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13.02.07

Web blog entry number thirty-five.

Time and again it strikes me how blind I am in "the now" and how subtle changes go unnoticed right under my nose until a few years have gone by and I suddenly realize how different things are!

Internet is changing so many things in our society right now, from the way we work to the way we meet and socialize.

Globalization has led to huge problems with people moving away from their home in hope for a better life in the rich world. We suddenly have huge groups of

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The robots are coming!

people that are living in subsocieties within the society with completely different values and culture.

The TV medium is finally changing after 50 years of the same. We have high resolution screens that cost nothing and Internet has finally enough bandwidth to support low resolution video on demand. More to come for sure!

People don't pay for music anymore. The record industry is clawing in panic.

The ice has started to melt. Suddenly global warming is a real problem, not only something for our kids generation to deal with.

USA has learned a lesson again that maybe you can not showel democracy down the throat of some people in some countries. Maybe they just need a strong dictator to play nicely together in the sandbox :)

And I firmly believe this is nothing compared to what we will see in the next ten years! The next major step forward will be more subtle. As the amount of data increases and the computers become more powerful, a new form of smarter applications will arise. There will be much more exchange of data between databases under the surface, and you will experience magic moments when you notice that the computer actually knew what you wanted :)

Networks will continue to spread into more and more devices. In the end of the next 10 year period we should have seen a breakthrough for robots that will start sneaking in to our homes to play with our kids and make simple house chores.

Just today I read about: 1) an american MIT project were they build micro sized jet engines. This should replace our batteries in computers and mobiles. A micro jet engine run on hydrogen is several hundreds of times more efficient than batteries. 2) A new computer type developed by IBM that works with several hundreds of core computing units, similar to what we already see in graphics cards. This tech will be introduced already next year.

So many things...the whole science world is bubbling right now. Lets hope we won't kill ourselves too soon. Its all too exciting for that.

If you want to keep track of development, please try www.kurzweilai.net.

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23.01.07

Web blog entry number thirty-four.

I can now count myself to the very few lucky people that have seen Jesus! Hallelujah! Don't worry, I will share it with you! Look at this picture.

So an apparition of the dude himself suddenly appeares in the burnt up remains of the french fries I just made...is that close encounter or what. And on the bottom of our very own oven! But I should have known already, those fries were special. It was somehow a religious experience to eat them. Can't wait until they want to come out.

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26.10.06

Web blog entry number thirty-three.

Our son Axel was born last Tuesday. He is a nice, calm boy that is so far doing really nicely. He is strong, can already lift his head, drinks his milk properly and doesn't complain about the service. Now we have to wait a few weeks until he "wakes up" from his initial feeding frenzy to see who he really is :)

The delivery was hardly comparable to our long torment in Tampere with Freya, but nevertheless, it wasn't extremely easy either. Only the smell of hospitals gives me the creeps nowadays, so being in a surgical theatre was a chance for me to train my stress control systems.

Its funny with us humans - we are living in this fancy world of advanced technology and mirror glass sky skrapers, but still we are stuck knee-deep in the evolutionary goo with our left foot. In the dark depths of our minds, that little Neandertal is still screaming commands: "Go HIDE! Quickly now before that sabertooth tiger machine comes to eat you!" He looks at the world around us through our own eyes, and he doesn't have a *single* clue! And still we are forced to continue to listen to him.

Especially in stressful situations he sticks up his ugly head and we end up having to combat not only some real dangers but also a lousy second on the inside keeping 95 % of your brain in paralysis with bad advice...Anyway, I felt slightly stressed with having my wife on the surgical table and about 10 doctors running around talking only German.

Next time I have a kid it will be 60 years from now when you can buy a babe-o-matic machine that will make one for you in 30 minutes that comes with a no diper change guarantee, and a "I love daddy" T-shirt that will stay clean through all feedings.

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12.10.06

Web blog entry number thirty-two.

Look at the creations of nature! Weird!
An Indonesian work friend gave me these after his vaccation. They are good too btw. Especially that red little hairy thing. Its called Rambutan. It might mean "monkeys behind" but I am not sure. I have to investigate that a bit further.

Few days back we got called by...a machine! God darn it, it never happened when I was a young man! Back then the only real problem was vacuum cleaner salesmen and Jehovas vitness, but no talking machines! Jehovas is still kind of a problem but compared to this machine...

