My problem is time, and more precisely time management. Looking at my calendar, there is only two or three important dates that I need to handle with care and those are months away. Yet, all of us who are currently writing our theses know there’s a tremendous amount of reading articles, evaluating methods and hacking scripts before that date. People from all over the world offer advice on how to deal with personal planning, ranging from simple Todo-lists to more complex methods like Pomodoro. No method has received much of my attention. I don’t believe there’s a way that suits all. I prefer regularity, therefore I go to uni everyday and use it as my “office.” At least the chance of meeting intelligent and inspirational people are order of magnitudes greater here compared to staying at home. Which helps.

We’re lucky we’ve got a place to work all days, not all students have I’ve been told. Therefore, my second source of inspiration comes from reading. One of the best things about studying is the wealth of information that you encounter everyday. A subset of my read items today include: Chatroulette and GeoIP tagging, ‘Pay it forward’ pays off, How much has Scala influenced Erlang, to mention a few. Ironically, it’s also my single biggest source for distraction. None of these articles directly contribute to my thesis work. There is, however, a subtle sense of achievement in broadening horizons. Regularly it turns out that after reading an article inspiration is blooming and all of a sudden I’ve burst out another two or three paragraphs on some writing that I just got to do.

Creswell suggests in his book “Research Design, 3rd Ed.” that you should take 30 minutes each day to just write. Ignore your mood. Clear your mind and just write. When you cannot write what you intend to write, write about something else. Right now my RSS is empty and there are no interesting tweets waiting, and you’ve figured, I got to write. So I write this.

How do you cheat your motivation?

Update 22:09
I just read this blog post maybe that’s the key?

Aren’t these lamps just wonderul?

Imaging turning on the lights and having this RSS-lamp shine with its cosy, orange warm glow…

Or why not the chic black lamp shade symbolizing the F1 and F2 keys?

Combining interior design with computing is actually quite awesome.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read in glossy magazines that you always should strive to create a personal style in your home. I wonder if they would change their minds if they saw all these geeky things? Lol.

It is often said that human communication consists of 93% body language and paralinguistic cues, while only 7% of communication consists of words themselves

–I find that pretty amazing.

However, when having a written conversation, which is basically the way people communicate today, you can never be sure of how that text is perceived, since you aren’t actually there to read any facial expressions. How do we solve this issue?

Well, as my explanatory title suggests: smileys.

If I write to you on msn for instance: “Shut up!” You might feel bad and wonder “Hey?! What have I done to you?”

But if one the other hand I write: “Shut up! ” You will instantly translate this as irony, since the funny smiley sticking out its tongue is anything but serious.

There are innumerable examples of how a smiley can totally change the meaning of expressions. Thus, one should never underestimate the power of the ugly yellow faces!

Outside my studies I’m actively involved in Scouting and I recently joined the planning team for a huge event in Sweden in 2011. It is the 22nd World Scout Jamboree and I’m working with some intelligent people on social media and marketing. One of the themes for the Jamboree is Meetings, implying that the Jamboree is a great place to meet new friends, bridge cultures and work towards better understanding. Around 30 000 Scouts from all over the world will be gathered. On a side note, roughly 20% of the participants are from Sweden. Meaning it will be a truly international event which hope to gather Scouts from more than 150 countries. The Olympic games isn’t even close

A part of the social media work is maintaining the @Jamboree2011 Twitter account which, at the time of writing, has 802 followers. Now, it seems to me that some of my twitter friends must also follow @Jamboree2011. Therefore, I postulated the following question: Would it be possible to measure the amount of meetings facilitated by the 22nd World Scout Jamboree? While that is a very broad question, perhaps we can use it to derive indicators for the social media marketing impact, and especially its contribution to the theme Meetings.

One way I thought of brought me back to Matt’s post on social recruitment. Twitter provides a developer API and there’s a handy python library to make it easy to use. Therefore, I started poking around with a small script that builds a graph based on the connections between the followers of a Twitter account. Here’s the first result when analysing @mljungblad:

Essentially, each red dot in the graph above represents one of my followers. Each connection between two red dots means that at least one follows the other, or both ways. Simply counting the number of connections gives us the total amount of meetings facilitated through me. Of course, there is little purpose of doing this for me, but it will generate some cool data on the Jamboree account. Until Twitter changes the rate limit on my account this is what I have to work with though.

