Day 1 of WordPress yielded 15 spam comments, about the usual topics. I’d actually forgotten about spam comments – the TinyTuring plugin for MT worked perfectly. I’ve enabled Akismet for now but I liked TinyTuring better, because it completely freed me from all comment moderation. No false positives, no false negatives, no work. I’m definitely going to have to find or write something similar for WordPress.

After almost seven years with the same employer, today I’m saying good-bye. I’ve been with the firm through recessions, market crises (remember Enron?) and legal upheaval. I’ve quit and come back; been a permanent employee, then contractor, and then an employee again. I’ve been in 3 divisions and 6 different teams. This was my first employer after graduation, and the reason we moved to London. And very soon this long relationship is going to become history.

I’ve already emptied my desk and my drawers, packed my books, and found a new home for my plants. I’ve almost gotten used to saying “here’s how you could fix this bug” instead of saying “here’s how we could fix this bug”. In a few hours we’ll go for farewell drinks, and then I’ll cycle home with a rucksack full of books, and that’s it. It’s almost enough to make me teary-eyed!

It will feel very strange to get up on Tuesday and not have a job to go to.

Meanwhile, this is the first time I blog during office hours!

If you’ve visited the site within the past day, you’ll have noticed that it’s got a shiny new look. That’s the WordPress migration done!

“Mostly done” would be a more accurate description. Some things are broken, and I’ll be working on fixing those. Known problems include:

• No RSS feed
• Broken permalinks for categories and for some posts
• No header (that line of black text up there is just depressingly black)

While this new version is still in progress, the old one is running in parallel, and that includes the existing RSS feeds. In fact I am still posting new posts to the old blog, and then copying them over into the new blog, just to get them into the RSS feed.

Apart from the RSS feed, all the features of the old blog are present in the new one. The orange colour scheme is still here; links should work and images should appear; there’s a list of recent comments and a list of most popular posts, as well as a link to my photo gallery. The only thing that has disappeared is the full archive of all posts – I didn’t find that page very interesting or useful.

Ingrid is seventeen months old today. I’m still keeping track of months for these blog posts, but otherwise I now think of her age as “about a year and a half” – the months no longer feel relevant. She’s old enough for years now.

Ingrid reads Edge magazine

This month has been a continuation and a consolidation of the previous one. She is learning new words, although they all still tend to sound almost identical. I used to think that when parents say “We understand her” about their babies’ incomprehensible babbling, it was just wishful thinking, but it really works like that. I know that no one else could possibly understand Ingrid’s words, and even though we also have difficulty at times, we do generally understand what she means. But it only works because she only talks about things she can see, so the range of possibilities is limited. When we’re out and she suddenly shouts “paa!” I know that that means “dog” and not “book”, because there are no books out there (and also because only dogs generate that kind of excitement in her).

Trains and dogs are the two things that she always points out, with 100% reliability. If she sees a dog, she will say so. And she’s very good at spotting them. It’s the same with adults: we see what we’re primed for. When I was pregnant, I saw pregnant women everywhere; now I notice all the prams and pushchairs I pass. She notices trains and dogs.

Dogs are interesting but scary too. They’re best viewed at a distance of about one or two metres. When they get too close, she gets scared, turns away and closes her eyes – even if the dog is a quiet and well-behaved one. Cats are also very interesting, but there aren’t that many in central London, so until a week ago she’d only seen them in books. Last weekend we visited some friends who had cats (and chickens, too). The cats were initially as scary as dogs – 2 metres was close enough – but within a few hours that distance had been reduced to a few (baby) steps. The chickens were just scary.

Ingrid has Estonian words for most things (I spend most time talking to her) but Swedish ones for some, including sitta (sit) and strumpa (sock), although she also seems to understand when I talk about sokk (sock in Estonian). “Cat” used to be called kass (in Estonian) and was then katt (in Swedish) and is now some sort of mixture between the two. At nursery she waves bye-bye when we leave, but at home, we say hej då. During the weekend it takes her a day or so to switch from bye to hej då, and then the week after it takes a day to switch back. So perhaps she is on the verge of understanding that people speak different languages?

She is also understanding more and more how things work, how the world works. She likes to pull my shoelaces to untie them, and she’s got a vague idea of how zippers work. She likes to pick up litter and throw it in a garbage bin. She likes to brush my teeth while I brush hers, and to try and screw the lid on her sippy cup.

Fruit is still her favourite food, followed by bread and cheese. Other things are more unpredictable. Some things she devours every single time (Grassington’s Sweetcorn & Sweet Potato Waffles), others she rejects completely (porridge, no matter what I add to it). I’ve been trying to see a pattern there but not figured it out yet. Perhaps there is none. Whatever the food, though, it needs to be finger food, or possibly fork food. She will NOT let me feed her, and her ability with a spoon is still not so good. She’s much better with a fork, but she generally prefers to use her fingers.

Walking and climbing are as much fun as ever, as is jumping down from things. When we go swimming, she is always trying to get to the edge, so she can climb up and jump down again. When she’s bored with everything at home, a walk down and up the stairs often keeps her occupied for a while. With her longer legs and better balance, she now takes them standing up, not on all fours any more, although she needs to hold my hand (or two).

It seems she also likes balancing – standing and walking on wobbly things. When I help her up on a spring rider, she isn’t interested in sitting – she’ll climb on top and stand up. (Luckily she’s sensible enough to hold on to my hands when she does that.) When we’re on the Tube, she tries to stand and walk, too. She’s also more fond of her swing. We’ve had it for a good while now, and her interest in it has waxed and waned, and is at a high now.

