Last week one of my co-workers here got a bit sick, some fever over the night and general feeling-bad for a day or two. (He had been to Portugal before coming here.)

On Sunday I started feeling a bit of a soar throat without thinking much of it, the night to Monday I got a major fever, all of Monday I had a major fever, all of Tuesday I had major headaches and wednesday was dedicated to an incredibly painful throat.

On wednesday I looked down my throat and actually saw all the symptoms for strep-throat / tonsillitis (those are the best translations I could find to Halsfluss).

So on Wednesday morning I actually went to a “hospital” here, an Urgent Care Center to be more accurate. Got to see a doctor, they took a strep-test to see if I had any bacteria in my throat, all in all it was about 1h 55min of waiting and 5 minutes of talking to Doctor/Nurse. It cost me $150 and I found out there was no bacteria.

Today (Thursday) I’m pretty much back on my feet again, I went in to the office and even though I have a bit of a soar throat and a cough it feels good to not be cooped up in the hotel room.

So the leading theory now is that this virus was brought by my co-worker from Portugal to the US, where it somehow mutated (possibly with the help of American drug-resistant super-bugs or something) and is now the ultimate weapon to take down Sweden.

I have pretty much never been this sick in 10 years, and even though each phase (fever, headache, throat) passed relatively quickly, the phases were rather extreme.

What’s worse is that the disease has infected all my hardware as well, the memory on my video card has somehow fried so when it tries to use the fried piece of memory the computer totally crashes. Luckily I have two video cards (an integrated one as well) so I can tell the computer to only use the integrated one and it doesn’t crash.

When I took out my headphones today to have a Skype call, the right cup had started glitching and either plays some buzzing noise or nothing at all, or if I hold my head just right I have sound in it.

So yeah, the American-Portugese Super-Virus took out 3 days of my life, my video card and my headphones. Congratulations.

Today me and Jared went into Portland proper to check out downtown. We had gotten some tips (specifically check out Voodoo doughnuts, which was on the Portland episode of No Reservations as well) and so we did.

The place was insanely busy and we had like a 15-20 minute wait outside.

After getting a hold of our Doughnuts of choice we got a box and went outside to eat. They were as you would say in Swedish “kränkande”.

Crazy crazy stuff. Like a pound of refined sugar.

Then walking around and checking out Pioneer Square (a mall) and generally looking around in downtown.

Really nice little city. Not very big though, it’s possible to walk across the entire downtown area in like 10-15 minutes. One other really cool thing about the place is the food-carts. Sprinkled all over downtown are these food trucks with various kinds of nationalities and flavours and they all generally seem very authentic. There was this Japanese one where I got an Okonomiyaki which was actually really good!

I’ve been in Portland for a week now so I thought I’d just post a quick update.

Things are moving along nicely with work and I have a really nice hotel room at a hotel with a pool, so that’s nice!

Here are some pictures.

I went to Egypt (Hurghada) over the New Year. I went with Emma and her sister, and it was very awesome. When planning the trip, I had for some reason thought I had gone to Sharm El Sheik last time I went to Egypt but of course this was the same place.

Nevertheless, we went to get sun and we got sun! I also got to read two books that i had wanted to read.

Being gone for a week and them coming back has allowed me to gain a bit of perspective on the habits I had before I left and coming back I’m not sure I’m interested in keeping them.

Those habits include watching gaming streams (and to some extent gaming, playing League of Legends maybe a bit too much), browsing reddit and even to some extent visiting Hacker News too much. It’s not that these habits would intrude on productivity in general, it was all in reasonable amounts, but it’s the kind of habits that mostly waste time and don’t lead to any improvement of life in the long-term. To some extent even habits like that are OK and even good to have, but then you should really enjoy them, which to be honest, I didn’t do.

