There are countries where just as many speak Icelandic as speak English. Iceland is such a country, and so is Mali. Albeit they’ve just discovered that French isn’t lingua franca anymore, and thus they all want to learn English, they’re not quite there yet. I’m lucky I grabbed a French computer to learn from, so I can at least tell the Malinese that the ping timed out, or ask them to copy’n'paste stuff and other useful words such as “wireless”, “start”, “search”, “accept”, “cancel” and “next”.

Back home it is freezing cold, and a week before we left Sweden, the cold, wet, refuckingpulsive snow began falling from the sky. Snow in mountains is good. It might be cold, but it stays snowy, it’s not that wet, and you can dress accordingly. Then you can put long plastic thingies on your feet, and glide down the hills. That’s fun. When you get bored you can get drunk. That’s fun too.

Snow in Stockholm is just refuckingpulsive. It doesn’t stay snowy. It becomes a cold, wet, muddy slush that gets into everywhere. And if you dress for the cold, you have to dress/undress frequently as you go in and out of buildings. I hate snow. Malinese have never seen snow. I like the Malinese.

Bada Lodge

A couple of days ago, we went to “Bada Lodge“. It’s a resort at the Niger river, about an hour away with a slow boat. I liked the boat trip, and Bada Lodge might be a very nice place, but it’s not what I would call Africa. Such places are everywhere around the world, and as long as the climate is good where they are, they’re certainly nice. But I want to experience Africa and Mali, the people, the culture and the atmosphere, including the poverty, the dust and the emissions. You don’t do that at places like Bada Lodge, but I guess my brother’s kids got more out of it than downtown Bamako.

Phoneshop

In downtown Bamako there are “boutiques” called names like “Riyadh Electronics”, “New York Shop” and “Paris Boutique de Luxe”. They are built with four tree branches with a roof of corrugated metal or straw (or a combination). The electronics include 486 computers, bakelite phones and huge calculators. The range of clothing is a bit better, at least if your into domestic traditional stuff (with velcro). They also sell traditional music instruments (with strings of nylon), traditional art (cars made of used coke cans) and all kind of Chinese second class stuff. But if you go beyond the crap, you can find the nice stuff. Today, we bought 40 metres of high quality fabric for less than €40.

I was at a Bamako football derby between Le Stade Malien de Bamako and Jeanne D’Arc. Le Stade won the African Confederation Cup this year, promising a good game, but apparently it was Le Stade 2 playing, in some other division. The level of football was comparable to juniors back home, four drummers (playing african rhythms for 105 minutes), two cow bells, a boat horn and no singing on the stands. Not the culture I’m used to with AIK, but it was fun anyway. Le Stade was the better team, but Jeanne D’Arc (looking like and playing like Trelleborgs FF) won by 1-0 (a counterattack, of course). The sold all kinds f stuff on the stands, including eggs.

Malian football supporter drummers video

Boudin

Ever since I was a little kid, my father always told me that Boudin is a blood sausage, and that the French Foreign Legion sings a song about making Boudin out of their enemies. But I’ve never seen any Boudin in real life. Until yesterday. The place where we celebrated new year’s eve had Boudin with mustard sauce on the menu! It didn’t take more than 37 years. I tasted surprisingly good.

I had a meeting with the Malinese police, since one of them stole the key for the moped I borrowed from one of my mother’s guards. Someone had told them that a traffic light high up in the sky was valid on the street, six meters below. Like if anyone would ever have the time to look up in the sky in the Malinese traffic chaos, full of people, goats (they call them sheep, but they also call crocodiles “caïmans”, even though there are no caymans outside South America, USA and China, so I’m pretty sure they’re goats), donkeys, carts, mopeds, cars and minibuses. I explained that traffic lights at that level could only be valid for flying vehicles. It took 20 minutes of French-pidgin-English negotiations before they agreed, and gave me the moped key back. Half the time I was trying to figure out what freaking fire he was talking about, since he yelled “The fire! No see? The fire!” over and over again.

