Are swedes really that normal?

A friend sent me an article today - "Are Swedes really that normal? (PDF)" by Colin Moon.

To quote some from it:

To communicate effectively cross-culturally the first thing you need to realise is that someone somewhere in the world probably sees you as really quite strange.

That may be difficult for some Swedes to swallow. How could anybody in their right mind consider normal, efficient, level-headed Swedes as strange?

...

This, in Swedish, is called the förankringsprocess ("anchoring [of a decision]", to gain acceptance for a decision before it is pushed through). If Swedes mention the word ‘process’ then it’s better not be in a hurry. There’s a process for everything. This one means getting everybody involved in everything.

...

However, fair’s fair - when they’re at work they’re very effective. But not before 8.30 as they have flexi-time, and not after 4 pm, thank you, as they have to pick up the kids from play school, and not after 2 pm on Fridays, if you don’t mind, and preferably not between 1 May and 10 August.

There's no way I can not whole-heartedly agree with that author. To begin with, the article is simply too densely satirical to be taken seriously. Because that's supposedly how it is intended, the author (let's not repeat his name, nor link to his homepage, thus promoting him) holds seminars in business communication and is a self-entitled expert in Swedes. I just hope the rest of his writings and teachings are less generalizing, superficial and pointless.

Obviously there are some points in what's stated in the article - maybe Swedes in general are less prone to work themselves to death (read: lazy), and maybe the general policy is to value the insights and objections of everyone, thereby avoiding poorly founded costly decisions (read: decision impotence). Regardless, all those patterns and behaviors have developed through decades of business and frankly, Swedes have many great achievements to be proud of, they can't all be contra-productive. I usually refuse calling entire groups of people stupid, and neither are the Swedes - there is a generally accepted collective behavior, it's nothing uncommon, and it's at least not always the case that people conform to a social pattern because they are slaves under it, maybe they actually enjoy it! Besides - "lagom" is a great and flexible word.

One point in the article I find more true and interesting than the others - That Swedes love to think they are normal. I suppose it is a common thought among non-internationalistic bigots of all nations, not realizing that their little tribe is just one of thousands, and thus losing out on the opportunity to liberate themselves from the need to conform to the own tribe.

I have met Estonians who seem to think they will be great just by being not like the Swedes. It's ridiculous and annoying, and sometimes that's what I respond to their Swede-bashing. There are plenty of things to despise about the Estonian culture as well, but... I try to focus on learning about the drawbacks and benefits of many cultures, growing as great I can personally instead. Next blog post I should make about cultural quirks I love!

Ending this post with a few links:

• More humorous Swede-bashing, this time spewed out by Australians.
  
• Industrious, humorous and inspiring disruptive.nu (in Swedish only) about venture capitalism and entepreneurship. Plenty of interviews and food for thought about "un-Swedish" (sv: "osvensk", it is hilarious that such an expression exists and is frequently used) mentality
  
• Mosquito and Governor Andy on Youtube. Mosquito is the kind of Swedish 90s TV, grabbing any cool animations they could find, I grew up with and love. Governor Andy is funny because it is good music and he has an absolute menagerie of Swedish reggae profiles lined up in the video. Spot Dr. Alban!
  

How to be there for your family - remotely

Let's face it, even if it's not the primary purpose for your family to want you to come visit, if you're anything like me, you will end up spending half your Christmas sitting in front of the family computer, cleaning it to withstand a new season of abuse, setting up and installing things (while trying to make it absolutely fool-proof, anything which breaks will cost you hours of frustrating phone-calls to try set things straight again) and generally... wishing you could spend Christmas doing something nicer but still help your family with all these things some other time.

A little engineering ingenuitiy (to get "call home" including tweaking sshd configuration was my idea), my favourite vodcast Hak5 and Bozteck OneClickVNC to the rescue! Go ahead and read the show notes / wiki or watch the episode.

Essentially I have now emailed a small (less than 1 MB) zip file to all members of my family, with some brief instructions on how to run it (I didn't bother about creating an installer, it's a zip file) and whenever they need my computer support (there seems to be no way I will be able to refuse them), they just send me a message and click the "Call CJ" icon on the desktop.

My mother got all teary-eyed today, partly about this and partly about Skype voice chat - "It feels like you're not so far away, it's really nice!". Yep - Trust your technolust.

