The most expensive sandwich I've ever bought.

I have arrived in Hurghada. It was pretty easy, while at the same time being a pain in the ass.

I booked the trip through a travel agency, so you have to follow them around and do everything as planned. You can’t even check in to the hotel yourself so you have to do it with them and it feels kind of ridiculous being treated like a 5-year old.

Anyway, I’m here and it’s pretty nice. My first thought was that of the web during the 90′s–everything is under construction. While riding the bus through town to the hotel, without exaggeration I’d say about 80% of this town is under construction. It’s a small dirty Arabian town like ones you would find in a video-game.

Right now it’s pretty much storming here, it’s really windy! But once that dies down the temperature will be around 24-25 degrees Celsius and I think it’ll be pretty awesome weather.

One thing I discovered as soon as wandering outside the hotel is that the salesmen here are extremely fucking pushy. I kid you not, they will chase after you and ask you questions and try to drag you into their store.

The Airport, just desert basically

When walking around before I really didn’t have any goal and nothing specific to do so I kind of started talking a sales-guy. We started talking about where I was from, what I was doing here. All that sorts of shit, then he pulled a trick that I heard like 10 minutes earlier, he want to give you “his card”. So you can contact him or find your way back to the store or whatever. It’s of course really just an excuse to get you into the store. Once in the store he started talking more and more about all sorts of things. After like 20 minutes of talking he wanted to get something to drink, he offered tea or coke. I took coke.

So we sat there, me drinking a can of coke (that I myself opened, I wouldn’t trust that he wouldn’t try to drug me) and him talking about all sorts of random stuff, including what he was selling. After a while he wanted me to start trying out products, home-made perfumes, clothes and the strangest thing ever; camel-milk as after-sun lotion. Just pure camel-milk. Super-weird.

Anyhow, I tried out the camel-milk and on it went. All in all I think I spent an hour with this guy, talking about me, about him and his life and his store. Sort of interesting really, but at the same time a bit annoying because it was sort a waste of time when I could be exploring more.

I bought some camel-milk from him and went back to the hotel-room.

At the room I have a very unpleasant feeling of being completely shut off from the world. I think I can manage to get internet in there, the bar I’m sitting in right now has WiFi and it seems to reach my room as well so if I buy WiFi access here I think I can use it in my room.

The backside of that dudes store

Anyhow, the isolation is what I came here for. But going cold-turkey from sending like 25-50 SMS a day and checking Hacker News and Reddit twice a day (at least) is kind of hard. Kind of very… unpleasant. It’ll be interesting to see if I get used to it. If not – I guess I’ll just have to spend all my time in this bar =P

Right now it feels like I would have a panic-attack if I completely stopped blogging and cutting of everything, so I wont be doing that right away. I’ll have to ease into the solitude if I’m to be any sort of happy.

I’ll try to upload pictures as well. I have my small camera with me and I’ll probably try to get some nice pics.

I think I’ll update this post with some pics later. Right now I just want to get this out there so you guys can know how it is here.

Having a beer at the bar with internet

I recently got a fine for parking without paying, not because I was wrong though. I had purchased a parking ticket via SMS and with that you obviously don’t get anything to put in your window. So they had just checked my window and given me a fine, without checking if I had payed via SMS. You had to write in by snail-mail to appeal the fine and this is what I wrote. I wont translate it to English because I don’t have the energy to do so. You can translate this page with Google by following this link.

I sent this too them a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t heard from them since. They haven’t sent any sort of bill to enforce the fine either so I think I’m off the hook.

Kära Lunds Kommuns Parkerings AB

Ni har grovt felaktigt satt en böteslapp på min fönsterruta och jag ber er korrigera detta grova övertramp på min person omedelbart.

Debiteringsnumret är som följer:
3210010511535

Enligt lappen fanns “ingen synlig giltig biljett” och “ej inloggad på SMSparkering”.
Fruktansvärda lögner allt ihop och jag betvivlar att ni ens kontrollerat erat SMSparkerings-system innan ni gjorde de här anklagelserna mot min person.

Jag har följande SMS för att bekräfta min inloggning i erat SMSparkerings-system.

