I have been wanting a real office for years. Short of renting an apartment (impossible here in Lund) I haven’t found anything that is doable, until now.

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).

Since there won’t be a lot of meetings and things this week I decided I wanted an office for the week to get some computer time in.

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.

A hundred

The last few weeks have seemed uneventful, even if that might not particularly be the case. I have gotten into a bit of a routine making time pass very quickly.

I remeber back when we only were here on vacation. A month was such a long time, managed to see so much and do so extremely much. Now a month flies by and I barely know what I’ve done or what I have to show for it. Upon restrospection there is a lot happening, or so at least my growing pile of school related papers would say.

I’m doing good in school. Though I can’t honestly say I always get 100% on all the tests I do keep a high standard. Not that it’s particularly hard right now though. There are a few disurbances in class that have decreased my motivation some. There are three big things.

1. There is a person in class who I swear to god does not shower or wash their clothes. The person smells of so much sweat that our entire classroom smells like a gym-locker every day. I can not express my frustration about this fact as I’m quite sensitive to that sort of sweat stench.
2. There are some people in our class that for some reason scream at the top of their lungs when we’re supposed to repeat after the teacher. Making it impossible to hear either yourself or the other people. They’re usually not correct either so them screaming the wrong answer makes everything so much more annoying. On top of this screaming about 90% of the chinese people in our class can not speak at all. They speak really quietly and mumble imcomprehensibly when asked something or told to say something. They also try to say everything as absolutely fast as they possibly can, so they loose every sort of intonation in their speach, making everything one big melted-together, incorrect, slur.
3. About half the class are chinese, so around 7-8 people. Of these 7 people about 2-3 are really immature and do not give a flying fuck about what the teacher is saying or doing. The policy of the school seems to be that no one is supposed to get a “bad grade”. No one is supposed to be “left behind” or anything like that. This results in the teacher adjusting the speed of the class to the worst students. If everyone was serious-minded and actually studied I wouldn’t mind this. But when there are people not giving a crap at all, this means we might spend weeks on something completely irrelevantly easy and not moving forward at all until those unserious people feel like listening for 10 minutes. I might sound negative towards chinese people but I’m not really, it’s just the case with my class. I know one chinese person, “Shizuka-san”, that is very serious and studies very hard and is beyond my level of Japanese long ago.

As a result of school slowing down (and them not really expecting us to study at home anymore) I have aquired a lot of free time. I had a choice to make with this free time, spend it studying at home and then inevitabely be bored out of my scull 4 hours a day during class or spend it on some other hobby. I was contacted by a very nice gentleman about some work a while back and we have come to an agreement that I will work part-time a bit for him.

So until new-year I will be working on a quite exciting project for RightRental.com. It is (partly) my job to make sure that every available rental apartment in the world is on that site. It’s exciting work because it’s a fun problem and because I get to work in a programming language I haven’t worked in before (Clojure). It’s fun to learn new things.

I’m not really working my ass of right now, I’m mostly in the studying and research phase to try to figure out the best solution, then I don’t think it will take too much time to actually implement it.

I guess you could say “To celebrate”, Emma and I bought some new entertainment for our apartment.

Call of Duty: Black Ops on Xbox

We both really like the Call of Duty game franchise, but of course I think FPS’es are ment to be played on a console, so we decided to buy this. I think it’s a good investment.

To sum it up; school is going good if a bit slow right now and I’m doing some fun stuff on the side.

So I think it’s about time for an update again. I am back from Britain and that all went super-well. You can read more about it on Emanuels blog. It was a good first run and we’ve been invited to the next event in November as well.

Thi is the room we got. Two small beds but definitely nice enough to stay during the event.

The biggest difference between DreamHack and the british LAN is this:

This is me and Emanuel in London, we got a half day in town before we flew home again. Really nice town, I like it a lot, it’s not Tokyo but it’s by far one of the best places in Europe.

In London we bought food at this awesome Japanese food store with everything really Japanese. Totally awesome store, I wish we had one of those in Sweden.