Anyway, if either of my dear readers are interested in this, I've also recently managed to set up my own TWiki (which I won't link from here), it's awesome in itself, where I've got some further helpful info.

Besides all this nerdiness, I spent Friday-Saturday in Toila spa and visited the freaky-looking "village of frozen urine" / Valaste waterfalls:



Spa was... very nice. Very nice. Thanks baby.

Lactating - now with a buzz!

Wired gadget lab blog (A happy place for nerds) writes:

It's hard to know just what to say about the Wine Rack, a bastardization of the Camelback hydration system that stores a full 750ml of liquid in a sports bra. Aimed at the kind of people who like to sneak hooch into concerts, games, etc., the thing also increases bust size by two cups.

Could this be just the thing to liven up a too-serious wine tasting? Or derail several years worth of therapy aimed at getting you past the oral stage? Or just inspire untold bad jokes?

Whatever, it's $30 and available in two sizes.

I just love this invention. And as they write - it's unlikely to be detected in any frisking as well.

In Sweden where alcohol sale in public places is only permitted in well-fenced areas to clients who are willing to prove that they are still sober enough to stand on one leg while whistling the anthem (though otherwise remaining quiet, the guards will beat them with retractable batons if not) and only then at 3-4 times the regular monopoly price... the Booze Bra is a given smash hit.

Any guys up for partying in drag by the way? :-)

In other news, I still have the same job, things are still as exciting, me and the girlfriend are finally renting an apartment of our own, and I still haven't figured out how to disconnect my (emigrant) blogger account from my gmail identity so I can't link to all the fun stuff I've been fiddling with recently.

Got to go, the girlfriend is steaming fractal cabbage!

Air Force Warthog

I haven't posted anything in ages, but today I stood right under a landing US Boeing C-17 Globemaster III (also here and here). It was awesome.


(Picture from wikipedia, not mine)

Supposedly, it was the Estonian batallion that's part of the coalition forces returning from Iraq.

As usual, things are incredibly busy - a bunch of turmoil in the company, I've joined a choir and am learning Estonian, and on Monday morning I'm heading to Gothenburg to celebrate Christmas. We'll be in Sweden until the 26th and I'd love to see some old friends.

I should probably get into a habit of posting more regularly if I'm intending to keep a blog (which doesn't happen when I'm always planning to write huge pretentious posts). But also, I've decided to explore what's possible to achieve with a wiki, piracy (also here and here) and virtualization (also here) and you know, change the world in general.

I've got a bunch of new stuff online, check out my flickr profile page which currently ties it all together. Ask me if you haven't seen it yet. Soon I may be moving to an official blog as well.

Social networking - making the world really small

Haven't blogged in a while. Never mind that.

The other day I realized it is not only Estonia which is a small place - this whole thing, cyberspace, blogosphere, what'ya'call'it, is becoming - or maybe is making the entire world, a really, really tiny place.

As I was ready a rather silly article on swedish Today's News ("Dagens Nyheter"), about someone who as a publicity stunt had placed a significant kiss-mark on some modern art masterpiece. Beside the article in the "blogs about this" box was a link saying "Here's the painting the woman in France kissed". Silly as I am I of course checked it out, and found Jack Hansen, self-made expert in guerilla marketing and search engine optimization.

This guy's blog was pretty interesting - no doubt was he good at attracting traffic, he had at least lured me in there with a pretty meaningless entry about a modern art painting, but I was disappointed to see as so often seems to be the case, the people best at getting your attention have the least to say, at least in what you came there for in the first place - "Empty barrels make the most noise".

Either way, one thing Jack was writing about was how he desperately wanted to be a beta tester of Spotify. That's interesting, I have heard of Spotify but do not quite remember what it is, Jack seem to think it is the coolest thing since sliced bread. So what does google and wikipedia say about Spotify? Well, this wikipedia diff on Ludvig Strigeus pretty much says it all. Very cool, so that is what my old prodigal classmate is doing nowadays. Sounds so much better than "working for the automotive industry".

Also, the other day I met the guy pretty much responsible for nicking Chalmers programming language guru Lennart Augustsson to dump that boring old university for an investment bank. He had a whole bunch of interesting stories to tell, and pretty much summed his profession up as "locating people who are desperately trying to cut a steak with their forks, then finding and selling them a knife". That sounds like a nice business, beneficial for all; the people who get to eat their steak, for he or she who sells the knife as well as the knife him or herself.

