Niklas' blog

Mikaela and I went out yesterday, and got ourselves some stuff. The first thing, though, was lunch at Legumes, a very nice vegetarian restaurant on Hornsgatan, the south side of Stockholm city. They’ve renovated recently, not that it actually brought anything really new to the place except for a sense that they’re faring well, and the food is still fresh. After that, we went next-door as there’s a book sale in this country at the moment. Every price-conscious person here should use this site, as it checks the cheapest prices for every book that’s on sale at the moment, so click away! The sale closes on the 26th.

Mikaela and I picked out two mugs (!) from said book-store, which were designed by Penguin, whose book-designs have always triumphed over all. We then went to Judit Herr where I found a brutally handsome shirt, which I first feared to be too tight, but as it was made from good, blended materials, I had no problem breathing while wearing it, so why not? We exited to the tunes of the shop-keeper singing along to the already loud Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”.

We then passed my work, picked up a few things I’d bought the day before – a couple of breads (speja) from Rivalbageriet, and a few DVD’s, for instance “3 Extremes” and “All The President’s Men“. We then ventured on to Hi-Fi Klubben where we bought new speakers, actually white two white MiniPods that Mikaela and I have been pining for. Finally, we can replace the bulky speakers we’ve currently got, and free space. Ah! Evolving, just like Link.

I also got myself a couple of books on the way home: Simon Reynolds’ “Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984″, which is a book on what happened after punk broke through; bands like PiL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, The Fall, Scritti Politti and The Human League are dissected, a lot of pictures are included and it seems like a good read, especially since I like Reynolds’ “Energy Flash“, about the whole grow of electronic music, focusing on England – and on the USA, of course, especially Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson – and make sure you get the edition of that one that contains a CD; not that the tracks are astounding per se, but they’re essential to understanding the evolution of electronic music.

The other book I got is Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s “Montecore – En Unik Tiger”. He’s the guy who wrote “Ett Öga Rött“, one of my favourite books in recent years, and the author’s debut. I’m not at all sure what this one is about, and I don’t want to know. Hassen Khemiri’s first is one of those works that automatically make me want his second, no matter what it would be, as with Morrissey. First, here’s an interview with Hassen Khemiri (in Swedish), courtesy of DN. Second, Sonic reports that Morrissey has “expressed interest” in appearing in the Swedish TV-show “Bingolotto”. According to Sonic, he wants to appear on as many “cheesy” TV-shows as possible, which is why he wants to appear on this one; for those of you who don’t know it, Bingolotto is probably the most popular gaming-show in Sweden, and I think it’s on weekly, with Gunde Svan as host. Weird. I can imagine Moz singing about kills, surrounded by old ladies and men drinking coffee, eating biscuits, plus the effing contortion of reality that Bingoberra is.

On the way home, we were accosted by this paralytic creature who sat next to us and turned out to be one of the people who still thinks one has to shout in order to be heard through a mobile phone. Play the snippet and you’ll perchance hear her shouting. The people’s reaction is typically Swedish: no matter what happens around you, act like it’s not there, and it will go away soon enough. Even if it doesn’t they’ll “do something about it” – by doing nothing. Brilliant strategy.

So what’s Origami, the next big thing from Microsoft? Check this and you’ll know before 2006-03-02, when Microsoft bares all at their site. When Mikaela saw that video, she exclaimed “Oh! An etch-a-sketch!”, which is the best description I’ve seen of the thing, so far. In the mean-time, until it’s released, here’s a java-driven online Etch-A-Sketch!

Speaking of time to do things, if you’re looking for a program (running in Windows) to build your work-days around, and haven’t found anything good, you might want to try Accomplice. Otherwise, ioutliner might be the web-based solution for you. While Accomplice is currently in beta, actually looking and feeling like a program that’s been hoisted from Win 3.11 to Win 98, it works quite well. You must check out the demo that’s available on their site. It’s apparently possible to use it to work in teams, although I’ve no idea how – and it might just not be possible, using the current beta, what do I know? – and you’ve got to use MS Outlook to get the most of it, like calendar and address book-features. Also, it seems to rely on some sort of peer-to-peer technology, that is, if you want to work on projects with others in your vincinity. A server-side-solution would seem like a better way to work, e.g. for letting suppliers in on working in a project, as well. On the other hand, you have Groove that’s been overtaken by Microsoft, and we’ll just see how that works out; I’m not too keen on something that has a lot of features – but needs MS SharePoint Server to give you all that. That said, with Groove becoming Office Groove 2007, I hope for the best as MS are due to release MS Office 2007 beta 2 “soon”. At the moment, I’m using trac to keep one of my office projects in check. As a ticket-handling and wiki-system, it’s obscenely good. I may even try Basecamp for project management.

Another thing I’m really keen on, is Lists of Bests, a site recently bought by The Robot Co-op, the company that also owns All Consuming, 43 Things, 43 Places, yada yada. I’ve been using All Consuming since the start, and I’m right now beta-testing Lists of Bests. The first thing that stikes me about the site, is that the name is irritating to pronounce, and will, no doubt, send people off to thinking and browsing “List of Bests”. Second, the lists contain a few doubles, irritating error messages that have to do with Rails, confounding versions (e.g. “Live At The Apollo (Deluxe Edition)”, which makes you wonder if they really mean that specific deluxe edition or just the album) and at times a title to click, without any artist or linkage to help you (e.g. “Cut” in the music department, which I suspect aims for great album by The Slits), Anyway, I understand the pluralisation of “lists” in the site name, so what about the site? No doubt another venture into the wonderful world of materialism, at first I feared this would turn out to be a catalogue for people with asperger’s syndrome, but no, it’s actually very nice. First, there are a bunch of big lists available already, divided into categories, such as “Movies”, “Books” and “Music”. For movies, you’ve got lists like “The Online Film Critics Society’s ‘Top 100 Overlooked Films of the 1990s’” and “The Criterion Collection”, which you devour by entering them, clicking the check-boxes and note whether or not the film was worth consuming. So what’s good about giving The Robot co-op a lot of marketing info? First, it really inspired me on what films to see quite soon. Of course, that goes for the other lists as well. A lot of the collections, especially those from major sources, often count the same films and at times you find interesting patterns. While browsing the music categories you laugh at how extremely Americanised the lists from Pitchfork, a music site, are, while thinking how British the best-100-albums-ever-list courtesy of Melody Maker is. Another thing I found myself doing was wondering how come so many critics had the wrong idea about something. “What, ‘E.T.’ makes a lot of top-film lists? How? Why? Does Spielberg always have to make up stories where all children do is scream and/or cry, plus something very bizarre (and cute, a Spielbergesque must-be) happens/comes to town, to strings?” Of course, one’s immaculate objections are…immaculate, right? Anyway, you can make your own lists, so I expect to see a lot of “Corbin Bensen’s top ten list of music I love to listen to while brushing my teeth” muddling what’s valuable; hence, I’d like there to be a way to sift the lists that are made by somebody-more-knowing-than-my-dog from the interesting ones. I’m not trying to be an elitist, but otherwise I might stop using the site. Do you often read bad magazines just to try and find one valuable article? Anyway, it will be interesting to see the site pander along.

Speaking of online apps, Wufoo interests me. It’s not for public use yet, but it looks very good and seems very easy to use, judging from their current interactive demo. So what is it? From the site: “Wufoo is a web-based tool to help you build and host amazing online forms. In only a few short minutes, you can create a mailing list, a marketing survey or even a complete customer management system.” Cool.

And, at last, this is a great list giving you “The Best of Web 2.0″, meaning new web technology. I discovered Vimeo from this list.