Isn’t it paradoxical that to stimulate the creative process, you need to increase the difficulty and make it harder for yourself? Time constraints are especially useful in this regard and works very well for me. I.e. unconditionally write and publish a blog post in 30 minutes max. Like I just did with this one. Whatever you do, do not choose the “When it’s done”-approach. Because if you choose that road, the probability increases that you will remain stationary.
Read MoreWhen you become a parent, you will discover the world again through your child. You cannot understand how fascinating and amazing it is when the wind rattles the leaves in a tree. But your two-year old sees it instantly and his mind is blown. And you stop and think for a second: “Yes, that is quite amazing actually. I had forgot about that when I became an adult”.
Read MoreToday is the first official vacation day for me, and never before have I felt such an urge to work! But wait a minute, isn’t vacation supposed to be about NOT working? Yes, but there is a difference between work and work. Running on and beyond the cognitive red-line for months on end has consequences and results in cognitive fatigue. No matter how much fun you have at the office. But this summer is unique. I just became a father for the second time and oh boy have I looked forward to all the “work” that follows. However, I would never call it work. Changing diapers on a screaming furious infant is relaxation. Pair it with a dog suffering from diarrhea during the worst thunderstorm I have experienced, and it is like a mental spa-treatment to me. I am now blessed with well-defined problems in abundance, something very different from the cognitively demanding role as an engineer.
Read MoreI always practice a musical instrument 15 minutes per day and have been doing it every day for the past seven years. In these years I have been experimenting with the optimal practice time, and I have tried all of them. What I have found, is that a habit like this works best first thing in the morning. When you open your eyes after a night’s sleep, your mind is fresh and feels like a blank slate. As the day goes on, more and more ideas enter your mind. And at the end of the day, the mind is so full of thoughts and ideas that a night’s sleep is needed to crystalize them, so that the process can start over the next day. That’s why I have found the morning hours to work best, but there are also other factors to consider.
Read MoreI have heard that a two-year-old can have the willpower to hold their breath until they literally turn blue. Today I witnessed something similar with my two-year-old son. Since last week, we now go on daily dog walks together, and he insists to handle one of our two labradors even though it is twice as heavy as himself. I have never personally witnessed determination or willpower even close to what I have now seen with my son. The dog is strong and pulls him in the wrong direction, he drops the leash, and he loses his balance and falls. A lot. And yet, he will NEVER let me take the leash from him. He shall do it his way, alone.
Read MoreIt is now 24 months since I decided to learn Bleed by Meshuggah on the drums, as a beginner drummer. This is a totally crazy project, because it is arguably one of the most difficult metal songs ever written. It is also one of the best, and a personal favorite. I can now play all the parts of the song one by one, in somewhat lower tempo. It took almost two years to just understand the riffs. But now the next phase begins, which I call “The Grind”. It is the final push to connect all riffs together and bring the tempo up to the original speed. And paradoxically, this is the easiest part of the whole process!
Read MoreHow can you get more things done is less time? There’s a viral video with Arnold Schwarzenegger where one of his key points is to simply do things faster. I really like this video. The funniest part is when he tells people who complain that they don’t have time because they need to get enough sleep, to just “Sleep fasta” [Austrian accent]. I am not claiming that sleep is overrated, but Arnie’s got a very good point here. Don’t waste time on things that does not matter. I tried it out this weekend when correcting exams.
Read MoreWhen I came across the concept “speed reading” for the first time a couple of years ago, it kind of blew my mind. I have been reading books wrong my whole life. I have always read the book as if a voice in my head spoke the words to me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it does take a lot of time to read a book. Especially technical literature. I don’t know why it came as a surprise to me, but it turns our that it is no problem at all to simply read faster. A lot faster.
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, our family used to go to a summer house in the archipelago. And old fisherman hut, far out with no running water and no electricity. There was no shortage of mosquitos, however. I have always kept that summer house in the back of my head as a reference point of how bad the mosquito situation can be. And there hasn’t been any motivation to revise it. At least not until me and my wife moved to our current home.
Read MoreHave you ever felt the urge to mow your lawn? That’s precisely what happened to me this weekend. The month of May 2021 has been one of the most intense ever, work-wise. I have been developing a university course in Building physics with eleven lectures in the course of four weeks. On top of that I have my regular work as an acoustician. I do love my work, both of them, but there is a problem. They are both extremely cognitively demanding. I am always on the edge, slightly – or even a lot – outside of my comfort zone. That’s why I felt the urge to spend my time on a well defined problem. Like moving the lawn.
Read MoreThroughout May, I have been teaching Building Physics in the course at Umeå University with the same name. The three topics included in the course are acoustics, heat transfer and moisture transfer. I know acoustics by heart and can teach it on autopilot by now. Heat transfer and Moisture transfer on the other hand, is a completely different story. I did not know anything about those topics before this course. And here I am now, teaching the topics that were as new to me as to the students. Can this actually work? Teaching and lecturing in a topic that you are not familiar with is about as scary as it gets.
Read MoreThe greatest difference between acoustic drums and electronic drums is that you can control the sound pressure level from the electronic drums by turning the volume knob. Whereas an acoustic drum kit will produce a sound pressure level that is what it is. If you want to play rock or metal, you need to hit the drums hard, or it will not sound or feel right. Consequently, the sound pressure level will be very high. The drummer only has one option, and that is to wear proper hearing protection while drumming, or face a near certain risk of permanent hearing loss. With the E-drums on the other hand, you can choose whatever sound pressure level that you like, and your ears will be safe. Or will they?