But her favourite pastime is watching Teletubbies. We don’t have a TV but we do have computers. Eric often watches movies and cartoons on his, and Ingrid likes to join him. In the morning when Eric has gotten up and is making his tea, Ingrid runs straight to his chair and waits for him to sit down there and lift her up as well. She likes Futurama, and she likes playing with the various small items on Eric’s desk while he reads the news, but she likes Teletubbies best. She is totally mesmerised by it.

Ingrid watching Teletubbies

Two weeks to go until we move, and only one week of work left. My brain has definitely switched into ‘whatever mode’: I’m taking a short-term view of just about everything. Desk getting messy? Whatever, it’ll all be packed away soon. Tower Hamlets starts collecting recyclable rubbish separately, so we need place for a recycling bag at home? Whatever, just stuff it in the cupboard on top of all the other stuff. New CVS tagging approach proposed at work? Whatever, I’ll be long gone before it has any effect. Gas company raising prices again? Whatever.

Victoria, Crown Princess of Sweden, is just about two weeks older than me. The Swedish media report on her doings regularly. I can’t say I follow them with much interest, but I’ve enjoyed the occasional updates on her “milestones”, because mine happened at about the same time. Victoria finishes high school. Victoria goes to university. Etc.

Today Svenska Dagbladet reported on Victoria’s name day celebrations. (Name day is a European concept and a reasonably popular thing in Sweden.) And I couldn’t help thinking – she looks like a tant, like an old lady. And she is my age! She may be a crown princess but at least I don’t look like a tant.

TfL is currently running an ad campaign “to encourage more considerate behaviour on London’s transport system”. There are posters on buses and in Tube stations, and films, too, apparently.

This seems like a pointless waste of money to me. People do not litter / make noise / put their feet on the seat because they don’t know better. They litter because they don’t care. The people who litter will not pay any attention to these ads, and if they do, they won’t change their behaviour.

It’s the same with all these reminders to “please remember to take all your belongings with you when leaving the train”. A passenger who’s attentive enough to listen to announcements will need no prompting to count their bags and coats before getting off.

I wonder if anyone has studied the effectiveness of such ads. Apparently public service announcements can be effective. And I can see how ads might work well when the aim is to raise awareness of an important issue (smoking kills) or to gather support for an important question (political protests). But the fundamental assumption has to be that your audience wants to hear your message!

I am (slowly) working on migrating this blog from Movable Type to WordPress. Whenever I hear the two mentioned in the same sentence, it’s always to say how much better WordPress is. I’ve only just installed it, but already I agree.

I don’t expect any major changes to the structure or layout. But if there are any improvements you would like to see here, now would be a good time to let me know, so I can try to do those at the same time. Is some part hard to navigate, difficult to find, hard to read, or just plain ugly? Leave a comment here or send me an email.

PS: To be fair to WordPress, migrating the blog content took a few minutes, so that’s not what is taking time. The hard part will be to find and customise a suitable theme, and to reimplement the various tweaks I’ve made to the MT templates.

I have finally made some active effort to find a job in Stockholm. Started today by updating my CV. Then I tried to translate it into Swedish and realised that I am unable to talk about any of my jobs (either the finance-oriented or the technology-oriented) in Swedish. I just don’t have the vocabulary. I don’t even know how to translate “desktop applications” or “automated data feeds” or “structured commodity derivatives”!

It could be worse… I could be looking for a job in Estonia.

Off the Books is subtitled “The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor”. It’s a study of the economic networks of a poor black neighbourhood in Chicago, complete with gangs, prostitutes etc. Reviewers have labelled it a “revealing study” and “a fascinating look at a place and community that would otherwise remain entirely under the radar”, and promised insights into the P&L statements of gang leaders.

It all sounded very interesting, but the book itself was a total disappointment. The book is too long but nevertheless has too little content.

First of all, the book focuses more on the social networks than on the actual economy of the neighbourhood. There’s more talk about the social responsibilities of gang leaders than about how they make money. This is perhaps to be expected, given that the author is a professor of sociology and African-American studies, not of economy, but it was nevertheless not what I expected.

Of course the book could nevertheless have been interesting, but it wasn’t. On the one hand it doesn’t carry its weight as a serious study – it’s not rigorous and solid enough. The whole book is made up of minutiae. There are lots of anecdotes and observations, but few hard facts and analysis, and hardly any conclusions. A study of an economy should surely at least give us some facts and figures: How large is the economy? How many people live in the area? How much do they earn? How much do they work? A map would have been useful as well.

It also doesn’t work as a popular book, because it’s not particularly well written. It’s repetitive and badly organised. The language is leaden, painfully awkward – an uncomfortable mix of highbrow academic terms and colloquial first-person accounts. The book is in desperate need of an editor – it looks like it got published without any attention from editorial staff.

Here’s a representative section:

[Big Cat] was only one of many local stakeholders who resolved economic disputes because the state had no formal authority. Many other local people enforced contracts, or resolved disputes, or, for a fee, could find you a gun, a social security card, or even a job as a day laborer or a nanny for a wealthy family. Others may have claimed control over parks, alleyways and street corners; these people would have to be paid if one wanted to fix a car, sell drugs, or panhandle at that spot. And there were many local loan sharks, besides Big Cat, who could loan you cash, or who could find you customers – for stolen stereos or drugs, for prostitutes or home-cooked lunches – in a matter of a few hours.

Enumeration is piled on enumeration, and it goes on and on in the same vein. I found this so irritating that after 100 pages I couldn’t take any more and gave up.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.