April 19 2010, 01:24
Categories: English | Life Tags: photos | lindholmen | fröken fokus | viktoria blok
My friend Martina aka Fröken Fokus, who is an extremely talented press photographer, wanted to broaden her experience by shooting edgy portraits in a rough industrial environment, and doing a more elaborate and playful shoot than she’s used to (apparently, when you’re doing press photography you’re mostly forced to work with whatever reality you’re confronted with in whatever timeframe you have scheduled). Viktoria Blok, a freshly baked makeup artist that Martina managed to track down through her school, wanted some portfolio shots to get her business started. Me, I just wanted some nice photos of myself for various vaguely mischievous purposes. Win-win-win.
We decided to get together for two sessions, one rough and edgy with a lot of rust, metal, dirt, leather and indecently unshaven beard (to satisfy Martina’s need for experimentation) and one more classical business-smart setting with chinos, shirts, blazer and a lot less make-up (to satisfy my need for something I could conceivably put in my CV). Martina and I went scouting for locations for the first one on Good Friday, and we soon found an old shipyard at Lindholmen that she immediately fell in love with. The second one we decided to do on the top floor of the Sigma building where I work. A few days later I went shopping with Viktoria to get some decently appropriate clothing for both sessions (this took over 5 hours, but was a lot of fun and turned out pretty well!)
We finally did the clicking on the gloriously sunny day 14th of April, one session in the morning and the other in the afternoon. All in all, it was one of the most fun and rewarding days I’ve had in a long time! :)
Anyway, here are some of the photos. I’ve yet to receive all the originals from Martina, but I’ve gotten my hands on about 75 percent of them, and I’ve picked out a few that I liked. Obviously, I’m nowhere near as talented a post-processor as Martina, so I expect she’ll have one or two constructive things to say about these… :) The images are thumbnails – click on them to display the full-size photo.
Session One
Session Two
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January 2 2009, 06:27
Categories: English | Programming | Life Tags: blog
So here I am. 05:41 in the morning of the second day of 2009. After almost a year of thinking, visualizing, planning, designing, coding, testing and tweaking (the past 8 days of which have been the most extreme) I am finally ready to re-launch my blog! I made a half-hearted attempt at it about a year ago, tried out various blog engines and themes, but quickly realized I wanted (had to have!) my very own unique look. As it turned out, it took me more than a year to turn that idea into reality.
Thus – welcome to my blog!
For a few years now, I’ve been saying to friends: “I really should be blogging.” Two kinds of things frequently pop into my brain that makes me want to share my thoughts with the rest of the world:
- Complaints on the state of things. I am constantly bothered by all the inefficiency and stupidity that I observe on different levels of society. Mostly it’s just these really practical everyday things, like how stupid it is that we carry around so many pieces of plastic in our wallets when one should suffice (the topic of an upcoming post, no doubt). It’s strange because I don’t consider myself an extremely opinionated guy, and yet so often I get so frustrated with such obvious inadequacy.
- Results from venturing into unknown programming territory. It’s not very often that, as a developer or IT professional I encounter a problem that no one else seems to have reported a solution to (at least one that Google knows about). But it does happen. And when it happens the result is usually anywhere from a couple of hours to several days of research and troubleshooting before finally coming up with a solution. And as a good citizen of the developer ecosystem, I of course feel the overwhelming need to share it with my peers so that anyone facing the same problem now or at some point in the future may benefit from my pioneering efforts. You know, give something back for a change.
Now I have a forum in which I can express these things without further delay!
So those two kinds of things are mainly what I will be posting. There will be other things too, I’m sure. We’ll just have to see what enters my brain. It’s quite conceivable that I might be posting both in English and Swedish (the latter of which is my native tongue), and I will maintain separate categories for both languages so that you may select to subscribe only to one of them if you like.
I also plan to make this blog a place where I can host various articles and pieces of software I plan to publish in the near future. I have so much stuff just sitting around for far too long now because I didn’t feel I had an adequate place to make it available for your perusal. Well, I guess this morning marks the end of that. Damn, I am so excited!!! :)
Before I go, a few words about the technological aspects of this blog. It is running on BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5, and the graphical design is implemented as a theme. There are some features of the theme I’m particularly happy with:
- Complete separation of markup and style (with a few exceptions imposed by the engine emitting crappy markup).
- Completely flexible and “stretchable” layout.
- Heavy use of PNG transparency. This should be obvious for instance in the way the illustration and green-to-black gradient in the header interact when you change the width of the browser window.
Speaking of the illustration, some folks have already asked me what meaning it is supposed to convey. I want to leave this up to each individual beholder to decide (you know, just like the kindergarten lady used to say about abstract art). Maybe it symbolizes the general area of human-machine interaction, a subject to which this blog is partly devoted. Perhaps it represents my frustrations in trying to make these damn machines do what I want them to do. Hell, maybe it even accurately depicts the feelings of the various women who have tried their best to love me over the years.
Leave a comment and tell me what you see. I’m off to bed now.
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