This is my summer 2016 blog!

It is Wednesday 13 of July and I am on my way to Amsterdam for my work.

When I was waiting for the train I contemplated over what I am blogging about. I have no problems with blogging about the blog-engine or paintings but it is not that often that I start with a blank piece of paper and start blogging – just like that. So that is a great moment for trying something new. Today I am in a train on the way to Amsterdam and it is not for painting. The things I do at work I cannot really talk about so this blog post must be about other things.

This morning I decided that I will not cut trees myself at Sunnerås, my farm in Sweden. Instead I will let a forest harvesting company do it for me. It is just about a small part of the forest at Sunnerås I am considering harvesting. There are a couple of grown up patches of forest and I could go for harvesting all of it but I really do not like the look of the forest after it has been harvested. I will do a minimal patch, this time.

You could think that the decision to harvest forest has no big feelings and emotions but on the contrary. It is a tough decision. I have kept this undecided for a long time. The house of my parents is lying next to this patch and there is a risk that trees can fall on to their house and that would be terrible. So that is adding to the feelings list. At first, I had decided to cut the nearest trees to their house all by myself but already that is a significant job. A job with risks. I put all feelings on a heap and tried to sum them up and out came the decision to let a company harvest.

Perhaps in the future I will look back to this decision and see if I made a good decision.

Feelings. Emotions.

Owning forest and knowing that one day you must harvest. That is destructive. Most of the time I spend in the forest is constructive. I like the forest.

Feelings. Emotions.

Oh well, it must be done.

At lunchtime, I tweeted about my frustrations of data replication with Microsoft SQL server. The twitter application crashed in my phone while uploading the tweet however I did not notice that. I put my phone away. Not until the battery was at 3 percent a couple of hours later and the phone gave its “I am giving up” tone I realized what had happened. I was left with a grayed out tweet that only I can see. It is funny though that the emotion of failing technology leads to a failing technology. I really love recursive events even though this was unfortunate.

On the way home from Amsterdam I had a dead phone and all people around me was using their phones but mine was dead. Between two stations the train stopped. We were standing waiting for 30 minutes.

When I came home I was tired and done with technology for a while.

The core here is that those emotions are more interesting than the facts around them. It happens more when emotions and feelings are involved.

On Thursday morning 14 July I was driving car for a couple of hours. I brought my wife and daughter to the airport. On my way home, I was listening to music in the car. I started to compare my music and the music on the radio. It occurred to me that there are feelings involved when I make music that not necessarily make my music better. Up until now I perhaps made music slightly “stressed” or perhaps eager is a better word. Now this morning when driving home I thought that it is a destructive feeling to have when composing music. Among one thing it makes the music very energetic and sometimes it is better to create dynamic parts in the music. The music needs to be relaxed as well. It cannot be full pace forward all the time. It is off course so that when someone is listening then they are listening because they want to listen. If they don’t want to listen, then they should not do that.

Another thing about tunes I have been thinking about is that it would be nice to produce a track where the drop is really a drop with regards to the feeling. “Oh yeah, a drop” – kind of. I should figure out some tunes how they are structured and when I really feels enthusiastic about what I am hearing and then really analyze that. That would be cool.

On Saturday 16 of July I decommissioned my Small Business Server Windows 2003! It has been working in my server room since 2005. My server room is the closet under the staircase. I had a ventilation to keep the airflow through the closet. All the websites I had on my server are moved to my new Virtual Private Server Ubuntu 14.04 at Argeweb.

When doing this I had to move out machines from the domain. That work is not finished yet. I had to find a way to print and what I found was that my router could work as a print server. I turned on DHCP and DNS on my router and then the new network was up and running.

My email handling also moved to the new VPS. I have a “half” email serving set up. The VPS can receive emails to various mailboxes and then it forward these to my “real” address. This way I can protect myself from spam. For every service that I subscribe to, I make a new mailbox on my VPS. Previously I did the same on my Windows 2003. That way I have full control over where the spam comes from. What I mean with “half” is that I cannot send from the VPS. For that I would need a fully qualified domain name and PTR records etc something I don’t need at the moment.

Anyhow, this milestone of the decommissioned server feels good!

I come up with a new photo art project! It is going to be “flower portraits”. It started by “accident” kind of. At the back of my garden in the Netherlands I got daylilies. Adjacent to the flock of daylilies I got my compost bin. Mine is black. It was windy that day and not at all easy to make the photos but somehow, I managed to get a photo of a daylily with the black compost bin as background and it was beautiful!

The next day there was another daylily flowering and it was much more graceful. But it was not in a spot that the compost bin could be the background. I went searching and found a black piece of paper. Namely, the top protection sheet for Arches aquarelle paper block of paper. It gave a really exciting result and the result was a flower portrait!

I will try to make some more of those. If you see me carrying around a black piece of paper this summer then you know what I am up to.