As of today, I am an employee of Konsultbolag1 (“the consulting company”) which, despite the name, is not an IT consultancy. Instead they provide training, consulting services and software tools for requirements management and testing of IT systems. The software tools part is the one I’ll be working with.

Before we got to Sweden, I was fully prepared for several months of job hunting. There might be no relevant openings, or I might not like them, or they might not like me. In the end it took no more than two weeks. We appear to have arrived right at the top of the business cycle for the IT industry: every firm is clamoring for more staff, and employees can afford to pick and choose.

Monday two weeks ago I searched through Monster and picked out 8 ads that seemed relevant and/or interesting. I also sent my CV to the IT departments of a few large banks. On Tuesday, the day after, I got replies to a few of my letters, and more followed the day after. 10 days later I had already met 5 companies, some of them more than once.

My initial plan was to aim for the finance/IT intersection: banks, other financial institutions, firms writing financial software, perhaps even IT consultancies focusing on the finance industry. And yet I chose the one firm I met that has no links to the financial industry. They seemed like more fun than any of the others, frankly. I also feel that I don’t necessarily want to narrow my career to “IT within finance”. I would rather broaden my experience than focus it. For that same reason I am also not continuing with Winforms or Office integration, but sailing off into unknown waters: web development (with ASP.NET).

So I will be developing software that will help other people develop even more software. That feels strange in a way: kind of circular. But at the same time I am keenly aware of the importance of good dev tools (as my previous colleagues can attest!) and good tools give me warm fuzzy feelings. The world needs more good tools, there can never be enough.

Via Bruce Schneier I found this essay by a mom who let her 9-year-old son take the NY subway home on his own.

Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.

Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.

Even more interesting is this graphic that Bruce links to, showing (anecdotally) how children’s freedom of movement has decreased over the past 4 generations. While I think some of this decrease is sensible (the 8-year-old in 1919 did not have to cope with cars doing 70mph on busy roads), much of it is due to excessive anxiety.

I am also reminded of this TED talk about 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do.

House 6. Mellangårdsvägen. Removed from our list already during our pre-check (a few days before the viewing) when we saw that the house was close to a main road and a busy crossing. No buy.

House 7. Norra vägen. Nice inside, but the plot of land was small, and the whole area felt badly planned: the neighbouring houses were too many and too close. The view from the bedroom window was right onto someone else’s wall, and when we went to the back garden and I imagined myself sitting there in the sun in the summer, I also had to imagine 7 other households staring at me. No buy.

House 8. Solhemsbackarna. A terraced house, but the last one in a row, and right next to a commons. Looked good on the internet but in real life the interior felt small and the ceiling a bit low. Plus of course the area was full of dozens upon dozens of exact copies of the house. It was half the price of a detached house, but it really would have felt like a budget option, and we’re not that anxious to save money on this purchase. No buy.

(This is my last post about the WordPress migration, I promise!)

I liked WordPress better than Movable Type as soon as I’d installed it, and my opinion hasn’t changed. If you’re using MT and haven’t tried WP, do try it out!

The only advantage of MT that I have noticed thus far is that it is possible to manage several blogs via one control panel. But on the other hand most settings and templates are blog-specific anyway, so I’m not sure how much time that actually saves (apart from software upgrades).

Just about every part of WP is more user-friendly than the MT equivalent. The control panel is better designed and easier to navigate. The templates are more transparent and much easier to work with. Instead of MT’s strange tags (of which there are two flavours and I could never remember what the difference was) WP uses normal php functions.

Wordpress is also more feature-rich and more flexible. I can create static pages in addition to blog posts, add a list of links, easily switch between themes, add direct “edit this” links to individual posts, etc. And from a developer point of view, the WP functions give me more control with less work (mostly because they have many more parameters) than the MT tags.

Wordpress makes tinkering a lot more convenient because pages are served dynamically. MT on the other hand pre-builds and saves all pages, so each template change leads to a full rebuild of all the affected pages. With 600+ blog posts, the rebuild caused by a change to the main template takes long enough to make me really reluctant to change things. (And there is no option to rebuild just one post as a test case.)

The documentation for WP is an order of magnitude better than that for MT. Compare: the MTCategories tag vs the wp_list_categories function.

My initial plan was to use an existing theme for this blog, perhaps only changing a few fonts and colours. I browsed a bunch of themes, downloaded half a dozen, and tried them out. When I had picked the few that seemed most promising, I took a look at the code of each one to see which one would be easiest to modify. The WordPress template structure turned out to be so clear and transparent and the documentation so helpful that I ended up writing my own theme, using the existing themes only as a source of ideas and to get an idea of what functions were available. And I did this when I had no experience of WordPress, whereas I never got comfortable enough with MT to write a theme from scratch, even after having used it for over two years.

So I got a nice exercise in web design, learning PHP and CSS, both of which I’d touched before but not really used much. Now I can write passable PHP code and do some pretty nifty things with CSS. Hmm, perhaps I could find a way to squeeze in some javascript here, too?