After London I went back to Stockholm and have been hard at work since. Before I talk more about that I want to share something I’ve recently taken an interest in:

I have really gotten into eating nice dinners at restaurants. Like really enjoying the food and taking my time. Get in, order something really nice with a nice glass of wine and just enjoying the food. Then sit and chat and discuss things for a while until the wine is finished. When you feel like you’re getting bored with just talking (and getting a little hungry again) you order in deserts and continue the culinary experience a little while longer. After you’re done completely, no dishes, no hassle, no nothing. You just pay and leave and be done with it! Totally worth the extra cost of the food. I don’t think I would enjoy doing it more than like once a month though, but I’ve only ever done it like once a year, so I think I’m gonna start doing that more.

Anyway!
After coming back from London I switched offices to the offices of another company, for which I will be working a bit as well. They have this super-awesome thing standing on a shelf in the break/meeting room:

It’s the Emmy they won for their “The Truth About Marika” game!

In other great news, Emma has joined me up here in Stockholm — so now I’m not lonely anymore! She came a couple of days ago and she is doing the town while I’m working =P
With the arrival of Emma I have also gone down a bit in my working hours to a lean 8 hours a day =P Which honestly feels a bit more healthy.

So I suppose it’s time for an update! All of the pictures found in this post and more can be found in their full-size versions on my flickr.

I’ve been real busy here and even though I didn’t get much accomplished this weekend I work pretty much all day long during the weekdays. By all day long I mean like today, get up 8, be at work by 10, leave work at 22, be home at 23.

I’m going to try to just bring a nice little picture update because I’m too tired to write anything serious about my experience here so far.

The first couple of night I slept at a hotel (Scandic) because the guy I was gonna live at didn’t leave for Indonesia until the end of July. I really love hotels, I think I’ve said that before but it bears saying again. One reason why I really love Scandic is this though:

Their breakfasts RULE!

This is what I look at most of the day:

And this is the building I spend my time in:

It’s a reallly cool place and the offices are just super impressive and creative. I really get a feeling that the people there do what they love and it’s awesome to be surrounded by that kind of environment. It’s super high-tech and the people are way more creative than me, I really feel like a small fish in a big pond. I’m usually the big fish in the small pond, so this experience is certainly something different. It’s inspiring and fear-inducing at the same time.

This is the more typical office-space, this one is that of my colleague Daniel, who brought me up here.

The guy whose apartment I’m loaning is a pretty cool guy too, got some cool stuff here. But there’s really only two things I want to show because I don’t want to like post his entire life-story on my blog without his consent

Yep, that’s a Zombie Outbreak Survival Kit and a Projector right above the desk.

There are two things I really like about Stockholm so far.

It’s easy to go out and grab a beer, there are many places, pretty much all quite nice and there are usually people outside even when it’s half-late. So it’s not a ghost town after 5 pm like it is where I’m from.

The other thing I really like is this place:

It’s a bookstore called SF Bokhandeln (Science Fiction Bookstore) and they have quite a selection of manga, perhaps 5-6 shelves like the one in the picture. Almost all of it translated to English or Swedish but even some Manga in Japanese, which is cool!

They have a lot of other role-playing stuff and games so while I was there I bought a super-advanced 2 player card-game called Call of Cthulu, apparently it’s somewhat like the Magic card game — which I haven’t played.

Here’s me and a good buddy spending our Saturday trying to figure the thing out

Well that’s it for now, I’m off to shower and then maybe watch an episode of Gantz if I feel there’s time and then sleep. Same procedure tomorrow, up 8 — home at 23.

By the way, I try working 12 hours a day now because I’m going to the UK on Thursday to host a game (more on this later) and need to catch up on work in advance. It’s suprisingly hard to work 12 hours though. With 1 hour of to-and-from-office-traveling and 3 hours of breaks and food a day. A 12 hour day turns into 16 hours. If you want a remote chance at getting 8 hours of sleep and some time to yourself, 10 hours is pretty much all you can do. I don’t like cutting into my 8 hours of sleep but I might have to, I do during school without much problem but I’m not used to it now. Oh well. For now I’m doing 10 hours a day and just hoping that I’ll be able to work like 2 hours a day in the UK.

Hur upptagen jag är går verkligen i vågor. Ibland är det väldigt lite och jag får slappna av och ta det lugnt, chilla med min favorit TV-serie för tillfället eller spela spel. Ibland är det så mycket att jag känner mig stressad.

Just nu har jag 4 projekt igång på jobbet, jag jobbar inte jättemycket på dem, men det är ändå saker att hålla i huvudet. Rätt så mycket med varje projekt. Jag gillar inte det riktigt.

