However i did take a pic of the nearby outdoors gym.   Yes indeed! Finally a gym for fat people!  Consider it a response to This post on Dante and Magdas blog.

Aron testing the seated row.

Swedish media reports today that facebook has suffered a leak. 100 million accounts had their information taken and made public. The article even goes so far as to talk about an “attack” being made on facebook. So let get the facts straight. The information was public to begin with, the was no attack and no leak, just a collection of information that may have been accidentally made public, by facebooks users. So in essence, the detailed information that was “leaked” was public from the start.  Classic media hype.

The issue is that Facebook has a tendecy of changing around things, and that can cause confusion. In their recent (Dec 2009) change of privacy settings they made the odd decision that if you did nothing, your account was insecure. A pretty poor design in my opinion, but not a security leak like the article makes it out to be.

Here is the detailed report from Electronic Frontier Foundation about what the changes were and what the significance of them are.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly

Facebook, like all things popular, is a lot of different things for different people. It can be a social platform to keep in touch with your friends, a way to keep tabs on family and collegues, or even to find a job. However lets all agree that facebook was never meant for confidential information. Do you remember when Danish troops used facebook to plan operations in afghanistan? or when Israel did the same for an operation in Pakistan? Pretty extreme examples, but the point should be rather obvious:

If you don’t want to share it, don’t post it on facebook!

Link to the swedish article: http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/facebookanvandares-personliga-information-utlackt-pa-natet-1.1145464

Click the image for more of the same..

The iPhones built in pdf viewer made a dogs breakfast of our staffs weekly newsletter. To great comedic effect since the topic of the article is legibility and the importance of clear communication.. at least so I believe.

Clearer communication at SLU

[...] for the reader a formal and simple language. The graphical layout will be  [...]

[...] understands the message.

Before:

After:

Happy Valentines day!

I am enjoying the first calm week in a while, with no special agenda to fill my evenings I am using the time to just relax and sleep. It turned out it was a good week to do so because Aron and Simon are both having trouble sleeping. Aron wakes up at 5am after a restless night, and that is on a good night. On bad nights he wakes up almost every hour. Thankfully we just completed a campaign to promote rest and sleep with Aron so now he at least accepts the fact that he has to sleep in his own bed.

Anyway as I’m writing this it’s soon 8 am and I have been up for 3 hours.

Simon weighs in at 9 kilos now for his 5 month bday. He has a wonderful calm about him, completely different from Arons red-hot temper at the same age. He has just started joining us at the table when we eat, and loves crunching up newspaper paper with his little hands and is just getting the motor skills to identity toys, grab them and drop them on the floor.

Technical Museum in Stockholm 1952 - Philips demonstrating television.

Me and L where talking the other day if we ever are going to see a change in our lives as fundamental as internet. Our generation grew up without it while this generation never knew how life was before cellphones and internet. And the next generation, what kind of internet will they get to know?

Changes are pretty big that the freedom and openness that we associate with internet today will be an unknown to them. I heard the other day on the radio a debater making the argument “of COURSE internet suppliers should be responsible for what is going on in their networks”. To that argument I must ask why. Internet connectivity is as commonplace today as any other part of the Swedish infrastructure. You don’t close bars if people get drunk there and then drive home. Nobody would even think about threatening my telephone company if I were to pick up the phone and call in a bomb threat at the Royal Palace. Yet somehow when it comes to internet connectivity, all the basic rules we take for granted don’t apply.

We are already being spied upon on a systematic and state-sponsored degree, Stasi of East Germany could only dream of having the control over its citizens that the Swedish state is enjoying at the moment. The argument that the intelligence gathered in Sweden cannot be used to track individuals is hardly comforting, when it is an established fact that intelligence data always have always been for sale or trade to intelligence agencies of other countries.

And now, around the corner looms ACTA. The article linked to below highlights a connection I was not aware of before: That ACTA operates the same way as the Great Chinese firewall. This in connection with the recent Google/China scandal really makes you wonder. What the hell is going on?