If it taught me anything? Yup. I learned that “red light” and “fire” is the same word in French.

A while ago I was sitting at EWK and had an hour to kill. To ease off the 3G bill for my boss, I scanned for wireless networks, and found Boingo. I had some trouble connecting, and searched for solutions. I found the solution, but even more interesting, I came across this. The author Annelie Näs had signed up for Boingo (also at EWK), and back home she’d been surfing the free wireless network at the café next door. Or so she thought, but the Boingo program chose the paid services of Boingo instead. Whe she got the bill, she contacted Boingo customer service, who refused to reimburse her. So she got mad and wrote the post.

Anyway, Boingo representative Lauren Sanyal found the post, wrote a comment explaining the issue, apologized and offered her the money back. That’s the way to go! It’s people like Lauren (and thus companies like Boingo) that makes us hope for a better tomorrow!

Booli.se is a Swedish site for people looking to buy or sell their homes. They scan the sites of all the house broker companies, and make the houses searchable for their visitors. They add the housebroker objects into iframes, and leave their own bar at the top. The big Swedish house broker Svensk Fastighetsförmedling contacted Booli.se, threatening with lawyers, fines and imprisonment if they didn’t stop doing that. Booli.se responded with a nice invitation to sit down and discuss the matter, and try to find some way to cooperate making both sides happy. Svensk Fastighetsförmedling replied with a rude mail making clear that they didn’t want any discussions, and again threatening with legal action.

That’s not the way to do it! You haven’t learned a shit! Keep that attitude, and you’re going down the same drain as the entertainment industry!

I will definitely use Boingo again, and I will definitely NOT use Svensk Fastighetsförmedling.

Edit: Now they can sue me too…

Update! Svensk Fastighetsförmedling posted a comment, make sure to read it.

It’s been a real pinball period now, with the IFPA World Pinball Championships last weekend, and the European Pinball Championships (EPC) the weekend before that. The EPC was in Northampton, a bunch of miles north of London. Me and some other Swedish players were scheduled to land on Heathrow at 13.50 local time, but since the famous English weather decided to close Gatwick down, we had to wait in the air for an hour before we could land. Oh well, we had plenty of time to get to Northampton…

Heathrow - Northampton, a 103 km drive on highways.

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…and it took plenty of time to get to Northampton. Since the weather couldn’t stop us, the UK Department for Transport did its best. Road works and accidents combined made the 1h+ drive take more than three hours. We were supposed to start playing the country tournament at 17.45, and at 17.40 we arrived to Northampton. By then our handheld GPS had run out of batteries, and we hadn’t brought the car charger. Another car with Swedish players were behind us though, and they had a working GPS, so when they arrived to Northampton, we used them as GPS by proxy, and finally arrived at the site at 18.00 sharp. The warming up that we had planned turned into an instant start of team tournament matches.

The Jochniyle Trans-Atlantic Express

But despite the abrupt start all the Swedish teams did well, and when the qualifications round was over, all three Swedish teams were among the six teams that made it into the final, ending up on place 1, 2 (my team) and 5. A 50% chance of a Swedish victory! However, one of the American teams was the better players, and they won the team tournament. My own team had apparently burned all our energy in the qualifications, and we ended up on sixth place. The other two Swedish teams took the 2nd and 3rd places.

The organizers had apparently taken the warning about the tight schedule seriously, since they had done everything in their power to minimize the ball times on the games. This makes the outcome more random, and a lot of good players didn’t make it into the finals. Players like Neil Shatz, Roy Wils, Albert Nomden, Jorian Engelbrektsson and myself ended up on embarresing positions. I ended up as 89:th, which is my all time low in ANY tournament, and the first time I ever miss the finals in a big tournament (except PAPA).

