Swedish Pixels

Mark Williams on Mindfulness

2012-01-24T00:00:00-08:00

A very nice introduction to mindfulness.

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The Flip Side of Love

2011-12-30T00:00:00-08:00

I had trouble falling asleep last night and went downstairs to sit on the couch for an hour, alone in the dark, while my wife, children and cat were dreaming.

I sat there under a blanket, consumed by fear. I’m blessed with things many can only dream of, but last night I was afraid. I was afraid to loose it all.

It struck me, as it has many times before, that the fear of loss and love are two sides of the same coin. I don’t think it’s possible to really care for someone without the fear of loosing that person lingering somewhere in the background. Sometimes perhaps barely noticeable, but always present. A dark current running underneath joy, a bitter sweetness, adding fullness to the experience of living.

Throughout the ages philosophers have tried to overcome the fear by detaching themselves from the emotions of life, but this is a fool’s way. You can try to stop caring deeply about people, or things for that matter, but what kind of existence would that be? A life of reason is only half a life.

If you want to love you have to pay a price. That price is fear.

The Science of Success

2011-09-07T00:00:00-07:00

On how personality traits commonly viewed as vulnerabilities—for instance making an individual more susceptible to depression—might actually be evolutionary high bets. Fascinating.

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Timothy Ferriss, Silicon Valley’s Self-Help Guru

2011-09-01T00:00:00-07:00

The New Yorker’s profile on Tim Ferriss. I’m still not sure how I feel about that man. While I certainly don’t agree with everything he has to say, I must admit I find him fascinating. Fascinating—and perhaps a bit sad.

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How to Land Your Kid in Therapy

2011-08-27T00:00:00-07:00

Perhaps we need to experience a reasonable amount of hardship while we are children in order to have a satisfactory life when we are grown up. Interesting theory.

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Thoughts on a Kindle Tablet

2011-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

Interesting hypothetical concept for the next generation of the Kindle. I would definitely get one. The backlit iPad display may be versatile, but my eyes hurt after reading for long periods of time.

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Elegy for a Cat

2011-07-11T00:00:00-07:00

Max the cat died today, after having cheated death for the past six months. He got to be almost eleven years old. I really have no idea how many cat years that equals.

Yesterday evening he went out and rested in the grass for a few minutes, before he went back inside and laid down next to the water bowl. He remained there until life left him this morning. He had seemingly waited for everyone to wake up and get downstairs, before he drew his last breath and his heart shuddered to a stop.

Max was an anxious soul, preferring to watch the world from a safe distance, rather than indulging in adventure. While his stepbrother went exploring in the garden, he preferred to stay in the doorway, comfortably supporting his head on the doorstep. To the casual observer he seemed to be a rather overweight and sleepy cat, but we had seen the lightning fast reflexes and his ability to literally walk on walls, while chasing mosquitos, flies and other winged creatures.

He was a cat of habit, preferring the same old food he’d always eaten and the same old spots he’d always rested on. He was utterly terrified of his own poo and prided himself of getting out of the litter box before it even hit the sand. I once saw him balancing on two legs while emptying his bowel. He never covered up after himself. Instead he scratched the floor some forty inches away, as if that would magically fix the stench-problem.

He also hated traveling by car. Whenever we brought him along for a out-of-town visit he made it a point to hide completely for the first few days. It’s still a mystery how such a big cat could disappear so completely.

He loved the feeling of soft fabric and pillows. Mackerel in tomato-sauce was his drug of choice.

They say your love for someone may be measured by how much you grieve the loss of him or her—or it. Max was a very well-loved cat, and his passing was marked by blackening sadness. It’s unfathomable how such a small animal can leave a void this big behind.

So, here’s to Max—and to a cat-life well lived. Godspeed, my furry friend.

Contact Issues

2011-06-22T00:00:00-07:00

Today I realized the email address provided in the footer of this site wasn’t working, and probably hasn’t been for quite some time. I don’t really know what went wrong and rather than troubleshooting the issue with my web host I moved the domain to Google Apps this evening. Everything seems to be up and running once more.