Using the raw data we can make many more applications, such as plot the distribution on a world map using the geographical data that some users provide. We could make measurements over time, to see the increase in number of meetings between followers. Hypothetically we could also determine the most or best connected followers and recruit them to our HR department. Once the data is gathered, there’s so much you can do. What would you do?

Meeting students from other universities is always a fruitful experience and this weekend I had the opportunity to accompany a friend to a house-warming party in Stockholm for another one of those experiences. It turned out the majority of the students at the party are studying medicine and soon to be doctors, with a knack for good laughs and down to earth conversations. I bet that you in similar situations, among people you have never met before, have to introduce yourself, why you’re there and what you do, in a short and easy to understand fashion.

Most commonly my introductions end up something like along the following lines:

Sophie – “So, what do you do again?”
Marcus – “I’m studying IT in Gothenburg”
Sophie – “Aaah, that means you’re good at computers? Right?” (once in a while computers can be replaced with “I’ve never understood what the purpose of computer games are” and then you’re lost)
Marcus – “Well, I’m not working with the hardware itself, it’s what runs on them that’s interesting… “
Sophie – “You mean like computer games?” (obviously this is true, praise and use perhaps?)

What I’ve found so far is that it helps understanding what the person you’re talking to does first. While he or she is talking make mental notes all the things that easily relate to software engineering. Make sure to use the terminology that you’ve just picked up to make the connections clear once it’s your turn to explain what you do.

Secondly, avoid software engineering terminology at all costs! No one understands what an architecture is, they will relate it to architecture of buildings, which is not the same thing. Hey, I’m not even sure I know what an architecture is.

Be polite and patient; it might seem like an obvious attitude to have, yet there are so many times that I feel my questions to seek understanding is ignored. Only once I know the person I’m talking to understands the concept I allow myself to dig into details. Otherwise I’m more likely to end as the lonesome nerd in the corner, and in that corner I’m not going to meet new friends, challenge my perceptions or learn something new!

Nevertheless, there are also more things to talk about than studies. How do you introduce yourself to people you’ve never met? I volunteer to try new ways anytime. If there is an universal solution, you’ll be the first to know. Promise.

Another way to relax...

Stress is a very dangerous illness. Yet, many of us suffer from it.

I have never seen stress as something serious. I mean, every day you hear about it, because everyone is stressed. Just like everyone is feeling tired when they get up early in the mornings, or getting hungry when it’s time for lunch. It’s natural.

And to these issues,
there are simple cures:

• If feeling tired:  Get some rest

• If hungry:  Go eat something

• If stressed:  Relax

But honestly, how do you relax? The tasks you need to carry out don’t disappear because you go to a yoga class. The workload will remain the same, even if you completely lose yourself in a hot bubble bath. Relaxation might therefore not be the cure to stress. It might even be the factor to why we feel this way.

Being too relaxed (read: lazy) often results in stress. So if you, instead of trying to forget about the things you have to do, just do them, I assure you: you will feel more relaxed.

Using a background image to cover the entire slide

How should we otherwise communicate abstract and complex ideas that intrigues us, creates business, and changes the world. Most people are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the technical terms and the norms of the hacker community. It is our duty to convey intricate ideas, whether it be requirements, architectural decisions, or implementation details, in the clearest way possible.

Within the SEM programme presenting is common practice. Project work has to be presented for your classmates, supervisors and examiners. We are naturally nervous when those occasions are mandatory or the stakes are higher for whatever reason. There are many great authors and inspirational sources for making your presentations better on the Internet. Two of my personal favourites are Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, and Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design and author of Slide:ology. But I thought I share a few of my own experiences when presenting within the SEM programme, both as a classmate and occasionally as a supervisor.

First, lets look at how I remember us starting out presenting and errors that I still experience today when watching presentations.

Using fonts effectively can help your audience focus

• Too many ideas are cramped in to one slide – message becomes unclear
• Poor use of imagery and visuals – slides are distracting rather than enhancing the presentation experience
• Presenter talks to the screen and not to the audience – the slides becomes the presenter’s notes

The answer to resolving all of above is seemingly easy to envisage. Then, despite trying to lead by example is it so hard to change? And here’s the catch; preparing a presentation takes time. A lot of time.  In preparation for the latest presentation that Emil and I held for our class we spent roughly 10 hours preparing the slides. Unfortunately, due to bad planning, we never had time to practice enough and the delivery was so-so. We survived on having presented together many times before.

