I write to you from the middle of the Baltic Sea.  While I can access the internet, I am unable to add the pictures and make a full blog post so you’ll find out about my adventures so far in Stockholm and Helsinki when I return to land sometime tomorrow.

Here’s a quick preview what you’ll learn in my upcoming posts:

• What I learned about the Swedish navy, and why it made me nervous to get on this boat
• What my cousin Sarah says Swedes think of Norweigans
• Why Finns have rows of hitching posts set up by the sea
• How to keep my grandmother happy for an afternoon in Helsinki
• Another reason why Swedes decided to stop fighting wars and start selling weapons
• The degree to which my uncle overestimated the amount Swedes party on boats during random Monday nights

Now I’m off to aimlessly wander around the boat.  Based on my observations from yesterday, here are some possible activities for tonight:

• Buy things in prices that would be outrageous in Dollars, but are actually in Euros
• Insert Euros into the TakeYourMoney Machine - either Video Poker or Slots style
• Convert Euros into 5.6% alcohol Finnish beer and watch cover bands/bollywood dancing (last night’s activity)
• Watch The Little Mermaid in German with Russian subtitles (I think).
• Try to find the movie theater and watch Indiana Jones (hopefully in English)

Categories: Travel
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At Kulturefest in Stockholm, Nana met a friendly robot who danced with her and posed for a picture.  This is in stark contrast to robots in France.

We also stopped by some of the little .  In Chicago, I spend nearly every weekend at one of the many street festivals.  I eased my way into Swedish life by doing the same.  The music on the stages were varied - this group played vocal-driven folk rock.  Stopping here also gave Nana and Papa a chance to sit down.

All kinds of companies set up booths at Kulturefest.  Green friendly Swedes won’t pimp their rides, but they will pimp their wheelchairs.  The only things missing were the elephant ears, funnel cakes, and beer stands.

While we were eating Lebanese food, CaribbeanFest partied through the streets.  In authentic Caribbean style, some of the countries’ floats were late, so every 15 minutes a different group danced by.  They also may have gotten lost, as I think we saw the same guys come by a few times.

Some other observations so far:

• Women here come in two varieties, Heidi Klum and frumpy
• Many things Sweden is known for - pancakes, vikings, lingonberries - don’t actually exist here.  Hot Dog stands are everywhere, but they’re called körbs (sausages).
• Teenagers own the streets - but that may be because I accidentally wandered into TeenFest ‘08.
• Street festivals here have lots less drinking in the streets
• At night, parks in Stockholm were filled with normal people, rather than drug dealers

Categories: Travel
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Just a quick note. My last post was written using OneNote 2007 which has a great feature to make blogging easier. To turn a page into a blog-post, just right-click on it and chose “Blog This” to launch a super-lean, easy to use blog-editor to polish and publish. Super-easy, which is great because One-Note is perfect for storing the types of snippets or ideas that turn into great blog posts.

One-Note was my killer-app in graduate school, allowing me to keep my whole life organized from classes to extracurriculars to work. I had all my readings in there and highlighted on top of them, printed slides to it and annotated them during lectures, and used it to outline papers. The features in the new version - allowing me to put a notebook on a shared drive and use it between computers, the in-line calculator, and especially text-recognition in pictures are straight out of my wish list. I highly recommend it to anyone who can pick up a copy.

Categories: Ephemera
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Loyal readers will notice that I haven’t blogged much over the past year and a half. It’s not because I have nothing to say, or I’ve wanted to neglect personal marketing. It’s because blogging takes a lot of time and I’ve been busy actually doing things.  

Good blog posts don’t just flow from the brain onto the keyboard. They start with a well thought out idea, which turns into an outline or a structure that becomes paragraphs and sentences. Then, the language is edited and tightened until you’ve got something that’s both interesting and fun to read. If you don’t believe blogging takes time, just go take a look at livejournal - around for years before blogs took off - and you’ll see what I mean. At least, if you can understand what they’re saying.

The amount of time it takes to blog well is one of the reasons that most bloggers fall into two categories: professional writers and the unemployed. Professional writers are practiced enough that they don’t take as long to write good prose, and usually have flexible enough careers that they can use the blog as part of their professional activities. In this category, I include not only journalist-bloggers, but also authors pimping a book and academics.

The unemployed also make good bloggers. Even if they take longer to write good posts, it doesn’t matter. They’ve got plenty of time. For those between jobs, it’s a great way to occupy their time and build a professional reputation on the interwebs. Students are underworked and not really learning anything, so they’ve got plenty of time. And finally bored millionaires who recently cashed out from a tech stock now have plenty of time to blog and a firm belief that their opinion now matters.

For those of us who actually do stuff, blogging isn’t so easy. That’s why only a handful of executives blog, and those who do blog infrequently. (Joel Spolsky is an exception here, Jonathan Schwartz’s blog is more of a marketing piece). They’re busy running companies. Same with investment bankers, corporate lawyers, management consultants, and other people whose high-intensity jobs have sucked away not only their time, but also their desire to spend time playing on the internet.

I definitely wish I could blog more. I want to review the last 8 books I’ve read. I have tons of advice for product-based companies trying to launch a services group. I’ve given some serious thought to hard problems in engaging employees. As part of my work, I come up with code snippets that would be great to share. And every time I read something on Employee Evolution or from Penelope Trunk, I want to write a post about it from the perspective of a millennial who actually works in the real world, does workplace research, and has actually coached and conducted job searches.

I’d love to get the time to cross-post from Slashdot, Marginal Revolution, and Arts and Letters Daily again. And maybe one day I’ll write “16 Reasons Penelope Trunk is Full Of It and 8 Reasons Why She’s Probably Crazy,” followed shortly by “The 6 Things Penelope Trunk Actually Gets Right.” But it’s 11:30PM, I’m exhausted after working a full day, I’m going to be in five cities this week, and people are depending on me to be sharp tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, blogging is a luxury that I sacrifice to actually get things done.

Categories: Ephemera
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