Moving on to new territories

I am moving on from wordpress.com to a hosted environment!

You can find my lifestream here: Words Like Violence

My photography / portfolio site can be found here: Words Like Violence / photography

My personal blog, where these old posts and hopefully new ones will soon make it’s debut. I’ll keep you posted!

Skinny Clony.

Recent news told me that a woman who obviously misses her dog very much, got herself not only one but five clones of said dog.

It got me thinking if that would be something I would do. I miss my dog, which passed away two years ago, very very much.

But, what’s the point? If there is such a thing as a soul it would not be part of the cloning.

I also happen to believe that we are products of our environment. Everything that has happened up until now, everyone I ever met, every thought I ever thought, made me who I am today. The same I guess would apply to animals, so if I want my beloved dog back I would have to replicate every moment, every second. Not bloody likely, is it?

In the end the result would be a dog, who just happens to look like her, but is someone else completely.

So I guess I won’t be cloning my dog after all. At least the memories still make me smile, laugh and cry. So in a way she’s still alive.

My new digital hobo life.

Those of you following my Jaiku stream might’ve noticed a certain resentment, some might even call it anger, towards SL, the company running Stockholms commuting traffic.

What it all boils down to is that I’m loosing valuable time while waiting for delayed trains and buses and losing time means not getting things done.

That seems like a reasonably small problem, doesn’t it? I just have to make sure I can get things done anywhere. How do I accomplish this?

First of all I’ve gotten myself a bigger shoulder bag, now I can fit some books and a couple of moleskins next to my iPhone on which I just installed the WordPress application so I can blog, read or take notes while waiting. Minuscule perhaps, but it makes a big difference for me.

Now I just need a small laptop and my digital hobo life will be complete.

And maybe SL will actually make me feel more productive now?

Living with diabetes on the read-write web, part 2

I’ve come to a conclusion after a few months of rigorously sending my blood sugar stats to Sweetspot, it rocks my world!

I’ll admit to being a slacker when it comes to measuring my blood sugar even though my doctors been telling me for 15 years how important it is to know your mmol/l. I’ve always shrugged it off telling myself that I can feel if it’s high or low.

But even if that’s enough I’ve noticed that sometimes I can’t tell the difference between high or low, or even just telling the difference between low and blood sugar that’s rapidly falling. Anyway, it’s not enough to just be able to tell the difference between high and low. I must be able to make decisions based on statistic trends and be able to see how the blood sugar after a meal relates to how much insulin I took and what I ate.

Sweetspot helps me accomplish this in a very simple way and now that they’ve implemented localization and has a mobile interface in the works (or maybe even a native iPhone application?) there’s not much more to ask for.

Here’s the kicker, with the help of Sweetspot my blood sugar has never been better, sure it’s still drifting wildly but on average it’s keeping itself on very good levels.

Another web application that I can’t live without.

Living with diabetes on the read-write web.

Let me just preface this post by saying that today was one of the worst days in a very long time and I’ll get back to why in a moment…

I’ve been living with diabetes for 15 years now. Wow, that’s such a long time. I don’t even consider it a “disease” any more, it’s just a state of being.

Being the tech-savvy dude that I happen to be, I asked myself (or rather; I asked Google) if there was some sweet web application to enter my blood sugar values and medications into.

I almost felt like my Google Skills gained +1 when I immediately found my way to SugarStats. This is a pretty good, but at times a bit too simplistic, blood sugar tracker. It has twitter integration and a good enough mobile interface (though I wish it would be more iPhone friendly).

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon Sweetspot thanks to fellow diabetic and blogger Scott Hanselman. Sweetspot seems like a good alternative to SugarStats with a more dynamic approach to blood sugar tracking. Too bad they lack a spiffy mobile interface but they have one good thing going for them, and that would be their small client application (availble on both Windows and OSX) that will let you sync your blood sugar reader to your Sweetspot account. Pretty cool!

However, both of these services have one major caveat and that is localization. Let me just go Ballmer for a second here;

Localization! Localization! Localization!

Being a swedish citizen, I simply do not write numbers like this (for example) “7.4″. I write them “7,4″. And don’t get me started on date formatting. It’s extremely frustrating to constantly be faced with error messages saying I did not enter a number, date or time correctly when in fact I did.

So let me list some pros and cons with respective service.

SugarStats
+ Simple
+ Has mobile interface
+ Can export data to CSV
+ Free
- Maybe a bit too simple
- No possiblity to get a graph over the current day, only stats
- Localization!

Sweetspot
+ Feature rich
+ Synchronization client
+ Can create graphs over any data you enter
- No mobile interface
- User interface is a bit too much at times
- Localization!

I’m going to give Sweetspot a try for a while, see if I get used to the interface.

So, regarding that first sentence. My day begun with my blood sugar going really low, effectively eliminating any possibility of going to the gym before work. I misjudged my insulin dose and accidentally got a ricochet effect with my blood sugar going waaay too high. So my mood today has not been the best, I’ve been tired and my blood sugar really didn’t pan out until sometime this afternoon. Hell of a way to feel when trying to write some C# code…

To i* or *Book Pro, that is the mac:ing question.

Ever since I migrated from my dear beloved Amiga (may it rest eternally in peace) to wintel computers I’ve been seemingly pretty satisfied with what Windows has to offer me.

Until pretty recently.

It’s not that Vista works bad, just a bit slow which is most probably a feature my current hardware seems to think I’m enjoying. (Which I’m not.)

No, it’s just that I’ve had an iPhone for about a month now and I got to say that even though I’ve been a very happy Winmob-user, the iPhone just slamdunks it’s way towards victory over all things Winmob. I still have to use a Winmob at work, but I can hardly stand it anymore.

So, now I’m planning on buying myself one apple computer or the other to my home, hoping that the experience with OSX over Vista will be the same as with my iPhone and Winmob. The problem is I can’t decide what to get!

The iMac 24″ has the perfect dimensions for my desk, but I want something mobile. That leaves me with the MacBook Pro 15″, but then I’d have to get an external monitor for my photo processing and that would clutter up my desk too much.

So what’s the solution? I’ll probably have to go for an iMac 24″ and a MacBook Air for all my portable needs. Yeah, I just keep finding new and innovative ways to spend my money.