Jonas Beckman

Susan writes about different kinds of thinking. Martin wonders: do you hear the code?

There are reports of major Swedish opto-cables being damaged today – I don’t know if it’s related, but so far I have very uneven access to most foreign sites.

Very little sleep, extremely tired – and yet another good day at the Parliament’s IT-lab. A morning meeting about the next generation of schemas (I presented one of them), then more prototyping and research, with developers and people who work at the Parliament. The atmosphere is very much hands-on, every conversation is a lesson.
Right now we’re laying the groundwork for an XML-oriented infrastructure and testing a new editor. Today I tested built-in functionality, wrote small pieces of code and scripts, tuned schemas… but more important, checked out what the others are doing and talked about best practices for future development. I’ll hold another XML-course soon – but just walking around is sometimes better and more fun.

Dive into Python – a free Python tutorial for experienced programmers. Via Jörg, Martin, effbot and all the other fellow snakecharmers.

More than three hours on the phone with Aila – very intense, very necessary. We’ll sleep well now – good night!

I’m at home, studying some Delphi code for interacting with XMetal. The guy who wrote it is home sick, but I can build and run straight out of version control. Sometimes I use a Delphi tool called ModelMaker – right now I list package dependencies and generate diagram of selected classes and interactions. Once the basic structure makes sense I’ll do some simple refactoring.

Still tired and a little cold but got some work done over at the Parliament. A good afternoon: developing schemas for some of the most important political documents in Sweden leads to plenty of interesting discussions. But these projects takes lots of energy – it’s not your average corporate development.

Aila was busy at her shiatsu practice, so I had dinner alone. On my way home I bumped into old friends and joined them for some evening tea.

When I finally got through to Aila on the phone she was extremely tired and almost asleep. There was much to say but no time or energy. We both felt the sadness – but there was nothing to be done.

Garret links to a long article that questions the future of the public intellectual. By coincidence (or is it?) I just bought a book that questions their past: Who paid the piper is a readable account of how CIA paid and controlled many famous intellectuals during the Cold War.

Martin is thinking hard about our weblogging community and says something very important: the more technical among us have a responsibility to help others make the best of the network that binds us all together, and that gives us our audience. Yes! I’m with you.

Al has the flu now – but he has a long list to prove he is taking care of himself. Others seem unrepentant, though.

Keep taking care, Al – hope you get well soon!

Jörg had many links about Berlin this Sunday. Made us want to drive there – it would be a fantastic city for some more cruising.
The Laws of Nature, A Skeptic’s Guide From Skeptical Inquirer – via Garret. Lots of nonsense is being spread by people who think these laws only apply when it’s convenient to them.

My own main project at the moment is unusual: I have less control than I’m used to, working as advisor rather than architect. So far it’s mostly a good experience. It also fits right in with everyhing else: I am determined not to lose myself completely in work. There must be time for love – and maybe art.

We still had our colds… but felt good anyway. Let’s force the devil out! So we drove an hour to the best sauna north of town: heated with wood, stairs leading right down into the cold lake. Maybe it worked… we felt even better.

Early Saturday evening in Stockholm. We called an old friend and explained our situation, drove by his place and picked up some music. He told us to play the K&D sessions first. Cruising abandoned southern suburbs in a fast smooth car: driving and talking… slowly. Dreamy memories, fantasies, connections… smooth, slow, inevitable. “Isn’t it amazing that we have choices?”

Sometime after midnight Aila started looking for something on far-away backroads – I didn’t ask. Just keep driving! Our friend had been right: Johnny Guitar Watson should be played after midnight – and some smiles are illegal.

Sunday is paradise sometimes, talking about dreams over a very late breakfast. We are at Aila’s place now, getting ready for another little expedition.

First we went East. Late afternoon fog, winding roads along the water and large houses – some of the people who really run Sweden live there, but so do many others. Sweden… it used to be a matter of pride that it was hard to tell.

We almost reached water before dark… what’s the point of living in a secluded house near the Eastern shores? What’s the point of just passing through? We didn’t know. Serenity, then some anxiety. Deepening fog, people driving home to Sunday dinner… we were moving again.

Back to the City: a little railway station surprised us with excellent food and attention to detail. Behind us we could overhear a poor lost son trying to impress an old school friend with esoteric knowledge of wine and his father’s connections. I recalled lost daughters I used to know – our conversation turned deeper again. We smiled like children and agreed that escape is possible.

Dark outside the car, heavy fog… Aila behind the wheel, tired but determined. Pushing on through City traffic, we aimed for Western suburbia. The most beautiful bridge is worn and feels dangerous… beyond it a long straight road leads West: many high buildings from the Fifties on the hills, below them small pockets of boastful one-family houses… so many people live out here! And yet it seems almost like a secret.

Further out on the road along the subway tracks… wicked dub in our car, we feel the presence of absent friends. As the subway ends, the hills become higher, the houses more sparse… then we reach water again and breakthrough into history! Stockholm is here now because the ships could pass this way, many hundreds of years ago.

All these buildings, all these ordinary people who live so well – and at night it’s very, very quiet. We step out of the car to smell the water and look at an abstract sculpture from 1971. This is what the Swedish dream used to look like.

Five minutes past midnight, Saturday. I had dinner alone at a small but crowded Greek restaurant not very far from here, pleasantly surprised by it’s warmth and lack of pretentions. My childhood neighborhood is becoming ever more trendy and expensive – but not everything is gone.

Early tomorrow, Aila will be over with breakfast. She will arrive in a rented car, proudly vawing her new driver’s license. Me, I am still slightly feverish and my place has become a bit of a mess this past week – so we’ll probably just get out of here and go for a long ride somewhere.

