Last Saturday we threw a surprise 40-year anniversary party for an old friend. At the event, I met a whole bunch of my old friends. The wise saying that “you will never gain any new old friends” comes to mind. Anyway, let’s elaborate further on last week’s topic of physical vs online meetings. An event like this is the definite proof of how irreplaceable real social interaction is.
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 MoreOne of the drawbacks with acquiring a PhD is that you “lose” around five years of work experience, because you are busy studying. It’s the same with all forms of education a.k.a. sacrificing the present for the future. I felt this very strongly during my first years as an acoustician. My friends who went straight to a private sector employment had several years head start on me, so by the time I was finally ready to start working for real, I was far behind, and I was frustrated by the feeling that colleagues assumed that my experience would be great and not comparable to a fresh recruit. Of course, when you have a good education/toolkit in your mind, it is only a matter of time before you catch up and take the lead, and in my case, I reckon it took around ten years in total (including PhD studies). During my insane quest to learn the drums, I realized something similar the other day with regards to music.
Read MoreFive weeks ago, on day 1539 of learning Bleed, I doubled my efforts in drum playing from 15 minutes per day to 30 minutes per day. Up until the 9th of October, it felt as if I had almost stagnated for about 6-9 months. It is very nice to see the results now and wow, what a difference it made to increase the efforts. For the past 36 days I have finally felt steady progress again. I suspect that after 4-5 years of daily practice I had reached a skill level on the drums where 15 minutes just isn’t enough to advance anymore. It’s an interesting observation because I have seen similar patterns in my professional life.
Read MoreOne of the best things about kids is that you get an excuse to dust off your old Nintendo games and play together. Especially around Christmas when I have the time to do so. My boys have a couple of old Nintendo DS’s, and yesterday I was attending some online auctions to complete our game library with some mandatory classics for couch competition. My wife also wanted to complete her library but couldn’t believe her eyes when she saw that her desired game went for 1500-2500 SEK today. Consequently, she brought her Nintendo box and started to check online auctions to see if she had some desired and valuable game. Several of them were indeed quite valuable at around 700-1500 SEK. But the most inconspicuous game of all we found in the back of a drawer in an old cabinet. A mint condition Game and Watch, Mario the Juggler. Her reaction after searching for the title in some auctions was priceless.
Read MoreIt’s been a couple of weeks now with late work-nights. A temporary reduction in sleep hours is usually no problem, but it is annoyingly easy to get stuck in a loop where you are active later in the evening or night, which both makes it harder to fall asleep and reduces the quality of the hours you get. Consequentially, it will be increasingly harder to get up in the morning and/or you will lose focus during the day, which will reduce productivity. And then you will need to work even longer hours to compensate, which only adds yet more gravel in the delicate machinery. It is a dark spiral. How do you break it?
Read MoreToday I got my ass handed to me in Mario Kart on the Nintendo DS by my 4-year-old son. I knew this milestone would come sooner or later, but honestly, I wasn’t expecting it so soon. Even though I had chosen Bowser, who´s kart was supposed to be the fastest one, I could only win one race out of five. And I won it by a tiny margin, courtesy of the almighty blue shell. I did not “play nice” either. I gave it all I had, but I just couldn’t keep up with the little guy. It was a weird and amazing feeling at the same time. I have never been so satisfied by losing at something.
Read MoreA couple of days ago, I finally received a package I had been expecting for about two months. It contains some spare parts to restore and repair a 20-year-old GPU. An ancient piece of E-waste. Why on earth would anyone want to spend their precious time on a project like that? I talked to my wife about it this morning and her instant reply was “Nostalgia”. She is partly correct, but I think there is another driving factor.
Read MoreBack in July 2023, I began my fifth year of daily practice to nail the song Bleed by Meshuggah on the drums, as a beginner drummer. The insanity of this project is of epic proportions, which can be verified by anyone who has ever heard the original. Many people have asked how I am able to be so consistent with my practice, and if I interpret them correctly, it seems like they would have given up long ago. However, I have finally reached the stage where I cannot keep up my 15 minutes per day. It is simply too difficult. That’s why I have now decided to double my efforts.
Read MoreTwo hundred weeks of consecutive blog posts tonight. Solid proof of the power of incremental improvement. Of course, I do not expect anyone to read all my 200 brain dumps. That was never the purpose. The purpose was to improve my writing skills. And it is impossible to not improve if you do something for 200 weeks straight. And by the way, it is also impossible to not deteriorate if you commence in harmful activities for 200 weeks straight. The only difference is that it is a lot easier to be consistent with bad habits. Consistency with activities that improve your life and the life of everyone around you is very hard.
