During the Covid years of 2020 and 2021 I went all in on distance education and experimented wildly with live-streaming and recording of lectures. But this spring I am back in the classroom again, and it has been very interesting to apply the lessons learned and the content created. In 2021 I held a few lectures in Building Physics on the topic of moisture, which I also recorded. It was the first time I lectured on the topic and my full focus was simply to keep my nose above the water line and get through the lectures without making to big a fool of myself. The students were very clear in their feedback and most wished for more calculation examples and less lectures. Consequently, this year, I thought about how to approach this and decided to replace all the scheduled lectures with calculation sessions instead. I am now extremely curious to see what the students´ judgment will be.
Since 2014, I have been practicing a musical instrument for 15 minutes every single day. It is a habit that I love more and more, the more I do it. I have found that the little-by-little approach starts to resemble exponential growth a couple of years. The last couple of years I have tweaked things up to eleven, by setting “impossible” goals for myself, like learning to sing opera in just twelve months from scratch for example. The key lesson here is that the impossible goals will constantly reward you with maximum growth if you only have the patience to sacrifice the present for the future. And the principle is likely valid for just about any domain in life.
Your past self is one of, or perhaps the most important friend you’ll ever have. I have recently started my annual course in Building physics which consists of Acoustics and Moisture transport. By now, I have enough experience to simply “wing” the acoustics part and get away with it, but Moisture theory is something completely different. Being a teacher in a topic you do not fully master is one of the scariest things I can think of. And now I have four lectures is Moisture transport approaching fast. Here, my past self has got my back covered, because last year when I did the lectures for the first time, I recorded all of it. It turned out extremely useful for rehearsal purposes.
The famous quote by Nietzsche: “He who has a why can bear almost any how” is a personal favorite of mine. Last weekend I was reminded of the why in a rather funny way. My wife, who also is a motorcycle rider, mentioned on the fly that it might be time to consider a mini 50 cc dirt bike for our petrol head son. Time flies. I used to love motorcycles. Around ten years ago, >20 000 km per year was an average season for me. But since becoming a father my offroad bike has mostly collected dust. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it anymore, but the problem is that it is not an activity that can include my family. Riding the bike is a solo endeavor. However, when my wife planted that PW50 seed in my mind, I instantly visualized a new timeline where the motorcycle passion might enter my life again but in a different format.
A couple of weeks ago, I was checking out a musician 2nd hand site. And I noticed something extremely unusual for a site like that, a vintage Bruel and Kjaer type 2209 sound level analyzer. There is something very appealing with the design of vintage measurement equipment. Everything from the big knobs and clunky switches to the choice of text font just oozes with hand made quality. I thought that this would make an excellent addition to our Umeå office. As a conversation starter, it doesn’t get much better than a professional sound level meter from five decades ago.
Last Saturday, I was going to take my dog out for a short night walk before we all went to bed. It was the last task of the day and everyone else had already gone to bed. Me and my dog were the only ones awake. We started walking towards the forest and everything was illuminated by a full moon, and the temperature was around zero degrees – very comfortable. Once my eyes got used to the moonlight, I didn’t really need my headlamp to see so I turned it off. We kept walking and after a short while we had entered a forest road with no houses or civilization in sight. The short walk ended up being the longest walk I’ve had in a long time. We just kept walking and I loved every minute of it.
I will never forget the final couple of months when I was finalizing my PhD thesis for the print. Several years of extremely focused work was reaching its conclusion. And the thing I remember best is that feeling of “I understand this topic now!”, that you can only get when you are close to the finish line. Everything kind of snaps into place and it feels like you can write the perfect thesis. However, when you finally reach that stage, the time is almost up, so you will only be able to write a fraction of all your ideas. It’s a wonderful and frustrating paradox.
Campus is open again for business. In a month from now I start the 2022 edition of my building physics course. It feels a bit strange to return to the physical classroom. I haven’t done a real lecture since early 2020. They say that if you don’t use it, you lose it. We will see in a month whether there’s some truth to that. I have been very active posting vlogs every day since 2019 and I have a feeling that the experience gained it will come in very handy now. Such a weird feeling, I have practiced so hard in front of the camera - around 1000 videos. It will be very interesting to see how that translates into a physical room.
Life as a consultant can often feel overwhelming, and I have certainly felt just like that for a couple of months now. However, when things feel rough, I think about the books I’ve read by Jocko Willinck, where he lays out the concept of Prioritize and Execute. He tells stories from his war deployment where one of his teammates falls and is badly injured, while they come under assault and must deploy their machine gun instantly. At the same time, a thousand other things happen and there is only time to do a couple of them… I think you see where this is going. There is no way on earth that consultancy work can come even close to that pressure (even though it can feel like it). And still, Jocko and his team survived using the only method available. Rank-order the list of tasks that needs to be done and start to tick them off in order of importance. What else can you do?