HN is an especially controversial habit for me, I have learned a lot from that site over the years, and I even have my current job thanks to an HN meetup. But going through the site and looking at it from the new perspective of trying to break habits; there is a lot of crap and circlejerking there. I think about 10% of content is actually good content that I want to read. But how often do you have to check the site to get that 10%? Emanuel suggested subscribing to a top-10 of HN twitter feed which might actually work to some extent. The fun stuff about Haskell showing up or job-posts rarely show up in the top 10 though, but maybe I can get 8% of the content I want, and that would probably be good enough.

Going forward in the new year, I wish to continue feeling a disinterest in these less productive habits and take up more productive habits like exercising more, reading more books (something I really want to do) and doing more things like play card-games with friends and working more. The problem is finding enough new mind-captivating habits to fill the time of the old habits. Some of those habits, like gaming or watching gaming streams, arose because better habits were too straining to do when I was really tired. I could potentially read when I’m really tired, but that would make more more tired. Gaming made me less tired (or at least so I believe). It’s tricky, we’ll see how it works out.

This is what I look like in a beard. It’s gone now because I couldn’t have a beard when I was going to Egypt to sun-bathe.

I think it looks pretty good, but it really isn’t thick enough to be a “proper” beard. There’s a lot of patchiness as well. I think to some degree, it could work. But in order to cover up the patchiness it needs to be a certain length, and that length might be too long to really look “clean”. I think it might make a come-back at some point in the future, but not right away.

Today we got our apartment! It’s been a long wait but now it’s finally ours!

(Excuse the blurry picture )

Unfortunately we can’t move in just yet. We’re going to sand some floors, paint some walls and do some minor fixes like that to freshen up everything to tip-top shape before we move everything in. Pretty much all of the furniture that we’ve ordered (couches and desks) have like 4 weeks delivery time left as well, though we’re not going to wait for that before moving in.

One thing that had arrived was the modem for the new cable broadband, and it is fast!

134 Mbit down and 11 Mbit up is damn good! It’s not fiber, but it’s a damn lot better than ADSL.

It’s going to be awesome very soon!

One thing I’m doing in preparation of moving is starting to build my toolbox.

I say every home needs a well-equipped decent toolbox. I have had immense joy in my childhood from having a proper workshop with everything from drills to welders.

Having witnessed multiple people in need of borrowing tools to get stuff done in the home (including Emma), I don’t want to be in that situation. And as being a member of the male species of course I enjoy shopping for tools at some level as well.

This is the start of my toolbox. A good cordless drill, an electric screwdriver (they are indeed different things) and a water level thing.

Tools

A blog post! Amazing. Going to try to write a little more relaxed.

I kind of felt like writing for a little bit.

A lot of stuff has happened lately and while it feels like time is going really slowly (because I’m waiting to move), I guess time is actually moving quite fast. I’ve been working on my thesis project for about 2 months now. Things are going well with work in general and the thesis project is coming along nicely as well. I’m really pleased with my current working situation, there are things that could improve it; co-workers perhaps, but in general I’m happy. Jealousy of Emanuel crops up every now and then, I wish I could travel a bit more in my current position.

Anyhow, in two weeks we get the keys to our new apartment. I’m really anxious to move in and and get rid of this feeling of not being home. However, we’ll be doing some work on the apartment in the first two weeks so we won’t move in until that is done, which should be around mid September.

There’s a lot of preparation going on as well. On thursday we bought two couches for the living room. Picture below, although it’s not that kind of fabric at all, and they’re grey.

“Oxford” Couch

Emma is handling most of the interior decorating in general. I only take charge of the things I really care about, which is the office and some small particulars, like coffee machines.

I’ve gotten these two:

Coffee

The left one is a Nespresso and the right one is a classic percolator. Left one for good but expensive coffee, right one for regular cheap coffee.

