Here is a link to Chile Person Finder, a tool to report and track missing persons.

http://chilepersonfinder.appspot.com/

Simon just turned 6 months old!

Time passes quickly when you are having fun, and it seems like only yesterday that we greeted this little guy into the world. Always with a bad concience we are very aware that his older brother is constantly stealing attention when he is around. Of course Aron is Simons inspiration and guiding light, there is no happier moment than when he gets access to one of Arons cars, to bite. The opposite of his will-strong and temperamental older brother, Simon is always happy, always greets the day with a dignified air about him. Also as you can see from the picture, he is a blonde! The roots from northern sweden run deep in this one indeed.

One of the best times for our family is breakfast time when we are all gathered around the table. As Aron is Simons god and emperor rolled into one, Simon sometimes just launches into cascades of laughs and giggles by just looking at his elder brother. The grumpier Aron then tries to rectify his brother with one of his great phrases that he uses on us,  “Stop laughing!  It’s not funny!”  Simon of course only laughing more thanks to the attention. If you are lucky I manage to get the thing on video, goodbye for now!

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.

2010-02-16

Upphittad katt i stadsparken. Gått i området ett tag. Katten har idag omhändertagits av Föreningen Samvetet. Är det din katt eller vet du något om den, kontakta Föreningen Samvetet på telefon 0762 – 36 54 78 eller via e-post till hittekatt@samvetet.com
Föreningen Samvetet

Our cat has been missing since midsummers. 8 months. Yesterday the unimaginable happened and we saw this ad. We are going to pick her up now.

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

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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.

December was such a cramped month, that I haven’t had the chance to blog about this before. The 13:th of december 2009, we baptised Simon Alexander Gumucio Bergström!

Three babies were getting baptised during the ceremony that took place in the church of Helga Trefaldighet, a sweet little chapel from the 11:th century.  Aron was a champion and sat with us at the front the whole time without making a scene. December is a difficult month, and Simon can count many relatives that live outside of town, but to our great joy almost everybody could attend,  making this a great party.

The speech the priest held was great. Patrik is a old friend and so knew we were in safe hands, among the highlights in the speech was when it covered how being baptized is like recieving the fingerprint of god, much like the church itself in one of its pillars actually holds a clear fingerprint from a worker, dating from when it was built, literally ages ago. It also got humurous when the audience was asked to keep a special place in their hearts for the children being baptised: To send them a mail once in a while, and why not join their groups on facebook?

We were also allowed to enjoy beautiful solo singing from Gabriel, accompanied by Anders Dillmar, the same instrumentalist that played at our wedding.

After the ceremony we gathered for a little coffee and cookies, from Magnus, Susanna and Gabriel we also got a preview from the musical City of Angels to offer our guests.

Thank you all!