Change is always for the better

Change is good?

Today DN, one of the largest newspapers in Sweden, has an article about how the municipality of Stockholm is outsourcing their IT infrastructure and support to Volvo IT. Quickly sifting through the comments reveal outcries of all sorts. “Why are they not choosing open source?”, “The state never thought about the IT infrastructure in the first place”, “Where does the numbers come from?” And so on! (Editors note: what does open source got to do it? it’s about outsourcing the maintenance and support… right?)

It’s dissappointing to see that no one dares to look at it from Volvo IT’s perspective. Not that I think the 8000-kr per installation price is justifiable, but someone there really appreciates the change. They’re making big money. Nevertheless, change is always for the better [from someone's perspective].

In a course called change management, which I’m unfortunate to take, my head spins with these perplexing thoughts all day. What’s changing in your head?

Oh, by the way, I’m not so sure the 200 IT technicians in Stockholm municipality agrees with me.

A way to cope: Life without torrents

Suffering from torrent withdrawal symptoms? You’re not the only one. IPRED certainly makes life a bit depressing sometimes. But there are ways to cope.

I will give you my best advice for getting music and still (read almost) respect the new directives:

The local library – Seems old-school, but hey, great music can be found in the most dusty libraries! For instance I just borrowed the new album from Empire of the Sun and another great one by The Killers and copied them directly into my iTunes library. With this solution you get fabulous albums with cd-quality without even being online. Piece of cake, as well as fool-proof.

DownloadHelper –A little add-on you can use in FireFox to detect media on a site. When there is, you will see the icon spin and by pressing it, you can download it from the URL. Here’s the address: https://addons.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/addon/3006

Last.FM –Believe it or not, but sometimes they let you download certain songs directly from their page. Just keep your eyes open.

The Dark Side of Coffee

The coffee machines at ITU are always running warm. People seem to be drinking coffee all the time. Breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, evening meal, fika, night-coffee… 24/7, coffee, coffee, more coffee.

I belong to the smaller category of tea drinkers, who don’t understand why someone would choose coffee over a cup of nice-smelling tea. Actually, there are quite nice flavours at the uni, and of course I’ve tried all of them.

However, in recent times I’ve been quite tired and thought about the solution of having a cup of coffee.

Can coffee make wonders?

Well, to be sure I made lots of it.

The first sips were lovely. It felt like magic! The energy slowly came to me as the coffee spread throughout my body and brought every cell back to life.

Just because it felt so good, I ran to make another cup of coffee.

And another one.

But, when the black gold was all absorbed in my body I started to feel weird.

What the hell! When I thought I discovered the cure to fatigue, my hands started shaking. My face became white and I felt like I had fever. Warm, yet cold and very soon really sick.

The dark side of coffee! Obviously it’s a stronger drug than I thought it was. No wonder people get addicted to it when taking smaller doses. You guys who are standing in front of the coffee machine: BE AWARE!

A necessity or an addiction?

There is one page everyone visits. Whoever you are or whatever you’re looking for; Google is there for you. It is everywhere and everything, addictive, yet necessary; a concept that has turned into a daily need. We do no longer have to visit libraries to find information. All we need to know is just a search away. Piece of cake.

However Google is more than that. It is a web based world empire. They take care of your mail, your calendar, photos, documents, groups, blogs, medical records, videos… and so much more; simply anything there’s a need for. I bet you’re using at least one of their services. Admit in the comments section.

But is this good? Certainly, life seems much easier with Google at hand. Still it’s a commercial company growing bigger and bigger, with gigantic databases. Most likely you’re stored there. How does it feel having a copy of yourself and your life in the digital world in a massive server somewhere in the world?

Another interesting question is: Are we dependent on Google, or is Google dependent on us? What are your thoughts?