I’m in LA right now, attending the MS TechEd conference. Walking around on the premices meeting people, both new accquaintances and people I already know. Perfectly normal. The other day Knowledge Factory had a party. Jeremy Moskowitz, running GPanswers.com, is a partner of Knowledge Factory, and he was at the party. It turns out that he plays pinball, and that he met a Swedish Pinball player last year. But he can’t remember the name, but he’s got a friend back home that do, so he could text her and ask for the name. So Jeremy sits down and start to write an SMS. I look at his phone, and the to field reads “Jamie”. I realize that Jeremy is from Seattle, and I know a Jamie from Seattle, so I ask him if it’s Jamie Beth. Yup, it was Jamie Beth - My candy lady! I told Jeremy to text her that he was partying with Candyman. And of course I knew that Swedish guy very well as well - Mats Runsten. Hilarious!

If we were talking about Säffle and Bromölla or some other redneck places I wouldn’t have been that surprised, but now we’re talking about two million-headed cities, and two guys meeting at a conference with several thousand attendees in a 15 million-headed city…

A couple of days later I met up with my friend John - the shotsbricka guy - and went to the Pig’n Whistle on Hollywood Blvd. We had a beer when this guy comes up and asks if he can have some snus from my box on the table. Apparently he had lived in Sweden, and he even had a Swedish flag tattooed. He talked about an Opeth concert the next day, and I told him that I knew a former singer of Opeth. It turns out that he knows him too, and a couple of other Swedish friends of mine, both from Stockholm and from Örebro. Hilarious!

Itty bitty world.

/P

Edit: And it happened again!

I started at my new job today - as a consultant at Knowledge Factory, after two years of working at Consign. This means going back to do more Microsoft stuff - Windows, Active Directory, Exchange and other products from their portfolio, and first thing now will be to take the Windows 2008 family of certifications. It does not mean that I’ll stop doing networking stuff though, and I’ll keep my assignment at Logica.

In a week from now I will go to LA for the MS TechEd conference, and so will a bunch of other Knowledge Factory employees, so it will be a great opportunity to get to know them, and also a great head start into the Microsoft world again.

/P