Anyway, it made it possible for me to put all efforts into the Classics tournament. They had eight classic games put up, and the best score on each game would continue into the finals. I took aim for Big Fair, and had a battle against Roy Wils for the win. I finally got 3453 against his 2893, and made it into the finals.  And so did four (almost five) other Swedes! That’s domination…

Classics finalists

The semifinal was played on Time Fantasy, where Jörgen Holm and I scored around 2 million points each, leaving the other two way behind. In the finals, Jörgen and I met Neil Shatz and Jim Belsito on Firepower. Belsito got over a million, giving him the victory, and I got second place with about half a million. The silver medal somewhat compensated for the catastrophy in the main division, and at least I didn’t had to go home empty-handed.

Jörgen and I had a flight booked the same evening, so we left immediately after the Classics final. We arrived at Heathrow in time to check in and return the rental car, and went for a smoke. After the smoke we headed towards security, but they wouldn’t let us in! The didn’t say why, and just directed us to a desk. At that desk they explained that there’s a new rule, saying you have to arrive at security at least 35 minutes before take-off. We looked at the time. 33 minutes to take-off. We’d been ONE minute late! She said there was a 30 minute wait at security. Heck, we were at terminal 5, there’s never more than ten minutes to wait at terminal 5 security. And BA flights to Sweden is at gate A10 or A11, which is a two minute walk from security.

If I wanted to catch a train, I’d get down to the train station, and if I’m there at least ten seconds before take-off, I’m on my train. But when flying, you have to be there hours before take-off, and go through a lot of meaningless procedures and elephantiasis security measures. And of those hours, 99% is waiting time! What the heck is wrong with the aviation business?? They really need an extreme makeover.

We rescheduled our flight and found ourselves a hotel, and all together that smoke was the most expensive one (with ordinary tobacco) of my life. Heathrow hotels really know how to get paid more for less.

Todd playing with cows

A week later I was back in England again. This time for the IFPA World Pinball Championships in, or rather outside of, Hemel Hempstead. Nick Bennet provided his personal farm to host the tournament! Rather unusual, but all you need to host a pinball tournament is space and power, and the farm had enough of both.

The qualifications system was a lengthy (but good!) one, taking one and a half day of continious match play to complete. I started fine, parking on positions around 12-15 somewhere. Since positions 1-8 and 9-16 were seeded in later into the finals cup ladder, it was important to do good in the qualifications. After the first day I was at the 18th position, so I had to play good on day two, to get into the seeded bunch of players. But morning pinball is not my bag, so I fell down to the 24th position when the qualifications was over.

That meant I had to play all rounds of the ladder. I started up against fellow Swede Marcus Hugosson. He beat me at F-14, but then I won four games in a row. Next opponent was Krisztián Szalai, the Hungarian guy who got second at EPC the week before. It was a tough match, and it took nine games to determine the outcome, before I finally won on Road Show(!). The next match was against Neil Shatz, second at IFPA last year, second at PAPA 2005 and third after me at EPC Classics this year. I beat him playing good on Star Trek, Simpsons and Road Show (again!), and had the least lousy game on Star Gazer. 4-0!

The quarter finals was the first match on the third day, and my opponent now was noone else than Bowen Kerins, the reigning IFPA champion and multiple PAPA champion. And again, morning pinball is not my bag. I got about 50 million on Simpsons against Szalai and Shatz, and I got 2 million against Bowen. Bowen had an easy win, 4-0 without having to put any effort into it. I had really been looking forward to that Simpsons game, since we have both made fantastic scores on tournament mode Simpsons, but apparently that fantastic match wasn’t this match.

The last game was a tie breaker for the quarter finals losers. Once again I met Jim Belsito, and once again he beat me to it. But I beat Cayle George and Trent Augenstein, earning myself a sixth place in the tournament. I’m pleased with the outcome, even though I really wanted to give Bowen some more competition. I won $400 and a bottle of IFPA Jalapeño Sauce!

This time the return flight went fine, except for “poor” Jorian, who had to stay to play the final against Bowen. Bowen won once again, keeping the title for another year.