If you tried to contact me using this email address and haven’t received a response, I do apologize.

Story Engineering

2011-06-14T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve had an urge to create stories for the better part of my conscious life. During my adolescent years I wrote, penned and inked comics with a small degree of success. During the later years I’ve turned to writing prose instead. I now have two novel drafts in my drawer, painstakingly written on evenings and weekends, on small fragments of free time between life’s meny responsibilities.

Both drafts suck.

It’s not that my words or sentences are that bad, but the drafts both lack that un-nameable thing that make them work as actual stories. It’s been very frustrating knowing this, but having no way of fixing it. The experience has been a lot like when our car wouldn’t start and I popped the hood open. Being a male I figured that was what I was supposed to do. I remember standing there, watching tubes, bolts and metallic thingies, absolutely clue-less. I’ve been looking as my draft much the same way. Why the hell didn’t they work.

While I’m too lazy to sign up to a writing course, I have read a lot of books on writing. None of them has helped. Not until this very moment. I just finished Larry Brook’s Story Engineering and for the first time I feel like there is hope. In a very concrete way he shows the elements a fully functioning story needs and where you should put them. He also shows you why, with a variety of examples from real life fiction.

For the first time I understand why my stories seem to slack in the middle, like a poorly tightened rope. For the first time I also understand why my characters seem one-dimensional and life-less. It’s not about some artsy attempt at mimicking life. The point is creating an effective illusion of life. Drama is nothing like real life, and real life is nothing like drama. We only think it is.

As an interesting side effect this book also changes the way you read novels, or watch movies. It brings a cool sense of being in the know when you shout “first plot point”, and “here comes the midpoint” during “Avatar”. I imagine my wife isn’t as amused, though. It’s uncanny how well commercial stories seem to adhere to the skeleton Brook describes in his book.

I have a new story cooking in the back of my head. I can’t wait to get it on paper.

The Logging Problem

2011-05-01T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve been reading Sarah Bakewell’s biography on Michel de Montaigne these past weeks and I’ve been struck by the sheer volume of diary entries and notes the man seems to have left behind. Not only did he write on the Essays most of his adult life, but also a slew of diaries and assorted notes.

I’ve tried to do the same, in a wide variety of planners, dairies and notebooks, but nothing has really stuck. While I find the notion of keeping a diary–or a commonplace book–very romantic, I’ve come to realize I’m just not the kind of person who finds the time to sit down every evening to write at length about the what goes on in my life. Also, producing a pen and Field Notes–or Moleskine–notebook whenever I have an interesting idea disrupts the flow to much. Writing about life as it unfolds makes me feel like a detached observer, when I really just want to immense myself in it. I actually had the same experience a few years ago when I photographed a lot and ran a photo blog. Looking at the world through a lens made me feel left out. I literally had thousands of photographs of my world, none with myself in it¹. So stopped carrying a camera everywhere and trying to write everything down, hoping that I will remember anyway.

As it turns out, trusting your memory is a mistake and every once in a while I sorely regret not having a written record of my doings. Was it I or my wife that stayed home with sick children that week in January? When did I buy those shoes? When did I last water the lawn? My iCal calendar only contains events planned in advance. I need a place to note all those on-the-fly stuff I do. But where?

I’ve come to realize my previous failures to keep a written account of my life probably is due to ambition. In the past I’ve tried to write longish diary entries, which I at best could keep up for a few months. A log is something different. While a diary chronicles your thoughts and emotions, a log is a brief and dry account of your comings and goings. It is a purely practical tool, which only answers questions about when something happened, not why. I simply don’t have the time to write a full diary entry every day, but I should have the time to jot down a log entry.