Från mig:
57 FSO384

Från er:
Parkering för FSO384
Giltig till: 09-12-03 19:12
Lund: Klosterhagen
Pris: 15.0kr.
Serienr: PAB673RJUQ

Från er:
Parkeringen för regnummer FSO384 går ut om 10 minuter. För att förlänga, skicka Ja till 72697.

Från mig:
Ja

Från er:
Parkering för FSO384
Giltig till: 09-12-03 20:12
Lund: Klosterhagen
Pris: 2.5kr.
Serienr:PAWD85RVLL

Från er:
Parkeringen för regnummer FSO384 går ut om 10 minuter. För att förlänga, skicka Ja till 72697.

Från mig:
Ja

Från er:
Parkering för FSO384
Giltig till: 09-12-03 21:12
Lund: Klosterhagen
Pris: 2.5kr.
Serienr: PAKCBQIVTR

Från er:
Parkeringen för regnummer FSO384 går ut om 10 minuter. För att förlänga, skicka Ja till 72697.

Att ni kräver invändningar mot “fakturan” skriftligen inom 3 vardagar visar hur episkt lite respekt mot mänskligheten ni har. Jag har dock uppfyllt detta krav då “fakturan” gavs till min bil torsdagen den 3e december, och denna invändning görs på Måndagen den 7e december, 3 vardagar senare (detta på grund av att jag har annat att göra och posten inte går på helger).

Jag hoppas innerligt att ni inser hur fruktansvärt handikappat hela ert system är, jag kommer tyvärr att fortsätta parkera på era parkeringsplatser eftersom ni har köpt upp i princip hela Lund. Eftersom ni dessutom sätter böteslappar, ursäkta, “fakturerar” folk som ni känner för det lär jag få fler “fakturor” ifrån er inom en snar framtid.

Jag ber er dock vänligast att makulera denna “faktura” då den som tidigare påpekat är grovt felaktig och ni kan observera beviset för detta påstående på föregående sida.

Om ni inte önskar fler brev av denna typ, som jag är övertygad slösar er tid lika mycket som den slösar min, hoppas jag också att ni inför någon form av elektroniskt system för att göra invändningar mot era fakturor.

Fixa ert skit.

Med vänliga hälsningar

Fredrik Olsen

This is a story of two very bad purchases. The whole thing started with my old Bose headphones breaking, one day the right speaker just started going in and out and well, they just broke. I had bought them in Japan 2 1/2 years earlier so the warranty was long gone, this of course meant I had to pay the €40 shipping-cost just to get an estimate on the cost for fixing them. In the end the price would most likely have ended up being the same or more than a completely new pair. So I set out to find a new pair of headphones that could fulfill my requirements of having excellent production quality, a hard-kicking bass and completely isolating both from the outside in and the inside out. No sound-leakage was one of the biggest requirements as I would use these headphones in the school library where there can be no noise or sound outwards at all.

Sennheiser HD 238  ~ €70

After browsing through different price-categories and looking at designs, stores, reviews and all that I found one pair that seemed OK. They had gotten some good reviews, they looked OK and seemed somehow to compare to the ones I got. I knew they wouldn’t be as good but they only cost like €70 so I was happy, considering my last headphones had cost €200.

As it turned out when I got them, they literally sounded just as much outward as inward. If I had cared to study product descriptions from several different sites I would have found out from one of them that they were “open” design, and that this means they don’t isolate at all. So I fucked up. I’ve returned them and I think that will work out and I’ll get my money back.

So what next?
Well, I decided to up the price-class again to avoid having a pair of shitty headphones in my hands again. I went to Hi-Fi Klubben, a well known Swedish audio-store. They have an awesome slogan “Bad sound kills good music”, how can I go wrong with them I thought?

Denon AH-NC732 ~ €240

I found a pair of Denon headphones with active noise reduction, which would be an extra treat.

I got the headphones home, took them to school and spent a couple of hours with them. With the active noise reduction on it really killed out all other sound. It made a car-ride completely silent. If you listen to a lot of music on the bus or are a frequent traveler by plane, I could actually recommend these headphones. The noise reduction did however make the quality and power suffer. The headphones have no kick at all, the sound is very flat and I really can’t get into the music if I can’t feel the bass.