Now I’m home for a few weeks, before it’s time to go to PAPA to battle once again…

/P

Last weekend I had some plans. Saturday, I was going to Lidköping to play Lidköping Pinball Masters Open. Monday, my beloved AIK played against GAIS in Gothenburg. In stead of driving 500 km back home and then 500 km more to Gothenburg, my plan was to bounce on Brygghuset in Fiskebäckskil (70 km north of Gothenburg) on Sunday, to eat some good food. They’ve got the best food in all of the west coast.

I had some stuff for my brother in Örebro, so on my way to Lidköping, when I was half an hour from Örebro, I called him and asked him to head for the highway. He told me he was already going to the highway, since he was loading his car for a vacation on the west coast. I met up with him at a rest stop, where he’d been waiting for less than a few minutes. He was going to Hafstens camping, 25 km from Fiskebäckskil. Same day, same time, almost the same destination.

I went playing pinball (got fifth), and stayed at a hotel for the night. The next day I went to the camping site, and spent some time with my brother and his kids. I invited them to dinner at Brygghuset, and we drove to Fiskebäckskil. The kids fished some crabs in the harbor before dinner, when someone suddenly yelled at us from a jetty. It was our old family home neighbor, who also happened to be a classmate of my brother back in elementary school.

Then my sister-in-law answered her phone. It was her parents. They were in Uddevalla. So we invited them to joins us for dinner. They accepted, took a cottage at the camping site and came to Fiskebäckskil. Instead of me eating alone, we ended up being seven people at the dinner!

I was just waiting for my mother to show up in Gothenburg, or some old friend of mine to be at the same gas station where I was filling my car, or something like that. I did meet up with some friends in Gothenburg, and of course I did meet a lot of friends at the football game, but those meet-ups where planned or at least anticipated.

A - Stockholm, B - Örebro, C - Lidköping, D - Hafsten, E - Fiskebäckskil, F - Uddevalla, G - Gothenburg

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And it’s not the first time…

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

I got texted by my mother today. “Internet is down at my hotel in Bobo in Burkina Faso. Fix it!” I’m glad to have a mother who believes in me!

/P

- Hi, I’m John!
- Hi!
- I’ve been here in Sweden for a couple of months, and now I want to go to Spain for a while. How do I do that legally?
- You fly back to the US, get a visa for the next couple of months, and then fly to Spain.
- Isn’t there any way to do it here? The american embassy?
- No.
- But I don’t want to spend a thousand dollars on flying back home just to fill in a couple of papers.
- Hmm… what is the date on the Swedish stamp in your passport?
- Ehm… I didn’t get any stamp?
- Well, you haven’t been here then, have you?…

I’m off to Australia. When me and the Jennyral got to the airport, with 15 minutes to check-in deadline, the check-in clerk told us we needed a visa. To Australia. Even though we’re Swedish. I thought nobody required visa for Swedes. I saw the 30 grand SEK we paid for the ticket get wings and fly off. He stood there smiling and looked at us for a few seconds, before he finally mentioned that we could get visas over at the ticketing desk. Why didn’t he say that right away!? We got the visas, and now we’re in Australia.

My laptop broke, so I had to get a new one. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, having no juridical presence in Australia, but I finally persuaded some company into renting me one. Internet at the hotel is $5 an hour or $12 for six hours. There’s no idle timeout, so if I fall asleep those six hours will be gone after six hours. After sleeping away a couple of six hour tickets, I negotiated a deal with the hotel and bought six one-hour ticket for $12. Now I will at least sleep away no more than 55 minutes each time.

I got a parking ticket yesterday. That means I’ve now got parking tickets from Australia, Germany, Austria, USA, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Thailand, Indonesia and Holland.

/P

(Originally written as a chronical for the Qbranch web site)

Hej!

Palle här. Jag gillar som bekant att resa, i jobbet såväl som privat. Framförallt gillar jag att resa till städer, och gärna stora sådana. Då får man se allsköns märkliga och omärkliga tingestar och människor. Ju större stad, desto fler märkliga och omärkliga tingestar och människor. I år har jag bland annat hunnit med Montreal, München, Wien, Lissabon, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur och Sydney.

