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. 

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.

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.