I’ve sent about 30 pages of emails this morning, so frankly I can’t be buggered to write a whole load here at the moment, so I’m gonna cheat and post some exerts from the mails instead:
On the subject of work I’m having a truly mad time. I’ve been given 4 weeks to come up to speed and a reading / study list a mile long. The week I’ve been doing windows internals, processes, threads, memory blah blah blah. Its very very geeky and very very fascinating. It’s a bit of a challenge for me in truth, but then its nice to be pushed. I talk to the people around me, just the other SQL guys mostly and many of them have been at MS for 10 years or so, and they know so damn much. It feels like its going to be hard to contribute something at the moment. I reckon I will be fine because I trust my ability to do support at the end of the day, but its forcing me to push myself far beyond what I’ve had to in recent years. If this makes it sounds bad though, I’m describing it badly. Its truly the most brilliant techie geeky fun I’ve ever had, and I can’t wait to actually start working on real customer problems. I actually managed this week to answer a SQL question to one of my colleagues when he needed some help, so this may me feel good, and reminded me that I do know something….
Seriously though, life here is pretty sweet. I’m still integrating administratively because the Swedes have a compulsory identity card scheme (sounds familiar?), which I haven’t received yet and without which you can’t do bugger all. My application is accepted its just at the processing centre currently, so I’m waiting on this. For example I bought a car last week, but they won’t give it to me without my identity card, and I couldn’t insure it either. I can’t open an account mobile, so I’m on Swedish PAYG system currently, and if I wasn’t living in a hotel still, I’d be having trouble registering my utility bills. Its airly all pervading but then there are apparently benefits. Once you are registered, it truly does track everything. Now obviously you could arugue whether this was good or bad from a freedom of information point of view, I have met Swedes who go both ways about whether its good or bad, but the major benefits is that their technology is completely properly integrated across all government departments, meaning that for example if ou change your address, you just tell these people and they inform everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone, automatically for you. Apparently when you do a tax return, they already know EVERYTHING about you income and expenditure and they just send the form to sign and approve. The guy sitting next to me at work did his by SMS last year apparently!!
Stockholm is slowly starting to green up now. Tonight is the big festival where we celebrate the arrival of spring (and therefore have public holiday tomorrow). On another note there are 6 further bank holidays before end of June – go Sweden!! But there’s gonna be some huge bonfires lit and various weird games and stuff like “hit the cat out of the barrel”, don’t know what this is yet, but it starts at 8.15 tonight. Also apparently everyone wears sailors caps and throws them in the air a lot..we’ll shall see, I’ll no doubt put some photos up on flickr next week.
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