I stopped eating meat… hmm, let’s see… 16 years ago. It started out as a teenage rebellion thing (I was 15 at the time): one day I announced to my mother that I was now a vegetarian. So that was that.

Initially I stuck to it out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Being vegetarian meant being different and it was kind of cool. Then it became a habit. Then I realised that I felt better when I wasn’t eating meat.

At first I was a straightforward vegetarian, eating no part of no dead animal. At some point (I can’t remember when or why) I felt like eating seafood, so I tried that again. After a period of experimentation I concluded that while I could eat fish, I didn’t like it much any more: most often it didn’t taste good, and it felt less good than veggies. (Meat, on the other hand, I neither want to nor can eat.) The exception was raw fish: sushi tastes good, as does gravad lax.

So now I eat veggies, and very occasionally sushi – maybe once or twice a month. Cooked fish remains a backup option for those cases when the choice is between either the fish, or boiled potatoes and bread for dinner all week. (Case in point: the Canary islands.)

This whole topic comes up regularly: lunches at work, various organized events, trips etc. I say that I’m a vegetarian, and inevitably get the follow-up question: “Is fish OK?” I used to think it was a weird question to ask when someone’s just told you that they’re a vegetarian. Vegetarian means eats vegetables after all. But then again, my own answer to that question tended to be a “Well, kind of, in emergencies, but I’d rather not” so the question obviously wasn’t as absurd as it sounded. It’s semi-vegetarians like me who’ve muddled the terminology.

I could call myself a pescatarian, except that isn’t really true, because I would almost always choose a vegetarian dish over a fish dish. (Assuming the vegetarian dish does not consist solely of boiled potatoes.) And besides, I don’t think your average non-vegetarian would even understand that word.

So I think I need a new word. From now on, I’m a sushitarian.

The Steve rule states that every group of fifteen or more programmers will have more guys with the same name than women. Yesterday’s event fulfilled not just the Steve rule, but the Steve rule squared. Not only were there more guys with the same name than there were women (which isn’t hard) – there were more such name groups than there were women. The participant list showed 3x Anders, 3x Joakim, and a few 2-name groups – and one single woman.

I’d expected to be in a minority but not that extreme!

Yesterday I attended an “unconference” organised by the Swedish ALT.NET group. An unconference is like a conference except it’s free, informal and mostly self-organizing.

This unconference had two parts: first a series of “lightning talks”, i.e. brief presentations of up to 10 minutes, and then an “Open Space”, i.e. a set of self-organizing discussions. (The Wikipedia page explains quite well how the “self-organizing” part works, and it actually worked surprisingly well.)

Both parts were fruitful and interesting. The lightning talks were a good way to get started and to get our brains moving, but the bulk of the action happened in the Open Space discussions. The topics ranged from Domain-specific languages through Traditional roles in Agile projects to Working with legacy code.

I wanted to take part as a pig rather than a chicken, to use a Scrum metaphor, so I held a talk myself, about continuous integration – how we’ve implemented it in our project, and why I think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. Apparently I made an impression on at least one listener.


I got somewhat spoiled at my previous job. At a global firm with a large number of excellent developers, there were always presentations to attend, debates to follow, people to learn from. Now that I work in a very small team of rather more ordinary developers, I don’t get that kind of inspiration and information served on a silver platter any more, and need to look for it more actively.

I’ve also come to realise that I care more about code quality and good design than the rest of my team, and sometimes the uphill struggle against a morass of ugly old code gets a bit demoralizing. It was nice to meet people whose values and ideals are more aligned with mine, and who grapple with similar problems.

I went home yesterday with two book tips, one tool to try out, some good advice, and a renewed sense of energy and inspiration. I’m looking forward to the next ALT.NET event already!

NY Times writes about the “25 random things about me” meme. A sign of some sort of respectability? Or perhaps simply of ubiquity.

As memes go, it’s a relatively good one, I’d say. Unlike stuff like “The 5 best books I’ve read” and “5 reasons I blog” this actually requires some creative thinking.

Inger Edelfeldt’s Namnbrunnen (“The Well of Names”) is a collection of modern fairy tales (in the tradition of HC Andersen and Selma Lagerlöf, the author points out) loosely connected by a framework story of storytellers meeting on a town square and telling each other their tales.

The stories have a proper fairy tale feel to them, with princes, serving maids, talking animals and such, and mostly happy endings. But they also have a more modern, psychological angle – children hoping to gain their parents’ love by living up to their expectations; jealousy killing a loving relationship, etc.

The psychological theme gives each story an anchor, while the fairy tale layer gives it wonder and magic and a sense of tradition. The combination is full of some quite unexpected turns and many of the stories ended up someplace I hadn’t foreseen at all.

Edelfeldt tries to use a fairy tale language, too, which for her means about 19th-century Swedish. I found that contrived and a bit pompous to begin with, then got used to it, only to be occasionally jarred by some modern expression. On the whole I would have preferred a simpler and more even tone.

This is one of those books that I had mixed feelings about while reading it, but the longer I let it stew in my head, the better I like it. I’m already thinking of re-reading it – and of reading HC Andersen.

AdLibris.

I’ve spent the last few evenings moving all my stuff from the old PC to the shiny new Mac, which has generally gone more smoothly than I expected. Opera is up and running, with all my bookmarks and email and RSS archive. Today I got Opera’s list of saved passwords moved as well, so I can now blog again! (For almost all web sites I rely totally on Opera to remember my passwords, and haven’t memorised anything, so without it I’d have to look them up every single time.) Moving Mozy from a PC to a Mac was relatively straightforward, too.

However I have concluded that NeoOffice is not an acceptable substitute for Office – slow to start, spreadsheets look horrendously clunkily ugly, and it cannot deal with .mdb files. I guess I will need to install Office (which means installing a Windows VM, because I’m not going to buy another version of Office).

Also I’ve realised that using iPhoto, which people generally say good things about, for managing my photos is pretty much out of the question. It threw all my 8000 photos into a single bucket, keeping only one folder level, which meant it was almost impossible to work with the files. I’m going to take a closer look at Picasa and see if there are any other contenders out there. Absolute must-haves include working with my existing folder structure, and good tagging support.