As said earlier, in our field of study, we constantly have to communicate abstract and complex ideas. Visualising the how a three-tier layered architecture fulfils the stakeholders needs is not an easy task. Nevertheless, by inverting the points made above we get three good starting points.

• One idea – one slide. If the idea is too complex, spread it across several slides.
• Use images to explain and enhance. Flickr’s Creative Commons library has tonnes of useful imagery. The audience listens to your words, use the visuals to focus on the idea you’re communicating at that moment.
• Write your own notes and aim the slides to the audience.

Consider staging your ideas across several slides if content is too complex

Actually, that last point should be emphasized. Your words and your visuals should be chosen to suit your audience. Presenting for geeks allows you to use the vocabulary of geeks. Presenting for customers is a completely different thing. Think about your audience, and do it early, already when you start planning your presentation. Otherwise your audience will not understand what message you are trying to convey despite how interesting your content may be.

Now I hope this will inspire a few more students to drop the boring slides and start to present their already interesting content in a fashionable and compelling manner! As Jesper says: “copy-tweak,” start small, then move slowly and experiment. Once you’re out there [in the big world] it is a lot harder to test and the pressure and nervousness might be much higher. Finally, I’d also like to recommend a short introductory presentation that the Duarte team made for (and with) PowerPoint 2010. Watch it here.

Ps. The images in this post are taken from our latest presentation. A presentation about how organisations can improve “corporate communities” by adopting practices found in the free and open source communities.

Dirty microwaves

Just before Christmas some students in the 2nd and 3rd year of Software Engineering and Management programme took their hands to action. They cleaned all Microwave ovens! We got 19 of them in our kitchen and they all looked like hell and smelled worse than ever. In other words, they were all completely appalling.

Two things comes to mind. 1) How come we (the students and the teachers) let our kitchen into such dismay? 2) What wonderful classmates I have that take initiative and lead by example.

Therefore, as a reminder for the coming semester, it is our collective responsibility to take care of the kitchens. The famous cliché expression “Your mother doesn’t work here” never fails.

What can you do?

1. Put your dishes in the dishwasher before you leave uni
2. Empty the dishwasher (if all do this, we only have to do it once a year)
3. Remind your peers

Thank you!

House Mouse, Mus musculus. lol ^-^

Kitty Kittiwat, a newfound idol of mine, having a masters degree in biochemistry and running an oriental spa (which I find very impressive) taught me some very wise things about the body: Take care of it now, you’ll never get it back.

Suddenly I felt both worried and perplexed, because I realized I have been taking my body for granted.

Lately, I’ve been having an unhealthy relationship with my laptop, which has resulted in my right arm getting totally out of function. Just being able to press one key at a time with my left hand sucks and makes me so mad I don’t know what to do. This is what we Swedes call the dreaded MUSARM!

Hurts like hell. Please, do consider taking care of your bodies.

Btw, when my pain is gone I will write some mindblowing posts. Stay tuned and take care.

My first keyboard

Robert Broberg, a Swedish artist, once wrote a song with the following paragraph “Det som göms i snö, kommer upp i tö” which roughly translates to “What’s hidden underneath snow, will show in thaw.” Since we actually have a white Christmas this year and most everything in my dad’s garden is covered in snow I thought it would be more wise to do some cleaning in my old room. It has basically been aggregating stuff over the years I’ve been living on my own, of which a large part is old computer hardware that’s been rendered unusable.

In the cleaning process I uncovered my first computer keyboard, later elegantly marked “UBC-Router 1″ short for United Broadband Clan which a friend and I created sometime in the very very early broadband days. This has been the keyboard for my router ever since the 28kbps modem served our house. (Yeah, for those older than me there was a time before 28kbps too but I’m not that old!) The router has been running various versions of GNU/Linux, including Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo (for a long time) and when the hard disk crashed, it was replaced with FreeBSD which it ran up until this summer when a lightning finally killed the whole thing. Poor bastard.

Dual CPU Sockets

There was also an old web/mail server running on a Pentium Pro. The motherboard supported two CPUs, however, I only ever acquired one, but it was definitely a killer. This machine was running Gentoo from the start to the very end. I hope to recover the data on these disks when I get back to Göteborg, who knows what crap I’ve been storing on them over the years?!

Today, my so called server room was transformed to its original purpose again. Its glory days are well exceeded, but it will be remembered as the place where I began experimenting and for taking me into a field in which I’m studying today. Who knows what I will uncover in years to come?

What have you found beneath the snow this Christmas? Do you already know where it has taken you or are you still waiting to find out?