Sooner Or Late They All Come To Me

During the conference we had a teambuilding exercise and the most interesting thing that happened was when we were gonna split up into small groups of like 8-9 people. Everyone knew me because everyone that has worked there for a while have talked to me so many times they know me and all the new people had their IT intro's with me so they knew me too. And I knew everyone for the same reasons. And I know when which lady got married since I had to change names and stuff in the network and I know when people transfer between offices. The problem was - alot of them didn't know eachother! And that put me in a kinda unique position during all this since I had to introduce people, team up the girls to talk about wedding preparations and stuff since one had gotten married just a few months ago and I could easily strike up a conversation regarding the pub around the corner of our office in Brussels since I know this guy just came back after working for 2 years in Brussels. That was fun and unexpected.

Report and pics from Czech Republic

Here you can find my report regarding what went down in the Czech Republic during the weekend and here you can find some pictures as well.

To put it mildly it was an awesome weekend! I was afraid it might turn out to be boring and "same old, same old" but it was just great fund and actually motivating!!

Back The The Czech Republic

Oh man what a party!! We left on friday morning (and I mean morning, sipped my first beer at 7 am!) arrived in Karlovy Vary at noon, spent some time in the town and had a wild friday night. On saturday it was time for a conference and some teambuilding activity (that was actually the most rewarding teambuilding I've done, and I've done alot!) and then the most posh dinner I've ever been to (got away with skipping the tie though!). Another wild night and today we took a 4 hour walk through Prague and then headed home and I'm exhausted...

BUT MAN WHAT A PARTY!!!!
(pictures coming up tomorrow)

Going To Prague!

Tomorrow morning I'm off to Prague! Yay, finally going out of the country again like the good old days :)

But this time I'm going with the entire lawfirm and it includes a posh dinner. I'll see how that goes. Will let you know when I get home which should be sunday night... SHOULD be...

New Design!

Ok, here's the new design. It's FAR from complete. Still need to do a cool logo and fill the content and write alot of stuff but I thought the old one was too old now...

Party Party!

The other day me and some friends went out for some beers and have something to eat and just enjoy a good night out. And it was really good, until around 12 when we were walking around looking for some place that was open, had beer and didn't have a queue to get in. So we ended up at Bullwinkles. I haven't been there for years but last time we were there it was a normal bar. But now it had been transformed to a meatmarket, pick up joint. After we'd checked in our coats, ordered the drinks and checking out the environment we realised just how out of place we were. Most of us where close to or over 30 which most of the other people (atleast the girls) wasn't, we had clothes that fit which the other people (most the guys showing off their pecks) didn't and none of us was looking to hook up. That was a bad way to end the night :(

V for Vendetta

Just came home from seeing "V for Vendetta". Awesome flick! Everything one could hope for when going to the movies. Great movie, great action, great dialogue, great script, great explosions, great music - and Natalie Portman. Ofc there was some less than perfect things in the movie, like Natalie trying to pull of a british accent, but overall an awesome movie! Go see it!

Women Are Amazing

You know how I say that me being so afraid of taking the initiative with women is one of the biggest reason I'm still single? Well, think we nailed another one today - I aim too high! Asked out one of the nicest and most beutiful women I've ever met today. Naturually I was shot down and I wasn't expecting anything else, and it was such a nice "no" I even went to bed with a smile on my face.

But to quote one of my favorite movies - if there is any other way to aim, I don't know how.

Pinata Burger!

Whoever came up with the idea of having nachos and salsa sauce on a hamburger should get a freaking medal! Best meal I've ever had on Burger King, which isn't saying much since most of the time I've been there I've been intoxicated. I doubt it's a coincidence they have restaurants at all the places I usually end up after a night out, but they've really nailed the spots - Medbrogarplatsen, Vasagatan, Plattan, Odenplan and Stureplan!

Technology Rocks!

Don't you just love technology? As I was sitting on the train to work the other day, bored out of my mind and out of battery for my MP3 player I picked up a newspaper and noticed something called Sudoku where the crosswords usually are. Tried to make sense of it by staring on the semi finished grid but couldn't really get a grip on it. So Blackberry (small PDA) on, WAP over to the National Encyclopedia's wireless service and look up what that hell it is. 3 minutes later I had it solved and one more new thing I learnt that day. And I'm kinda getting the impression I must've missed a craze by not knowing what tha hell it was in the first place.

But I love technology :)

Gangsta Natalie!

You know I love people who can make fun of themselves and see humor for what it is. Well, now I like Natalie Portman even more! She's always had this nice, clean princessy Long Island Harvard graduate-thing about her. Then she did "Saturday Night Live" the other day and did this rap. Didn't see that coming...

Spinning

I love it when the swedish newspaper have nothing interesting to report. Like last week, the day after it had been established that this current bird flu had hit sweden and people were all like "so?", the next day the published The List. The List of people, or rather positions/institutions, who was on some kind of priority list for vaccination should this mutate and kill people. I thought that was hilarious as hell, but from a journalistic point of view, what tha hell where they hoping to accomplish by that? Sow some seed of discension or what? Noone really cared it was here so why would anyone care if our King was very high on that list? And they had absolutely no reference to where the list came from or anything. But I found it amusing that the IT departments did get a special mention. Even if it was the governments and healthcare IT departments. Thing is, everyone there knows you can just order home your own supply of this vaccin on the net if you want to feel like the king...

