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Here are some photos I've forgotten to upload. They're all from the Fujian White Crane competition in Hastings in April this year.

When I first started at Fry-IT they gave me Maverick! by the same author as this book and they said: "Read this. This is how we work". This book is the sequal to the Maverick! book. The first book tells the story of Semco, an industry manufacturer in Brazil that is run by the employees with the CEO Ricardo Semler as "catalyst". Employees come and go as they please, dress as they please, recruit their own bosses, no secretaries, no dedicated desks and even set their own salaries! Employees are given more or less total freedom to do what they want or to do what they have to do how they want to do it.

The core principle in both books is: He who is given responsibility takes responsibility.

It's mostly about moral trust. For example, they abandoned having a security check when people left the plant. Sure, a couple of people stole some tools and stationary. But showing respect to the majority of people boosts their confidence and hence perform better. Besides, the people who stole things were soon kick out (or persuaded otherwise) by their own collegues because it was counteractive for them when tools were missing. I must add that the employees all have generous bonus schemes.

Read the first book for more explainations and examples, but you don't have to have read the first book to read this second one. In this book Ricardo Semler talks about several things such as:

• Why can employees check their work-email on a Sunday but not go to the movies on a Tuesday afternoon?
• Question everything! Ask "why?" at least three times to all things that you think about.
• Working is not only about making money. Considering the amount of time you spend at work, you'd better make it worthwhile.
• Managers that don't care. Why should a manager get involved in things that his staff can solve better themselfs if they're unafraid of making misstakes?
• Aligning your interests. Employees can develop their own ideas into business and take the lead.

Ricardo constantly surprises me with his unconventional ideas. I thought I was "modern" in my views of worklife but constantly I get reminded of being old-fashioned. This book has given me many new ideas to adopt when I work. One such idea is to go play golf during the day and make up for that in the evening.

One major idea I've learnt from reading this book is that about Aligning your interests. Suppose I have an idea for something our company can make money on, then with my collegues acceptance and guidance I can enthusiasticly develop this idea from within the company. This is what a lot of people do. They leave their job to instead start up a company and work with their idea. That comes with risks, and if your company instead can allow you to develop your idea within the company, the employee is more secure and the company gets yet another product to sell.

I recommend that you buy this book and read it if you want to learn about how to make worklife more interesting. It's one of those books that makes you think and re-evaluate your ideas. I like books like that!

Today I went to see Whale Rider at Odeon in High Street Kensington. We were first going to see Pirates of the Caribbean but the air conditioner in the auditorium was broken and in this heat even I wouldn't sit hour and a half with 50 people sweating like a pig.

The Whale Rider is one of those films which has lots of rewards from small international film festivals, and I now think the film deserves them all.

It's about cute little Pai on New Zealand. She's a Mauri and should be the heir to the trone as chief of the little village. The only problem is that she's a girl which her grandfather cannot accept. That is what the film is about.

You get a warm feeling for these people and their culture. If you think the dance sequence the "all blacks" do before a rugby game is chick, you'll love this film.

All in all the film feels like a sweet fairy tale like Amelie from Montmartre but with a contemporary important message. I suggest that you go to see this film. It's one of the most comfortable films I've seen this year.

Just went to see Terminator 3 at Warner Village in Angel.

Actually not too bad. It was fun and had some entertaining scenes in terms of action. The car chase scenes were great. Maybe I think this only because I saw it at the cinema with great sound.

A lot of old tricks from Terminator 2 Judgement day was in this film too. Like "I'll be back" and getting a biker outfit. This was bad but I suppose it was inevitable to connect this film with the previous one.

The film made me laugh many times. Almost always when Arnold does something almost ironic for example when he says "Talk to the hand!" as you'll see when you see the film.

My suggestion is: Go watch it. Don't expect too much and see it at the cinema unless you have a great home cinema system.

A plus for the atomic bomb explosion scenes.

Once a month I get one or two pieces of spam in my inbox. So far no "normal" email has been misstaken for spam as far as I know.

The software is called SpamBayes. I run it as a proxy. That means that my email client (Thunderbird from the Mozilla project) connects to localhost which gets forwarded to mail.grenna.net which is the real mail server.

The software holds absolutely no information about what is "spam" and what is "ham" initially, so you have to train your SpamBayes for a couple of days using an easy web interface to say: "This email is spam", "This email is ham", ... Then SpamBayes breaks down each word in the email and can tally each word with a probability-of-being-spam. Don't worry, it's much less complicated than I fail to explain it as.

Read this article which is another success story like this.

You will need some computer skills to set it up, but if you use M$ Outlook you can download an installer that should be more or less double-clickable.

It doesn't work with hotmail, yahoo or alike but if you have a POP3 account and hate spam I strongly suggest you have a look at this.

My website has been offline for a couple of days because I've moved it to a new machine (my old laptop with Debain on it) and have it running behind a Squid server instead.

A Squid server is a superfast cache server that makes a temporary copy of the dynamic site requested and serves that instead. The disadvantage with this is that at least one request will spawn the cache to make a copy; then all consecutive requests will be run from Squid instead of Zope.

So if my site is ever slashdotted it should be able to handle the load (...better).

There are still some settings I need to tweak about with to get exactly the kind of caching I need and want. One problem is the laptop that is now my webserver. It is a weak Celeron 500 with 192Mb of RAM, so the performance will still be pretty poor no matter what I do.

Another advantage with having Squid set up like this is that I can easily define all the virtual hosts for my sites (I use pyredir) but also for stuff like images. One hope is to be able to have all photos run off the filesystem and by doing that I'll be able to serve the raw images from a different web server (something really fast like thttpd)

Now I'm back from my holidays in Sweden.

I had a great time with fishing, swiming and meeting old friends. The first couple of days I spent at our familys summer house on the west coast where fishing is my biggest hobby. We were only out twice this time in the beautiful fiord sitting in boat the beyond the magnificant sunset on the ridges. Both times the fishing-luck was with us and on the first day I caught that big cod as seen on the photo above.

The rest of the week I spent in my hometown enjoying doing almost nothing. A lot of alcohol was consumed finished with a swim in lake Vättern till the sun rose.

All in all: A great time!

Here are some photos I've uploaded since:
Lots of whitings
Family barbacue at summer house
Vips with a little snake
Mom with two whitings

Here's the recipe from that fish we caught.

I have now moved the fishing photos from last year onto this site. Enjoy!

Today, Saturday I'm going on holiday for a week to Sweden to visit friends and family.

I won't be able to read any emails but I will try to provide a callable mobile number that I will be available on.

See this videoclip (3.2Mb) from last year when we were out fishing and I kill a fish by biting it to death.

Some photos from the last camp.