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.

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. :)

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. :)

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.

Denver, Boulder and Red Rocks

It's been a while since I last updated the blog, I'll blame that on two things; first of all there has been so much going on both at work and in my free time, and also I forgot the password for a while. ;)

Anyway, it is time for an update and first I will let you know about my trip with Troy to Boulder and Red Rocks last weekend - actually it is kind of easier to tell with photos instead of words so here is a link to the Flickr photo sets:

Boulder
Red Rocks

Boulder is the major university city in this area, with lots and lots of students - actually it is so expensive to live in Boulder that most people there are either students or really well off. Red rocks is an enormous outdoors amphitheatre where there are huge concerts and other events.


There is also another set with photos from Denver and the street and house where I live - check this set as well:

Denver

There are some really American moments in there, like the Wendy's and the skyscrapers, or the Good Times - Burgers and Frozen Custard fast food restaurant. :) I took these photos on a sunny day just after the last snow fell, the day before this was like a snow storm (though they tell me it was nothing), this day it was melting away and now a little over a week after it is 20 degrees Celcius outside - it's like a warm spring day in Sweden! That is something I have learned already about Denver - the weather changes quickly. "If you don't like the weather, wait 'til tomorrow."

Getting to know Denver

This Saturday we took a trip riding bikes downtown, Troy and Andrew have two but they needed to be fixed so we went by a bike shop first. Riding a bike around made it feel strangely similar to riding around Linkoping, only the streets are more grid-like and the cars are larger. Speaking about cars, about 50% of the cars here in central Denver are either trucks or jeeps... if anyone can explain the need for these vehicles in the city I will be keen to know. I will try to interrogate this further, going deep into the American soul. :)

Since my luggage still hasn't arrived, we went clothes shopping at a few different storse including GAP where Troys friend had a discount. After that we had a cup of coffee at Starbucks, which is located at each and every street corner as well as inside our local Safeway store so you can get a latte or espresso while shopping - pretty smart idea actually.

One very nice thing I have discovered here is that there are actually a lot of organic products available, both in the local Safeway store and especially in the huge Whole Foods supermarket at Cherry Creek, about a 20 minutes walk from where we live.

Yesterday we went to the museum to see a planetarium show and meet Ka Chun (my main contact at the museum). The museum is larger than I thought and seems to have a lot of interactive elements that suits both adult and kids.

Today I am going to meet Ka Chun again and get my ID/keycard for the museum. I have a designated office space (in the "space odyssey briefing room", hehe) and I will get a workstation as well for more intense graphics work.

So I'm now finally in Denver

I got to the airport in Norrköping last morning and was informed that we were gonna be late because Kastrup was using only one runway because of ice and wind. After getting to Copenhagen, I had to stand in a transfer hall for 2 hours (during which my flight for Frankfurt went) so I got a new ticket to Seattle about six hours later.

Had a nice lunch with a British guy and then took the 10 hour flight to Seattle with SAS, managed to sleep some on the train and also watched The Rock and Truman Show. 10 hours is a long time, but it was ok, the planes are nice and I got a dual seat section for myself.

Anyway, then I got to Seattle and managed to get through customs (not so hard really, just fill out the 100 forms and give them your ID, fingerprints and digital face photo - only retina scan and blood sample left now, I reckon...). My final flight for Denver left pretty much directly after that and I got there nice and cool with Alaska Airlines. I spoke to a guy from Microsoft on the plane who worked with hardware development - I bet you didn't know they use Linux for their CAD systems. ;)

Finally I arrived in Denver and met up with my hosts Troy and Andrew who are apparently really nice people. Now I've slept for maybe six hours, woke up two time during the night, first time I thought it was 5 PM but it was only 5 AM. Just had some breakfast now and I am going to the local Safeway to get some food and other supplies. As far as I understand, you are already enjoying Friday evening in Europe now - have a good one.