Brief update from the Siberian countryside

Posted on August 17, 2015 by jonas

We have spent a week at the dacha 40 min outside of Novokuznetsk with a few visits to the city. Today was a city day for example and Tanya and I got our teeth fixed with excellent service for a very reasonable fee.

After the visit at the dentist I bought a mobile 3G router and a mobile internet subscription for the only provider (out of three with coverage) that has decent 3G coverage. It works quite well and it has a battery, is charged via micro USB and handles 10 concurrent users.

The weather has been poor, intermittent rain and cloudy around 20 degrees Celsius, but this week has started on another note and the coming days are said to be sunny and around 30 degrees instead.

After some bureaucracy I am now once again allowed to drive one of the two cars and I drove back from the city today. Just in that short time I saw two ruthless over takings but for being Russia they were legitimate…

Anyway, it is late and Sonja will wake us up tomorrow so I better get some sleep. I will write soon now that I have internet connection.

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Home alone

Posted on August 2, 2015 by jonas

Wife and daughter are in Siberia since two weeks and in one week I will join them. The last week I have been in Adliswil alone and the week before that I spent in Wroclaw in Poland.

I miss Freja (in Sweden) and the girls (in Russia) but it also means I an can do whatever I want or need. Yesterday I went to Germany to fix some things and at home I have mowed the lawn, fixed some lamps, ironed my shirts, cocked for the coming week and washed the bed linen so I think I look after myself quite well for being a grass-widower.

Wroclaw was a good visit and the drive there and back was without incidents. For the first time I got to get to know the city a bit more than just the hotel, the city square and the office. I went to visit two garages in the south and north for some “Saab spa” and also took the trams around the city in different errands. I went jogging in the southern suburbs and could see how it looks like outside of the the tourist areas in the city center.

The summer has been hot so far here in Adliswil but lately we have been blessed with some rain too. I have equipment for “artificial rain” too but meanwhile I am away I would prefer some natural precipitation.

Now it is getting time to get the bed linen from the tumbler and to go to bed…

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Lake Garda in May

Posted on June 7, 2015 by jonas

June is here and the summer in Zurich has been hot so far. It might be that we have had it all at once, or maybe we will be compensated for last year’s cold weather. Anyway, we have had good use of the AC the last days and we have probably already used it more this year than last year.

In May we did not go for anything particularly spectacular but we did one trip abroad when we went to Lake Garda together with Tu-Anh, Piotr, and both dogs for a long weekend. The car was packed but spacious enough to cope with the challenge. On the way there we took a car train under the alps and on the way back we went via Innsbruck. The stay in Malcesine on the east side of Lake Garda was very pleasant even though the weather was less reliable than one could have expected on beforehand. I hope and think that we can go to this area more in the future.

We have not had a modern DSLR for some time. Neither Tanya or I are fanatic about photography but we have missed one sometimes and when there was a decent offer on Canon’s low-end, but “enough-end” for us, we got a Canon EOS 100D. It is pretty light and familiar to use. My old zoom lens fits and I will put some photos from Lake Garda in the web album later on.

In the near future we will be happy to have Rasmus as guest and after that I will go for my yearly trip to Poland.

Posted in arbete, bil, båt, tåg och flyg, fotografering, semester | Tagged , | Leave a comment

March and April

Posted on April 21, 2015 by jonas

I got a mail today from my blog saying that it had updated WordPress, i.e. the blog tool used for publishing these texts. I guess the blog is trying to make fun out of me for updating the blog more often itself than I do. Nevertheless, it is time for a comeback again… The good thing with my update interval is that at least there are some things to write about. 🙂

I did not go to the Geneva International Motor show last year (the year before I went with Rasmus and Tanya) but this year I got an invitation from Porsche so Fredrik and I took my 911 out for a ride in southwest direction. The reasonable choice might be to take the train to avoid traffic jam and horrible parking far away from the expo but Fredrik rightfully pointed out that it does not make sense to go with anything else than a sports car to a car show. Porsche did by the way offer a splendid lunch and some VIP access to their latest automobiles. It was all very appreciated and maybe it is time to get a 918 after all. It’s not more than a million Swiss francs after all…

Over Easter my parents and my older brother visited us. We did not do any spectacular, or unspectacular, trips together but we did a few nice walks in Zurich city. We all enjoyed the stay despite the weather being mostly crap with quite a bit of rain but that’s life north of Spain… Freja did for sure enjoy my mother’s extensive care and probably wonder why she can’t follow that nice lady to wherever she stays.

