On Saturday, it is time for me and my family to leave our urban life for a while and get "skogstokiga" as we say in Sweden. We will spend a week in a house in the deep forests of Småland, guaranteed Internet-free. I will be back blogging in August.

toothpastefordinner.com

Comic from xkcd

"Rights group Privacy International rated the search giant as "hostile" to privacy in a report ranking web firms by how they handle personal data. The group said Google was leading a "race to the bottom" among net firms many of whom had policies that did little to substantially protect users." (BBC News)

Yeah. Google knows that most people give up their privacy to get something for free. And that the emergence of communities and social networking sites makes people willing to give away information about themselves without thinking much about it - how it might be used and possible abused.

"Change should not be done for the sake of change -- it's a strategy to accomplish some overall goal. " (Basic Context for Organizational Change)

How does this apply on a personal level? Why do we sometimes seem to change things in our lives just for the sake of change? Or maybe it only seems so on the surface, but we are in fact following a strategy to accomplish an overall goal in the back of our minds. The promise of a better life?

Someone will call
Something will fall
And smash on the floor
Without reading the text
Know what comes next
Seen it before
And it's painful

Things must change
We must rearrange them
Or we'll have to estrange them
All that I'm saying
The game's not worth playing
Over and over again

From "The Sun and The Rainfall" by Depeche Mode,

Rest in chaos (VERY usable when you have kids)

I am a man of principles, but I am flexible and use the principles that the situation requires.

Merlin Mann has written an excellent post "My War on Clutter: Never “organize” what you can discard" on 43 Folders:

"If the stuff that you accumulate doesn’t help get you closer to the life you want to have, it’s simply not worth keeping. Period. "

"...the real story is about the ways you try to solve clutter problems solely by getting more space or obtaining more containers."

"...The clutter doesn’t need a prettier package; it just needs to go. Now, and in very large quantities."

I agree 100%.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

Take a look at these cool pictures from the STS-117 Atlantis mission's rendezvous with Expedition 15 of the International Space Station in June.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.

When people see my mobile phone and conclude that it is an old (Nokia) model with a mononchrome display, they look confused and ask me why I haven't got a model with a big color display, mp3 player an X.X megapixel camera. Well, because I use it primarily as a phone and to send and receive sms messages. The these features have been available in mobile phones for years, so my current mobile phone is good enough for me. For shooting pictures, I prefer to use a compact camera like Canon Ixus which can actually deliver phones of the quality that I require. For listening to mp3:s, I prefer to use a player which is best at this, such as an Creative Zen Vision:M or iPod.

Fact is, I have been waiting for a mobile Internet device from which I can access the web and all my web apps such as mail and that is simple to use. Apples iPhone looks promising and promises "Internet in your pocket". I think it will excel all other mobile phones when it comes to entertainment and connectivity, but I am not sure about if it is enough of a mobile Internet device to make me ditch my old Nokia mobile. I simply want a mobile device with a browser and that is always connected.

Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.