Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Back in Stockholm

After a few days in Linköping and a quick visit to Malmö (to play Big Bad Bass at Panora) I am now back at the office in Stockholm.

I just got a new laptop (an Acer of the same model as the one that broke down) and after moving the harddrive over to the new one I am up and running just as before the motherboard fried!

There are A LOT of photos to be taken care of now, and I have already started that work back in Linköping, so keep your eyes peeled on the Flickr page. But until then, here is one of my favourites from the Denver Zoo visit:


Clicking on the image takes you to a directory with four more photos from the Denver Zoo.

Now I'm off to visit Peter in Östermalm and finish the paperwork for the apartment I will be staying in this summer. :)

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Packing and wrapping things up

Tomorrow I fly out from Denver, it is with 50% of "I WANNA STAY!" and 50% looking forward to coming back to Europe. :)

I am currently at the office trying to wrap things up here, I got a lot of papers and things to take with me, and I am due for a barbeque at Ka Chun's house in about two hours, so this will only be a brief message.

I will write a longer post when I get back home to Sweden, plus all the photos waiting on my camera to be transfered to a computer and uploaded to Flickr. As my laptop has been broken for the past month, I haven't been able to do any photo work. Speaking of the laptop, I picked it up a few days ago; though SCISS decided not to pay for replacing the motherboard (makes sense), so I will get a new one when I get back to Stockholm instead.

Anyway, time to get back to work here and sort the final things out at the office before heading over to Ka Chun's.

Europe - see you soon!

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Back in Denver - last week!

I am back from Minneapolis and had a great time there, played two gigs, got to see both S:t Paul and Minneapolis including the Science Museum and also a round of disc golf. :)

Actually, that was about 10 days ago, so I have been spending some time in Denver again, including a few good meetings at work and a baseball game with Ben & Pat and Kim & Dominic on Friday! Even though the Rockies lost 8-3 I had fun experiencing live baseball for the first time, and learning a lot about the nuances of the game. :)

On Friday I also finally made it to the Denver Zoo which was a lot bigger than I had expected! The weather was amazing and I got a lot of photos taken, so expect a new photo set on Flickr soon. ;)

Last Sunday was Mother's Day here in the US and Troy & Andrew had their friends with families over for a Mother's Day brunch.

Last night I was at Ben & Pat's for dinner and they had invited a lot of the other relatives - it was great to see them all again!

Tonight me, Ka Chun, Troy & Andrew are going to see Björk perform an outdoors concert at the Red Rocks outside of Boulder (check the Flickr photo set from Boulder to see photos from there when I was there with Troy to check out the place itself). Last night we had some harsh Thunderstorms here but right now it is calm and sunny, so let's hope for good weather tonight!!!

I will be back soon with more about this last week in Denver, next Monday I am heading back to Sweden, with mixed emotions; I both want to stay, and I really look forward to coming to Europe again. :)

I "go out with a bang" though with a happy hour for the people at work tomorrow, a gig opening for Stakka on Thursday and a gig playing alongside Q-Bert and Craze on Friday, so I really can't complain. ;)

See you soon!

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Hi everyone

Just a short message to let you know why there hasn't been an update in a while - my laptop broke down last week and refuses to start, so it has now been at the repair shop for over a week. They first thought it was the CPU fan but after replacing that it still doesn't start up, so now the hypothesis is that it is indeed the motherboard that needs replacement.

Anyway, short summary of the current situation: My parents were here and among other things we went to Cripple Creek and Canon City, and I have a lot of photos from there that I will sort and upload as soon as my laptop returns; the harddrive is functioning well by the way, but just for safety measures I have taken 2 DVD's worth of backups from it, so all the imagery will eventually surface on Flickr.

After being here for two weeks they went home and after a bit of trouble in Copenhagen (11 hours to be exact!!) they got home, safe and sound.

I keep on working using the workstation computer at DMNS, and I have had a few interesting meetings in the past week, and have a few more planned. Next week I got to Minneapolis to play records at Konkrete Jungle and 9th Circle, and I will also meet up with the planetarium people at the Minnesota Science Museum while I'm there, so it will be a nice combination of work and play. :)

Well, time to go to bed now - I might actually get up really early tomorrow and run the Cherry Creek Sneak, a 5 mile race that is very close to where I live. The only issue is that I haven't been running a lot, as I got my running shoes when my parents came here, but I might try anyway. I will report soon again and I hope that the laptop gets fixed before I leave for Minneapolis on Tuesday!

Until next time, have a good one.

Sunday, April 8, 2007

Happy Easter!

My parents have arrived in town, they arrived this Tuesday - they arrived well but their luggage took another day to arrive - an impressive feat by Delta. :)

They are staying at Ben & Pat's house and seem to have adapted quickly to the Mountain Time time zone. Their jetlag wore off quickly compared to how I experienced my first days in Denver; it took me 3 or 4 days to become normal (cue bad jokes here), but then again my trip included a 5 hour extra wait in Denmark and as I arrived after midnight I didn't get more than around 6 hours of sleep the first night. But enough about that - here is a nice shot of the Denver airport that I shot from Ben's car just before we picked up my parents. :)

I've had the pleasure of showing them all the museum, including a special visit to the planetarium showing the Uniview software in action. My father was even the star pilot for a while, successfully navigating us from the moon to Saturn and even further out in the solar system.