There was however a bigger problem! I bought them for about €240. I didn’t care to check the price that much at other places because Hi-Fi Klubben were the only Swedish retailer selling them. I’ve always had a good impression of Hi-Fi Klubben too, so I thought – “Surely, they must have reasonable prices”.


Turns out I was wrong, they charged me €240 for them when they cost €120 if I had ordered them in from Germany. What happened is illustrated in the image below.

Hi-Fi Klubben fucked me so hard... in the ass...

What really put the icing on the cake (interpret that as you wish) they didn’t let me return them. Swedish laws require stores to give customers 14 days to return a product and get their money back if they aren’t satisfied. They had circumvented this however by declaring headphones as a “hygienic product” like underwear or a toothbrush, which you obviously can’t return. I can understand this for in-ear headphones, you can’t really return that, but for regular headphones? That sucks.

Bose On-Ear ~€210 – the ones I ended up with

Now while it is hard to admit I got fucked, it is even harder to admit that it is my own fault. I should have checked the pricing and I should have tried to bring in my old headphones and see if I could get access to a quiet room to test them properly and compare. But the thing that really got me was obviously that I overpaid as hell. Everything isn’t lost however. The store manager gave me “a deal”, he bought them back with a 30% reduction in price, so I got almost all my money back, but I still lost €70. I don’t think I could have sold the things used for €50 above retail-price, plus I would have had to put in the hours it takes to sell stuff.

I licked my wounds, took the money I got back and walked over to the Bose store, bringing out my puppy eyes and asking them to take me back. I paid €210 to get back into the Bose club and I’m happy I’m back. Plus, they have a way better slogan then Hi-Fi Klubben anyway “Better sound through research”. I like sound, I like research, so we’re a perfect fit.

Now I'm back with my sweetheart

Bose has always treated me well. When my cord was broken I stopped by the store in London and they unpacked a new pair of headphones to take the cord and give it to me free of charge. When I bought the new Bose headphones today the store was actually closed, I knocked on the window and some guy came out and opened, started up the register for me and all that. I asked what cord was included (because it was the new model with the iPhone microphone and all that) and he opened the package for me without knowing that I was buying them just to check. Bose has service. Hi-Fi Klubben fucks you in the ass.

Abstract

With this blog post I intend to argue for an hypothesis about the benefits of extended solitude. I will try to quantify these benefits and propose an experiment to test whether my argued hypothesis is true.

Definition

To be able to efficiently talk about solitude we must first define the word and its meaning. Solitude is obviously about being alone – but more is required than simply being alone in my definition of the word. One must be isolated from regular communication and daily routine. It is permissible to talk and communicate with ones close-standing friends and relatives, but not in a frequent manner and most of all, not at will. Communication with people you know can not be whenever you want, it has to be at some occasion where downtime is experienced. The reason behind this is that you should not be able to simply communicate your thoughts to someone else for a discussion about the subject, your thoughts must stay with yourself and you must you yourself go through the entire chain of thoughts and sort things out for yourself. So in summary; no frequent communication, no regular daily routine and physically separate from anyone you would know.

Hypothesis

I contend that putting yourself in a situation of extended solitude will have a much beneficial effect on your capability to have deep thoughts, relax to a greater extent and do things you would otherwise not deem yourself to have time to do.

Deep thought In every day life, I seem to dismiss a lot of thoughts because they are simply to large to think about. In a recent article from Pete Michaud, it is proposed that thinking large – and thereby deep, complex or otherwise more important and evolving – thoughts is impossible because of the restriction imposed by short-term memory. He suggests that to maintain a train of thought large enough to be important one must write it down. While I fully agree with his statement that large thoughts must be written down for us to have the capacity to process them, I do not agree that only large thoughts are important, this is however besides the point.

I suggest that putting oneself in complete solitude and with no clearly defined task ahead of you, one will have the possibility to explore these deep and large thoughts in a more thorough manner. One should of course bring a notepad to such a period of extended solitude because of the previously mentioned reasons.

The illusion of time While a daily routine is maintained and a person is in a familiar setting, I believe that we observe time differently than if we are in an unfamiliar setting doing things we would not normally do. I don’t think this argument would stand out as odd to anyone, it seems to be a well agreed upon statement. I suggest that the different view on time can in many cases be a much negative effect of daily life. We will think that we have much less time than we in fact do, we will easily make excuses to not to do something because we knows the schedule ahead very well and we are stuck in a mindset where we only see the next thing on the schedule as important. In a familiar setting, we might also easily fall into patterns of laziness – again a quite obvious statement.

