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Saturday, 13th March 2010
Stranger in a strange land
So, I've survived my first few days in Sweden. It's all been pretty straightforward, actually. Partly because I'm used to moving country by now - this is the third time - but also muchly thanks to the company I've come here to join taking care of many, many things for me. That's been nice. As soon as I arrived, I had working mobile broadband (I can commit and read mail and surf on the train and in meetings wherever in Sweden...excellent), and today my ADSL got installed too, so I've been enjoying the rather lower latency than the mobile broadband provided me with.
My new place is rather smaller than my one in Bratislava, and nothing so impressive; there's no beautiful castle view, underfloor heating or anything so exciting. It's plenty big enough for me, though, and clean and decently equipped and furnished too. The location is very good: on a quiet street, a few minutes walk to a small but very well stocked supermarket, and just under ten minutes walk to the railway station. There's a curry house that I've yet to try near to the station, a much larger supermarket and various other eateries. A few minutes more walking leads to the British Pub I lazily used on my first day here instead of cooking; it does some basic pub grub and has plenty of choice of beer - it's expensive there though! I'm sure there's much, much more to find and discover, but that's as far as I've got so far.
I checked out my local Systembolag - the alcohol shop - a couple of days back. The range of beer is pretty impressive, and it's beautifully categorized by type (ales, dark/stout, lager, pils) and clearly marked up with the country of origin. Didn't see any Slovak beers, but there was a decent amount of Czech stuff. I couldn't resist picking up a bottle of German Weissbier and a bottle of Bishop's Finger (an ale I frequently drunk back when I lived in England), too. The prices weren't as bad as I had feared, either. Only downside is the opening hours - particularly at a weekend (until 3pm on a Saturday, and closed all day Sunday!) So I'll need to be a tad more organized about things. Anyway, I'm content. :-)
The thing I've found oddest so far is not being able to speak Swedish. I'd got so used to just being able to cope in Slovak in everyday situations that I'd kinda forgotten what it was to live in a place and not know the language. Granted, I known some words, and more are sinking in as I see them each day, but I very much need to find a tutor so I can learn to speak. I think I should be able to pick Swedish up much faster than Slovak - it's a Germanic language so there's many more familiar word roots, and the grammar is simpler in many ways, since it lacks the epic case declensions that makes Slovak so much fun. (Curiously, I've caught myself looking at Swedish words that follow prepositions and trying to parse out the inflection - and of course failing, since Swedish doesn't work that way. Really odd.)
Anyway, here's hoping I'll be able to get nicely settled here and that with time it will come to feel like home. I think a part of me still thinks this is just some trip and that I'll be going back to Slovakia soonish, and it's not really sunk in yet that I've left it all behind for at least the medium term. Alas, I have, and now I'll just have to settle on paying a visit once in a while, and my fond memories of my days there.
Monday, 15th February 2010
Sweden - Beer win after all?
A Swedish reader of my blog kindly took a moment to leave a comment on my last post, pointing out just how huge a selection of beers the Systembolaget has (it really is a big one - over 400 varieties). I figured I'd be able to pick from whatever my local store had but apparently, you can make custom orders too! So, what have they?
Amongst the English ones there's 31 beers. Picking those I know and like best, there's Abbot, Adnams, Bishop's Finger, Circle Master, Hobgoblin, Newcastle Brown Ale, Old Empire and Spitfire. That's not a bad selection of English ale at all, to say I'm out of England!
What if I get nostalgic for my time in Slovakia? There's Zlatý Bazant, which is my favorite Slovak beer. Of course, much of what I drink here is actually Czech beer, and there collection includes all those I especially like, including my favorite Starobrno, which I'm drinking as I write this post, as well as Pilsner Urquell and Staropramen.
Of course, there's a huge selection of Swedish beers on offer. I'll have to admit to massive ignorance here, though in a country that seems to very much value quality, I have a feeling that discovering Swedish beer will not be a disappointment. The range seems to include ales, stouts, pale ales, porters as well as lager, so it's pretty promising.
Glancing around at what else is on offer, I notice a couple of Weissbiers from Germany that I've enjoyed a few times in the past, the wonderful La Trappe from The Netherlands and a bunch of nice ones from Belgium (Hoegarden, Duvel, etc). Sadly, from India there is only Cobra, which is a very good beer to go with a curry, but I have a slight preference for Kingfisher. There's a bunch of American ones, which I don't really know, though "Double Bastard Ale" is a name win. Sadly, no Tsing Tao (or anything else) from China, a beer that I find strangely refreshing. Small lackings amongst plenty of awesome though. :-) Also, browsing the Systembolaget site is a good way to learn the names of various countries in Swedish!
