Free advice to big media

I bet that one or two executives in the film industry is wondering what they can do to have people buy their product instead of just downloading the content from elsewhere. I have a humble suggestion: produce and sell something that is better or at least equal in quality to what can be downloaded almost for free.

One of the more absurd examples of this is the current high definition movie offering to people using Macs.  I have a MacBook Pro which is fast and has a large screen and no trouble displaying HD content, as can be shown for example when watching movie trailers. Yet there is no way that I can get my hands on full length movies in HD format in any way blessed by the movie industry. There are no Blu-Ray players for Macs, and iTunes movie store has not yet opened here in Sweden. A quick visit to the bay however, shows quite a large supply of High definition movies, delivered without any limitations and easily playable on my mac with VLC.

In short, the choice consumers have is to play by the media companies' rules, and get mediocre quality DVD movies or download via BitTorrent and get movies in the best quality that their computer can support. With a choice like that, it is no wonder the movie produces get in trouble.

Different types of recreation

There are lots of different types of recreation that crops up when the tempo slows down in vacation times. I try to blog, write a bit of software, and my dear partner Alex has taken up crocheting. Yesterday I had a bit of trouble finding my laptop, buried in a pile of breathtakingly beautiful naturally dyed yarn. You could have worse problems.

Can you spot the laptop?

 ps. If you are interested in yarn, knitting and such stuff you should definitely check out my friend Linster's blog Yarnlove

The definition of irony

It turns out that the very definition of irony is placed just outside my office window. It has been there for quite some time, including when we had our most intense rain storm this year.

The text reads "NOTE: The goods must be stored on a level surface in a dry place protected from rain".

A day with the kids

Today Alex went with some friends to an auction on the country side, so I had a quiet day with the kids at home. When Alex is away I sometimes take the opportunity to cook food that he doesn't like. So I made liver stew. It went a fair bit better than last time, when the stew was more like soup.

I also used the day to dive deep into a geeky computer project while the kids were playing. More about the specifics of that in a separate post, but the end is that you now can access this web server via an encrypted connection via https://noa.resare.com as well as the usual way.

I also managed to watch two pilot episodes of new TV shows. I really liked the first one, The Mentalist and the second one – Flashpoint – was kind of ok, but something I think I will follow.

Ah, the joys of new gadgetry

So today was iPhone 3G day. Telia, network operator with an exclusive deal with Apple here in Sweden, has worked hard to hype the release day. There were three stores in sweden that held special midnight events, however there is about 1000km to the closest one in Stockholm, so I had to wait until the morning to get a chance to buy.

This was my first time in a release day line, and I didn't really know what to expect. I went in line about 2 hours before the store was to open, and there were about 25 people before in line before me. It was cold, somewhat rainy and a bit slow but with some really interesting podcasts from This American Life in my iPod it was nice anyway. I had my alpaca sweater on and my timing couldn't have been better, when I finally got into the store I got the second last black 16gig iPod in the store.

So, now I'm a proud owner of a really neat phone.

Is web standards compliance finally catching on?

I was surprised today to see a W3C Valid XHTML icon today at the bottom of www.svd.se, the webpage of one of the largest daily newspapers here in Sweden. I have always thought that being compliant with the various HTML and related standards was something that only geeks paid attention to, and that major mainstream web pages would always use as ugly HTML code as they got away with with decent rendering on a few tested browsers. It's always nice to be positively surprised.

I can blog, I’m not afraid

So, it turns out that I haven't written in my blog for quite some time. Why? Because I have had some problems deciding what this blog should be about. Discussions in my head about it have gone back and forth. If i write about geeky stuff, will my non-geeky readers think I'm boring? If I write about polititcs or LGBT issues will the geeky people be annoyed about that? So instead I wrote nothing. Boring.

Consider this somewhat of a fresh start. Hopefully there will be some texts here in the near future that are interesting to read for lots of different people, and hopefully I will gradually find a tone and topics that work well together. So, enough of the meta writing. I'm glad to be back.

So, what do you eat between meals?

Most of the time I try to avoid eating stuff with lots of carbohydrates such as bread, pasta, potatoes and rice. When I describe to people I meet what I eat, one common question is this: "I think I understand how your meals look like, but what do you eat between the meals? The way you eat sounds interesting, but I wouldn't last a day without sandwiches." One answer to that question is high quality sausages. My favorite right now is the Napoli Piccante Salsiccia from Montorsi. It is a spicy sausage with so much taste in each slice that you don't want to eat the whole thing at once. It goes great with some cream cheese!