The sun painted everything golden all the way to the horizon. As far as the eye could see, there was ice. My son Elis was riding his Stiga Snow Racer pulled by our dog Jussi. The three of us were on a round trip on the ice around a nearby island, with the sea as a backdrop. That morning, my son woke up at 05:44 which had interrupted my morning routine. But what an interruption! It was one of those mornings that you only get a handful of throughout a lifetime.
To make real progress you need both the carrot and the stick. I have got plenty of carrots, and last week I finally got a proper batch of stick. It’s amazing how much productivity boost that can be achieved by a feeling of impending doom. My to-do list had been growing steadily for quite some time, perhaps for a couple of months. I was adding things faster than I was ticking them off. Problems like these are appropriate to consider the saying “How did you go broke? Little by little then everything at once.” So, when you get that feeling that you are inching slowly in the wrong direction, be careful. Be very careful. Because then suddenly everything might twist and turn at once and you don’t want that.
Tonight, when I was reading our daily bed-time story to my three-year-old son, my eyes teared up with joy. It is without a doubt the best part of my whole day and I am so grateful and blessed to have this daily routine. You have little kids for four years and then it’s GONE, never to return. And you miss it at your own peril because it is the literal definition of “peak life”.
”Daddy, hug!!!” My three-year-old son yelled while running to me and gave me the biggest good-bye hug I have ever got in my life. I was about to leave on a job trip with a stay in the hotel. Just one night, no big deal. The tears started rolling down, mostly from overwhelming joy but also from sadness. Every single soldier on both sides were also somebodys three-year-old not that long ago. Somebodys brother, husband, friend, dad… I thought about what it would feel like if this was the last time I would ever hug my little boy. It gave me a glimpse into the reality of what thousands of Russians and Ukrainians are going through right now. And that’s all I can write tonight. I will pray instead.
A very good rule of thumb when riding a motorcycle on a racetrack is to stay within 70% of your maximum capacity. Because you will need those spare 30% when you mess up – which you will. I love to do track days with my motorcycles. It’s the best practice there is. To expand your skill level and learn exactly where your current limit is and how it feels to approach it. That has saved my ass and perhaps even my life on several occasions in the real world, which is less forgiving than a racetrack.
Last Saturday I finally tested positive and started acquiring my natural immunity. Knowing that everyone on the planet will get it sooner or later, I was relieved when the two lines showed up after inserting a tops half-way into my brain. So nice to just get it over with and leave this whole insanity behind us. The sickness has been a walk in the park. One of the mildest colds I have ever had. But the week was quite tough anyway due to the lack of sleep. My sleep account was already running dry, and when both boys got the fever and kept us up at night, the whole situation felt more like a bad hangover that went on for a week.
Austria recently became the first EU country to make vaccinations mandatory for all adults above 18. I just checked some numbers, and the current coverage seems to be around 75%. To enforce the law, the government have decided on fines of 600 EUR up to a total of 3600 EUR per quarter. This move is interesting for several reasons, but the one that I find most interesting is that such a law will be completely impossible to enforce in practice on one condition: The ones who don’t want it simply need to say No, if their number is large enough.
During the current struggle between vaccinated and unvaccinated, I have been thinking about what it means to support the exclusion of certain groups from society. For example, Emmanuel Macron recently proposed that “they” should perhaps not be regarded as citizens. It is one thing to suggest enforced vaccinations in a heated online conversation or a Tweet, but once you dig a little deeper, certain noteworthy consequences appear. Below, I will simply list some proposals – simple solutions – that I have experienced in my own social network, and how I interpret their consequences. It will not be a pleasant read.
This weekend I finally managed to photograph an Otter. Actually, I even got three (1) of them in a single shot/video! I have been trying to snap a picture of one for over a year, but they have always eluded me until now. I have usually seen them from a window, and then I have rushed to grab my camera and when I got back it was nowhere to be seen. We are talking about a time window of about 30-60 seconds here. I can honestly say that I am hooked permanently now on nature photography. It is so rewarding, and when you live in a place like we do, it is all but mandatory to get a tele lens and learn photography. My wife told me that there are only around 2000 Otters in the whole of Sweden. They are super rare. That means that I have just documented a significant part of the entire Swedish Otter population. They are so rare that you are supposed to report sightings in Sweden (which I just did).
When I decide to do something, I often become obsessed. The perfect example is when I decide to learn to play the drums and chose Bleed by Meshuggah as my first song. This is arguably one of the most difficult metal songs ever written, and thus I thought that it must be the perfect place to start for obsessed beginners like me. If you learn a song on the very edge of what is possible, any other (normal) song becomes a walk in the park, right?
After a couple of hours of screaming kids and dad duties I can finally start writing my blog post, Iron Maiden style: Two minutes to midnight. Tonight, the only thing driving me forward is the routine. This is the 110th weekly post and for every week it just feels more and more difficult to miss it. I know that if I miss just one post, this blog project is over, but I am not there yet. I find great pleasure in writing even if no one is reading, and that makes it all worth it.
