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

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

However, I don’t want to take the time to code and for this kind of huge blog, there are some things that make it unsuitable. It takes a long time to render all the pages so publishing is a time-consuming process. It’s also a pain in the ass to handle loads of images when they’re all supposed to have links and titles and all that.

If I was building a technical blog or small blog, I would actually choose Jekyll in combination with something like GitHub Pages to host it. But for this blog, it was too much of a deterrent for me to actually write something.

Multiple times I’ve found myself wanting to write something, but not doing so because of the hassle of publishing through Jekyll. So I’m back to WordPress with a clean install and no plugins that could stir up problems.

I now have an office here: http://temenos.se, located just east of Lund.

It’s a single room at about 8 or so square meters and feels like a really productive space.

I have studied at school for 3 years, and it’s actually worked well. But that’s mostly because I’ve been studying by reading books and doing calculations on paper, not really using a computer. Using a computer in a library can work, but it’s usually not that awesome.

At the office I have my big 27″ Cinema display so doing computer work is excellent. There’s also enough space to do paper calculation should I need to, but with the courses I’m taking now there’s not much of that going on.

Basically it’s just a very productive space where I can get a lot of studying done, but on the occasion that I have time and energy over, it’s also an awesome space to get work done.

Enough talk, let’s do some pictures. This is what the space looked like when I arrived.

And this is what I turned it into.

What’s left to do is to fill this space in the picture below. It’s begging for a plant or something like that, but I need a watering-system as well so I don’t have to manually water it myself. Another thing I want is to put some sort of comfy arm chair/recliner/reading-type chair where I can sit and relax in between long sessions of work, to be able to change positions now and then.

Another awesome thing is the internet, I get a private 100mbit line from the best ISP there is (Bahnhof).

There’s something lacking in all of their explanations of why they’re blacked out though. I think this one by Khan Academy is the best one yet. Well worth the 10 minutes, and you’ll fully understand the whole problem in 10 minutes.

I had been looking around for places to rent by the day/week before I came here and a pretty good site I’ve come across before in my researches of co-working space is Loosecubes. They’re a site where anyone can post that they have free office space available. There’s quite a lot of good places there actually (even in Tokyo) but there was one place in particular whose own website I had come across before. That one was Moboff (short for Mobile office).

Moboff has several locations, but their Shinjuku location looked really awesome.

We tried to reserve an office through the website but since it was such short notice (I basically wanted access from yesterday) I didn’t want to wait several days for a reply. So I just showed up at their front desk and asked if they had some available seats.

They normally only rent out per month with a required membership fee, but after the receptionist called up the owner and a little bit of hassle (because there was no system in place for what I wanted) they were kind enough to give me a deal and let me in on a per-day fee.

The space is awesome, there’s everything you’d expect (coffee machines, internet, good chairs) and the room and layout is great, it was easy to get productive there.

The only downside was that the place was practically deserted. Now I’ve only been there one day and it might be a fluke, but it seemed like they could really use some more business. Perhaps opening up to per-day or per-week customers is a good idea.

Normally if you pay per month for the shared-office you don’t get assigned a desk, you just come in the morning and hope there’s a desk free and take that one. This doesn’t bother me at the moment but if I was looking to be there long-term I would want a fixed desk so I could put a screen there, but for that you need to rent a private office.

Personally I don’t see the reasoning behind this, they shouldn’t be charging full price for a “maybe there’s a desk for you, maybe not” kind of thing. And if they only have enough members to fill the desks (so there’s always at least one free) then why not assign permanent desks? Just rent out all the desks and people can leave their stuff there if they want. I don’t want a private office because that defeats the whole purpose of a co-working space, I want to meet other people.

It was permitted to drink at your desk, but not eat, I suppose because food can cause quite a lot of smell which might bother other people. With the whole of Tokyo available right outside the door I doubt I’d bring food very often anyway though.

Overall my first impression is really good. If there had been reserved desks it would be a place I would definitely want to use long-term. But as it is right now, it’s a perfect place if you just want a productive space for a day or a couple of weeks.

The location is great, about 10 minutes from where I’m staying. It’s on the 20th floor so there’s a great view and it’s really close to Shinjuku station if you want to do something after work.

Before I went to the US this summer I found an awesome Samsonite bag that I bought and am absolutely loving. It’s just perfect and the quality is outstanding. I really believe I will have this bag (unless it somehow gets lost) for pretty much the rest of my life.

But I do feel that there’s been something missing to the equation. I’ve have had the thought to have a separate bag for my laptop, but it never really clicked with me until I saw that Emanuel had it.

To me it makes perfect sense, so I went out and bought this Victorinox bag with life-time warranty.

The reasoning goes like this: I can have all the things I want on the plane with me in that bag. And then in my rolling bag I can have everything else that I won’t touch for the duration of the flight. I can simply throw that up above (without even having to be particularly careful) in the stowage area and then put the laptop bag under the chair in front of me, where I’ll have easy access to all the important things.

