Freudianisms

I have been really quiet on more personal topics for a while now. I’ve been pursuing a path through the lands of techno-blabber-blogging, and I will now take a short de-tour into the more personal spaces. I’m not fooling myself, most people that read this blog are my friends or family and you guys couldn’t care less about how to use Winamp 😉

The plans for this summer have started to materialize from nowhere. I actually already have the necessary flight tickets bought and ready. The plan is bascially this: on the 14th of June I and Shirley will fly from Hong Kong to London, where we will arrive after lunch, thanks to the time difference. We will then spend a little more than two days in London for general sight-seeing – it was a while ago I visited London and there is still a lot to see.

On the 16th we will fly to Gothenburg and meet my family. Then it gets a little complicated – Shirley really wants to see more of Europe, especially Germany. I won’t object to that, even though I certainly have been in Europe a lot already. The plan is to borrow a car and drive down to Germany and just travel around for about a week. The problem is – Germany is hosting the World Cup in football (soccer) which most definately will make it crowded in the hotels. As of now, this is an unsolved matter. We plan to visit Berlin, some scenic castle and perhaps go down to Freiburg to meet Benjamin and maybe take a detour into France or Switzerland. I will have to do a lot of driving, given that I’m the only one with a license 😉

We will return to Sweden right in time for the Midsummer festival at the summer cottage of my family – we can show Shirley all the typical Swedish habits of dancing around poles like frogs, eating stuff and getting wasted. After that weekend, we will take a minor tour in Sweden by car – maybe even to Stockholm and back. Shirley will then fly to London on the 2nd of July and onwards to Hong Kong.

How about me? I will stay in Sweden. But not for good. My return ticket to Hong Kong says 14th of August (right after Visby Medieval Festival, which I very well might attend). If me returning to Hong Kong is news to you – although not all the paperwork is done, I will stay in Hong Kong in the autumn to finish my master thesis (‘examensarbete’). When things are more clear about this, I will write a post about it. After that, I will return to Sweden for graduation, and maybe, maybe study in Sweden together with Shirley for some time. But that’s far into the future…

While staying in Sweden this summer I will be taking it easy. I won’t work. Or rather, I will work intensely writing products for Neogames, but it won’t be that well payed. In the same time, I will role-play as much as possible and meet friends. Notice how I prefer staying in Sweden only at the summer (my clinical tests have shown that Sweden is unhabitable for me during winters).

If you wish to meet me in Sweden between the 14th of June and the 14th of August, don’t hesitate to contact me! I have a lot of catching up to do!

The Freebie Finder has been featured in many big blogs lately, such as Lifehacker and TechCrunch. And that I can’t really understand. Freebie Finder is maybe smart technology, but it’s a crappy service. After going through the links in the Freebie Finder I realize that most of it is really not worth ordering. Why this obsession of getting free stuff? Why give away your personal information to get something you can buy for a penny in any store? Why be so cheap? Looking for freebies is a dead cause, taking time and definately not rewarding – been there, done that. Free is not always good.

Have you ever wanted to synch two folders? Or make one folder a constantly updated version of another? Or a folder with only the newest files mirrored from another? Now you can, for free. Microsoft’s SyncToy is a free solution that is surprisingly simple and powerful. Try it! There are some small glitches though – if I want to omit one subfolder, I have to manually select that for every sub-sub-folder, instead of clicking once. Well, you can’t have it all!

Everything is Web 2.0 nowadays. It’s trendy. It’s AJAX. It’s rounded corners. Sometimes one might wonder if it’s the same dozen of guys/gals (almost in their thirties, from Texas, has a cat and a little kid) that writes all the Web 2.0 sites. Yes, it’s a bit dogmatic, it’s even getting a bit conformist (“Hey, where’s the rounded corners! That’s not Web 2.0!”). It is a bit blown up, for sure.

So is it all just crap, old news or no news at all? Actually, a simple comparison between any Web 2.0-site and it’s Web 1.0 predecessor, or desktop program, shows the differences. There are a few very apparent advantages of the Web 2.0. Sure, the technology isn’t that new (“My grandpa was a XMLHTTPRequest pioneer back in summer of 1999!”), but it’s now about the tech, it’s about how you use it, mate. Web 2.0 offers for example:

• Mobility – the service is accessible from any (modern) browser, anywhere with Internet.
• Instantly up’n running – no install, just type it in your browser.
• No more updating software – server-side software can always be up to date.
• Usability – almost the same as desktop programs, and far better than previous web sites.
• Social collaboration – basically, sharing information in a way previous sites did in a halfhearted fashion, and that desktop programs don’t do at all.
• Business interest. Thanks to Web 2.0, whatever it is, the Web is hot again and you can start earning money. I guess that’s good?

Someone wise said that Web 2.0 is basically just about making the browser into a virtual machine, like Java. And in a sense, that’s very true, the browsers are becoming full-fledged software platforms. Buta browser is network oriented, while Java and other virtual machines are desktop oriented – which makes a clear difference. You still have to install a Java program (sometimes from the command line – that’s usability folks 😉 ), and you have to get the updates yourself and there is very little use of the Internet in the Java software out there.