They say that once you graduate, your most valuable book is going to be the address book. Speaking of which, Sugardaddy, if you're reading this, I have got a most interesting business project in mind; involving some valuable technology evangelization, and a whole heap of excellent, unsold knives. I'll be in touch.

”Now there’s a red light blinking there, has it been all the time?”

Lately I've been following the "Chairman Persson" documentary on swedish television. For those of you unaware of the situation, Göran Persson was first a high-ranking official in the social democrat administration, later became minister of finances and finally sat as party-leader and prime minister for some eleven years. Already at the beginning of that story, in particular one reporter, Erik Fichtelius, got his background stories much through Persson and managed to get an agreement to continue that kind of semi-confidential interviews throughout Persson's career. Among other conditions, the interviews were made with the agreement that they would not be released in full until Persson stepped down. No one realized then it would be that many years...

Last week SVT released the material in four hour-long episodes, plus at least as much material only online, plus that the entire unedited material will be available for scholarly analysis. Keep any thoughts you want about the social democrats and Göran Persson, but the amount of interesting thoughts (on politics, primarily), not to mention the amount of insane blunders anyone would let out in front of the camera in such long time is absolutely amazing.

It makes me a bit nostalgic and proud to be a swede when I see a project like this made. The programs had some 1.5 million viewers, and I feel like blurting out "And me!", and it was important enough to watch it online from Estonia! Debate afterward has been thin at best though, reminds me of the media-judgments in the sulphur-reaking monologue of Carl-Johan Vallgren. Documentaries and debate- and cultur-pages may be hard to digest, but I still instinctively resist the lazy approach some people have that "what would the world care about this?". I think that at least taking some part in what's going on in the world around you is essential to expanding your understanding and intelligence. If a reasonably mature arena for public debate is not maintained a society may face total political bankruptcy and citizen participation goes extinct. If nothing else, as a necessary basis to enable action it is necessary, or as Doktor Kosmos so wisely put it "Actually what you say matters, not only what you do".

One recent topic of public debate here in Estonia has been that the Estonian Lutheran Church decided to do a Church of Nigeria (quote: ”our commitment to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality which is a perversion of human dignity and encourages the National Assembly to ratify the Bill prohibiting the legality of homosexuality”) and announced some kind of objection to that Church of Sweden has decided to perform same-sex unions. I wish I could read that article but anyhow try follow the debate closely, the schism is a fascinating one.

What seems to be the case is that Church of Estonia fail to, or refuse to see the decisions Church of Sweden had to make. Facing an increasingly secular society where religious fundamentalists gather in more charismatic movements, the "state church" saw their clientele fleeing, especially if they would take the conservative path in issues like that of sexuality. Especially the former arch-bishop K.G. Hammar was one very strange but successful bird in reforming the swedish church, with statements such that he considers the biblical texts on virgin birth "poetic" and when supporting the Ecce Homo exhibition.

Now the government were releasing their groundwork on reforming marriage law, and Church of Sweden did essentially all they could, stated not only that they are willing to accept same-sex marriage, but that they support equal rights for all, especially for such a persecuted group as homosexuals. Essentially they would have lost their right to register any civil unions otherwise. Still, they guarded their integrity and think the tradition-laden word "marriage" should be kept out of civil unions law altogether. Fair enough, in my opinion. Let them those who want remain bigots, and all others marry!

PS. Work here in Estonia has granted me some fascinating insight into the true story and people behind Skype. So go check out Bluemoon and compare their people list with that of Skype (the page I meant to find was here), as well as the great coverage back in the day by CNN

Update 2008-01-11: The international version "A Prime Minister - Ten Years Behind the Scenes" was released a while back, so now anyone inclined and fluent enough in English can get an insight into our dear Swedish social democracy lunacy. If you don't want the web fluff you can simply open http://svt.se/content/1/c8/01/01/97/71/op_int.asx in your favourite media player, or for you advanced geeks (i.e. Me) dump the stream from mms://qstream-wm.qbrick.com/00928/sthlm/dokumentar/dokumentarfilm/op_int.wmv

The highs and the lows

Haven't blogged in a while. There have been a numer of highs and lows worth mentioning lately.