There's also a Bishop's Arms pub in Lund. I've no idea if it's related to the Bishop's Arms in Malmo, though I do know that the Malmo pub of that name was a very nice - if pricey - place to have a few pints, not to mention a tasty bite to eat. Anyway, seems I may be not so badly off for beer after all.
Wednesday, 10th February 2010
Lund it is!
Contracty bits are done, and I have a place to move to in Sweden! I'm going to be not all that far to the railway station (much closer than my place in Bratislava is), and thus near to the center. Oh, and the systembolaget (the place where beer is available - a curious quirk of Sweden is that the state has a monopoly on alcohol sales). Seems there's a couple of pubs where I'll be able to obtain ale too, which will in a way kinda make up for the Czech and Slovak beer I'll be missing here. Of course, what I'd pay to buy plenty of beer for an evening out here will buy me just one or maybe two in a bar in Sweden! In fact, things generally will be pricier - though I gather the quality is also generally good.
It also seems there's some good walking to be had in the area, and it's not that far to get out of the city and be in the countryside. So hopefully there'll be some nice opportunities, as the weather gets warmer, to get out and enjoy the natural surroundings. Of course, while living in Sweden, I must pay another visit to the Abisko National Park too. :-)
Anyway, I'm sure I'll be blogging plenty about how Sweden is as a place to be living once I get there, in under a month's time!
Sunday, 7th February 2010
Looking like Lund
Trying to find a place in Malmo has been rather tougher than I expected. Lund, on the other hand, has proved an easier target, and it looks like something might well work out there. Lund is perhaps also a more "me" kinda place. It's smaller than Malmo, and home to Sweden's second oldest university. I've been there before, and it's got a pleasant center to hang around in. Like Malmo, it's got direct trains to all of Goteborg, Copenhagen (including it's airport) and Stockholm, so it's just about as easy to get around. There seems to be a decent bunch of places to eat and drink there too, though rather less in the way of Indian food - I guess I'll have to do the less than 15 minute journey to Malmo to get that (choice of 7+ restaurants there, versus only 1 with some quite bad reviews that I've been able to find out about in Lund...maybe there's another one that I don't know about though). Anyway, that's where I might be ending up. :-)
Thursday, 28th January 2010
So am I attracted to the iPad?
With the incredible amount of hype around "that thing Apple will announce soon", whatever they did was just never going to match it. People I think expected something amazing and revolutionary, which I suspect Apple also quite like to play their product as. I'd describe it more as an evolution - a kind of next step from what they've had before.
At first glance, it felt to me like they'd essentially taken the iPod Touch and super-sized it. The iPod Touch is perhaps the nicest tech product I've ever owned. It started off for me as a really quite nice web browsing device that I could easily take anywhere with me, and it also provided a good way to listen to music. With the app store, it's become one of the key tools I use for language learning. But does a bigger device help or hinder me? (Oh my, I may have just got this flagged as spam...)
For web browsing, it's for sure that the extra space would be nice. I do, sometimes, sit on the sofa and surf the web on my iPod Touch, but after a while the small screen gets a bit too cramped. I'd really quite like to do more of my non-work, casual surfing away from my desktop, but it happens rarely because laptop = worst posture than the desktop and iPod Touch = awkward for extended browsing session, even if it's an excellent web browsing experience for a device of that size.
For music it makes no difference at all to have this over an iPod Touch and I very much doubt I'd use it to listen to music unless I was using it for something else anyway.
For apps - this will be interesting. Watching the video demonstration of the email app that will come with the device - everything done by touch - I have to say that it looked like a good user experience. Apple seem to be really pioneering touch and multi-touch interface, and as someone who did once suffer a bit from - and still gets aches now and then due to - repetitive strain injury, time using alternative input methods to do stuff is appealing. I doubt typing a lot on the device will really fly, so I can't see me really replying to emails on it, but reading my mail, tossing the stuff that doesn't matter, following mailing lists and so forth could easily be done without much typing. For the language learning stuff, just having things bigger will mean less eye strain, so I'd not complain about that.