Read this –> The Similarity Between ACTA And Chinese Internet Censorship

Just like all male members of the Gumucio family I was born with Cataracts (Gråstarr) in my both eyes. This has been fine for most of my life, since its in my case was very mild. The diagnosis i got as a child was that I would not have to get surgery until the age of 40.

And now, the moment is upon me! At the tender age of 35 i find myself seeing really really bad. The deterioration started about a year ago and my recent visit to the eye specialist confirmed it. I have about 50% vision on both eyes, and will be getting surgery sometime probably during the next month.

As a positive thinking person, i cannot help but notice several advantages to my current situation:

The people that you try to avoid, you never have to pretend you don’t see them when you meet them on the street, because you don’t see them. This happens to me all the time, and I’m pretty sure that some people in our apartment buildlng have me pegged as some kind of uptight snob that ignore them. This of course is a half-truth at best.

You make new friends. As you wave like an idiot to complete strangers, trying to avoid  situations like the one described above, you are bound to be waving at people that only have a distant similarity to your personal friends or acquaintances. This also happens to me all the time, three times in fact during just past weekend. You can also factor in that I have an exceptional memory for faces, and also frequently say hello to people I haven’t met since kindergarten. They don’t wave back.  Uptight snobs!

The excerpt above is from my long long list of drafts for this blog, I must have written it before my surgery, the text for which is in another draft as it were. Read on for the full story..

I had the good fortune to recieve the eye surgery in August of 2008. In two separate sessions I paid a visit to the company Medoculars office in Östermalm, Stockholm. The first time I was very nervous, but an elderly gentleman in the waiting room told me that I actually had nothing to worry about. I was offered and accepted a mild tranquilizer anyway.  The operation itself is considered a very minor one, since the lens of the eye doesn’t exactly reside in the eye, but in a sack hanging outside the actual eye lobe. No opening of the eye lobe is necessary, only a millimeter-wide hole in aforementioned sack.

The operation itself was quite remarkable. You lay down on the bed and they put a mask over your face, it covers your entire face and then they cut a hole in the mask over your eye, the nurse actually caught a piece of eyelid in her scissors, no harm was done but I freely admit it didn’t help my stress level one bit. The end result of all the setup was that I found myself staring into a bright yellow rectangle of light: The microscope of the surgeon.

In the next phase my old and blurry lens was smashed into a thousand pieces using ultrasound, the effect of this was quite stunning, as the rectangle of light suddenly became completely out of focus.  The surgeon opens a tiny aperture to the lens and sucks out the pieces, the new artificial lens – specially made just for me – is inserted with a syringe and unfolds on its own to fit my eye. All the surgeon has to do now is to make sure the lens is centered and that everything looks ok.  The whole procedure took 10 minutes, after which coffee and a bun was waiting for me in the next room. After recovering from the blinding light of the microscope, I was completely fine and ready for new adventures. Absolutely amazing how easy and completely pain-free the whole process was.

In a side note, when I returned to do the other eye, I realized in the waiting room that I had been sedating the wrong eye, and that the eye I was about to do surgery on was completely au naturelle. Accepting my fate (and another tranquilizer), I decided to rather bite the bullet and let them do the procedure anyway than wait, my theory being that there were almost no sense of pain in the actual eye, and relying solely on the anesthesia I received then and there. My theory was right, it was perfectly fine, but I did feel the surgeon opening my eye.

My status right now is that with progressive glasses, as my new lenses are unable to adjust focus, I see better than I have ever done in my entire life.

This is the same model cellphone as the first one I owned. I didn't have the flashy headset however.

It’s been a while since i bought a new cell phone. As a matter of fact the only phone I ever bought with my own money was my first phone. An Ericsson, back in 1997 or something like that when it was still quite exotic to have one.

You would think that that technology has progressed since then, but what we see today is a market totally overcrowded with bad products. I’m not joking when I tell you that the SonyEricsson p990, a phone I had the misfortune to meet at my current job, actually choke on the task of dialling a number. Out of memory after two digits! Receiving a call was the same gamble, the phone could run out of memory as it tried to recieve the call.. system restart.