Meanwhile, before I go to sleep, I am trying to understand the current status of MUOTD (My Userland On The Desktop). The concept is brilliant, but how much is usable right now?

I am extremely tired right now and trying hard to think straight about many things. So I need a clear path that lets me keep writing… and must avoid seemingly trivial things (like editing OPML in the browser) that break my flow.
The truth is, I still feel much more comfortable writing in the browser. And yet I update radio.root everyday, I read the discussion group, I check out what’s new… Oh Lord, I want to be saved so bad – only not yet!

Garret and Martin reminds us there is a single word that summarizes some of what we all said yesterday about the chill.

Koyaanisqatsi:
ko. yaa. nis. katsi [from the hopi language],
n. 1 crazy life. 2. life in turmoil.
3. life disintegrating. 4. life out of balance.
5. a state of life that calls for another way of living

Yes, true… and Hal, Ken and others also remind us we just passed the Chinese New Year. New things are beginning all the time – let’s celebrate that we are still alive and can enjoy them.

I came home Thursday evening prepared to write… but EditThispage was down. Otherwise I could have spent a sleepless night here – now it’s early Friday and I am too tired to write much more.

Dave and crew – thanks for bringing our sites back to life! Shit happens. And you are doing a lot better than Microsoft.

Update: Dave Winer now writes at length about the outage. As usual, he is trying to figure out the right thing to do in public – it’s sometimes hard to remember how rare that is and how difficult it can be. BTW – I completely understand Dave’s reluctance to sell hosting. My little company already owns Frontier and we could certainly afford to run a dedicated server. But we don’t have the time and there is no good business case – to stay independent we must invest our time just the right way.

Flyingchihuahuas is back after a holiday break. Welcome back, Greg!

Morality and the photographer Via DangerousMeta

Martin read Al and Garret, then wondered out loud: do we feel the chill?. Well yes, certainly.

I recently started reading The Jewish war, by Josephus. Written 2000 years ago by a Jew working for the Romans in Palestine, it’s a fascinating read. But the short summary goes like this: everyone is being killed and tortured by everyone else all the time (except for a few rich Romans and their lackeys). Those were BAD bad times.
An aside: the Monthy Python crew all have classical educations – so they probably read this book long before they made Life of Brian.

No Roman emperor ever had more power than George Bush – we should all be very scared of what he can do. And yet recent comparisons with an invasion of drunken amateur thieves feels just small enough for the man himself. Thanks for the link, Craig!

There is a new essay that describes why copy protection of content is a dangerous idea. Forget all the talk about piracy – most consumers are honest. The truth is that a handful of big companies are already forcing everyone else to pay several times for things they don’t own – and will do almost anything to keep it that way.

All this chilly stuff isn’t about the weather, of course – but there is rain and cold winds all over, too. My cold from yesterday is worse, bad enough that I decided to rest at home today and hope it’s over by tomorrow.

In the morning, after several phone calls, some deadlines were unexpectedly moved forward. This was mostly a good thing, but I found it hard to shift focus back to my main project.

We’re hacking up a prototype in XMetal, and it would normally be lots of fun. But the beginning of a cold made me feel unproductive and awkward.

Early in the evening I went to Riddarfjärdsskolan and saw the Dance Academy’s annual exhibition. Some of Sweden’s best young dancers study there – so it was the usual awkward but interesting mix: some classics to please the old audience, some brand-new compositions and many young, talented but unexperienced dancers trying to find their own voices.

I went alone, Aila was still in bed with fever. I never asked anyone else.

I had much to think about and much work to do – but all Monday was booked for one long meeting. It had to be done, for professional reasons.

Aila still has fever and struggles to get well and get on with everything – I spent some time at her place, brought some food. Then her fever rose. I went back to my place to work, waited several hours for some Python code to arrive, worked some more – next deadline is Wednesday morning.

Late at night I thought again about a song from the early Eighties called Private Life – Chrissy Hynde wrote it, Grace Jones did the definitive version: icy, dark and beautiful.

Spent the day with Aila yesterday – she is still nursing the last of a really nasty flu but was well enough for long walks, yet another excellent dinner and fantastic conversation. She made apologies for being boring company – but that’s just not true! Get well soon, my love!

The beginning of next week looks like it will be extremely hectic, so I am trying to tie as many loose ends as possible together this evening. But first I’ll do some running – it’s cold tonight, but with a bit of luck there won’t be much ice on the roads where I usually run.

A fantastic run! 1,5 hours of slow running: road & track, uphill & downhill, across the bridges along the water into the woods and then back again through the City streets… snow everywhere, no ice, temperature just above freezing point… tired, very tired… but clearheaded and strong.

Now I’m warming one of the gourmet dinners Aila made last week and put in the freezer: fish, shrimps and raw rice. She’s still at home with a fever, otherwise we’d eat together.

Zeldman and aListApart has a special issue about how people survive the Web design crisis. To me, looking with disinterested eyes from outside, the American labour market has always seemed to be all about unchecked exploitation – it’s no great surprise that people now have to work even harder under worse conditions. Interestingly enough, the few European voices all bring the same message: still plenty of work here. Enjoy it while it lasts!

On a similar note, Dave Winer sings the US blues today: while people who have to work are being screwed, others are gathering patents and trying to kill even more of what’s good about the Web.

Had another long talk with Aila. I have to get up early and work tomorrow… and I won’t have time to do much of the work I had planned to do this weekend before I go to bed. But it’s OK – happiness takes time, too.