Just after 15:00, a beautiful autumn sunset, perfect traffic conditions and around 4 hours on the Swedish main road E4. A full tank of diesel and two nights of proper sleep. It doesn’t get much better than that. I was just smiling in a state of total relaxation. This is what driving is all about. And I haven’t felt it this strongly in years. The W124 has finally arrived in my garage.
Read MoreI recently built an extra home office at my parents’ house with a fully equipped workstation with thunderbolt docking station, two 1440p screens mounted on a premium gas arm, keyboard, mouse and everything you need. The total price was below 2000 SEK. A brand-new setup with equal performance is likely to cost at least 10000 SEK. With some patience and a clear focus, 2nd hand deals are abundant. There is a lot of money to be saved on this road. For the past years, I have learned to shop at auction sites. Mostly electronics, but the principle holds equally well in other areas too. The limiting factor is time.
Read MoreDo you recognize this feeling? You are working on a report or a text document, and you proofread it 10 times without finding any errors, and then send it to the printer. While proofreading the physical copy, you often discover several issues within seconds or minutes, that you have been staring at on the screen, completely unable to see. It has happened to me more times than I can count. Moral of the story; By engaging other neural pathways in your brain, you will bring new insights even with very familiar input data. Tonight, I had just that experience in VR.
Read MoreLast Tuesday, I had five consecutive Teams meetings booked. I landed with the early morning flight, and connected to the first meeting while in the car on the way to my ordinary office around 30 minutes from the airport. My plan was to transfer the call to my workstation upon arrival. Instead, as I parked my car, I got disconnected. Before long, I realized that I had no reception on my phone. Unfortunately, my office isn’t connected to fibre, and thus I am running a 5G broadband service. The problem is that when the phone tower dies, I am completely cut off from the world.
Read MoreI have been experimenting with various screen sizes for many years, especially triple monitor setups or very large single screens. In this post, I will try to figure out which one has worked the best for me in various scenarios. Choosing a monitor is not just about the size, but about the screen resolution i.e. your pixel real estate. Personally, I think the number of pixels is just like horsepower. It is impossible to have too many. Another very important factor is the refresh rate. Currently, I am running a triple 4k 27” setup, and for engineering purposes I think it will be all but impossible to back to anything less than 4k. Still, I am not satisfied because this setup has some serious drawbacks.
Read MoreWhile talking to a colleague last week, I went on a rant regarding cognitive work. I sometimes have a strong urge to work with something where I can just turn on the autopilot and cruise for a while. But it seems like that day never comes to me. I am a specialist consultant, and I find my work very difficult most of the time. And every time a palette drops, and I finally figure out how to solve a specific problem, you might think that life should get a little easier. But no… the only thing that happens is that the difficulty setting increases even more. It feels like mental tractor pulling.
Read MoreSteve Jobs once did a speech on consulting and how crucial it is for learning and improvement to “stick around” for a long time, several years, to fully “own” the consequences of your recommendations. I have worked as a consultant most of my professional life and it hit very close to home. In the building industry where I am an acoustic consultant, the delay between your first advice to a client to the finalized building is measured in years. And I am finally getting old enough to seeing several of “my” projects materialize. It is equally scary and wonderful.
Read MoreSince almost ten years, I have been doing a yearly guest lecture at my old university. In the beginning of my presentation, I use a couple of slides where I demonstrate Moore´s law, and how the fastest supercomputer on Earth was beaten by a Playstation less than ten years later. Then I move on to demonstrate where we are now and a hint where we are going. I usually look up what is the state of the art shortly before the lecture, and every time I notice that the monster computer that was the king of the hill, was already old news. And indeed, progress is accelerating. But what does this have to do with wooden constructions?
Read MoreHave you ever had that feeling in a Teams meeting where you interrupt each other by starting a new sentence “simultaneously”? And then you realize your interruption, so you go quiet, wait a little and start again because it seems as if the other person is giving you the que to go ahead, only to interrupt each other again. This almost never happens when you are talking to someone in the same room. I think the crucial difference here is latency. Over Teams, you introduce a handful of precious milliseconds, and they can make a world of difference. This is analogous to playing music in a band. To play in time, “tight”, the latency must be very low. This is also the reason why it is almost impossible to play music together online.
Read MoreI have used a Macbook as my private computer for a couple of years, but it never occurred to me that I can use it as a professional workstation as a civil engineer. Not until now. My regular company tablet PC, an HP Elite X2, has easily been my worst computer experience of all time. Even though it is fully specced and upgraded, it still is borderline unusable. At least if I am not running Linux on it – then it works perfectly. But that’s another story. The issue is likely the ultra-low voltage 15 W CPU which runs at 100% pretty much all the time. Don’t be fooled by the quad-core i7 logo. It is nowhere near the performance its name indicate. Anyway, the problem is that many of my crucial engineering apps are Windows only. Now I have learned that this is not a problem at all.
Read MoreOutsourcing is fantastic. I do it all of the time for many things both professionally and in private. But there are also things that I spend a lot of time on, even though I could solve a specific problem 10X faster by simply handing it over to someone else. The problem is that I enjoy certain problems, crazy as it may sound. The perfect example for me is to build a new workstation PC. I could solve that problem in minutes by outsourcing it. But to build it myself is something that I enjoy so much that I simply cannot rob myself of that pleasure. Even though it will certainly drive me crazy at times.