I’ve actually experimented a bit with this in the past, usually in a digital format. I once wrote an applescript that every midnight pulled today’s events from iCal, as well as today’s completed todos from Things, and wrote them to a plain text file in my Dropbox folder. I also had this loose idea of writing a script, which pulls emails to a specific address and turns them into text files in a specific folder. This way you could simply mail a log message from any computer or iDevice. It would probably be beautiful. A generic system of text files, forever searchable.

However, what a digital system gains in search-ability, it looses in presentation. Nothing really beats leafing through a notebook full of scribblings. Also, a digtal system needs maintenance, even if it only consists of text files in a folder. I don’t trust myself with carrying that folder with me into the future. Will it still be around in fifty years, after several hard drive crashes and the demise of Dropbox? I wrote a diary on a floppy disc some twenty years ago. Even if I did find that disc somewhere in my parents garage I would have no way of reading it. I haven’t owned a computer with a floppy disc driver for at least five years. Paper seems like a safer bet.

For now I’ve settled for a hand written log in a small Moleskine diary. There is only room for a few sentences a day, which forces be to be brief and removes the pressure of writing a god damn novella every night. I think this might work out for me.

See also The Headless Way, by Douglas Harding.
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People Suffer

2011-03-28T00:00:00-07:00

I finally read this article from New York Times, buried deep within my Instapaper account. Titled “Depression’s Upside” it investigates the possibility that depression as a medical condition might be of benefit to the human species.

Apparently Charles Darwin—the very man who hypothesised on the origin of species—suffered from recurring depression. He asked himself why a condition as common as this, which results in sexual inactivity, diminished appetite and sometimes self-slaughter, could be so common among human kind. Could it be that it had some evolutionary advantage? A few modern-day researches seem to believe it might be so. They see the painful rumination, a core pathology in depression, as focused problem-solving—a tool to help us learn from experience and avoid future mistakes.

I think this is nonsense. Depression is not an evolutionary advantage, it’s an evolutionary cost. Humans are hard-wired for problem-solving and worry. We all have a negative bias, making us better at to spotting problems and possible dangers, than enjoying a sunny day. This has made us survive through the millennia. Unfortunately it also makes us susceptible to anxiety and depression, more so in today’s society. It is the unfortunate price we have to pay for our evolved, abstract-thinking brain.¹

However, this doesn’t mean that the situation can’t be improved. As a species we lack the necessary physiology for flying, but we managed to get around that rather nicely.

Hayes, S. C., & Smith, S. (2005). Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (1st ed. p. 206). New Harbinger Publications.
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Vibram Fivefingers Speed Seem Less Durable

2011-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

To my dismay I’ve almost worn through my Vibram Fivefingers Speed at the second toe of my right foot, after having run no more than 600 kilometres in them. I obviously do some funny business with that foot, instead of lifting my it properly from the ground. Still, I never had this issue with my Sprints, which leads me to believe that the soles of the Speeds (as well as the Bikilas) are not as durable as the original rubber compound. This annoys me no end.

In an attempts to make my Speeds last this season I’m planning to mix in a lot of running in my old Sprints. I ran 10 kilometres in them yesterday and was taken aback by the different feel. The thinner sole instantly improved my technique, without any conscious effort on my part. The body took care of it on its own. However, the strap closing of my Speeds are not as comfortable and I felt the old familiar pressure areas, which leads to blistering if I’m not careful. The shoe giveth and taketh away. It was a harder workout for my feet, that’s for sure.

This makes me think twice about reinvesting in Vibram’s newer models, since most of them have the Speed-type sole, or a thicker trek-sole. I wish they would simply make a lace up model of the original KSO.

Do I Really Need Web Hosting?

2011-03-22T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve paid for web hosting for more than ten years now. All this time I’ve been a loyal PowerSurge customer and they have indulged my every whim, adding more space for free, setting up Subversion servers and helping me troubleshoot SSH access. Their support is top notch. I believe I’ve paid 15 US dollars every month for their services, which is a fair price.

Lately I’ve wondered if I really need traditional web hosting at all these days. For a few months now I’ve handled all my email with Google Apps¹ and I host two out of three websites on GitHub². Both solutions are—or can be—free and they work very well. In fact, they work so well that I see no advantage in using conventional web hosting at all. Not for a person like me, with rather modest needs.