In order to break all these “bad habits” – I as most others believe that we must go to an unfamiliar location and do things we would not normally do. While this change of setting and routine will counter many of the negative effects stated above, I believe that to gain true efficiency, as opposed to the statement that “you do not have time”, you must be in a state of previously defined solitude as well as have a loose unscheduled structure on your tasks. The words efficiency and unscheduled structure do not often coincide in the same sentence, for obvious reasons. But I am talking about efficiency within a very narrow set of tasks.

Relax I believe that relaxation comes from being able to do whatever you want. If you are in the act of performing a certain task like reading a book and get that kind of thought you want to explore, relaxation comes from being able to put down the book, pick up the notepad and explore that thought. This is opposed to the way I live my daily life where reading that book is most likely mandatory and I need to get it finished as soon as possible. I maintain that being in a state of solitude will make your brain work differently. Knowing that you are “allowed” to put the book down and explore a thought without any negative effects will make you more likely to have that thought. Another benefit of solitude would in this case be that it is the ultimate form of doing whatever you want. If you are not put in a state of solitude you might have to think about the effects of your behavior on others. This is also why there must be no regular communication in your solitude because it would impose a schedule on your time, making your brain less free to drift and more restrained in thinking about when and where it is.

The experiment

To test the hypothesis that solitude will make you more efficient, have deeper (and productive, not simply pointlessly introspective) thoughts and more relaxed there is nothing to do but try it out. To this end I have constructed an ultimate scenario in which to test this hypothesis, fulfilling all my conditions of solitude as well as facilities to heighten your relaxation as well as your ability be completely unconstrained in every way.

Figure 1: Hurghada

I propose that to have the perfect circumstances to test my hypothesis one should travel to Hurghada, as illustrated in Figure 1. I have specifically chosen the Shedwan Golden Beach hotel as the destination for this test. It lives up to the conditions of the definition of solitude while it has all the facilities to enhance your ability to relax. Facilities such as a heated pool, jacuzzi, several bars, a fitness center and a buffet restaurant. If one can not relax, focus on thinking and get loosely planned things like reading done here, I suggest it can not be done anywhere.

Possible flaws

As any hypothesis, I have simply constructed a model to the best of my experience. Naturally this model is an approximation of reality and as such it might approximate some aspects better than others. The possible flaws I see with this is the instinctively contradictive statement that one can be “absent-minded” and allow oneself to set things aside to explore a thought and still do your main task more efficiently. I contend that this effect can be attained by the fact that all your time is the time you spend doing this task, as opposed to the regular 8-12 hour workday where one will usually waste the rest of the time of the day. There needs to be some balance of thinking and reading if one is to get much reading done, but I suggest this balance is quite easily attainable. There is also a possible and probably great risk of the solitude leading to useless introspection, instead of productive introspection. Being alone for extended periods of time has a tendency with human beings to lead them into a false sense of “being right”. If exposed too much to your own world view without input from others, one can convince oneself that anything is true, no matter how crazy it really is. This is a bug in the function of the brain and I think it can easily be avoided by keeping the extended period of solitude to less than a week or two.

Do I intend to execute this experiment?

Yes, yes I do.

After the final exams for this period I will be going to Hurghada (as illustrated in Figure 1) and spend one week in the jacuzzi. With a book.

What I hope to attain My goal of this trip is threefold. Test the above hypothesis. Read the books listed below. Fill a couple of pages of my Moleskine with some thoughts I have been walking around with the last couple of months and hopefully get some coding done on a project that I will be doing in April next year (which I suppose is to be publicly announced pretty soon).

Appendix A – Books to read

I’ve already read about half of the first and third books, so the page-count totals at around 1500. It’s an absurdly high goal, but what the hey. If you’ve read this long; you’re probably not that adverse to reading anyway so you probably thinks it’s OK! ;P

Update: Ericsson Labs has now posted on their blog about the challenge.

I’m back from DreamHack and things went down well. The last task was a bit too hard (well, impossible really – until we released clues) but otherwise we got a very good response.