So it was with pretty low expectations that I went shopping last week. What I wanted was so simple.

• A phone that is small, and that I can drop without it going a million pieces. A “vacation” phone if you will.
• Not an iPhone clone.
• As less keys as possible and as minimal design as possible.
• Wi-fi  and ability to stream music from my home network.

Ok so that last point was a bit of a joke, because I never expected to find a phone like that. The iPhone does that kind of, via the tversity web-interface. But it’s pretty slow and only works when it feels like it.

But what do you know, looks like Nokia r&d have been reading my mind.  I went and bought a Nokia 5630. The rest of this post is going to be about how great it is, and how UPnP changed everything.

I bought a budget Nokia for emergencies some months ago, it’s in itself a pretty good device, but as basic as you could possibly get. So the question arises: What else could you possibly need to have in your phone?  Turns out… lots of things!

The Good

There are the normal things you would expect, here are the things that first strike you:

• Its fast
• Its stable. I have managed to crash it a few times, but nothing major.
• Good battery time
• Nice design! Minimal.  Me like.
• Games games games. The Ngage gaming platform is built in. And no, I don’t care about that.
• Good camera.  Video editing is built in.
• It’s Symbian OS, so you can install lots of nice apps. I have seamless syncing with Googles Calendar and Contacs for example. Everything i put into the phones calendar, gets auto-synced.

The Awesome

Nokia 5630

Here is a rundown of the features that for me were totally new: I didn’t know any phone could do this.

• The voice-control is amazing: You can call anyone in your contacts by saying their name and what number to use. ie “Anders, mobile”. You can also say the name of any artist, album or song that you have in your phone, and it starts playing it.
• Total support for UPnP. That means that you can browse up music from your computer to your phone and stream it. So for example listen to anything you like when in bed, your whole collection at your fingertips, from your cellphone. Or why not copy it over so you can listen to it later when you leave home? You can also play music from your phone, on your computer or whatever else you happen to have in your home that supports UPnP. I have an old hacked xbox, works great. Fantastic way to move music between friends etc.
• Support for wi-fi.  Auto-detects hotspots and shows you an icon when there is a hotspot you can connect to.  This is the smallest cellphone I know about that supports wi-fi.
• Support for SIP.   I realize I’m coming late to this party, but it seems that there is built-in support for Voip (voice over internet).  That means that when the phone is without wi-fi range, I should be able to get a SIP account somewhere, and make REALLY cheap calls with my normal cellphone. The tech in itself is not so cool, but boy, that it comes built into my cellphone, that is pretty cool indeed.
• Podcasts,  every morning it grabs the latest episodes of whatever is new. Automatically, over wi-fi. This is how it should be.
• It can read you your new SMS’s and emails. (again to your headset if you like). A bit cheezy perhaps, but I like stuff like that.

The Problems

Here’s what doesn’t work:

• It’s pretty clear that this device was meant to be sold in Finland. The manual was in Finnish.. no big deal I thought I can get the manual from the web in some non-ugric language. But sadly there are functions in the phone that are in finnish only. Still trying to sort this out with Nokia support. Update:  I discovered that you can also download a voice for almost every language on earth for this feature. Very cool.
• This phone is not listed on the Nokia Support pages yet.  Update: Don’t bother with Nokia support. Read forums instead.
• When listening to music over bluetooth, there is no way to adjust volume. I trust this will be fixed. Right now its LOUD.  Very bad for my tinnitus.
• After installing some apps, the camera no longer works.  No big deal since It’s not a feature I use a lot, but still annoying. Update: After a  complete wipe of the phone the camera function is still broken! I guess I have to take it in for service. First time I own a phone where a software installation messes it up for good!

Updated

Here is the Bounce tribute.  The girls at 1.01 that look around and realize they are the only ones that not dancing are my favorites.