So this thing calls us up and asks us with a cute female voice if we want to have a voice mailbox. So we don't want it, so we hang up, and then it CALLS AGAIN!!! And again, and again...argh! In the end we had to get that bloody thing, there was no option. I really hope those artificial intelligence researchers get their acts together. I mean, the day those things are intelligent we can at least tell them to go and xxxx themselves.

On a more general note it is funny that we live kind of oblivious of change don't we? It doesn't really feel like things would go forward that fast. But then you start thinking and you realize that, "hey, things have changed". Its kind of the small things that sneaks in to your life. One day you notice that the bottles with handwash fluid has this clever nozzle that makes life easier. And you notice that someone has put vitamin into the candy. And now they have started to sell socks for men with nano particles that kills of all bacteria and leaves your feet smellfree after work.

One of my favourite standup numbers ever was when Seinfeld talked about the new watermelons that came out without any seeds. He's asking the very relevant question: "if they don't have seeds, where do they come from?".Please check it out on my tube and see if you share my sense of humour :)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsLidazCO78

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30.09.06

Web blog entry number thirty-one.

Jan, my work-room-mate-polish-consultant-friend had his last work-day on Friday, so we went out to Altstadt here in Düsseldorf to say our au revoirs.

Altstadt is the old part of Düsseldorf where people have been drinking beer since they learned how to make the stuff. I don't know how long time that is, but when you walk auround

there in the night, you can almost hear the alcoholic ghosts of past whisper in your ear: "come on, just another one!". Its a really nice place to be in the nighttime - if you think about Gamla Stan in Stockholm, but older and more pubs. Just next to it, Rhein is threading its way so if you feel philosofical, you can go and sit next to it and just watch all that murky water flow by, and forget about yourself. We went to Urige, an old beer brewery, where they serve freshly brewed beer straight out of the brewing tanks. Oh lord, is it good beer or what!! Sorry to say, but they are definately much better in this trade than any of us Scandinavians.

Here in Düsseldorf the preferred beer is called "altbier" (old beer) and its a bit to the darker side with quite a sweet taste. Every little village, and often even every little beer drinking place, has its own beer, and often you will see on the label that they started making it about the same time as Jesus was born. Urige for instance (the place we went) is a really old place and one of the main waterholes in Düsseldorf. You can see it from the way it has kind of spread within the building. The place is like a labyrinth of old apartments that has been used to host its expansion. Anyway, news to me when I came here is that you should drink it from a small glass, only 0.25 cl. Its actually only down in Bayern (southern Germany) they use those big beer mugs. But it really doesn't matter how big the glas is, since it is anyway constantly refilled. Remember that when you go out to a big beer garten here in Germany: they will refill your glass when it starts to be empty unless you put your tab over it.

We had a really great evenening, so thanks Jan for your generosity and have a nice time down in Cheese-eating paradise. See you in April.

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19.09.06

Web blog entry number thirty.

Sweden has a new el presidento! Fredrik Reinfeldt is his name, the leader of the rightwing party "moderaterna".

If you didn't know, Sweden has traditionally been more or less a democratic one-party state lead by the social democrats. This time they had the worst electon ever, and they lost on what is normally considered their strongest subject: unemployment.

But who cares! I am in Germany! I can have fun with Fredrik instead. Want to make him look better? Then try your artistery at: http://jinge.se/akar/kar.htm.

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17.09.06

Web blog entry number twenty-nine.

Today a report from the kitchen.

I found a really nice recipy for chicken lemon that I'd like to share. Thats right, chicken and lemon. Its fresh and different from the everyday boring salt/pepper taste. Then as a nice side effect the lemon makes the chicken really soft.

So, to the recipé:

1. Buy some chicken breasts, maybe 400-700g.
2. Put the chicken into a bowl and press 1,5- 2 lemons over it.
3. Take one of those iron scratchboards and scratch off the shell over the chicken. Use only the outer yellow stuff.
4. Add some soya (like 1/2 a dl) or something similar (I use indonesian ketjap manis).

Then mix all together with a fork. You can add some thyme (timjan) or some other nice herbs. Lime is for sure nice to.

Now you let the chicken just stand for some time and suck up the juices. At the same time you can make something nice to eat with it. If you are lazy, rice is fine, but there are of course a lot of other alternatives, like oven baked potatoes etc. When the chicken is ready, fry it in the pan.

At this point, add some salt and pepper, but don't take to much. Just a little bit. And then, eat and be good!

