Jonas Beckman

I hit the streets of Södermalm.

Not very mean streets today: local police and local drunks are having a friendly chat.

The subway…

takes me to the Old Town.

Next… 15th century IT

I’m having fun, writing captions and uploading images for BTC. But I am too tired and feverish to attempt any automation. No meta-efforts today - this will be done the slow, stupid and manual way.

My gallery is finished - or at least all the pictures are uploaded. I’m down to 48, from close to 200. I’ve changed almost nothing about these pictures, except size and compression. I don’t have the time to polish all of them, so this is it.

As soon as Garret gives us the official URL I will link to it - if I am still awake. It’s now past six o’clock in Sweden and I am very tired.

Hot sauna, cold lake…

Afterwards, we are hungry.

Wet towels on the balcony.

THE END

Just outside central Stockholm…

less than 15 minutes away: Hellasgården.

Some people come here to run in the woods.

But we head straight for the sauna.

Sauna is a ritual - we wouldn’t dream of disturbing anyone by taking pictures. But this is what Aila thinks we look like:

Digital drawing by Aila

Next… Cold lake swim

Aila prepares something nice for my breakfast

Hmmm… blueberries!

From hausfrau to digital wonder woman

Meetings downtown? I’ll just write some stuff first…

Today is BTC day? OK, I’m ready.

Next… To the Old Town

Monday the 18th of September - images

Early morning - 5 pictures
To the Old Town - 4 pictures
15th century IT - 9 pictures
Taxi through the sun - 5 pictures
Urban paradise (a k a home) - 8 pictures
Multi-kulti - 7 pictures
Evening sauna - 5 pictures
Cold lake swim - 7 pictures

More than a hundred webloggers took pictures of their lives this day. 3300 photos from all over the world - take a peek Behind the curtain!

Bad cold today. I’m watching the Olympics, MTV and even worse stuff on cable. Nothing intelligent to say about that. Never mind, this will pass.

Good news: Martin’s family are home from the hospital - and he seems to be on his way to a new job. Congratulations!

And Hal’s dental problems are finally getting better. I’ll have to add my horror stories about teeth later.

My head isn’t working very well today, I find it very difficult to read anything more complex than a headline. Some kind of cold. Aila just had a cold, maybe this is the same one?

Aila is at her place, learning how to print good A3-format pictures. It’s hard to remember she was a complete novice at everything digital not too long ago. Oh, and she decided to use her pictures from Monday for BTC - so here’s a few drunk friends of ours from Sunday.

Apart from the usual nice pictures, Der Schockwellenreiter has been linking to interesting things about Python and XML lately. And, just like me, Jörg seems to be a muesli-programmer who still wonders why there is no Hypercard for Windows. But unlike me, he steadfastly refuses to write in English. Well, at least he writes in German and not Ancient Greece. .
Seriously, I admire anyone who decides to stay with his mother tongue. And sometimes I worry about using English - but most people who read this will never ever learn Swedish. So my decision was to find a new voice and just try to write as well as I can.

Flyingchihuahuas has collected some interesting tales about the Web in Japan: My Wild Cup Noodle! Greg Franklin is on a roll!

Yesterday, a fríend said some people who teach Computer Science are too lazy to understand the basic file paths of their own development environments. I said: lots of corporate programmers are the same way. Today Cam links to The ideology of ease.

I’ve always believed in teaching people to fish instead of giving them fishes. Sometimes I am a bad teacher or people are too lazy. But when it works it’s beautiful: Understanding is love.

Fray Day 4 will happen real soon. Sometimes I wish the Atlantic wasn’t in the way.

The weather in Stockholm is beautiful with a chilly edge. Everyone has a cold again - mine is mild, thank God.

Yesterday Aila got a surprise looking at her recent pictures: she hadn’t realized she spent almost all her time wandering around in a scenery of fantastic beauty.

Tomorrow I’ll put together my pictures for BTC. Garret has several tips here - I especially like the simple but precise way Phillip Greenspun does it. And here’s another nice link about displaying photos on web pages (via OnDecidingBetter).

Work is still rather slow, which is good: I need to prepare before I face some really difficult design decisions again. It’s time to curl up and read again.

BTW - I just found and printed out a talk by Michael Corning, called XML 301, Schema-based programming. Some of this stuff sounds extremely familiar - if it’s good I’ll write a little review later.

Slow day at work, still in maintenance mode. Started to make a complete re-write of some XSLT stylesheets, but felt the beginning of a cold and went home early.

On the way home I bought some books, including Essential XML, beyond markup, by Don Box, Aaron Skonnard and John Lam. Very strong opinions, technical yet clearly articulated… but not for readers looking for how-to:s or quick fixes. It might be a good foundation for thinking about XML as an abstract data format (as opposed to syntax for document markup).

To be fair, I was looking for exactly one quick fix and found it at once.