The best thing about the event was however that me and Emanuel participated in the Ericsson Labs developer challenge. So this is a story of how I won a PS3 by proof of concept alone.

The goal of the competition is to develop the most creative, useful or fun mobile or web application that uses at least one of the APIs available at Ericsson Labs.

Your application must be a runnable example and you must be able to show that your idea works. However a few flaws here and there won’t hurt.

This was the competition. Use some of Ericssons tools that help developer do fun things to do something fun.

The whole process was extremely fun actually! It started out by me having an idea about doing some classical positioning-game, like tag but with GPS locations and covering a city or something like that. The idea has been tried and proved many times so I thought it would be quite trivial to implement a copy of that idea. But the idea had a few flaws, when talking it over with Emanuel we bounced the idea back and forth a few times and came up with the best concept we could.

On the day after, we started coding after the first half of our own competition was done, at like 20:00 or so. We stopped coding again at 05:00 with some sort of basic working model of the application. It was pretty intense and we ran into more technical issues like Java not being able to handle SQLite3 rather than coding issues. But at 05:00 we thought we had something good and went to bed, only to get up again at around 10:00 to start working out the finer details and some of the absolute worst bugs (essentially crippling the entire app =P).

After 5 hours or so of more coding on the morning, we demoed the app, got some basic approval and sent in the contribution. We really had no idea If we were going to win or not as the judges gave absolutely no impression of what they thought until the competition was over.

In the end though, we stood up on the stage as first prize winners taking home about 9000 SEK of awesome stuff.

We split it so Emanuel took the phone and I took the PS3 + Rockband, worth around the same amount.

It was extremely fun going from idea to just providing a proof of concept and get rewarded for that, instead of having to put in the additional 80% of work that takes a product from proof of concept to finished.

So what was our idea I hear you asking? It was actually pretty fun. The front-page of our temporary website we put up explains it pretty well.

banzai is all about the fun of the chase. It was originally designed as an urban tag-game played out in real life. Because of the accuracy of the Ericsson Labs Web Location API we switched our market to people with access to large areas to play around in while using some kind of motor vehicle, the urban city-based game might be revised when the Web Location uses GPS to a larger extent.

The game is about finding “the chosen one”. The game is initiated at a given time and place, you choose which games you want to participate in yourself. Once the game is started you will get the location of everyone else. Completely at random, one player will be informed that he is the chosen one. It is then the goal of the chosen one to stay away from everyone else.

Points

Points will be given at three times.

When the chosen one is caught, the round is over. At this point, everyone needs to get 500 meters away from each other as fast as possible. The sooner you are 500 meters from everyone else, the more points you get. When everyone is clear a new round will begin! The number of rounds is defined in the particular game you choose to join.

The chosen one will get points as long as he is not caught, the chosen one is deemed caught when everyone else is within 200 meters of him.

The other players will get points when spending time close to the chosen one, the amount of points they get will depend on how close they are to the chosen one. The proximity to the chosen one is displayed for each player at all times with a bar diplaying 0 – 100% where 100% is within catching distance.

So that was it. A screenshot might be in order.

As you can see, a list of players show up, some controls for the map to zoom and stuff like that (all of the map stuff here was one of the Ericsson API’s we used) and your score as well as the distance to the chosen one.

All the locations here for the players drawn on the map were polled every 30 seconds by Emanuels backend server, while I wrote the user interface, map stuff and calculating distances and scoring.

All in all it actually works surprisingly well, and I’m quite proud of having done it in 15 or so hours. The idea is pretty solid as well but obviously needs GPS and not triangulation like the Ericsson API was using.

What is the result of all this? We might get some small recognition withing Ericsson Labs, we own full rights to the idea and code that we’ve done if we want to continue building on it. But the only result I’m really seeing right now, is this.

From the money I will make by selling the PS3 I bought an xbox 360 Elite so I can play Modern Warfare 2 with Emma (and I like the xbox controls more than the PS3 ones). I also bought a new 24″ widescreen display that I’ve hooked up to both my computer and the xbox. So when I’m not playing I have an additional 24″ screen and when I want to play, I just turn on the xbox and switch the screen over with the press of a button.

Pretty awesome.