weekend more of development and we don´t have the programming resources at this moment. You can still check out our idea at getmeetapp.com if you are interested.

Or get in touch if you would like to get together and create. It was a fun weekend and I did not expect what I received next, a phone call from the company wanting to talk to me. Although I had a few offers on the table by now, CPI is where my focus lies at the moment. After all I´d like to become good at it before I take on something else. But hey let’s check out what they do and what they can offer.

Spending some time with my friend working for this company I met some more of his colleagues and friends. It genuinely seemed as a nice working environment and they did have some very interesting areas I think I´d love to develop my skills in. We´ll see what happens.

It is all very interesting how much time it took getting that first job, after coming back from my travels. Somehow things always got postponed or ran out into nothingness as the business changed or their strategic goals changed. Among other things I went to two interviews and not getting the job, something which has never happened before. That is usually when I do well. In retrospect the first one I was quite rusty and had a feeling I would not get it as I left the interview. The second one I did too well and overqualified myself for the position.  It´s interesting how the right balance is important for things in life.

Corporate Culture

Team building can be done in many ways. Personally I like the idea of creating good bonds between people. Friends tend to not want to let each other down. Then again they might not take things too seriously if the environment is too relaxed and friendly. This should however not really be a problem in a professional environment. I find it interesting to see how team building and social activities are managed at different companies and different sites. Although I think I missed a few at my current position I had the pleasure of attending some. So far they have mostly centered around two things and been performed in two ways.

One is the company “fika ” on Thursdays, a afternoon coffee and tea time where time is taken to eat some pastries and drink a cup of something together. This is an extremely common occurrence in Swedish working life. It´s also an important bonding ritual that cannot be neglected of one want to maintain good relations. Usually people take turn to bring fika or bake something. I´ll try to get back to the nuances of fika another time as it´s much too complicated and stretches into social dynamics way out of this specific context. 

The other one are shared activities with some sort of food and drinks involved. These tend to be either management organized with the company paying and planning it or “employee organized” where people chip in and contribute to doing something together. For the second alternative has mainly been “knytisar” of different sorts. A knytis is literally a potluck and can range from very organized to just bring something and let’s see what we get.

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