Caboose

If you came here looking for our wedding website you might want to have a look at the photos.

The album is password protected, if you can’t remember the password then contact me.

I’ve been out on a few bike rides recently, with Eleanor while she was here and on my own.

Here’s the most recent one (Ekängsturen from the leaflet I got from tourist information):
Ekängsturen

The paler part of the route was added manually, my GPS batteries died in Tallboda.

On Friday I got back from a week working in Seattle, with one of the many customers for whom we customise Opera Mini.

The flight is pretty long, but fortunately we were able to start from Linköping and fly via Amsterdam. Unlike the last few times I’ve flown via Schiphol we didn’t have hours of hanging around there.

Most of my time was spent working, but I did have a free weekend and Adrian and Amy managed to travel down from Vancouver. It was really good to see them again and catch up over some beers and nice meals.


Here are some more pictures: (more…)

I recently spent a week working at Opera’s Wrocław (Wikipedia). office, we have quite a lot of the Opera Mini server team based there.

The journey is pretty easy, Ryanair fly direct from Skavsta to Wrocław, so it’s just the usual torments of flying with an airline that hates passengers. We got there about lunchtime, checked in at the Scandic and then wandered down to the market square for a beer and some solid Polish food.

It was a really fun week, the team took us to lots of nice restaurants for lunch and it’s always good to spend some time with people you normally only see by video-conference. I especially liked the Spiż bar/brewery on the square, whenever you bought a beer you got handed a lard sandwich to go with it. Food and drink are very cheap compared to Sweden, especially lunch at Miś Bar — where you can get platefuls of dumplings for a few złoty.

It’s a city full of statues and monuments, this one was right across the road from the hotel:

Last time I wrote anything here it was winter, now it’s summer in Linköping and people are out and about enjoying the sunshine. I went for a wander round today this afternoon with my new toy: a Nikon D90.

I started off walking up Vasavagen to Raoul Wallenberg’s square.

On the way up to the cathedral there’s another statue sitting outside the Länsmuseum and lots of flowers covering this walkway.

Up at Trädgårdsforeningen they were celebrating 150 years since the society was formed, with music and dancers on the stage. Other people were just sitting in the sunshine or playing volleyball.

This weekend is also Linköping’s harbour festival, although there’s little left of the once-busy harbour. On both sides of the river there were stages, beer tents and various activities going on. They’ve even made a beach outside the Scandic hotel.

Over the past week I’ve been combining catching up with my family with packing up all my possessions and shipping them off to Sweden (using Seven Seas). Today I followed them, flying out to Linköping via Copenhagen.

I’m renting a furnished apartment until August, so that I can take my time looking around for a more permanent apartment that I can then furnish exclusively from IKEA. In fact I’ll be going in there tomorrow for a few things I need right now.

I have a new job. From March I’ll be working for Opera Software , at their office in Linköping in Sweden.

More specifically I’ll be working on the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones. If your phone supports Java (most do) then it’s worth trying Opera Mini, the built-in browser on most phones is dire!

So, when I get back from my trip around the world I’ll have about a week to unpack, visit people and then repack and move out to Linköping.

I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Benin City, drinking Crystal beer brewed at the Bendel Brewery next door.

On the label it gives the strength as “5% +- 0.5%”. This is a lot more honest than other Nigerian beers, claiming to be exactly 5.2% when everyone knows it’s more like “somewhere between 2 and 8 percent”.

This week I’m down in Enugu and Benin City, continuing our work at NTI’s zonal offices.
I’m waiting for the carpenter and electrician to finish, watching TV. An advert just came on for a book launch: “100 Reasons Why IBB is a Great Man”. That’s IBB the former military dictator, looter of the Nigerian Treasury, political godfather and self-proclaimed “evil genius” (he’s half right). The book launching’s supported by the current Senate leader.

On my travels I’ve ended up watching a lot of TV in hotel rooms.

Tonight the Nigerian version of ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ was on. The contestant was a bit stuck, so phoned a friend. The friend’s side of the conversation went something like this:

Hello? I can’t hear you. Who is speaking? Hello?

It continued like that until his 30 seconds ran out. The joke is that the show is sponsored by MTN.