The White House 2.0

The government of U.S.A. with Barack H. Obama is doing an impressive effort of modernizing the spreading of information. In the official blog from the white house they write about their new channels of information using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube and iTunes.

I think Sweden might be a bit behind here. There are probably many but I only know about one blog being written by a politician and that is one that left office for several years ago. That might say something about the Swedish politicians ability to reach the Swedish people... or maybe it say more about my interest in Swedish politics.

Star Trek 11 - Great reviews

Currently the new Star Trek 2009 movie is getting a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes from its 17 reviews. These reviews are supposed to be made of respected film critics, so it is not any hard core Star Trek nerds posting these reviews.

The 100% means that this many critics have given a positive review. The actual score the movie have received so far is an average rating of 7.6/10 which also is very good.

The director J.J. Abrams is getting a lot of positive feedback about how he managed to revive the magic in Star Trek and how he successfully tells the story about young James T. Kirk and Spock.

The premiere will be next week on 7th of May.

I'll be there! Will you?

Apple pie

Yesterday I got the idea to make an apple pie. I googled for a good recipe but it was really hard to find one that seemed to be okay, so I took a couple of them and mixed to make my own recipe.

I started out with a quite small recipe but because I am new at this with baking I cut up way too much apples so I had to compensate with more dough. In the end I had to make two pies of which the smaller one Girlwing and I ate and the larger one I froze to feast on another time.

Boywings apple pie, 6-8 persons.

Dough:
3.5 dl flour
0.5 dl oatmeal
0.5 dl sugar
150 g butter

Filling:
5 apples (I mixed red and green)
1 dl sugar
1 msk cinnamon (I had a little more, maybe 1.2 msk)

• Turn on the oven at 225˚C.
• Mix flour, oatmeal and sugar in a bowl.
  
• Add the butter and use your fingers to break the butters to small pieces so it blends with the flour mix.
• Butter or oil a pan.
  
• Rinse the apples, throw the core but keep the skin.
• Cut the apples into 1x1 cm pieces and put them in the pan.
  
• Add sugar and cinnamon to the apples and mix well.
• Cover the apples with the dough.
• Put in the middle of the oven for 25 minutes. If the pie starts to get too much color you can cover it with some aluminum foil.

Let it cool down some and then enjoy with a lot of vanilla sauce or vanilla ice cream. Tasty... :)

In the head of Emily

I just found out that one of my friends have a blog at IT24. Emily is writing about her work with processes, ITIL and all other things she stumble over at work. She is writing in Swedish so if you are able do decrypt the language you can read about what is In the head of a processor. Her posts are written in a smart and funny way and it is worth reading about every one of her trivial and highly interesting reflections.

Get strong at Kibitz

I was reading some random pages on Sensei's Library when I stumble upon this great page about how to Get strong at Kibitz. It is so "on the spot" how it is on KGS.

Check it out!

Who are you, really?

The other day, during a coffee break, we were talking about natural neural programming in the brain of animals and humans. What do we have with us from birth programmed from our genes? Why is some animals ready to run just a couple of hours after being born and why is a human so helpless for several years. I find all of this quite interesting.

Our topic were evolving and transforming several times and somewhere in the discussion while talking about psychology I told about my experience with a personality test I made online a couple of years ago. The Jung Typology Test.

The test is usually referred to as a MBTI-test (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator). At first I was a bit skeptical that this was some Internet joke or something, but something felt right and I made the test. It takes some time and then I am done and gets the result.

First it says nothing else than that I have the personality type of an INTJ. What the %¤&# is an INTJ? Well there are some links on the result page to some descriptions of the result. Like this one by Marina Margaret Heiss. More descriptions are made by Keirsey who talk about four temperaments where I belong to the rationals.

Do the test now!

The reason I can recommend this test to people is that it gave me an understanding of who I am. The description of an INTJ fits me very well and I recognize myself in it. I have read special INTJ-forums on the Internet where they discuss the special features we share that are both blessings and handicaps. All of which I too have, more or less.

Only 2% of the population are INTJ so many others might think we are odd and strange... but we are the masterminds and we rule the world! Hee hee hee... ;)

Melodifestivalen song contest

Now it is over for this year. The so loved and so hated song competition Melodifestivalen. For you who don't know what it is I can tell you shortly...

Almost every country in Europe are sending a song (with a performer) to the big Europeans Song Contest (ESC), which will be in Russia this year. It is common that the countries have their own competition first and the winner is sent to the big ESC final.