Jag gillar även att resa virtuellt. På Internet. D v s kommunicera med allsköns olika människor runtom i världen i olika syften, professionella såväl som privata. Även här noterar man spridningen av märkliga och omärkliga tingestar och människor. Fördelen med Internet är att allt finns på Internet. Nackdelen med Internet är att allt finns på Internet.

Något som slagit mig är konformiteten i Stockholm. Inte nog med att alla människor ser likadana ut, alla bilar och alla hus ser också likadana ut. I de flesta andra städer, åtminstone de icke-europeiska, blandas olika kulturer, och de har ofta egna stadsdelar. De nordamerikanska städerna, Kuala Lumpur och Sydney har t ex allihop varsin China Town. I China Town är inte bara skyltarna på kinesiska, även många hus bär tydliga kinesiska spår. Bilarna ser dock likadana ut överallt.

Platt stad

På tal om China Town så finns det, precis som det alltid har funnits, människor som inte gillar när andra människor får vara sig själva och göra vad de vill. Alltså görs det ideligen försök att stoppa friheten och variationen på Internet. Vissa stater censurerar Internet och organisationer gör vad de kan för att stoppa olika företeelser. Internet har dock en väldigt pragmatisk syn på censur. Det betraktas som nätverksproblem. Eftersom Internets design i grunden är redundant, så hittar trafiken snabbt nya vägar förbi nätverksproblemen.

När det gäller arkitekturen är konformiteten extra märkbar. Varenda kåk i Stockholm är fem våningar hög och har en putsad fasad i någon blek färg. Någon har tydligen bestämt att det ska vara så, och gud nåde den som vågar gå utanför ramarna. I alla de andra städerna har arkitekterna haft betydligt större frihet. Det innebär förvisso en större andel fula hus, men det innebär också en större andel vackra hus, och det innebär framförallt en betydligt större variation.

En dansk domstol förbjöd nyligen danska Tele2 att svara på DNS-förfrågningar efter www.allofmp3.com, den ryska MP3-sidan där man kan ladda ner väldigt billig musik. Genom åren har det förekommit försök att skapa alternativa DNS-infrastrukturer, men inget sådant försök har lyckats särskilt bra. Men om fler följer danskarnas exempel, så kommer det ganska fort att växa fram alternativa DNS-system som effektivt kringgår domstolarnas beslut. Naturligtvis går trafiken att stoppa med andra metoder, men även då kommer Internet att betrakta hindret som ett nätverksproblem och trafiken kommer till slut att routas andra vägar.

Nyligen knåpade en kanadensare ihop ännu en proxy-applikation som kan användas för att ta sig runt censur. Nackdelen med den är att den kräver personliga konton på serversidan, vilket kan bli lite jobbigt när en dryg miljard kineser vill surfa fritt, men det är ändå ett exempel på hur censuren undviks. Sedan tidigare finns t ex Tor, som routar trafiken via tusentals proxyservrar runtom i världen.

Husen i de större städerna är allt från 2 till 80 våningar höga. Materialen varierar friskt mellan puts, sten, trä, betong, stål och glas. Färgerna täcker regnbågens hela spektrum. Nu svär jag väl i kyrkan eftersom vi svenskar får lära oss i småskolan att Stockholm är världens vackraste stad, men resultatet av arkitekternas frihet är faktiskt betydligt vackrare städer.

Beautiful Sydney

I och med ”web 2.0”, den ”nya” synen på Internet där majoriteten av innehållet är användargenererat, så blir det dessutom betydligt svårare att veta vad man ska censurera, eftersom det inte längre finns några få centrala källor till informationen. Det blir så att säga en massa fula och en massa vackra hus mest lite överallt. För att travestera Göbbels: Man kan hindra alla personer en gång och man kan hindra vissa personer alla gånger, men man kan inte hindra alla personer alla gånger.

Det är uppenbarligen betydligt lättare att stoppa arkitekter än IP-paket.

/P