Opinions

Just the facts…

A word of warning for you who stumbled upon my blog: this blog is not going to be that fun or interesting to read.

I find that the blog post I really like are the ones where the author has very strong opinions about a subject, so strong opinions in fact that he or she just can’t shut up about it. Usually the stated opinion is on the border of insanity and far from my view on the subject. These types of posts are interesting to read. They make you think. They often also make you feel something.

I am not going to write that type of blog posts. I hate opinions. I only have three:

  1. I don’t like opinions.
  2. XSLT is a terrible programming language.
  3. Redefineable syntax like operation overloading and macros is evil and the worst language feature ever.

Other than that I try to stay to just the facts. I like facts. Still, I might do two more blog posts about opinion two and three sometime. In this post I will just talk about my number one opinion: I hate opinions.

One of the thing I hate about opinions is that everyone seems to expect that you should have an opinion on every subject.

”So, what do you think about…”, and then insert any subject like ”the new Mac Book?”, ”the situation in Crimea?”, ”this blouse?”

What? Why should I have an opinion on these things?

It’s a computer, I can use it to program, thats good.

I have not lived in Crimea, I have no idea about the history between those people, but war is never the answer. 

It is red. What do you want me to say? You look good in it. But you look good in anything.

See, now I was forced to have opinions on things that I don’t care to have opinions about. And then we can start arguing. And there is no way that we can settle such an argument, because it is based on opinions and not facts.

Therefore I am always trying to just stick to the facts. We can argue about the facts, for sure, but such an argument can be settled by finding out if the facts are true or not. Facts can be proven or disproven. Opinions can not. They just are. And they are often crazy.

It is fun to read other peoples crazy opinions, but I’ll try to not have any opinions. If I do have opinions I’ll try not to tell you or write them down in my blog. I will just write facts about how Erlang works, how the Erlang runtime system works, and how programming in general works. Without opinions. It will not be that fun, but perhaps you will learn something. Something based on facts.

And please don’t force me to have opinions about things I don’t care about, or even worse force me to have opinions about thing I do care about.

I hate opinions, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

Moving On

Yes, I quit my job.

Since so many of the people I meet keep on asking me I thought I’d best make it official.

After working at Klarna for more than eight years I decided to try something new. So I resigned and started my own company HappiHacking. Tomorrow, Sunday March 9th, is formally my last day of employment.

Right now I am taking a vacation in California, and after that I will start working on the Erlang runtime system book.

And, no, I do not really know what I will do after that.

I am on my own now, and I can do what I want. This is both exciting and very scary at the same time.

 

Sorry, this post was neither funny nor very informative, it was just a public announcement I’ll try to do better next time.

 

Hh

The TV Wall

After ten years of longing I finally bought a flat screen TV.

The old fat TV with a "media PC" under it.

The old fat TV with a "media PC" under it.

I managed to by a new TV just a few years before flat screen TVs became affordable, and since my nice Philips TV kept on working just fine it took me over ten years until I finally bought a new TV. All I needed to do was to choose which TV and convince my wife Cilla that the time had come, a reasonable project for the summer. It turned out that Samsung just had launched a new series of 3D TVs. Since I apparently only buy one TV every ten years I might as well get the latest technology… I thought.

I soon realized that a 3D-TV required a 3D blu-ray player and a 3D capable receiver so the project grew a bit.  Now I needed a TV, a receiver, and a blu-ray player plus some new cables.

The old living room

This is what our living room looked like a year ago (that is in April 2009).

But wait, I can not have a nice new TV and a 3D capable receiver and a blu-ray player and just have two old Jamo Art speakers from 1988. Hm, I might as well also get five new speakers and a sub-woofer. The project grew some more. Fine, no problem, at least I now knew what I wanted. For the next step I only needed to convince my wife.

I started that part of the project by showing her how nice the new TV looked and how much space we would save compared to the old TV. My wife soon agreed that it was time to get a new TV but demanded that there could be no more cables in the living room. The project suddenly grew. OK so I needed some new hardware and some way of hiding all the cables. After a few weeks of surfing and thinking I decided to build a new wall to hang the TV on and to hide the cables in. The project grew a bit again.

I started sketching the solution and soon realized that my old media player wouldn’t fit, so I decided to upgrade to a mac mini. And what use is a HD TV without HD content? So a new Humax HD PVR system from Comhem was also added to the mix. Now I knew what I needed and after some surfing I knew the dimensions of all pieces and I could start to draw a blue print for the construction. I needed a 20 cm deep wall to fit the speakers in the wall, and I needed room for the TV and for storage of  DVDs and Whiskey. I also wanted to be able to hide all media equipment but still have easy, well relatively easy, access to the connections at the back. I decided on a home built shelf system with a removable side and top.

Now that we where going to redecorate our living room, we might just as well get some new furnitures also, so a new sofa, table, rug, curtains and lamps where added to the shopping list.

The construction could now start.

Placeholder for TV

I started by putting up some placeholders for the TV and speakers.

studs

Now the the vertical studs are in place.

chaos

The old sofa covered in mid work chaos.

more studs

Most studs in place and the first layer of plywood is up.

planning

The new sofa arrives and my friend Olle helps me do some planning.

grandpa

My father in law Lasse gives another helping hand getting the gypsum board in place. (In truth Lasse helped me a lot with the whole project.) In the right hand corner (above the temporary TV) you can see the new surge protecting power outlet.

holes

Now all gypsum boards are up and we have taken holes for cupboards and speakers in them.

TV and Tor

The speakers, the receiver and the TV has finally arrived, Tor is testing 3-D. Cilla has repainted the wall (in the same color as before) with a nice white paint down from the ceiling.

wallpapers

Cilla, with unborn Nils in her belly, is putting up the new wallpaper.

final touches

My mother in law is putting some final touches to the wallpapering, hiding the cupboard doors behind a perfect pattern match. Cilla is looking for a new sofa table on the mac mini on the new TV.

The finished wall

And here is the final result. Almost completely hidden speakers, hidden doors to storage, an alcove with ornaments with lights in adjustable colors.