Not much have changed with the cars since last time. I have got the windscreens changed on X5 and 911 plus the X5 has passed its first car inspection. No drama, no complaints. Like it should be. Sonja did her first Porsche ride two weekends ago when we took a sunny ride around Zugersee. Both ladies still sit comfortably in the back seat without complaints about lack of space for head and legs. I have to admit though, it is not a family car and to take Sonja in and out of the car demands an act of acrobatics or some decent will power.

In February I started the project to install two lamp posts in the garden, one in each corner basically, by installing one of the two cables. Last weekend I completed it by running the other cable in the ground as well plus actually installing the lamp posts themselves. They both have LED lamps so I don’t feel too bad about letting them spread their light from 7 pm to 7 am. With my contract the electricity is cheap (half price) in the night so they are subsidizing the cozy garden atmosphere heavily. (I guess it goes without saying that cables, isolation, and lamp posts are all bought in OBI in Waldshut…)

Last Friday I did a German test, Telc B1, since I will need that certificate for the immigration authorities later this year. I don’t know yet if I passed it but if I did I might blog about it in a month. If I failed you will know due to the lack of such statements. 🙂

At work things are fine, not much to complain or get super excited about. Most days I am able to get home in reasonable time but when there is a release the pressure builds up slightly. Unfortunately there is one on Saturday but hopefully it will be quick and smooth.

In the apartment we have done one project lately. As usual it was triggered and led by Tanya. The old work place in the living room got upgraded and now facilitates two seats and a 2.6 meter long desk. The printer is neatly installed “in the air” under the desk and cables are hidden neatly. One of my favorite shops, once again OBI in Waldshut, provided the desk and the legs so it was basically for free. In an expensive country like Switzerland one learns to appreciate such occasions. 🙂

I have seen some good movies lately and those which I remember as noteworthy are The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Still Alice, I Origins, Leviathan, Tangerines, Citizenfour, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and Interstellar.

Tomorrow my younger brother with girl friend will come and visit us for a few days. We are looking forward to it and still have some hours to get rid of the cold we have caught lately. The weather has been great the last days and I hope it can stay this time meanwhile we have Joel and Sara visiting. The walks with Sonja are even more enjoyable with nice warm temperature.

Time flies and it is time to get to bed and read a few pages before the eyes get too tired.

Posted in arbete, bil, båt, tåg och flyg, djur, freja, hus och hem, Sonja, vardag | 1 Comment

February update

Posted on February 22, 2015 by jonas

It turns out that this is my first blog post in 2015. I don’t have any illusions about daily or weekly updates in the blog but occasionally I will drop by to summarize some recent events.

Nursing a baby obviously takes a lot of time, energy, and commitment. During February, and beginning of March, we are enjoying the support of Tanya’s mother which makes life much easier for us. There is of course also a valuable social component to it as well and Tanya is able to escape the “apartment prison” to a larger extent.

Sonja is now 4.5 months and she is developing well as far as we understand and are told in the regular checkups. She has invented her own language mainly consisting of variations of the sounds “agah” and “agoh” but she might also throw in an “rrrrrh” sometimes. She eats well and is not afraid of putting on some weight. When Ira and Vitaly is back I should ask to get the scales back so we can see if she is over 8 kg now (which would be in the upper segment according to the growth charts). Sonja grips things with her hands, also slightly heavier toys, and can coordinate both hands in operations like “grab the big matryoshka doll and bring it in for inspection by mouth”. She enjoys sitting in the bouncer reaching for toys and listening to psychedelic MIDI versions of great classical masterpieces. And she still falls asleep quickly when being put in the stroller for a walk. (She might have inherited it partially from her mother who also typically quickly falls asleep, also before becoming a mother, when she is going by car.) Since Sonja sleeps well in the stroller we take longer walks than we used to do when we only had Freja. Even if Freja maybe gets less attention than “pre Sonja”, she at least enjoys the longer walks.

Our lives are of course very Sonja-centric at the moment but we have also looked into other things. With the current state of the ruble it might be a good opportunity to acquire an apartment in Saint Petersburg so we have sent Tanya to sort it out. More details later if things play out as planned.

At CS, my work, things are going well and I have found a spot in the organization that I enjoy. It’s a good mix of requirements engineering, business analysis, software development, team building and communication. It takes time to shape the role to one’s liking in a big organization so I’ll try to keep it this way and then we’ll see how it goes. I have learnt that things can change fast, for good and for worse. At the moment I enjoy a bit more flexibility and freedom so I tend to work from home on Fridays. That works well since we have an office, including a bunch of laptops, a few servers, and a fridge plus water boiler, in the basement.