Not only is that very convenient, it increases my total luggage capacity by quite a lot and it also leaves me free to check in my rolling bag if need be. Like if I find some sort of fluid that I simply must have with me home, it can theoretically be done without purchasing (or bringing from home) another bag.

Another added benefit of having a separate computer bag is that when I arrive at my destination and have business to do, I can bring my computer in a nice-looking bag instead of walking around like an idiot with my computer in my hand.

I’m very happy with the Victorinox bag that I found because it fits perfectly on top of my Samsonite and the whole back can be put over the handle of the bag so it sits very stable on top.

I can also fit an amazing amount of stuff in it, not that I plan on fitting that much but a perfect example is the stuff below. A bag filled with Apple’y goodness.

That’s my 15″ laptop, big fat book, headphone case and iPad, all the in main “pocket”. I also have a notepad and pen in the outer pocket.

I normally don’t travel with books that big, it’s either something small or I will have the book on Kindle/iPad for easier handling, so replace that book with a Kindle and the storage space is quite abundant.

With this I think I can be very efficient in security control, have maximum storage capacity and maximum convenience.

On top of everything, both my Samsonite and this new Victorinox bag look really awesome.

Overall, things are going swimmingly over here! I love it as usual and I managed to spend some awesome time with Emanuel (he loved Tokyo too). I’ve done some shopping and been keeping busy as usual!

I’ll probably write up more details later. For now, here’s some pictures!

I went and bought a really nice kitchen knife that’s the kind that I’ve been wanting. It looks very traditionally Japanese and the shop I bought it in seemed really legit so I hope it’s good quality.

He stamped my name on to the knife, which was pretty neat.

I went to Meiji Shrine with Emanuel during the day of new years eve and we found a bunch of priests walking around.

This is the temple at night, after standing in line for about an hour and thirty minutes to get to the front.

We went into an arcade and Emanuel managed to win a bear.

Required photograph from high spot.

Me and Emma in one of our favorite places.

And a group picture of me, Emma, Emanuel and Sherry.

And this is just a picture of the 30th floor in an office building I’ve been having meetings in.

This was about 3-4 weeks ago or so.

I reacted quite promptly (within 24 hours) and moved my sites architecture over to Jekyll, a tool to generate static HTML. So now there’s actually no running code on the server, which makes the site itself literally impenetrable from a security standpoint.

This is all well and good, but it also means there are some bugs on this site until I get time to fix it all. Like the search on the right is not working at the moment.

I just fixed the general deployment structure so I can start writing in a decent manner again and deploy without too much hassle. There’s still some plugins I need to write however to handle adding new files and images and stuff like that. I don’t want to have to resize images manually so I’ll write small script that takes images and moves them into the correct folders and resizes them in to three sizes and stuff like that.

For the time being it works decently doing it manually so that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m writing this because I will be going to Japan in two days and I’ve just spent some time fine-tuning this stuff so that I can blog in Japan without too much trouble!

First, let’s take a look at what apartments we’ve stayed in so far;

Apartment 2007 & 2009, ~13 sqm

I remember the initial shock walking into this “apartment”. The actual living space is probably smaller than most people’s bathrooms. But it didn’t bother us. And apparently we liked it so much (lol) that we returned to exact same place 2 years later. Since we were only there as tourists, staying just a month, we didn’t really care that much about the living standards. After all, you don’t spend that much time inside. There were some good subway lines within close distance, that’s all we needed.

Apartment 2010-2011, ~24 sqm

Now when we came back in 2010 we wouldn’t just be tourists, we would actually live there, for a year. So we amped it up and splurged on a 24 sqm apartment. That’s 11 more than last time! And a lot more central. And more expensive. I liked it, it was practical, small and cute.

If you’ve never been to Japan, these places may seem insanely small. Well, they are. But you get used to it. Next time we return and stay for a longer period I want a bigger place though. And I want a kick-ass view overlooking Tokyo. So, as I mentioned in the beginning of the post, we browsed for some apartments just for fun. But still reasonable ones. All apartments have a monthly rent of 15 000 SEK / € 1 600 / ¥ 200 000, are between 50 – 70 sqm and are in central Tokyo. (Our previous apartment was 10 000 SEK /  € 1 100 / ¥118 000  per month, but it was intended for short-term stays)

Apartment #1, Concrete wall to the left

Now this is more classy, huh? What I’ve noticed is that they very often leave the concrete walls exposed. I love that raw feeling.

Apartment #2, Concrete bathroom

Apartment #3, More concrete walls

This is what a typical cool-looking “house” in Tokyo looks like to me, you see them everywhere. I think about 4 families live in this complex. Or maybe the double. If I can’t live in a skyscraper, I could definitely settle for this.

This is one crazy house! It’s 45 sqm and a few stories high. A bit too “open planned” for me, I wouldn’t want to use the bathroom. Imagine the reaction when you have guests over who want to use the toilet.

Excuse the horrible montages, it wasn’t me. These last three images show my current dream apartment. 2 bedrooms, 54 sqm, 15 000 SEK / € 1 600 / ¥ 200 000 per month and it has the view! Just look at that big window!

Well, some day