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, I watched the movie Karate Kid where young Daniel wants to learn Karate and gets old Karate master mr Miyagi to train him. Miyagi lets Daniel clean and polish his cars using the “wax on, wax off” motion. He also lets him clean a terrace and pain a fence, always using special motions with his hands when appying the wax, paint or cleaning water. All in all, Daniel spends lots and lots of time with these activities until he finally snaps and goes furious – “When are you going to teach me Karate?!” It turns out, that is precisely what he has done. The special movements Daniel used in the activities are important Karate moves, and by doing restoration and renovation work, they have just killed two birds with one stone. A lot of works has been done, and Daniel now has the correct movements in his muscle memory.
Read MoreSince I resurrected my old enormous RGB shining gaming laptop from the dead to a new life as a blog typewriter, I have been trying to figure out if there are any similarities between restoring old computers and for example old American cars? Old cars aren’t really usable as a daily driver either, I told my wife. Yes, but at least old American cars can be beautiful. An old laptop with RGB cannot. She has a point. It got me thinking: Have I ever seen a beautiful computer? I can’t think of one honestly, but I can think of several beautiful cars. Both are tools meant to be used, so what is it that cars have that old computers doesn’t seem to have?
Read MoreIn the last 5-10 years I have been losing my hair. It started as a little bald spot on the top of my head, which grew and was later joined by a second smaller one on the back of my head. It’s actually not that easy to spot when you look in the mirror, but from behind or above, the hair loss is obvious. I could have painted a big H in the spot and used it as a helipad for small drones. When I became aware of it, I simply decided to just get rid of it all with a clipper, because it was NOT a flattering look. Instead, I let my beard grow out. I have been visiting my barber regularly for at least five years, and I have listened to and followed their advice on what kind of hair- and beard cut I should rock. But a week ago, my wife started to read up on men’s hairstyle and bald shaving. She suspected that I would look much better if we chose the razer instead of the clipper the next time it was time to trim the hair. So, we did it, and oh boy what an upgrade it was!
Read MoreThe definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expect different results, a wise man once said. However, there is an exception to that rule: Computers. From my experience, trying the same thing and expecting a different result is usually the first thing I try when my IT gives up. And the success rate is high enough to keep doing it. Technology is wonderful when it works. I love technology. It might also be the thing that most effectively can send my pulse to 300 bpm while I am screaming on the top of my lungs (my kind of anger management). I suppose my family is grateful that I am often in another building when the glitch gremlin strikes.
Read MoreI am writing this blog on a laptop from 2006, running an operating system that was released in 2021: Linux Mint 20.1. I have been using PC:s since 1995 and I remember the “good old days” in the second half of the 1990’s. You bought a high-end PC for a small fortune and it would last a year or two until it became an unusable brick, at least with regards to gaming. The performance increases with each generation was extreme back then. But in the late noughties, things began to change with the release of multi-core processors, hyperthreading and 64 bit support. The growth has continued for sure, and Moore’s law implies the growth is exponential. But with regards to the user experience, to me it seems like the computers got fast enough to run most important software, even when they got old. It’s as if the hardware improvements grew much faster than the system requirements of software. I mean the kind of software that you need to have a basic computing experience and not the latest games or special applications.
Read MoreMany years ago, I tried Virtual Reality (VR) for the first time. It was the Oculus Rift developers kit, one of the very first Head Mounted Displays (HMD) that was the result of a KickStarter campaign in 2012. It looked like a pair of ski goggles superglued to an iPad. I remember that I went for a ride on a rollercoaster that was extreme, even with some jumps. I played around for about 15 minutes and then suffered from severe motion sickness for about three hours. The concept was extremely cool, but clearly the technology had a long way to go. Last week I pulled the trigger and got my first VR HMD (HP Reverb G2). My gut feeling is that the technology is now mature enough to provide a lot of value. In the coming months, I will evaluate how VR can be used in civil engineering and acoustics.
Read MoreSocial interaction while wearing a face mask is kind of like joining an online meeting without enabling your camera. Even though the eyes communicate a very large part, probably most, of our message, it just feels extremely awkward to me. There is so much information lost with the subtle facial expressions and especially the smile. I do not like it at all. That’s why I am grateful to my past self that I listened to my gut feeling some years ago. My gut told me that we had to get out of town and move to the countryside, as soon as humanly possible. Which we did. Out here everything is exactly the same pre- and post-Covid. Nothing has changed. Mother Nature does her thing regardless of what goes on in the human world. It is a blessing to be reminded of that every single day. She is my immovable, solid foundation to which my life is anchored.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago I upgraded my computer screens to a triple 4k setup. When I was working with CAD drawings on my old lo-res (1680*1050) screens, it felt like looking at the world through a telescope, and my productivity suffered. The new screens are wonderful. I can now fit my entire old triple monitor screen real estate on just one screen! But anyone who has ever considered a triple monitor setup should also consider cable management. LOTS of cable management. Every screen requires a displayport cable and a power cable, so that’s six cables right there just to turn them on. I did some other upgrades as well. Let’s throw in a couple of active loudspeakers, camera, sound card, USB hub, conference speaker, mouse, keyboard, mic, Stream deck… the list goes on. And all this should be mounted on a sit/stand desk with a flexible length. This weekend I spent several hours doing cable management. And oh boy, did it turn out great! I was also reminded of a crucial life lesson.
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