Christmas party! As one of the newly-joined employees this year, I was roped into the party committee. Which really didn’t involve much more than a brainstorming session for finding a theme. After that, our new office assistant took over, because it turned out that organizing a party is one of her favourite activities, and she wasn’t very interested in offloading any tasks to the rest of us. Until this afternoon, when I got to hang up balloons and other decorations.

It didn’t look like much in strong lamplight but felt quite festive with added disco lighting.

And here’s my alien costume! There were a few more aliens in the party crowd, and three Edgar the Bugs.

A thing got messed up at work, through nobody’s fault. Or perhaps through the fault of Google and their crappy communication about their services. Anyway, it was broken and it needed to be fixed, and it was going to be several hours of tedious work of cloning and configuring databases, and manually recreating stuff that we already had in our original database but that Google wouldn’t let us move to the new database. And while that work was underway, nobody could use the test environment for anything, so doing this on Monday morning when people had demos scheduled and whatnot would have sucked even more. So here I am, working well past my normal hours on a Friday evening.

At least I have my knitting – the big one that I can no longer easily bring on my commute. And snacks. And a cat, although he is not visible here.

I will never voluntarily choose to use Google’s cloud service offering ever again.

Brewery tour and beer tasting evening at Omnipollos kyrka with Active Solution.

Kind of fun, mostly because this brewery is fun and irreverent in their approach to everything. It was founded by two people, one “beer person” and one artist. Now the beer person brew experimental crazy beer, and the artist person makes art for each new beer. Apparently the first beer they submitted to Systembolaget caused serious head-scratching because the label they sent over was just art and didn’t even include the name of the beer.

We had dinner (with beer), then a tour of the brewery as well as of the atelier in the attic. Then a long beer-tasting session, which I abandoned halfway through. Most beer is undrinkable to me, and I don’t much enjoy drunken company either.

They had some interesting alcohol-free beer, one with mango flavour and one with blueberry. I did enjoy those with my dinner. Sadly but expectedly, those were not part of the tasting.

Our team is getting shuffled to a different corner of the office. We’re now at the very far end, furthest from the kitchen, and about as far as you can get from a toilet. It’s still an upgrade in the sense that we get better views, and even a small balcony. Plus the room is smaller and cosier. Until now we’ve been occupying a quarter of a large room that is otherwise mostly unoccupied, so sometimes it feels like we’re rattling around in an empty crate. And it means that the room has often been a bit cold.

Today I learned how modern office interiors can work. There are these “wells” in the floor where cabling comes up. And it turns out that that’s all modular and adjustable. You lift up the carpet squares, under which there are floor squares, under which there is an almost knee-deep space with cables and ductwork. The floor pieces are only supported in the corners – the rest of the space is free to play with.

If, for example, you want to rearrange the desks in your room, you can move the cables around, put the floor piece with the well where you want the cables to come out of the floor, and put the rest of the floor back. New room layout, no messy cables, and no handymen required. At most you may need to cut out a space for the floor well in a new carpet piece, because the carpet pieces and the floor pieces don’t match each other in size.

Zeitgeist: The theme of this year is AI.

(Also: the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, and the demented paedophile at the helm of the United States. But those are mostly too far away to directly affect me, or for me to affect them.)

Everyone is talking about AI, and AI is infesting everything. Especially the tech sector of course: AI tooling to assist coding, AI assistants in every other application, AI-generated images in every article and presentation and blog post.

Some of it is useful. Getting an AI assistant to review my code changes, or asking ChatGPT a technical question that I can’t get any solid hits for from Google – absolutely a win.

Some of it is annoying. Any time I see yet another bland, soulless AI-generated image in a Powerpoint presentation – because the speaker thought the slide looked dull without an image and couldn’t be bothered to do more than write a generic prompt – my respect for the speaker goes down several notches.

Some of it is worrying. Far too many people ascribe intelligence to something that is simply a statistical process for chaining together a likely-looking string of words. When your prime minister says that he uses chat bots as sounding boards for his ideas… yeah. Not good.

On the corporate side, everyone is scrambling to get on board the AI train. Very much putting the cart before the horse, in many cases, asking themselves “Where can we use AI in our business” rather than “These are the challenges ahead of us, what is the best solution?” Everyone has been given a shiny hammer and is now desperately looking for anything that even remotely resembles a nail, because god forbid the market believes that they’re not swinging their hammer as fast as everybody else.

Giant corporations burning billions of dollars, ever faster, on stealing everybody’s work, in order to create content that is sometimes useful and other times utterly destructive. What could go wrong?

The results of our team retrospective we had this afternoon.

Do I expect you to find it interesting? Not really, no, but it’s the only thing that I photographed today.

Stuff is broken at work. Stuff that impacts our work immensely but is entirely outside of my circle of control; there is nothing I can do to fix it. I can only watch the alerts go off constantly and the graphs all point in the wrong direction. And I can turn things off and back on again at regular intervals to minimise the damage. I’m like a data administrator from the previous century, pressing buttons to refresh my numbers and then manually twiddling knobs in response.

It’s simultaneously stressful and boring. There’s no way I can focus on any of my actual work while this is going on, but I can absolutely make pancakes in between clicking stuff, so that’s what I’m doing to add some cheer to my day.

Conference day with Active Solution on Gistholmen.

Theme of the day: workshop techniques. So we workshopped about workshopping.

In the afternoon we took a ferry back to the city. Much noisier than sailing, but also quite a lot faster.

Two-day company conference with Active Solution en route to and on Gistholmen. The company is really spoiling us.

We spent half of today sailing to Gistholmen.

Met up at the harbour at Strandvägen and got on the four boats that would be ours for the day.

None of the people on our boat were particularly familiar with sailing, but luckily the boats came with skippers who actually knew what they were doing. We got put to work pretty soon, though, pulling on ropes and sometimes not pulling on ropes and manning the wheel.

Sailing boats are high-tech equipment these days, with all sorts of sensors and meters. Speed, depth, the angle at which the wind hits the sails…

We left the city behind.

When we got into roomier waters, we raced the other three boats. Really the skipper did all the racing and we just did our best to follow his instructions as quickly as we could, without misunderstanding him. Which we didn’t always succeed at.

It wasn’t very windy at all, but when we caught as much wind as we could, the boat leaned quite impressively. For a non-sailor like me, at least.

I don’t know what looks weirder: the below-deck room at the angle that it actually was, or seeing everything hanging crooked because I’ve straightened out the room.

We passed some narrower bits around Vaxholm, had lunch on board, then raced the others again.

Arrived at Gistholmen and did a bit of actual conferencing.

The island is a small one. A cabin village with 21 small cabins, one larger central building with a reception, a kitchen and a great hall, and that’s about it.

I was all peopled out after the day and took a walk around the island in the early evening. Circled about 80% of the perimeter of the island.

Small changes in circumstances can lead to surprising changes in wardrobe needs. In February, the IT team at Sortera moved down one floor. The new space has much more effective climate control, to the point where the seasons melt into one. It doesn’t matter much whether it’s February or August, it’s almost the same temperature. That’s a stark contrast to floor three where we used to sit, which got rather stuffy and hot in the summer. Our corner of floor two is rather cool even on the hottest days.

And all of a sudden I have no need for my summer-weight office clothes. I have a bunch of summer dresses that I’ve been wearing to various jobs and various offices through the years, and this season most of them haven’t left the hanger. Summer is about to end and I’ll be packing them away without even needing to wash them. Instead, when I’m getting ready to cycle to the office, I pack trousers and long-sleeved shirts.