The main issue with bigger is that it's then less portable. I have absolutely no qualms about carrying my iPod Touch and my laptop around with me. Carrying a laptop and an iPad? Hmm. No. Do Not Want. So in many ways, I expect if I had an iPad, it'd mostly stay at home, apart from on those occasions when I was going away and didn't need a laptop (e.g. pure vacation, not for conference) but could spare the space for taking something a bit bigger.
So anyway, cool bit of tech, look forward to playing with one, can imagine how I'd use it, but suspect it's going to be a luxury rather than a "must have".
Tuesday, 19th January 2010
So for some reason I joined. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it, but my presence there seems to have made some people happy. Anyway, if you want to follow my semi-regular but thankfully length-restricted babble (it's like, SMS-length or so), then I can be followed - I guess a slightly better term than stalked. My longer babbling will, of course, continue to appear here. :-)
Wednesday, 13th January 2010
Exam 70-536
This is the name of the incredibly boring exam that you must take before you can take any of the possibly less boring exams that then make you a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist. While I was in Sweden, I had a crack at taking this exam...and passed it. Not just passed, but passed quite strongly: I got 88%, while the pass mark is 70%. Not bad.
The really annoying thing is that even though I've been doing .Net development commercially for quite a while now, that only sort of helps. While you can get so far with a general understanding, the test is, in a large part, about memorizing a bunch of method and class names from the standard library. For bits of the standard library I've used quite a bit, that wasn't so bad; for the other bits, it was a case of madly trying to cram them into my brain in the few days before the test (because, being me, I didn't think to start preparing until a few days before).
As an aside, tonight I logged onto the Microsoft Certified Professional site. What a steaming pile of crap that is! Took me three attempts to log in, took me in a loop while entering the activation code, and once I did log in trying to view the list of exams I'd passed just to check the one I expected was on there gave...a .Net Application Error! Oops. Guess they shoulda got some ASP.NET certified technology specialists to write it for 'em... :-/ Ah well, one more exam and I'll have something shiny to wave at anyone who thinks such things matter...
Tuesday, 12th January 2010
Avatar
While in Sweden, my friend Tore arranged for us to go and see Avatar. It's the first time I'd been to the cinema in a while, and the first full-length movie I've ever seen in 3D (the only other one was a short at the IMAX cinema in Bradford in England, years ago). It was a great film to have seen at the cinema rather than just at home: decent plot, lots of action but also insight into human nature. While there was something of a love story in it, it didn't dominate and detract from the key plot, which was good. Anyway, worth seeing in my view. Won't tell any more and spoil the surprise. :-)
Monday, 11th January 2010
Time for change
It's time for me to be moving along again. I spent much of last week in Sweden, and the upshot is that I'm joining a startup company there. The work looks to be interesting, and less dominated by doing web development, which I'm mostly fed up of. It'll give me a bit more financial stability. I can still keep on going to Perl conferences, and it's not a full-time arrangement either, so I'll continue working on Rakudo, Perl 6 and other small bits. Overall, it was a hard offer to turn down, so I've taken it.
For the first time I actually have work that needs me to base myself in a specific part of the world - specifically, south-west Sweden, around Malmo/Lund/Helsingborg. So, sadly, at the end of February/the start of March, it'll be time to say dovidenia to Slovakia and move over to Sweden. Unlike when I moved from the UK to Spain - which I gladly did to run away from hurt - and when I moved from Spain to Slovakia - which didn't feel so bad, since I didn't want to face the hot Spanish summer and was excited to be going to live in central Europe and to study a Slavic language - this isn't a move I'd have just spontaneously done without something to motivate it.
That isn't to say Sweden doesn't have many attractions; I have always very much enjoyed my visits there, there's some great scenery to be had, there's lots of places by the sea, I like the people, there's lots of good restaurants and the pro-conformity and confrontation-avoiding social attitude fits me well. Of course, it presents me with another languages to get to grips with too - Swedish in all its oh-no-you-have-HOW-many-vowels glory. On the other hand, the grammar - after Slovak - should be a good bit easier. That's kinda annoying in the sense that I'm good at grammar and suck at rendering tricky sounds. Ah well, I'll try and find a good teacher (my Slovak one will be a hard act to follow though) and see how it goes.
