Jonas Beckman

Julgransplundring is the Swedish word for “Children’s party after Christmas”. It literally means: plunder of the Christmas Tree - so that’s what my family does!

Every year for as long as I can remember my great-aunt Karin Beckman (now 95 years old) has arranged this party, where four generations come together.

We play a lot of games. Our favorite is Catch a fish! - because that’s when everyone gets presents.

First you catch a fish with the little magnet - then there is a present with the same number as the fish. There are lots of toys and small inexpensive things. And sometimes a few special things - like old jewelry or books.

Swapping presents is allowed (otherwise the children would never get the right presents). Children fish several times, adults only once - but no one under 65 seems to be an adult.

I got one!

Here is my brother - yes, this is what a very serious legal expert looks like in Sweden.

When the party was over, me and my father got rid of the Christmas Tree. Next year there will be a new tree and a new party!

Saturday - a brief respite before going back to bugfixes and final features.

Our system is beginning to feel beautiful again, it’s almost real… and this close to deadline it had better be. Some old friends are in place for the support and maintenance contract - so two weeks from now, I will have some serious time left for new things!

I am surfing my way through a lot of answers to the question: WHAT IS TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT UNREPORTED STORY?

Played around a litte with Rebirth - no, not another life. Just the digital reincarnation of some classic analog bassline synths and drum machines (TB-303, TR-808 and TR-909). More mainstream than cutting edge these days - and certainly there is more to dance music than beats like this. But Rebirth is a very nice piece of software.

What the title says.

Of course, I’d rather be in the sauna with my darling.

Going, gone. Back later.

OK… I’m back. I kept working through a very severe cold, but didn’t have energy enough to do anything else. Therefore… no weblogging. But our team at the Swedish Parliament is just a few days away from version 1.0 now - I will write more about that when we’re up and running.

I have been playing with Frontier and a local mirror of this site - I really want to run on my own server. The cable ISP I use at home say they are putting together services for companies who want to run their own servers. Since I am also thinking of doing some hosting a better approach might be to make a deal with some small to medium Swedish ISP… we’ll see. I know I could easily offer a good mix of hosting and services to some old customers - but not without a swedish version of Manila.

Over at Babelizing Manila they have started on a french version. And I seem to remember a japanese attempt from somewhere. Has anyone else tried to translate Manila yet? And does Userland have any future plans?
Please send me a mail if you know anything! I’ll post more here later.

I checked out the new Nr 1 EditThisPage site - obviously the work of a very competent person. But instead of immediately going off to make my own site better, I started to read a great online guide to Frontier instead. It’s a great excuse.

Just found out that my Wu-Tang Clan name was Flippant She-Creature. Now I know I work too hard!

Still sick, still working… if I was a surgeon they wouldn’t allow it. I hope.

This is starting to feel like some really boring old blues: “Woke up this morning/fished disgusting stuff out of my nose”.

Sweden is a dark, wet place this time of the year - everyone either has a cold or is about to get one from someone else.

My girlfriend is at her place, nursing her cold - but she called and told me to look at her latest painting. I just did - and I think you should, too!

On Slashdot, there was a rumor today that John Carmack was going to rewrite the Linux TCP/IP-stack. A long way down in this thread, Carmack himself wrote in to deny this. The signal-to-noise was as bad as usual - but I found a very fascinating little paper about latency and interactivity.

Just like the States, Sweden has had a year of relentless broadband-hype. But if your latency sucks bandwith quickly becomes irrelevant. And it’s good to realize that even with infinite bandwidth we will never play Quake in real-time across the Atlantic - the speed of light is a limiting factor.

I still like clicking on weblog banner ads!

At some point it becomes necessary to stop working and call in sick.

But before that point there are shades and degrees: when your work is in your head there are ususually a few good hours left even on a very bad day… if you pace yourself carefully. No use flogging dead horses. Ah well, enough of that! It’s Saturday and I’ll stay home and play today.

I like clicking on weblog banner ads.

It’s fun! Why let the boring liars who produce “real” ads monopolize that?

NoLondon is a nice site featuring some digital pictures of London. But sometimes I wonder why we all run around with camcorders, putting whatever is around us on webpages? I know I am doing it - if if find out why I’ll let you know. I got mail from Gary at iSee iSay, who tells me there is a really simple answer

I also downloaded an english mindmapping program. Very alpha, but still interesting. I own two of the three closed-source alternatives they mention, but have always wanted something else. I don’t know… there is a weird, New Age-quality about most mindmapping programs: they are supposed to transform the user (”unleashing creativity”, whatever) and of course they never quite do.

Maybe it’s time to start coding seriously again? Lately I’ve been playing around with Python. I haven’t done any real work yet - but I like the idea: clean, readable high-level abstractions and the quick-and-dirty thrills of a good scripting language.

I have a bad cold again.

Yesterday I worked anyway, had fun, felt almost OK for a few hours. Our XML-editor for the Swedish Parliament is close to 1.0 now - it’s a nice piece of software. But dreaming up architecture is one thing, getting a system out the door another: tight deadlines, complex architecture, shifting requirements, worn-out developers… all the usual technical lead stuff. It will be OK this time, too - but my kicks come from teaching new people to take over. Soon I will do something new, too.

But today it’s holiday again, so I don’t do much of anything. This morning I started reading The seduction of madness, a book about recovery from psychosis, written by E. M. Podvoll, a psychiatrist with Buddhist leanings. He talks a lot about “islands of clarity” and how people recover from serious mental illnesses. Interesting … but as usual, it’s just a little too easy to write fascinating stuff about madness from a literary point of view.

The part describing Podvoll’s own therapeutic community reminded me a lot of a buddhist monastery in France, Plum Village, where I spent some time this summer. Not all literary, then - rather good old-fashioned zen: “do-the-dishes-and-pay-attention”. I will read the rest of the book.

OK - it’s late, I have business to take care of tomorrow… my girlfriend’s homepage has the short, no-picture version.

On New Years Eve I went native briefly, at four o’clock in the morning, crying drunkenly about the mediocrity of it all. But it passed. What set it off was probably the finnish upper-class fools pretending they were having fun to bad music… reminded me too much of the people I went to school with (who still have way too much influence in Sweden).

Next day, over a very late breakfast in the luxurious manor, I thought darkly about about the wars: hidden beneath the successful, Nokia-powered surface there are scars. You will find lots of links describing how the Finns heroically fought the Soviet Union in the very cold and hard Winter War of 1939. But even though no one wants to remember the civil war of 1918 (the “White Army” prevented a revolution and then executed more than 20 000 Reds), the older generations still do.

On the other hand, their future looks better than it ever has - and come to think of it, so does mine.