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7.09.06

Web blog entry number twenty-eight.

just heard that my older brother Jan and his family have arrived safely to Germany so I say "herzlich willkommen!".

Jan has worked for the swedish foreign ministry all his grownup life, mainly in the eastern parts of Europe (Yugoslavia, Russia etc) so this might be a new experience :)

Here he is this summer with some swedish singer that I can't remember the name of...

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30.08.06

Web blog entry number twenty-seven.

Sometimes you see things that are really hard to explain. An old work friend of mine sent a video of a magic trick to me, and I can honestly say I have no idea how she is pulling it off. "Pulling off" is, by the way, kind of a key word here (warning for a softly adult content :-).

http://tinyurl.com/e8gad (for it to work, copy/paste the URL into your web browser)

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20.08.06

Web blog entry number twenty-six.

How was it now, I keep forgetting, my mind is blurred. What was the deeper meaning of life for the middle-aged man?

S ometimes it feels a bit difficult to grasp and sometimes it fees like society, no matter which country you are in, blindly relies on us, middle-aged men, to just perform our duty, not think too much about why exactly, but just go on doing our things for the ant farm, the king, or the rich guy at the bank who owns our house. Its a constant going to work, and going to work loop...and every time you turn on the TV there is some freaking program of people having vacation in exotic places or some TV series with all good looking young people that either don't seem

to be in work at all, or then they spend all their time there and they are all rich and doctors or whatever...where are the normal people?

Heard there is a show from the UK called "the office" which is like more about normal life. Have to see that one.

Carry that straw! Stay in the line!

A few days back I went to the doctor to complain about pains I have in my back. "Its muscle pain" said the doctor. "No, its not muscle pain, its something in the bones", I repeated, as I had told the previous doctor that looked at it. But it didn't really help. The doctor had already decided. So now I guess I have to accept that its only the muscles. When my wife went to her doctor, she had half a day service. I got like 5 minutes! He could at least have given me a pill or something.
No, life is hard for us middleaged men. We are supposed to go on without blinking. And nowadays you'd better stay alert because there are like 5 million other middle-aged men out there, unemployed with their eyes on your strawcarrying duty. How the hell would that look like in nature? Half the antfarm just sitting there waiting for someone to give them a break? At the same time the antfarm is doing better than ever on paper. More spoils for the few rich - thats what we are doing. I think I am turning into a socialist.

Up that hill! Faster, faster!

The rain is falling outside. In a few hours its back to work again. Now I have bought a new bike so I'd better use it. Its time to build a better body. Fight my stomach. It was just so much easier to find the motivation earlier. Then in fact it was easy to sit up on a bike, and you knew something would happen after a few weeks. Now my knees hurt after five meter and I know that my stomach is as easy to get off as that face sucker in the Alien movie. And then there are a gazzillion other things. Who really cares? A flat stomach - why? Whats wrong with a round one?

Well, okey, one more time....lets see if I will survive going over the top when the whistles blow. Life is a struggle, but in the end, thats what it was designed to be. And in the end, I have so much to fight for. I think I will take that straw all the way up tomorrow.

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16.07.06

Web blog entry number twenty-five.

Life is slowly getting back to normal routines, and so is this blog! So many things have happened lately that I don't know exactly what to write about in particular.

We had vacation in Sweden and we moved in to our new apartment and we got the message that in October we will have a boy.

But in this blog I wanted to write some first experiences of Germany. First of all Germans really don't speaking english. Really, really don't at all. Not even the young people want to speak english. They learn it in school for sure, but they never get any real chance to speak it, so it kind of dwindles away over time. Remember that all German TV, Radio etc is in German. In fact, I get a headache of all the dubbing! Especially the women's voices - it seems like its the same woman dubbing all the woman's voices in all programs and it sounds like she's angry when she comes to work.

When I come to the bank or whatever and suddenly start asking things in English, people get nervous at best. Its like scary - a foreigner that don't sprache!!! So I have realized that I really need to learn German and FAST! I started my classes last week so lets see if I can manage...my brain is still all infected with finnish.

Annother weird thing: Germans don't drink tap water. We found out now a few days back when we tried to find squash ("saft" in swedish, the stuff you mix with water for drink) and we just couldn't find it.

So why don't Germans drink tap water? Well, there is nothing wrong with the water so its somewhat of a mystery. But someone wrote that it had something to do with the second world war. After the war, all fresh water was polluted, so Germans started to drink bottled water and have continued to do so ever since.