Read MoreThe other day, my son was playing Mario Kart on his 3DSXL in the sofa, and I sat down beside him to watch. It was quite enjoyable and relaxing. After a while however, I started thinking about screen time in general and why this experience was pleasant, whereas other forms of screen time are often downright annoying?
Read MoreYesterday I had one of the most memorable meals in my life. A perfectly prepared medium/rare entrecote steak and a glass of water. There’s a Swedish saying that “hunger is the best seasoning”, and few truer words have ever been spoken. My spice of choice was a 26-hour gut-rest fast with only H2O to hydrate and nothing else. I don’t think I have ever been without food for so long before, and that made my meal a religious experience. The fasting put a whole new perspective on eating, and I was not aware that a piece of meat could ever taste that good. It opened up a whole new dimension.
Read MoreI was defeated by life once again yesterday, by failing to publish my weekly blog post every Monday. Still, two times out of 197 consecutive weeks isn’t too shabby. But as I suspected back when I missed the first one, the chance that it would happen again increased tremendously. But a week with several deliveries in combination with sick kids for several days is just a combination that cannot add up. Not without giving the middle finger to your wife at least, but it was not worth it. Instead, I have been thinking about potential solutions to the problem of how to maintain a weekly writing habit.
Read MoreMostly, it is very easy to do the weekly brain dump that is my blog. Tonight, I feel rather empty. Strange. But it is the same pattern with my daily musical exercise. Some days are just totally off. The solution is fortunately extremely easy. Just do the task anyway. I am just too critical of myself and even if this will be my worst post so far, it will still be 1000X better than no piece at all. The unconditional importance of carrying on cannot be overstated. Besides, these worst days are the best and most important. They will ruthlessly reveal how good of a writer, or drummer or whatever you are. No-one cares what you can do on a good day. It is the bad day that counts. Don’t practice to win, if you want to become very good at something. Practice until you never fail instead.
Read MoreSome 10-20 years ago, it was standard practice to download games, movies, and music. The reason was simple, it was a lot easier and better than any commercial offer. Personally, I haven’t done any piracy download or torrents the past ten years. And the reason is just as simple; the commercial offerings became so good that it was a no-brainer to go fully legit. That, and the fact that I now had a steady income instead of being a dirt-poor student. But this weekend I got sick and tired when I was trying to buy a movie legit, but it was just not possible. I took me around 30 minutes until I had managed to get the movie to start on my iPad. It would have been way easier to just fire up a Torrent client like back in the days. And that is a bit sad in the year of the Lord 2023. It felt as if I had moved backwards.
Read More“Error: Keyboard not detected. Press F1 to continue or DEL to enter setup”. This is not a joke. It is a brilliant real-world error message that I got this Saturday during our retro-LAN while running four Windows 98-powered battle stations. What a magnificent weekend, to meet up with four very old friends for a trip down memory lane. Gaming together on period correct hardware in a single room. Easily one of the funniest things I have done in about two decades.
Read MoreMy life for the past ten years has been an intense ride. Starting a family and changing the direction of your career has a steep price on the sleep account, among other things. The past week, however, one thing has been stuck in my head. If you never have time to hang out with friends or family, what’s the point?
Read MoreRepainting a garage sounded easy at first. Four weeks of vacation was plenty of time. On paper, it would have worked. Never has time evaporated more quickly for me. I strongly disagree with victim mentality, but in this case the primary reason for the missed deadline can be blamed primarily on external factors: Stomach sickness in sunny weather and Constant rain while healthy.
Read MoreEarlier today, while repainting our garage, my wife came up with the expression “Pod detox”. We have been painting for days on end now, often more than 10 hours per day. Neither of us have listened to any music, audiobooks or podcasts during these days. Usually, I listen constantly to conversations or audiobooks, so it has been a new (old) experience for me to only listen to silence. It is just like it was before, only that I had forgotten how to do it.
Read MoreWe are currently re-painting our houses, starting with the dog kennel and the garage the first year. The houses haven’t even been cleaned for a very long time, perhaps never, and it is a massive undertaking, at least three years. To outsource it would cost a small fortune and it isn’t that difficult to do a half-decent job so we went the DIY route to invest the money in more challenging tasks like plumbing and construction. However, things are only free if your time has no value. And time is the most precious commodity of all. Projects like these really highlight the importance of choosing a place you call home that you love.
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