I suspect I will hold on to my PowerSurge account for a little longer, mostly out of fear. It feels weird to abandon something that has worked so well for so many years. However, I could really use those 15 dollars better, perhaps for a paid GitHub account. I really am in love with GitHub, which is a strange thing, since I rarely write a line of code.

I actually moved all my email to Google only to be able to use Sparrow.
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Both Swedish Pixels and my novel project Flickan utan navel use GitHub pages.
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Post to Jekyll by Email

2011-03-19T00:00:00-07:00

Speaking of baked weblogs: one thing I do miss a little is the wonderful email publication interface I enjoyed with Tumblr, Posterious and even Wordpress. It should be possible to make a similar solution with some local scripting, though.

Imagine an email rule, which takes a message to a specific address, runs it through a script that extracts a title and url from the email title and body, adds a proper YAML header, saves it as a text file in your Jekyll post directory, commits it to your Git repository and pushes it to your server.

I think it definitely is doable, even though I probably can’t code it myself.

Baking your web site with Jekyll

2011-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Brent Simmons recently made a case for “baking” your web site, by what he meant using static pages instead of dynamically generated ones. He argues web servers won’t get faster soon enough to cope with the ever rising tide of traffic. Even tough this site is in no immediate danger of getting Fireballed, I agree with him. His thoughts aren’t new of course, as thoughts seldom are, but they’re becoming increasingly relevant. Since the idea of returning to simpler ways of publishing content aligns very well with the increasingly popular minimalism trend, I believe we’re going to see more and more of this in the coming years. Dynamic publishing took of because it made it simple for anyone to write on the web. The pendulum is swinging the other way and now the nerds will lead us back to simpler times.

I’ve tried a lot of different publishing platforms: handcoded HTML, my own database driven system, Textpattern, Webby, Movable Type and WordPress. I like tinkering and learning new stuff and it has been fun. Computers and the Internet allows for joys of discovery and amazement seldom available elsewhere to a regular guy like me. I also think I’ve been moving around between systems because they never felt right for me. There’s always been that nagging discomfort, like a pebble in your shoe. Authoring my own system was educating, but the efforts involved to keep up with security aspects of a dynamic site were too overwhelming. I really liked Textpattern—it’s an awesome system—but I found myself holding my breath every time I had to upgrade the system. Movable Type and WordPress are enormous monstrosities. For me they were like firing canon balls to kill mosquitoes.

For the last month and a half I’ve been running Jekyll and for the first time in years I feel content. With my web publishing, that is.

The feeling of writing everything as text files on either of my computers, committing it to a Git repository and pushing it to GitHub pages for publications is best described as satisfaction. It feels incredibly robust, almost incorruptible. There are no upgrades you have to do. No database backups, which I always forgot anyway. No plugins to manage, no theme park of a web interface you have to sift through to make the tiniest change. I say good riddance to all of that.

I’ve also gotten the chance to acquaint myself better with Git, which really is a most extraordinary version control system. I now use if for all my writing, fact and fiction, for the web and for paper. I’ve tried most of the graphical interfaces, but keep coming back to Gity. Textmate’s Git bundle is also pretty convenient.

I haven’t really seen much of the theoretical down sides of static site generation. I never did publish texts from my iPhone or iPad anyway. Comments, as well as a lot of social media sharing, can be added by using javascript snipplets, provided by Disqus, Twitter, Facebook and more.

Most of my minor quibbles have had to do with Liquid, the template language used with Jekyll. If you’re used to script your site with PHP or Ruby, Liquid is a bit limited. I also found that some Liquid code that worked great on my local Jekyll install didn’t work when I sent the pages to GitHub, which was annoying to say the least.

Also, I really loathe Maruku, the Markdown parser Jekyll ships with. I hope someone writes a Ruby wrapper around Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown 3 and adds it in the near future.