I also had the pleasure to use the Firefox Web Developer extension. A very nice tool, so good that it’s worth downloading Firefox just to get that extension.

  1. Ingrid’s version of longer words often consist of the first syllable said twice (possibly with a difference in tone or stress). mandariin becomes ma-ma, magama becomes ba-baa, käru becomes tät-tää, and so on. It’s not just babbling: she knows that the words are not supposed to sound like that, but she cannot say them our way. My theory is that she cannot reposition her mouth quickly enough to string two different syllables together: she prepares the mouth once, and then just opens and closes twice.
  2. Her words generally end in vowels or in ll or ss. She cannot say bok or õun – it’s always boo and õuu. It makes me think of Japanese where (as far as I know) syllables consist of one consonant and one vowel (and McDonalds becomes Makudonarudosu). Perhaps there is a linguistic conclusion to be drawn from this?

House 3. Torulfsgatan. Not too bad on the inside, but from the outside this was an ugly house in a street with 10 more identical ugly houses. Gives the owner all the disadvantages of a terraced house but at the price of a detached house. No buy.

House 4. Båtsman Nähls väg. Garden too small, and the inside of the house was nothing spectacular. No buy.

House 5. Stackvägen. Another split plot, where the access road must have taken up a third of the plot, the house another third, which left a narrow strip of land on each side of the building as “garden”. On the inside the house was beautiful – just the kind of open plan house we’d been looking for, plus it was in very good shape, shiny new. We were really sorry to see such a lovely house on such a tiny plot of land. No buy.

House 1. Byvägen. Large house on a split plot*. Long and narrow house, so we called it “the loaf”. Garden too small, house too dark, with too many small rooms (which is good for a large family but not much use to us), and the whole thing felt a bit cheap. No buy.

House 2. Frälsegränd. Average on all counts. Did not stand out as either good or bad, except for the location, which was far from both bus and train. No buy. Snapped up by someone else within about a week.


A split plot (avstyckad tomt) is a plot that has been created by cutting up a larger plot. Someone has a house with a large garden and decides to chop their garden in two and sell the other half. Often one of the plots is behind the other one, not adjacent to the street (rather than the two being side by side), so an extra strip of land is cut off from the front plot for an access road to the rear plot.

  1. Going through the box of clothes that I put aside (because they didn’t fit my new shape) when I went back to work 6 months after Ingrid was born, and discovering that they now mostly fit again. It’s like buying a whole new wardrobe but a lot cheaper, and with far less hassle.
  2. Finding a jar of vanilla sugar in the kitchen cupboard, with a “best before” date in late 1996.

I have now fixed the last remaining functional issues with the migration to WordPress and decommissioned the old Movable Type blog. Unfortunately this led to some duplicates in the RSS feeds, but that should be a one-time issue. Almost everything else should work, including 99% of any links that you may have to pages from the old blog. Let me know if you run across anything that’s broken.

We have two big projects right now: I need to find a job, and we need to find a house. Every Sunday is househunting day: we take the tube to Spånga and go to all the viewings we can, as long as they seem even remotely interesting. In fact when we have time we also view houses that we don’t expect to be interested in at all, just to see what’s out there, and to educate ourselves.

What are we looking for?

  • Location: Northwest Stockholm, at a distance that’s convenient for commuting. Spånga is the area we’re focusing on, because it’s a nice area, and not as expensive as some other nice areas in NW Stockholm. It also has good communications in to the city centre.
  • Open plan, or something that can be converted to an open plan through judicious tearing down of walls. We loved our last flat in London, which consisted of one small bedroom and one huge everything-else room, with a high ceiling, exposed brick walls and exposed beams. If we could have taken it with us to Stockholm, we would have. We want something similar here. We want a house where it is natural for the entire family to spend time together in one large area, so that whoever is cooking dinner in the kitchen can hear the music that the others are listening to in the living room, hear their comments on what they’re doing on the computer, etc.
  • Lots of light, lots of space. High ceilings.
  • About 3 bedrooms.
  • A house. Ideally a detached house, but a good terraced house might be interesting, too. No flats, though. This is because we also want…
  • A decent-sized garden/yard. It should have enough space for children to run around and play, for some flowerbeds and berry bushes, and perhaps for a small kitchen garden.
  • We don’t care very much about the current state of the house (as long as there are no structural problems). Ugly 1970s wallpaper, worn-looking bathrooms, old fridge/freezer/washer – all that can be fixed later.

Swedish real estate agents have a shared database that lists all houses for sale via an agent, in all of Sweden. This database is freely available on the internet, with photos, maps, viewing times, floor plans etc. We keep track of everything that’s put up for sale in Spåga.

I’ve created a del.icio.us account where I will be saving all the houses that we consider even remotely interesting. They’re tagged by viewing date – this weekend’s viewings, for example, are tagged houses+20080413. Feel free to take a look and send us your views on what you see!