But despite all the attractions of Sweden, I'll certainly miss Slovakia. Being in central Europe has been really nice - I love the hearty food, the architecture and the scenery throughout the region. I'll also miss the language - I don't know why, but I'm somehow fond of, and fascinated by, the Slavic language family. And of course, I'll miss the people here, especially my friends from Bratislava.pm and those I've made through the international church here, which has been an enormous blessing to me. I've found it kind of sad to hear one Swede describe this as me "moving to a sane country", and one family member describe Sweden as "better than Slovakia". If there's any word for this part of the world, it's perhaps "misunderstood" or "under-appreciated" or some such. Sure, it's a bit rough around the edges here and there, but hey, so am I.
Anyway, I figure that since becoming an adult, I did a few years of work-focus at university, followed by a few years of traveling, living where I liked, and avoiding committing myself to things that would tie me to living in a certain place. Now it's time to do a chunk of work-focused time again, and accept the commitments that come part and parcel of that. Of course, there'll still be travel and fun - my university years had both of these. And I'd not like to imply any expected duration for my time in Sweden - that'll come out naturally, just as the right opportunity for me to kick off a work-focused chunk of time also naturally appeared. So when I say goodbye to my home here in a couple of months, I do so with an expectation that life stands a good chance of granting me another opportunity to live in this region again. And I'll most certainly be able to come and visit in the meantime - it's not all that far away. :-)
Sunday, 3rd January 2010
Last decade I...
So, the so called noughties have come to an end and a whole new decade lies ahead. So what exactly did I do in the last decade?
I finished school, college and university, and then called a halt to study. I may return to the academic world some day; I muchly enjoyed my time there. But I don't see that being in the very near future. Anyway, I came out with good grades through it all, and finished up with a first class honors degree in computer science. It goes without saying that I didn't see that as innevitable at the start of the decade. All the way through, I knew I was goodish, but always doubted whether I'd hold up at the next level. Turns out I did fine.
I visited 33 countries. That's something I'd most certainly not seen myself doing ten years ago. My love of travel evolved around hte middle of the decade.
I've lived in two countries other than the UK. I'd not seen that one coming either. Alas, no regrets, and I it'd not surprise me at all if I live the next decade out of the UK.
I've developed a love of natural languages as well as computer ones, and muchly worked out how to learn and cope with them. A decade ago, I was a competent but disinterested attendee of compulsary French classes at school, and didn't expect I'd ever long to learn a language. (Recently, I've been working on an article about some of how I look at natural languages today, which I hope to publish later on in the month.)
I've remained a Christian, despite many challenges, and a few times where I had to ask God, "seriously, why the f**k did you just let THAT happen?" I still don't really understand most, if any, of the things that caused me to ask such questions. Alas, there's been a great deal more blessing than pain. I've increasingly refused to identify myself with any tighter label than "Christian", come to advocate a non-denominational viewpoint, and lean to a fairly minimalistic view of what defines being Christian. Whether somebody has a different take then me on homosexuality, use of tongues, child baptism and so forth should absolutely not prevent me being willing to share in communion with them - because those issues actually don't matter that much compared to the core truths.
My music tastes switched from electronica to rock overall, through a stage of industrial and crossover style stuff. That said, a lot of the rock I like has electronic elements or, often, symphonic elements. These days I'm most interested in progressive rock/metal, power metal and symphonic rock/metal.
I also wrote some music, some of it for Christian worship, some of it not. It started off as electronica, but along with my tastes evolved towards more crossover and sometimes all out metal. I've moved more towards production of music using existing samples, and have enjoyed writing lyrics more than anything else. Sadly, the last year or so hasn't seen much new get completed, however.
I've come to appreciate beer and coffee. That is, good beer and good, strong, black coffee. I wasn't into either a decade ago. Then, I guess I was a bit young to be into beer anyway. :-)
Indian food is still my favorite type of cuisine. I was exposed to it from a fairly young age, so a decade ago I was already fond of it. While I've discovered much other great food in the meantime, Indian remains my favorite. Most, if not all, years, I've had curry as a key part of celebrating my birthday.
Importantly, I gradually became more comfortable with who I am. I'm me, with all my quirks. And now I'm quite comfortable with the fact that this is just fine - a view I found harder to take back in the days of school, where fitting in is somehow made to matter more. If people don't want to accept me as I am, that's fine - they can go hang out with people they can accept.
Over the last decade, I've had the pleasure of meeting, talking with, travelling with, working with and being taught by many great people. I'd like to finish off by saying a huge thank you to all those who have helped make this decade one that, amongst a large bunch of crap, has actually been an overall positive one. Here's to the next one. :-)