Read MoreAbout ten years ago, I was the lead guitar player in a successful metal band called Meadows End. Playing on that level, including international tours, was something I had dreamt about since I was a little kid. A couple of thousand hours of hard work later I finally achieved my goal. The joy was unfortunately cut short. After only two albums, my life hit a fork in the road. I was writing my PhD thesis at the same time and had been under heavy stress for a long time. After many long conversations with my wife, and mental gymnastics on how to make it work even though it meant placing three suitcases (career, family and the band) in a baggage compartment that had room for two, I finally realized that I had to let go of one of them. That was the hardest decision of my life.
Read MoreLast week I got an urgent call to measure noise from installations as soon as humanly possible, in a project which have had some problems with too loud ventilation. The problem had just been mitigated (hopefully) but they still needed a protocol to give the green light to the building. I basically booked the next possible flight and went to Stockholm. Usually, I hate doing these one-day trips. They can often be exhausting. This time however, it wasn’t a complete disaster. I had planned extreme margins both before and after the measurement. Still, I learned a couple of valuable lessons on why these one-day trips are a bad idea anyway.
Read MoreI am almost embarrassed to tell you that I haven’t jumped on the dwg bandwagon until 2022. On the other hand, I have a feeling that I am far from alone among acousticians. It is common that we “paint” on PDF files instead of working with “real” dwg files. This has been a thorn in my eye for many years. PDF painting works fine if you are only going to do one (1) drawing and no updates, preferably in a small building. But that’s not how it works! To do multiple revisions of drawings in large multi-storey building can easily take hours to do in Bluebeam Revu, because it is not the right tool for the job. For example, I recently did an update of a school with new floor plans – 18 drawings in total. With Revit, I could update them in minutes, what would previously take at least half a day. I was smiling the whole of last week.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago, my right-hand controller for my VR headset HP reverb G2 broke. It started to disconnect and reconnect at random, which was extremely annoying and interrupted my workflow and immersion. When I bought my VR headset about 1-2 years ago, I specifically chose the HP because it was marketed as a great productivity headset for professional use. Indeed, it is, when it works, that is. Unfortunately, the HP reverb is in a class of its own when it comes to technical problems. A while ago I wrote a post about divine intervention in a positive sense. This little VR story is perhaps the antithesis.
Read MoreSometimes things happen, that are so unlikely that they can only be explained by some kind of divine intervention. We’ve had two of those occasions recently during our renovation project. The first one, and most unlikely, was the impeccable timing of our electrician who arrived here just in time to install new wiring in my office at the same time as the construction workers had torn down the old roof. To have a house without a roof is obviously a bad idea, so this type of work is dependent on weather conditions. Then they work very fast to remove and replace the ceiling in a day. So, we’re talking about a time window of 4-6 hours, maximum, when the roof is gone (i.e. half of it). And there will never be a better time to reinstall the electrical wiring. I booked my electrician months ago, with a gut feeling that “this day will probably be the day when the roof is removed”. And he arrived with the precision of a Japanese bullet train, exactly when the roof was gone.
Read MoreAbout two weeks ago, my three-year-old son broke his left index finger in an accident at kindergarten. The little guy went to the hospital and got patched up with a plaster. Two weeks, and then re-check was the verdict. Usually, he is like the Duracell bunny, which I solve with physical activity, especially biking. Now, however, he is temporarily disabled from our usual energy burning activities, and that means excess energy. A lot of excess energy. We could perhaps put him on a treadmill connected to the power grid and let him single-handedly solve Europe´s energy crisis. That’s why I realized quickly after he came home with the plaster, that this thing will not last two weeks. I’d be impressed if it would last the day. This, in combination with teaching an intensive university course, is a recipe for disaster. It’s very difficult to change the course schedule on short notice. My past self however, has been taking good care of us. When I scheduled the course, I added not one, but two reserve bookings in the end just in case. Tomorrow I am heading to the hospital for the second time to re-make the plaster which came off again. I would be beyond stressed right now if it weren’t for those reserve slots. Now I feel inner peace instead.
Read MoreThe most frustrating thing about being an acoustician (for me) is the delay between you giving a recommendation to a client and the final result. This process typically takes several years. I have had many sleepless nights (metaphorically speaking) where I have thought about specific technical solutions like floor structures or junctions. And when I finally send my documents to be used for the construction of a building, that’s typically it. I never hear about it again, except for some control measurements at the building site in the best-case scenario. But I want to know how the final product turned out! Last week, I decided to do something about it and went on a road trip visiting eight of our dwelling projects.
Read MoreTomorrow starts my third week of 100% focus on dad duties. It’s been an interesting time, and a fantastic boot camp for learning better micro-management skills. No matter what task you are trying to accomplish, the only person that can have your back every single time is your past self. Preparation and Routines are crucial. From breakfast to dog walks, you won’t have time to look for misplaced stuff. I have found these weeks thoroughly enjoyable, and it has been the perfect healing that I badly needed for my soul.
Read MoreElon musk recently told Tesla Employees to get back to the office for at least 40 hours per week, or “pretend to work somewhere else”. I noted that there was a significant backlash to this statement in the comments sections on LinkedIn for example. Clearly, many people do not agree with Musk and appreciate the choice to work from home or the office and where you consider yourself most productive. It is a question that evoke a lot of emotions. Personally, I think Musk is correct. I also think it is useful to evaluate this question and compare it to education.
Read More