Ovanpå det har jag såklart skolan, som är som vanligt. Jag har inte gjort någonting de senaste 2 veckorna utan sparar allting till lovet och planerar ta igen då.

Vilket leder mig till att jag ska ta igen saker på lovet, och avsluta projekt. Jag siktar på att avsluta alla projekt under lovet och komma ikapp så att jag ligger helt i fas.

Just nu känns det ganska jobbigt, det är saker överallt och allmänt mycket att göra. Jag ser inte riktigt hela planen och hela bilden framför mig, inte lika klart som jag brukar göra.

Det fixar sig, det gör det alltid. På något sätt lyckas jag dra ihop allting och känna mig nöjd i slutänden. Det tvivlar jag inte på.

Jag måste bara hitta något sätt att sortera allting i huvudet så att jag kan få tillbaka mitt perspektiv.

Jag har lyckats få ett riktigt nice jobb på Lunicore tack vare tips från Emanuel. Som har fått exakt likadant jobb uppe i göteborg på ett liknande företag.

Jag kommer jobba med saker jag tycker är kul och håller min tidigare bestämda gräns på runt 8-15 timmar i veckan. Jobbet går ut på i princip samma sak som jag gjorde i min enskilda firma, fast kanske mer allmän programmering än bara webbprogrammering. Vilket är vad jag vill.

I bästa fall kan jag jobba heltid under lov också, vilket vore nice.

Har inte kommit igång så mycket med det än, men ska ha möte i övermorgon och sen får vi se vad som händer.

Just nu är det fett mycket i skolan också dock, så får nog ta det lugnt med jobbet tills tentaveckan är över. Har 4 feta tentor att försöka klara av på samma vecka så denna och nästa (och nästa igen) kommer bli 10-20 dagar allihopa.

Det känns kul hur som helst, och att Emanuel också har ett likadant jobb gör att vi har ännu mer gemensamt och gör det ännu mer roligt faktiskt.

Skolan har börjat lätta lite igen. Det går väldigt mycket i vågor, men just nu ligger jag nästan i fas. Framförallt, även innan när det var som mest, tyckte jag inte direkt att det var jobbigt. Det var bara.. mycket att göra.. Naturligt på något sätt… ja.. inte jobbigt helt enkelt..

Jag har börjat titta lite efter jobb. Jag behöver något soft jobb jag kan jobba runt 10 timmar i veckan när det passar mig, eller ett heltidsjobb under 4 veckorna över jullovet. Jag håller på att försöka få ihop pengar till en resa nästa sommar. Vi får se vad som händer med det.

I have some big plans for this summer, and right now, my plans are about 10k short ($1600) so. I need to find some work.
Things i can consider doing for the money:

• Code something (Web coding I.E. Ruby, PHP, .NET, or like basic Java apps)
• CAD something (I’m pretty good at SolidWorks CAD and i could be like a CAD slave and take blueprints and make them 3D or put them into a simulator or stress-tester or something)
• Teach, like… English, Math, Physics.. Well anything really but I’m only competent enough to teach seriously at those subjects. Can you be a private teacher for like 2-3 weeks and make 10k?

Well that’s it really. Maybe i can do some other things but no boring month-long jobs of doing the same thing. I can’t stand that right now.

Oh, and I really don’t want the job to be longer than like 2-3 weeks.

Oh, and I’m not really that serious about getting it, but it would be really sweet if I got a job like that.

Det känns som att tiden börjar dra ut, gå långsammare.
Det är skönt, på ett sätt, det känns som att jag har bättre koll på vad jag behöver göra, på vad jag hinner göra.

Det känns som att om jag inte hade haft ARKAD och DH hade jag haft sjuuukt mycket tid till skolan. Kanske till och med hunnit göra något annat också, men vet inte direkt vad det skulle vara. Efter jag varit på föreläsning av Jonas Birgersson och idag en annan entreprenör, som jobbar med ECO TECH och håller på med massa andra investeringar och projekt,  så börjar jag känna att jag vill komma igång med någon egen verksamhet igen. Men inte att jag vill sitta och jobba utanför skolan, inte som innan, inte jobb. Utan bara försöka få fram någon idé, jobba med att försöka rita upp någonting som kan funka. Men hur jobbar man med det?

Sätter man sig ner och filosoferar?
Vad har man för metod för att komma på någonting kul?