WoW Again

Now I'm gonna force myself to play WoW less 'cause I've been putting so much stuff off in the past months that I have alot of stuff to catch up on. This place being one of them...
So 4 years ago we had all the expectations in the world to get some olympic medals and that didn't happen. So this year we didn't, but we did get tons of them. Think we ended up like 6th or 7th all in all. Biggest one ofc was the hockey, and now there's alot of legal issues with that because of the celebration party they had here in Stockholm. Since it was arranged by the swedish ice hockey organisation it had their logos and sponsors, not the official olympic sponsors which goes against some rule somewhere. I just love legal mumo-jumbo and there are even talks that it might disqualify our hockey team. Good luck with that :)

It's The Small Things

I was going to work on monday in my normal "monday morning, yet another week" mood that I'm in on mondays, got off the train and started the long walk to the office. That's when I just walk around looking at things all around me and laugh at the small things and enjoy the smell of newly baked bread. But this monday I saw some funny new posters on the wall going to the subway. It was advertisement for our biggest lingerie chain, and the slogan was... "We love boobs!". I thought that was so damn funny and unexpected it really made my day. And guess what's on the news today? Some people think that's offensive and have protested against the text, so they are gonna take the text away and all that's left is a zoom of a womans cleavage. Did that make it any better for them?! Some people just don't get humor... and don't get me started on the Denmark vs. Islam thing...

Migrating WoW Server... Big Deal?

This is terrible, I'm falling so behind on updating this place I feel kinda guilty about it. But there isn't that much going on. Well there is, but nothing you would ever be interested in. Like our plans to migrate to another WoW server, doesn't sound at all interesting but you'd be surprised at all the discussion about it :)

But the good news is I haven't had a headache in quite a while. Actually can't remember when was the last time I had one. The bad news is that the problem migrated to the left front of my head! Something is really messed up with my blood circulation in my head because now I feel the blood pumping through my veins behind my eyeball sometimes, extremely annoying. So maybe that MRI is still on :) But I guess I shouldn't complain, if that's all that's bothering me right now.

Party, Party!

After all the stuff we've been doing last year with the entire IT structure at the lawfirm we thought we should have a little small party. And that party was held on friday. Started at 3 with some stuff we did just to motivate why noone was answering the helpdesk, then small dinner and afterwards a musical. Yes, you heard me, I actually went to a musical! It was the swedish version of "Beauty and the Beast" and I've read some great reviews about the Broadway version as well as the swedish version. But I'm not a musical fan but I thought I'd give it a try. Which I did. And I'm STILL not a musical fan! At the pause some of us agreed this wasn't for us and since there were plenty of bars around and it was friday so we ended up there drinking free beers (sponsored by the two consulting firms, including my old employer, we've hired for some of these projects).

Fortunately for me we had a Star Trek day on saturday which is just what I needed - sitting back in a dark theater watching good Star Trek!

Belated Happy New Year

Well hello there, long time, no update! Sorry about that, been busy with levling up my third lvl 60 character in WoW.... yeah, it's screwed up how much time that game can take away from you!

But happy new year everyone! 2005 wasn't really a good year for me but I'm expecting 2006 to be much better and more fun and I hope that your 2006 is too! The standard question, atleast here in Sweden, after this holiday is "so what did you do on New Years?" at which point you usually reply "I was at this wild party and made out with this crazy chick" or something. But for the first time ever I thought it'd be interesting to see what it would be like doing absolutely nothing! And to quote one of my favorite movies "It was all I hoped it would be". It wasn't that I felt anti-social or anything, I just thought that the past 10 years I've either spent it with my family, with female company (which so far has been the most awesome way to do it!) or out partying - so for once I just skipped all of that and did nothing. You should try it :)

Finally!

And so it finally happened. I got an extension on my contract at the lawfirm which means I'm legally employed here until I screw up bad enough to get fired. At first I was employed on a quarterly basis, but then they decided to extend it to the end of the year and now I can finally rest my worried little mind about being unemployed. Not only that, I got a $300/month raise too. Merry Christmas!
(and everyone that knows me IRL are going "I told you!", yeah, you did, but I'm the worst case scenario planner that I am I need to have it on paper!)

Can't believe I did that!

The other day I did something really, really bad. As I was driving a friend home along Huddingevägen (a road FULL of traffic lights all the way!) I accidentally drove against a red light. Those lights are always green except that one time and I missed it. The spontaneous reaction right after was "SHIT, I hope noone saw me?" since it's one of those things you lose your license over. But after I drove home and through that same intersection again I realised just how badly that could've been. It was just pure luck that noone was crossing the road at that spot! If someone had followed the lights and crossed it I might've killed 'em! Even though I was doing slow 60 KPH, a car vs. human at that speed is not good. But that didn't happen. And I still have my license. But after feeling like shit over how badly it could've gone I'm gonna be way more observant in the future.

Fun At Work

Over the past three week's I've migrated about 230 mailboxes from one mailsystem to another. And some small errors pops up here and there and I end up having to go through their mailboxes to find that one mail among thousands to see if it's worth doing manually. And I've seen alot of fun stuff while doing it! Some fun legal things about company mergers that you wish you'd seen about a year ago but also some fun private stuff. I _accidentally_ saw a mail from a girls ex after they had just split up and man was he pissed! So even if it's a really boring thing to do, those small things makes it worth it :)