Yesterday they celebrated their wedding day and we all went to Vesta Dipping Grill in LoDo (= lower downtown, the area with all the nice restaurants and bars). We had some really nice meat, dipping sauces, and vanilla ice cream and a hearty chocolate cake (with even more dipping sauces) was indulged during dessert.

Today I met with about 20 of my relatives for Easter dinner at Ben & Pat's house! It was fun to meet them all, some of them I had met before but even more of them I had not, so it was good putting names to faces and vice versa. :) A good time was had and the kids did a great job egg hunting all over the house - the snow made us refrain from hiding eggs in the garden, though (yes, the snow is back for a while).

Speaking of snow, there was some serious snow in the end of last week, of which I took some photos - here is one of the images showing the amount that fell just during one night. The temperature fell about 30 degrees Fahrenheit from Wednesday to Thursday! And then on Sunday I was downtown in shorts and sunglasses - the weather here is just too funny.

Tomorrow we are going on a trip to Cripple Creek and Canon City, and on Tuesday we are going to the Royal Gorge Bridge. Tomorrow evening we are also invited to Dimitri, one of the space scientists at the museum, who lives up in the mountains. And on Tuesday evening we will return to Denver in time for the Space Ethics discussion event in the IMAX, where I have also been asked to play some live music on the laptop, meaning it will be my first performance with the new live PA setup that I have been working on for a while.

Speaking of music, I played my first gig this Friday at Recon, and had a great time - people seemed to enjoy the selection and I even managed to get the Air FX hooked up for this one, for some extra 3D madness along the way. :) Next DJ gig is on Saturday, when I play at the Nation 4 party at the Palladium Event Center.

I'll be back soon with more to tell about what is happening here in the Mile High city! Until then, sleep well and Happy Easter. :)

Monday, March 26, 2007

A summary of the last week or two

I know, I should write more often, but you know how it is. :) Anyway, here is a slight summary of what has been happening in the past weeks.

Me and Ka Chun went to a space theme party at an old synagog in central Denver, a party organized by Burning Man people - it was, to use an American expression - awesome. Obviously they had spent 5 weeks preparing all the decorations and there were around 10 different rooms with art installations plus a big main room for the live concerts. We met some interesting people and saw some interesting costumes, to say the least. We realized the need for costumes the same day the party was, so we went the easy route and dressed as Men In Black - me being Ka Chun's trainee as I don't have a full suit here. :) I didn't bring my camera there but I will let you know if I find any photos on the internet.

Anyway, musicwise I have been meeting up with a lot of people and it seems I will play a few gigs here now; I will post them all at tectonic.groundmotion.com when I get them confirmed. I have already played one gig, an electro/tech/deep house sesson at one of the local clubs called Funky Buddha, a really nice place, small, intimate and stylish. Imagine Bakfickan with an outdoors patio on the second floor. :)

I have had the pleasure of meeting with my relatives again, this time in their home, and a good time was had! Coming up next is an easter dinner where I'll get to meet even more of the relatives. Looking forward to that!


Last, I just want to share a picture I took of a car that I pass by almost everyday on my way to work, it's parked on 16th & Madison and it looks like it hasn't been moved for a few years. :)

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Getting settled at work

I am getting settled at work, with my Swedish laptop and a fairly brutal HP workstation with dual NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 cards (geek mode on). I also ended up with dual screens, which is kind of nice and very easy to get used to. ;)

There are a lot of nice people here and I am starting to get to know more and more of them - I am sitting in the middle of the Space Sciences volunteer area so there are many people passing by doing different tasks and presentations for the Space Odyssey exhibits (that is the name of the space exhibit area).

Working in a museum really is a very nice environment - one minute you are working at your desk, tapping away at the keyboard, and the next minute you are out walking by dinosaurs, spacecrafts or Russian gem statues (!). Yesterday I was just about to finish a meeting with Marieke (geologist from Holland) when her boss Bob came around and asked us if we wanted to see a 30-minute movie about Antarctica - "sure" I said, and thought we were heading for a lecture of some kind, as has happened before.

But instead he set forth towards the IMAX and I realize that as a worker at the museum I can achieve free entrance to the IMAX shows if I just show up at the last minutes before the show starts. So I ended up seeing a really inspiring movie about the adventures of Shackleton and his crew of 27 men, surviving 17 months lost in Antarctica, both on land (ice) and sea. A story almost to amazing to be true, but it is supposed to be based on a true story, and after hearing about them ending this massive quest by walking across a totally uncharted island filled with mountains and ice, without any serious climbing equipment, and without having slept for 6 days and had fresh water for 2, you'd be pretty hardcore not to be impressed.