March seems to have some things lined up for us as well. In the beginning of the month we will escort Tanya’s mother to the flight home which departs from Munich. Meanwhile there we will visit the city center which I have not been to since 2010 if I remember correctly. Later on we will make an attempt for Geneva and the Motor show. We went two years ago and this year I was given tickets so we’ll go if we can.

We don’t currently have a big amount of renovation projects or such going on but before the snow came, we currently have a few centimeters covering parts of the garden, I started installing light posts in the garden. When the snow disappears, March?, I will try to finish it. Yesterday we bought a lot of Magazine files (“Kassett” for those who knows the IKEA products) to harmonize the chaotic book shelves in the living room. Small improvements can also be improvements…

I don’t usually recommend movies here but why not. Leviafan is worth watching as it gives a much more interesting and nuanced picture of some parts of the Russian society than one usually finds in big movie productions. Lately I have also watched Fury (not great, not bad) and John Wick (stupid but fun to watch Michael Nyqvist as Viggo Tsarov).

The Sunday is about to unfold so it is time to finish and enjoy the day.

Posted in arbete, film, freja, hus och hem, Sonja, utflykter, vardag | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Observations as a father

Posted on December 6, 2014 by jonas

Today it is Sonja’s two-month-day and I figure it could be good to take some notes of what I have observed during the two first months as a father. In 30 years I have most likely forgot what it was like.

  • You quickly learn to do things with one hand since you have one hand busy holding a baby (and the head!) on your arm. Surprisingly many activities can be done with one arm, including figuring out why a raspberry pi camera does not work and watching TV series and reading magazines and so on.
  • You learn to do things “one at a time” if you are both at home, i.e. one person takes a nap/snack/dump meanwhile the other one looks after the baby.
  • It is possible to take care of the baby between feeding sessions meanwhile working if you have a decent headset and can solve issues by talking.
  • Everything, yes everything, takes long time with a baby and a trip to IKEA followed by a walk can be the adventure/challenge of the day.
  • Walks are indeed useful, especially to make the baby fall asleep and get some rest. Since Sonja sleeps well in the stroller I have taken more long walks than ever. With a sleeping child you can do a lot and the dog gets happy meanwhile “for free”. I don’t miss any issues of the Economist or the interesting podcasts. Since I can easily do the walk on my own, Tanya can take a nap or do something else meanwhile.
  • If you thought you had limited “me time” before the baby is born, it won’t be more afterwards.
  • TV series, and a media player that plays next episode automatically, is excellent as some kind of entertainment for daily repetitive tasks like feeding the baby.
  • Since the mother is devoting a LOT of attention and energy to the baby, there is little or no time for arguments or discussions. If she want’s something, figure out the quickest and best way to do it.
  • It is an excellent time to start following American events, like sports (e.g. NHL/NFL), since it might make you feel like you get something “for free” when you are awake at 4 am.
  • When the baby is unruly and does not stop screaming for hours during the night despite “food/temperature/diaper/whatever check” and your work day is quickly approaching, imagine that the baby will remember and remind you of your actions 20 years later. Getting frustrated and stressed out won’t help anyone.
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Paternity leave and bureaucracy

Posted on November 22, 2014 by jonas

Fathers in Switzerland are not supposed to be out of office for a long time just because they got a newborn at home. The Swiss law gives fathers the right to take one (1) day off but since my employer is so generous, they add four extra days. These five days can be used during the child’s first two months. Unfortunately five days pass by quickly and I have now finished my paternity leave. Fortunately there will be a Christmas break in a month and then I can support Tanya at home again.

On Wednesday we finally got the birth certificate for Sonja from “Zivilstandsamt”. Normally it is handed out a few days after birth but for foreigners like us it turned out to be a challenge. I have to say the Swiss bureaucrats did disappoint me this time. They were incredibly slow and inefficient and almost on the border to stupid. We had to spend a lot of time explaining, maybe a dozen phone calls and five-six snail mails and a few electronic ones, to get it done. They gave us different information depending on who we spoke to. They demanded information from the Swedish registry of people that is not present (but which they claimed exist because of their misinterpretation) and a new birth certificate for Tanya even though the birth certificate in Russia is usually only given once, when you are born. Of course such documents can only be handed out in Russia so we had to get a power of attorney organized at the Russian embassy in Bern, send it to Novokuznetsk, get the document from the authorities, get it translated, get an apostille, and get it sent back here. They could have saved us from that procedure by a bit of understanding of how the birth certificate works in Russia but that is not how they work… And when we finally got Sonja’s birth certificate they thought they could just keep Tanya’s original documents with the motivation “you don’t need them anymore now when it is registered here”. Excuse me? They even got them in 2011 so then they should not have needed them this time either. Well well, luckily it is possible to very rarely interact with these people.

