Jonas Beckman

I had Lomi-lomi massage again today. It’s been a while and it’s still fantastic!

I had planned to relax afterwards - do my laundry and perhaps take a nap. But when I checked my phone I had more work (another intense remote debugging session), some unpleasant old business and some sad personal stuff to deal with. So I dealt.

Well, now it’s evening and I am very tired… but smiling again. I feel yesterday’s swimming and today’s massage with more than my body.

Time for something to eat - maybe sushi?

Some light debugging via phone - nothing serious today.

But I turned one customer on to Python - that was fun! It took us about twenty minutes have him running and modifying some of my test-scripts. Including downloading and installing Python.

In the afternoon my cable connection went dead and stayed that way for about 16 hours. I wonder what UPC were doing?

Hard swim-practice today: plenty of timed intervals. That really hits the pulse. We also practiced starts, which I haven’t done for years. And doing flipturns every lap is becoming natural.

Met two deadlines today: one very early this morning, the other one after lunch. Everything went well. Now I’ll just try to wind down.

Soon. But not yet. One customer calls and has problems writing VB6 code to parse some Unicode. It’s doubtful if it really is my problem and I loathe VB6… but of course I try to help him through anyway.

My lawyer calls in the middle of this - I make a quick and perhaps important decision.

Then I struggle on until the customer call it quits and says he’ll call tomorrow. It is now half past nine. I start thinking about other things again.

I am sitting in bed with cushions behind my back, listening to the rain. It’s a good place to be.

Work is going well. Today I am debugging and re-configuring some web services that will go live soon. Tomorrow I’ll go over to another customer and install an upgraded Python/XML/SQL Server app.

Common errors in English. Via Dane Carlsen

Feeling Moral. Trusting your feelings sounds good - but what does it mean? Via Times Shadow

The main character in one of my favorite novels says: ‘I spend most of my time happy, sad or bored. I know I can get rid of the happiness if I try really hard - the rest I am stuck with.’
Dhalgren, by Samuel R Delany

Of course, everyone else in the novel thinks the main character leads an interesting life. And sometimes he is even flattered by that.

So what about me? Well, I prefer happiness to being interesting. But I am not bored very often.

Forgot about the cleaning lady today. She knows me by now and wasn’t surprised.

So I decided to work elsewhere a few hours and walked over to Aila’s place. It’s empty right now and has the connections I need (I set them up myself once). The customer never noticed: I am working from the same machine and answer the same phone.

On the way, I bought several early-seventies thrillers from a bookstand. Sleazy covers and authors who mass-produced long series about private eyes and secret agents… the very same ones I used to buy as as a kid who had just learned to read.

Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, secret agent OSS 117, taught me to be particular about what brand of champagne I asked for. I was 8 at the time but never forgot that.

I am home again, in a very clean apartment. Night is falling. Deadline tomorrow morning, but it’s under control… a few more hours and I’ll make that one.

Sometimes when you work at home the day doesn’t really start until someone calls. And if you keep the phone off that can take a while. Today there weren’t many calls even after I turned it on.

Sweden is a long dark tunnel this time of the year. But I don’t care - I’ve made it through worse winters than this one. Sometimes all this keeping the faith gets to me, though… what am I waiting for?

And then I breathe deeply and find it again. There is nothing to wait for. Everything is here. And sometimes I share it with someone and sometimes I don’t.

Enough work. I’m off for an evening run. It’s rainy but not too cold - it might be good running weather.

I love running on the edges of the city at night. Rainy bridges, highways, forest tracks and back streets… endorfin!

I woke up freezing and the skies were grey all over. Even I had a cold now. All the nice people from yesterday were momentarily forgotten - instead I worried about other people’s problems again.

But it didn’t last long. I slept it off - rested almost all day until the cold let go. Then I took a long walk through rainy streets, stopped by for some live DJ:ing & sandwiches and went back home to work.

Several hours later, after some Python hacking, I mailed off a status report to a customer.

Why Larry O’brien decided to jump to .NET
Via The Wagner blog

A Simple NUnit Set in Visual Studio.NET Via stronglytyped.com

NAnt, a free DotNet build tool

DotGNU Portable.NET is a suite of free software tools to build and execute .NET applications(GPL). Here is what they have to say about other alternative DotNet tools. They cooperate with Mono in some ways, but have their own C# class library.

Yesterday my current employer celebrated five years as a company: we had an amazing sea food buffet down at the office. Excellent food & wine and a very relaxed atmosphere, too. Few of us have long certain gigs anymore, but most still work - in fact, we even hired a new consultant recently.

Then I slept well, despite strange dreams. And today it’s pool-time!

Maybe I should make a slower animation for days like this I had a slight cold and no real power in the water. But I enjoyed it anyway.

Now I’m off to a party: an old friend just moved to a fantastic apartment not too far from me.

Had a very long talk with an old friend yesterday after swim practice. The condensed version goes like this:

Me (trying to make sense): What if? Perhaps? Maybe? I don’t know!
She: You have reasons to worry, most of which are not under your control. You must choose what you want to do anyway.
Me: I know and I already have. But I am tired and scared today.
She: That’s human.

Today I feel better. And we were not talking about work, anyway. Right now my world if full of warm and comforting things like a C# crib sheet and lots of XML character encodings.

It may be impossible to design a program that can do the right thing to all data from all sources. However, most application process the same data from the same sources over and over again. With an understanding of the problem, a little custom configuration, and some testing after each new source is introduced, it should be possible to develop a solution to any real- world requirement.

I am about to find out if this is true…

Update: at least it wasn’t false. We found a working solution just before the weekend. I’m off to dinner now!

OK. A little more rested today. But I still feel bad - I need at least one more night of really good sleep.

A reintroduction to XML with an emphasis on character encoding

XML vs. HTTP - issues affecting safe transport. Technical. Sending arbitrary XML documents over networks is not that easy. Yesterday, I struggled with one of the bad alternatives described here.

The Saddameter: what are the odds for war?

I’ll think some positive thoughts for garret and sandra today.

I recently made an appointment with an habitual liar who says things are changing now but won’t go into detail. Reminded me of a song: Don’t ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies…

A long time ago I was given some stuff to take care of my feet. I still use it, just did. Thanks! Small things count.

Work is slow today but I don’t mind. And tonight it’s swim practice again - the coach promised me lots of kicking excercises this time. Which hurts but is good for my speed. Alright, let’s do it!

Kicking against underwater jet streams is hard. But I AM getting faster. Funtime! It’s strange how much better everything feels once I get back in the water.

Hmm… I find myself debugging Java web services clients today. Well, why not? But I should have gotten more sleep.

C# webservices, Java clients and lots of small Python scripts for my own testing - it’s a nice setup. And I can run it all from my old Thinkpad.

My fellow debugger didn’t have it so nice: he was inside corporate firewalls, up to his ears in tangled-up app servers. Don’t even tell me how fast your testing setup is! he said with mock despair.

It took me five seconds to test a live server from the outside - it took him twenty minutes. So we worked by phone. I tested things for him from outside, as he slowly got the production stuff inside sorted out.