I see that The Northern Boys are playing in London in December, so now I have scheduled a 5-day trip to London 🥳

Also, seems I have to apply to be allowed into the UK now 🤷

Update: okay, I got an email after 5m that I was approved.

I have managed to do one important thing today: I got a library card! 🥳

I was playing this game to stack chairs on a car that moves in a circle with my niece, and while doing so, it somehow reminded me that we’re at the end of Q3, and it felt eerily familiar to some sights at work…

attending the weekly operations review and the chat ended up talking about euphemisms as someone said that an incident is an “unscheduled learning opportunity” (I agree, and this mindset for the ops meeting is 💯):

rapid unscheduled disassembly

something went boom

unscheduled unauthorised backup

data leak

and after realizing for the umpteenth time how annoying it is to spell out this domain name, which I do love, I decided to register bjorn.now to point people to my /now page and this domain. The vanity domain amuses me, and it’s practical 🙂

Now, what email should I setup for that domain? me@? ba@?

I told Peter that I’m going to have to install a new VPS because my existing one has been humming along since 2015 and is wildly out of date, and so are my Ansible roles. He suggested I do it with NixOS because then I don’t need Ansible and this other tooling. Starting to read about Nix again it got me thinking of the Monty Python philosophers: “Is your name not Nix then? No, it’s Michael. That’s gonna cause a little confusion. Mind if we call you Nix, just to keep it clear?”

the joy of dealing with things international: DHL refuses to send my work laptop to Singapore using the standard mobile site because it’s too valuable, it might work on some other site, which doesn’t work on my phone. Schenker happily takes it but will deliver it when they want to, but only in Europe. Postnord can’t validate the postal code in Singapore (bug report sent) so I can’t send. Once more into the breach trying to suss out the other DHL site. 🤬

update: whoo, on the computer I could get it sorted on the DHL site and it was 3x the price, so I’ll see if I can get it sorted with Postnord instead because I can’t justify the price difference.

Now that I’m getting stuff for the new apartment I’m getting a lot of stuff from Biltema. It’s so cheap, and the quality is usually good enough that I don’t overly worry about it. It feels more like “the basics” and no frills but stuff that will do you.

In comparison, I rarely bought stuff in a store in Singapore, because it always felt so expensive and the quality felt way more questionable on the cheap stuff (mostly the tiny shops in Sim Lim or so), not sure if that was a fair assessment most of the time. And I generally felt waaay more uncomfortable with the quality for the cheap things there. As an example, I bought a C7 cable with a euro plug (standard power cable for things like DVD players, and in my case, a charger) from Lazada from some small local shop, very flimsy, low quality, and cost me something like $12 with shipping. I bought one of those at Clas Ohlson for 69 sek (~SG$9) and it’s much higher quality.

It reminds me of talking to a distributor when I was working at DollarStore, he told me that it’s cheaper for them to sell us quality at a lower margin because then neither of us have to deal with returns and unhappy customers. Because a big batch of things that don’t work means you’ll have to scrap the whole shipment, and that’s too costly when you buy container loads of things. I bet that’s true for Biltema as well.

…I feel the need to point out that the “You’re the best” coffee mug is the apartment’s.

I told a friend ‘I have historically had an apparent predilection for chicken videos 😅’ and I feel the need to elaborate…

It’s all a big misunderstanding. The kind like when someone gets, say, a frog from someone and keep it on their desk. Then people think they like frogs and they get more. Suddenly, all gifts are frogs. You’re the frog person. I’m the chicken video guy.

It all started innocently with Chicken Techno:

through the algorithm I then learned of New Bibi Hendl (a Japanese man yodeling and singing in Swiss german about a chicken):

Then as luck would have it, Takeo Ischi had another banger out: Chicken Attack

At this point we’d created the “Friday Playlist” where everyone from the office were putting in weird songs, that’d we’d play the last couple of hours on Friday. Then until tonight, this was the last song, which apparently is just a bunch of onomatopoeia in Chinese: Wang Rong Rollin - Chick Chick

And that was until tonight when the algorithm sent me a weird cover of “I will survive” from the point of view of a chick:

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Full circle. A snake eating an egg.

after the co-op (BRF) board met it has been deemed okie-dokie to lease an apartment to me and I have a place to live in Sweden 🥳

something I have missed living in Singapore is going to concerts and I just saw that Electric Callboy is going to Stockholm on the 5th of November, and now, so am I 🤘😁
(gearing up to be a 5th of November to never ever be forgot)

Hasse and I went for a walk into Karlstad city center yesterday and spotted this vending machine right by Klaraälven and near the opera.

…yeah, don’t eat these flugsvamp if you find them in Sweden, they’re poisonous. Even if supposedly viking berserkers would eat them to help ’em… berserk, so if feed up enough about something maybe it’s worth it…

Famous rather than infamous. Aaaand now it’s time to have a nap…

it’s so quiet staying in ruralish Sweden that I hear the hum of the fridge/freezer more than anything, pretty great when you’re using to hearing traffic all the time 😀

I shared my swedish pizza lunch, and while I know people have strong feelings about pineapple on pizza, I’m genuinely surprised at how strong the reaction is to the creative use of ingredients we have for pizza. Swedish pizza is some of the best around and that’s a hill I’ll die on!

(one person asked “is this throw-up on pizza?” 😅)

drove a car for the first time in a looong while today (years), and after I backed out of the driveway something felt off: I wasn’t 100% sure where I was supposed to be on the road.

I just came to Sweden yesterday, after five days in Bengaluru, India, where I sat in the front passenger seat (i.e. the Swedish driver’s seat). I was positioning the car like I had been sitting in India (fast thinking?).

So I decided to go back to the driveway, because I’m not putting someone else at risk when I haven’t driven for a while and I’m getting a weird feeling.

As I went back I reflected that I know it’s right-hand drive in Sweden (slow thinking?), but I had mostly experienced sitting in that seat as a passenger in left-hand driving countries (Singapore for more than a decade, and just days before, India). I was 95% sure it meant I put myself so I’m closer to the middle of the road.

As I looked it up online: yes, I’m supposed to be towards the middle of the road when driving. I didn’t hit anything. And the sense of the car started coming back after a couple of kilometers. Just like riding a bike 😉