Today was “getting to know each other” day, by way of a treasure hunt on bicycles.

We took a couple of pre-booked boats from Strömstad to South Koster island. It was windy and a bit cold, but the views were nice.

On South Koster, we all got bikes and went off on a treasure hunt kind of thing. We’d all been divided into teams of about 8 people beforehand, with a mixture of people in each team, both geographically and departmentally. There was a website with a map, and markers on the map denoting places where we would do various tasks. The tasks were predictably mostly quite cringeworthy. “Take a photo of your team to illustrate teamwork.” “Record a team cheer.” “Answer this quiz with questions about Evidi.”

There wasn’t much time to complete the tasks; our team was half an hour late for lunch and still didn’t manage to get all of them. Hence the lack of photos. I guess you could say that a little bit of teambuilding happened? We spoke to each other, but didn’t have an awful lot of time for that either.

Lunch was at Kläpphagen, which at least served better vegetarian fare than Strömstad Spa, although that bar was very low. (Yesterday’s dinner at Strömstad Spa had a barbecue theme. The meat-eaters got at least four kinds of grilled meat. The vegetarians got the meat-eaters’ side orders: potatoes, corn on the cob, sallad. That’s it.) This place did have a delicious vegetarian dish, but I ended up eating salmon because there was no vegetarian protein. Seriously, are these people all living in the last century?

Got back on the boats and were ferried back to Strömstad. Lovely views again. And not a drop of rain! The weather forecast promised heavy rain off and on through the day, and I had been mentally preparing for a grim day out. But somehow we managed to miss all of the rain. There was none of it while we were on the boats out, none while we biked. Then a serious downpour while we were eating, which was over before lunch was over. No rain on the way back; pouring rain again in the evening.

As of September 1st, Active Solution becomes part of Evidi, a larger group of consulting companies. I don’t yet know enough about them to have a firm opinion on whether I like this or not. Or, rather, I don’t particularly like it, because I intentionally joined a smaller consultancy instead of going for one of the big ones, but I’m not all that upset either – maybe I will learn to like it. It is what it is, for now.

Every summer, Evidi gathers all their employees for a weekend in the countryside. Today was day 1 of a three-day weekend in Strömstad.

Well, first I got a three-hour train ride, an hour in Göteborg, and two more hours on a bus. I had time to see Göteborg cathedral, a few canals (including one with small flowering, floating, artificial islands) and a second hand shop.

Evidi is mostly a Norwegian company, even if they have some of their business in Sweden and Denmark. The mood in Strömstad was seriously dampened by the death of Norway’s King Harald V.

The half-day of conferencing we did was par for the course. Leadership figures going through presentations telling everyone about how great the company was and how well it was doing.

And a case study to be discussed and solved in small groups. Too bad that all the 47 small groups were crammed in one giant conference hall, and 90% of everyone was speaking Norwegian. I barely heard half of what people said due to the noise levels, and understood barely half of that, so I had no chance of participating in any of the discussions. Good thing I had brought my knitting.

The office plants – two somewhat scraggly ones – have somehow survived the summer. I thought I was the only one watering them, but they’d be dead if that was the case, with me having been away for five weeks. Interesting.

I am growing somewhat tired of knitting socks during meetings and dead time at the office. Now I’m trying origami as an alternative.

I bought a thick pad of origami paper in Estonia, because it caught my eye and looked pretty. It came with instructions for a small handful of models. The instructions were mostly crap (apart from the very classical models, like the crane and the butterfly) and I only figured out the correct final fold for the box mostly by accident. When I did, I made three, to hopefully cement it in my memory.

Pro: something new for the fingers to do.
Con: a little bit noisy. Although I’m probably the only one to notice the noise.
Pro: the result is pretty.
Con: the result takes up space and is not the least bit useful.

Last week of June, and people are generally gearing up for their vacations. Today was the last time I come to the Active Solution office, until August. There just isn’t likely to be anyone here apart from maybe some manager. Massage Fridays are on pause and there will be no Wednesday fika.

Already today I was the first one here (although that may be due not just to it being summer but also the Sweden-Japan world championship football game, which took place at one o’clock in the morning for us, and which many wanted to watch) and among the last ones to leave, even though I didn’t stay particularly late.

Vacation prep: take home my towel, which has been here for my bicycle commute, and take home whatever is left of my chocolate stash.

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?