Computer simulation, programming, software, technology, research, and more (since 2007)
We spent a few days in Vilnius at the end of October. Rather late in the tourist season, but the city was still open for business. It was a very good experience. Vilnius is one of the friendliest and cleanest places I have visited. Definitely on the “recommended” list. Here are some assorted notes from what we saw.
Continue reading “Vilnius – History, Russia, Ukraine”
Over Easter, I took a short trip to Prague with parts of the family. It is a fascinating place – full of tourists and tourist businesses, but still feeling informal and homey. We tried to climb as many towers as we possibly could and visited a ton of sights in a few intense days.
Continue reading “Visiting Prague”The big family vacation his summer was a cruise in the Mediterranean. Most cruises sail from Italian ports, unfortunately. Traveling to and within Italy is a bit of a challenge, resulting in far more heartburn and stress than necessary. Here is our story.
Continue reading “Adventures Traveling to and from Italy”A few weeks ago I visited Berlin. A fantastically interesting city, and much more affordable and accessible than places like New York or London. However, it is almost comical how much of what you see ends up being about either the Third Reich or the Cold War and the DDR. The war in Ukraine was also noticeably present.
Continue reading “Berlin – Cold War, Third Reich, and Ukraine”The current price spikes for electricity in Europe has driven a new interest in saving energy, and part of doing that is to understand just how much energy different things use. I realized while I knew that modern LED lights are magically efficient, just how much electricity is used by other machines? No idea! So, I set out to find some examples the utility you get from a one kilowatt hour of electricity.
Updated in November 2022 with additional data.
Continue reading “What’s in a Kilowatt Hour?”I recently made a trip to the US to look at some interesting things like the USS Intrepid, the architecture or New York City, and Battleship Cove. Battleship Cove is located in Fall River, Massachusetts, and hosts the South Dakota-class battleship USS Massachusetts. Additionally, the site holds the destroyer USS Joseph P Kennedy, the submarine USS Lionfish, and the East German missile corvette Hiddensee. Given that I only had an afternoon there, I ended up only looking at the battleship with a brief run through the submarine. It was that good, especially in company with an old friend who also had read up on how the ship worked.
With Covid-19 still a bit of an issue, the summer of 2021 is yet another one for “svemester” (Sverige-semester, or Sweden-vacation). There are plenty of things to see, and one place that I finally got to visit was the old oil refinery at Oljeön in Ängelsberg, home to Engelsbergs oljefabrik and the world’s oldest preserved oil refinery dating back to the mid-1870s. It is a beautiful piece of industrial history, well-preserved and with good guided tours.
This year’s vacation trip was a roadtrip into Norrland, the northern part of Sweden. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, it seemed safer and fairer to the healthcare system to stay in our own country. It was also an opportunity, since I have wanted to and look at some places up north for quite a while now (such as Bodens Fästning and Hemsö Fästning).
Continue reading “Going Norrland”
Continuing on my blog posts about our Hemester (part 1 covered Bodens Fästning), this blog post will cover Hemsö Fästning. Both are fascinating places, but also rather different, and clearly demonstrate the changes from the early 1900s to the Cold War of the 1950s.
Continue reading “Hemsö Fästning – Coastal Defense from the 1950s”Due to Covid-19, this year’s summer vacation involved a “staycation”, or “hemester” as we say in Swedish. We went up north in Sweden, and took the chance to visit some military museums. In particular, the fortresses at Hemsön and Boden (fästning means fortress). Both are fascinating places, but also rather different, and clearly demonstrate the developments from the early 1900s to the Cold War of the 1950s. This post covers Boden, with a separate post for Hemsö released a few days after this post.
Continue reading “Bodens Fästning – A Fortress in the North of Sweden”
Recently, we had a discussion at work (in our daily virtual team “fika”) where we reflected on just how many weeks we had been working from home due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It has been quite a few; I last saw the office in week 11, and week 19 is beginning… so I am looking at eight weeks personally. Just how did it all begin? I thought it useful to go back and try to remember how we got to this point. In hindsight, I never thought it would be this huge.
Continue reading “Recalling the Beginning of Covid-19 and Work-from-Home”I have been spending quite a bit of time in recent years developing training materials and doing trainings for Simics. There is always a discussion on how best to do training, in particular between live sessions with actual trainers and offline video and other self-study resources. I am a firm believer in the value of live training, and during our recent winter vacation up in the Swedish mountains I made myself provide a perfect example of the value of a teacher. I took a skiing lesson.
Continue reading “The Benefit of Live Teachers (Applied to Myself)”
This year’s family vacation was spent on the Greek island of Crete, in an all-inclusive resort close to Chania on the north coast. Overall we got nice weather and an enjoyable pool-and-sun holiday, mostly staying at the hotel with a few excursions. In the following, I will go through some of the most surprising or interesting observations I made in Crete. Greek letters are cool, but I do not think we will go back to Greece any time soon when there are higher-quality places available (such as Spain).
Continue reading “Off-Topic: Vacation in Crete”
During this year’s vacation trips, we sampled an unusual number of ice cream places around Sweden & Europe. Here are some notes on a few places we visited and where I took the time to actually take some photographs…
Last month, I (together with my family and some friends) tried the virtual reality (VR) experience that has been created for the museum in Gamla Uppsala. VR is used to let people explore the area around Gamla Uppsala, experiencing what it looked like back in the year 650 AD. 650 AD is in the middle of the Vendeltid era (before the Viking age which is typically considered to start around the year 800). At this point in time, Gamla Uppsala had been an important religious and political center for a long time. The big burial mounds that dominate the landscape to this day were already old by then, having built in the 500s.
Continue reading “Experiencing Gamla Uppsala in the Year 650 using Virtual Reality”