It’s going to be soo nice to move in. What I’m looking forward to the most, in order:

1. Dishwasher
2. Real office desk with screen and good computer setup
3. Accessible way to store clothes
4. Good internet connection (we’ll have 200/10, which will probably end up being around 150/7, but is still good)
5. Proximity to decent restaurants

I’m currently attending a “Summer School” 2-week course on Functional Programming in France. It’s essentially 2 weeks of Haskell lectures coupled with exercises from some of the best Haskell programmers (one could even say inventors of the language) in the world.

The lectures haven’t started yet (first one is in about one hour) and so I spent the morning walking around the location and taking some pictures. We’re staying at the absolutely lovely Chateu de Cadarache about 70 kilometers outside of Marseille. It’s full accommodation with three awesome meals per day included (and of course wine is included at dinner ; ).

I was expecting a sort of dormitory style room where it was a small bed and shared bathroom shower, but I have a full hotel-room with my won bathroom and shower and the room even has TV. There are three houses with rooms for accommodation, but unfortunately the building I’m staying in is the only one without Wi-Fi. So I have to settle for using the internet in the common-area (like lecture hall and dining area).

Without further delay, here are some pictures of the place. You can check out more pictures on flickr. There are more short explanations of pictures on Flickr as well.

This saturday me and Emma were out hiking again. This time at a nice place called Söderåsen. It was actually one of the best trips we’ve done. We walked two separate trails on both sides (and down inside) a pretty big valley.

The first picture here below is the best one. The others are awesome too, Emma took all of them.

Quite some time ago one of my best friends Emanuel started talking about going hiking, and how he’d like to do some fun hike somewhere at some point. I thought it was very intriguing as well but didn’t give much more thought to it.

Then for some reason a while back, 2 or 3 months or so, I started gaining an interest again. In my world hiking was something you went to the alps or the himalayas or japanese mountain-ranges to do. It’s not something you did “in your own backyard”.

Then I started researching and reading some books and looking up some gear and stuff like that, and I found it extremely interesting. I’m a gear-geek, any gear-heavy technical hobby is something I’m interested in. So the moment I found out theres a whole range of extremely expensive stuff to buy for hiking, I was hooked.

One aspect that I initially was drawn to as well was the more extreme side of hiking, doing it in tough conditions like extreme cold or mountains and cliffs to make it physically hard. Though I’ve mellowed a bit and realized it’s actually a lot of fun to do a simple one-day hike as well! Though I’m still aiming for doing the multiple-day tent-only, bring all your food-hike. I’m just saving up some money for gear like backpack, tent and sleeping bag, which are quite expensive things if you want good quality.

But I have acquired some gear so far. I immediately realized the most important thing was good hiking shoes. I went with some really sturdy boots because my goal is as I said, do to like a week with a weeks worth of food on my back, which is going to be very heavy.

Hiking boots

The second thing I wanted was a way to cook food while out. Even doing a one-day trip you need food on the way, hiking 6 hours without food is just going to be uncomfortable if you’re hungry half the way. Warm food especially increases energy and motivates you a lot more than cold food (at least in cold environments). So I invested in a cool little gas-stove (after much research into different fuels for stoves) and some pots and such. Which wasn’t that expensive actually.

New cooking gear

Cooking gear packed

Stove in action

After going on a few trips I realized two things, my backpack wasn’t optimal for hiking since it didn’t have support straps to go over chest and hips. It made the backpack slide off a little all the time and made it slightly annoying to walk. So I bought a cheap one-day trip backpack that I can use for one or possibly two-day trips. When I decide on a long trip I’m gonna buy a 70L backpack that I’ve already picked out. Below is the backpack compared to my laptop back and squash-racket bag.

New backpack

And now I’m all set for all kinds of one- and two-day trips! Emma and I have already been out on 4 trips and I’m looking forward to more. The best one so far has been a place called Kullaberg in northern Skåne. I’m going to finish off this post by showing a few pictures from there. I’m logging all my one-day trips over at EveryTrail so click that link if you want to see more pictures and stuff like that!

Kullaberg