Sweden just had their own local final to figure out which song to send to the European final ESC. Actually it is a little more complicated than that because we first had thousands of applications sent in to the organizers and they pick out 32 songs that compete in live television in four semifinals. One every Saturday night. Then the TV viewers can vote for their favorite song (or artist) by calling an expensive pay number and the two song with the highest votes get sent to the Swedish final. The two with second highest votes will be sent to the "second chance" and they can perform again after the semi finals and before the big final. Then the two "best" in the second chance get sent to the final and there are 10 songs in the final. But then we have the "international jury" in the background who picks their favorite and sends it to the final and suddenly we have eleven songs in the final. All this is very complicated... and actually I have simplified the rules a lot in my description... :P

Before the final I listened to all the songs and I was sure which one were going to win. Ok, you can never be sure but I knew which one I believed would have the best chance. My favorite was Måns Zelmerlöw – ”Hope & Glory”.

Girlwing and I watched the final last Saturday. I was hoping for Måns and Girlwing was hoping for H.E.A.T. – ”1000 Miles”. Both Girlwing and I didn't like the desperate song Caroline af Ugglas – ”Snälla, snälla”. The international jury's choice Sofia – ”Alla” was really good but it would feel more right if it was performed by Greece in the EGC. Another song that I liked was Alcazar – ”Stay the Night” and I think it is the largest threat to Måns. Higher in the results I would like to see Emilia – ”You're My World”. B.t.w. You might remember Emilia from her debut song Big Big World.

In the end of the final when all the artist had sang their songs the voting starts. First there are 12 juries giving points. This year it was very strange when the first six juries all had different songs for highest score of 12 points. Usually you can see a pattern of a specific song get several top scores. But not this time and that felt a bit suspicious. Are they trying to make it more exciting and to trigger more people to make phone votes so they can earn more money? I didn't call anyway, but it felt strange.

After all the juries had given their vote the top scoreboard said:

1. Måns Zelmerlöw – ”Hope & Glory” (96 points)
   
2. Sarah Dawn Finer – ”Moving On” (75p)
   
3. Alcazar – ”Stay the Night” (67p)
   
4. H.E.A.T. – ”1000 Miles” (58p)
   
5. Caroline af Ugglas – ”Snälla, snälla” (51p)
   

After this I felt quite good because Måns were so much ahead. But the thing is that now is it up to the TV viewers to keep voting and their votes are exactly as much worth as the professional juries and you never know how the Swedish people will vote. They usually don't vote as I want. They have a strange taste in music. And now it happens...

Sarah get 12 points from the Swedish TV viewers. Måns got a low score of 48. Alcazar get a medium high score of 72. Caroline get the second highest score of 120 points and now all in the top got their points and it looks like Caroline will win with her terrible song. Girlwing and I swear and say that damn if Caroline win.

We got the time to calculate and reflect over the points. Five in the bottom had not got their points yet and three of them could win the whole contest if they get the last highest score of 144 points. We said that let anyone win as long as it is not Caroline. The points went to the 8th place holder of Malena Ernman – ”La Voix”. That was not expected...

This is the final result:

1. Malena Ernman – ”La Voix” (182 points)
2. Caroline af Ugglas – ”Snälla, snälla” (171 points)
3. E.M.D. – ”Baby Goodbye” (145 points)
4. Måns Zelmerlöw – ”Hope & Glory” (144 points)
5. Alcazar – ”Stay the Night” (139 points)
6. Sarah Dawn Finer – ”Moving On” (87 points)
7. H.E.A.T. – ”1000 Miles” (82 points)
8. Agnes – ”Love, Love, Love” (40 points)
9. Emilia – ”You're My World” (28 points)
10. Sofia – ”Alla” (12 points)
11. Molly Sandén – ”Så vill stjärnorna” (2 points)

So Sweden will compete with a opera/pop in the European Song Contest later this spring. It can be great and it can become a fiasco.

What do you think?

Create a social network on Ning.com

Do you want to create your own Facebook.com? Or maybe your own XiaoNei.com? Maybe you want to make it more specialized to a certain area? You don't care that much about all your current friends but instead want to focus on your special areas of interest and maybe make some new friends?

That is where Ning.com has found their idea. Let people create their own Social Networks on the Internet. I just heard about it today and it sounds really good compared to Facebook that is getting more and more boring for every day. When will the hype die out? Probably when someone figured out something better and neither Facebook or Myspace will be fast enough to catch up. Maybe that is what we are seeing now? Maybe Ning.com will be able to activate us again and keep the interest alive and permanent? We'll see...

Anyway... I just registered and created a new Social network called The world of WeiQi. The reason that I created it is that there were no social network that was general enough. There only existed one for a weiqi club in America. I thought about creating one for Sweden or Stockholm but I feared that was too small, so what a heck here is a network for the whole world!

Next I need to find a social network for Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Star Wars, Programming, Linux and all other stuff I find interesting. There already exist a lot of specialized networks and if you miss one, you can always create one on just a couple of simple steps.