Once we got Sonja’s paper we could organize her insurance and start the procedure to get her Swedish citizenship. Yesterday we got an apostille of Sonja’s birth certificate so we can use it in January when we will go to Bern to kick off the procedure to get her a Russian citizenship too. It will be a bit of bureaucracy to get these passports but we have learnt that it is so much easier if your issue only concerns one country. As soon as two countries, especially Switzerland, is involved, they start demanding things purely focused on how their superior system works without thought of how it might work in other countries. When only speaking to Swedish or Russian authorities it is usually possible to talk and discuss and find a solution much smoother than when trying to communicate with the Swiss since their starting point seems to be that they are right instead of trying to find the right solution.

Sonja still have some colic issues but we think it is getting better.

Yesterday I got a chance to put new floor tiles in the garage. It was really easy so it was quickly done. If i get a chance today it would be good to get the hedge ready for the winter. Time to try out that new cordless hedge trimmer…

Garage floor tiles

Posted in hus och hem, politik, Sonja | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Withings Smart Baby Monitor Hacking

Posted on October 27, 2014 by jonas

As many other parents we have bought a baby monitor and even though it has not been of much use yet, I got to play with some new technology so it has been more of my toy than anything else so far.

It is very clear that the producer has not put much effort into the development for Android but the iOS apps for phone and tablet are okay. It is possible to talk to the child, initiate lullaby songs and enable monitoring with threshold values for temperature, humidity, noise and so on. So it is easy to understand why Withings, the producer, has added “smart” in the product name but there is room for improvement.

It is possible to watch the live stream via Withings’ website but a slightly geeky parent would of course like to be able to decide for oneself how that livestream is consumed. Maybe via VLC or in your own web portal or a mobile app of your choice? When you buy a Raspberry Pi and their Pi NoIR camera for a third of the cost you get higher resolution and can access the live stream in any way you want, so it is clear that the Smart Baby Monitor needed an IQ boost to fight the competitors.

There is not much on Internet about where to start but this blogpost was helpful when I did some initial research. I did the same thing as that other guy, and took a look with Wireshark and the developer tools that comes with Firefox and Chrome. It is obvious that the monitor produces an RTMP video stream which easily can be consumed in VLC and for example Flowplayer (which is the same Javascript player that Withings use on their website so it is easy to find inspiration in their Javascript code). The video is encoded with h264 and the audio with aac so that is not too bad if you ask me, but it is of course possible to transcode with libav or VLC or similar.

The RTMP stream is exposed via a URL that contains a hash which gets updated so if one could retrieve that hash in an automatic way, the problem is more or less solved. I don’t know yet when or how the hash is regenerated but it does not matter much if we easily can get to know the current hash before starting to consume the stream. As outlined in the blog post I read, the relevant hash is the “kd_hash” that is returned as response in the POST request to “https://healthmate.withings.com/baby/service/presence”. My addition to the research in this area would be how that hash is retrieved. I used curl in a quick-and-very-dirty php script (download and rename extension to php). It is not beautiful but it will return the hash as output when mail, password and device id parameters are set appropriately. The device id is also found when logging in “normally” on withings.com and by inspecting the network traffic or via Wireshark. It should be easy for someone to rewrite it in Python or as a shell script if that would fit better. I might revisit the script to clean it up later. Probably next time Withings decide to change their login procedure or change the way the hash is retrieved…

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More photos

Posted on October 12, 2014 by jonas

I added some photos of Sonja to the web gallery: The arrival of Sonja

Posted in fotografering, Sonja | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Sonja enters the world

Posted on October 7, 2014 by jonas

Early Monday morning Sonja started to make her way out to the world. At 12:48 on 6th of October Sonja and Tanya succeeded together with some help of the midwives. My role was mainly to support with the pain relief during the labor.

Sonja is a healthy 54 cm long and 3630 grams heavy girl. All fingers and toes are in place and in our eyes she is obviously the most beautiful girl in the world.

Tanya and Sonja are still at Triemli hospital, where this blog entry is also published from, and I am here to visit when possible.

Tanya’s mother is staying at the hospital with Tanya and at home Sasha is currently assembling her bed so it is good team serving little Sonja.

image

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