The weather has been really nice the last two weeks. My first barbeque of the year was this weekend, followed by a day of surfing and tanning at the beach. Last week I and a friend had a great evening out dining with LaserDavid and his friend who were visiting SFO for a convention.

My car suddenly stopped running while driving on the highway two weeks ago. Naturally this was shortly after my ceiling fell in. It's also stalling sometimes when stopping at a red light. Very annoying. I have to turn the key three or four times before it starts up again. I left it at my local mechanic and of course they couldn't reproduce the problem. So I got it back, and of course it soon started to act up on me again. Now it's back in the shop for a second attempt at identifying the fault. I've investigated the problem and done a lot of searching on the net for that kind of problem with Volvos of that model and year. It could be pretty much anything from a rare short circuit ($) to a broken ignition control computer ($$$) to a worn out fuel pump ($$). Either the mechanic can repro it and replace the part, or I have to live with the issue until the car starts bailing on me with such a high frequency that's it’s impossible to miss it. *Sigh* My car is a wonderful piece of machinery otherwise.

This coming weeking I'm going skiing, hoping that my bad luck qouta takes some time to replenish itself. I'm the one with least experience with winter sports in my social group, so it's likely going to be a hard weekend of learning.
I am learning to surf right now and so far that has only cost me a new pair of glasses. Despite having security straps for them, a wave hit me so hard that they disappeared with straps and all. Luckily I didn't have to drive all the way home without them, and I needed new ones anyway.

Some weeks ago, me and a bunch of colleges, friends and friends of friends rented a limo and took an 8 hour ride around the wine country in Napa Valley: Wine tasting, picnicking in the sun and listening to trivia about wine. You get pretty dizzy after such a trip but it's certainly worth it, not having to drive around the valley yourself with a bored sober driver, or no sober drivers at all. In California, you can drive if you have a blood-alcohol level of less then 0.08 percent (0.8 parts per thousand, "promille"). That's crazy in the mind of a Swede (we have 0.0). It's my ambition to try not to take advantage of such freedom.

Otherwise I have pretty much worked 60 hours a week the last few weeks. I guess it’s a matter of “You work hard, you party hard”. Speaking of work and party, I got my hands on the movie “Riot On” last weekend. It’s a crazy movie about a Finnish tech company that got a lot of VC in 2000 and crashed as IT went down two years later. It has been around for a while but I noticed that I could get the DVD from Amazon just recently. Anyway these guys blow a lot of money on building a company image, recruiting relatives and partying like crazy. If you have ever worked at a startup, been though a "high-tide" with crazy inflated expectations in industry, or worked at an IT company you should see this. It takes a bunch of Finnish guys to make a movie about that time. Like they weren't good at partying anyways. I can just hope the age of wonders is not over yet.

Robert

The Aparment Complex "Billy"

The week before last was a bit messy. On Wednesday I woke up from a loud crash, and realized that about 20 square foot (2 square meters) of my ceiling had just collapsed. What the f*ck?



Housing in my area is expensive. As I might have mentioned, houses cost about the same as they do at home, but the prices are in dollars instead of SEK.
California, not to mention Palo Alto, is insane. My one room apartment is $1100 a month to rent. But it's not the houses themselves that cost money. Construction materials are more expensive, but often of lower quality and construction labor is cheap.



The standards are somewhat set by climate. It's always above freezing and doesn't rain for about 6 months out of the year. Historically the price of energy has been very low. So instead of building well-insulated houses people have been cranking up their heaters. The peak of energy consumption however, is reached during the summer when all the air conditioners pump heat out of the buildings. Energy is becoming expensive though, and building codes are changing to accommodate, but the quality of most buildings compared, at least to Swedish standards, will have to be described as crappy. I was about to compare them to buying a whole house at IKEA, the same fragile particle board material that most of the stuff from IKEA is made of, and assemble it with discount tools from your local DIY construction warehouse. But then I might be discrediting IKEA too much. Much of the stuff they make is sufficent quality for many purposes.

Anyway. I got a weeks worth free rent and a new unit in the same building. I also took the opportunity of partying and sleeping over at friends during the few days I couldn't occupy the old apartment.

Robert