All packed for Lund and I'm leaving nothing to chance!

I count on this to insure I make
friends on the airport!

• Laptop Check
• Kindle Check
• Kindle with full batteries DoubleCheck
• Valid passport and printed plane tickets Check
• Spare clothes Check
• An umbrella Check
• A power cord for making friends at the airport Check

I have been hoping for a dry day,
the forecast changed on the last minute.

You are probably thinking something along the lines "What? Is he moving to Sweden already? I thought that was months away!" So let me reassure you right now: I'm only visiting Lund for a day, I'm just leaving nothing to chance.

Have I forgotten anything? This is the list I've come up with and I can't think of anything else I might need for my epic trip to Lund.

I'm leaving home tomorrow very early and depart at 7 AM from Ljubljana's airport. I suspect it will be a mad dash across Frankfurt's airport to catch the 9:30 flight to Copenhagen. All I need to do there is find the train to Lund and then sailing should be smooth all until I start making the return trip at around 17:00 - this time a lot more relaxed since history will already have been made!

If your path tomorrow is by any chance crossing mine please say hi!

I expect I won't have any spare time in Lund to meet with anyone but Nokia, however I'd love to have someone to chat to on the airports and/or flights. If you are travelling tomorrow drop me an email and let's see if our paths intersect!

In other news Radio Sweden has aired their interview with me from a couple of weeks ago. Here is the link to the episode and here is the direct link to the mp3 file. My short bit starts at 21:40 and lasts for about five minutes. While not exactly thrilled by my performance I think I did all right for a first radio appearance.

Related articles

• Actually visiting Lund for the first time! (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• Planning: Visiting Lund for the first time (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• The game is on! (helpmemovetosweden.com)

Equipping our family with technology

Google+ Hangouts are the best. By far.
Seriously, you have to try them.

Our departure date is approaching with ever increasing speed (I know it's an illusion. Bear with me :) ) so we have started thinking about keeping in touch with our families after we embark.

I have some very good experiences with Google+ Hangouts from a time when a friend of mine was working in Germany (Hi Kristina!) and have used it to keep in touch with my Mom in England ever since. It is the the service we are planning to use with our friends anyway, so we decided to introduce the rest of our families to it.

After the tedious process of shopping we installed the new cameras and laptops and eventually tried it out. Everyone loved it, al though introducing my dad to the effects option might have been a mistake! In all we have bought one new laptop and equipped two stationary computers with new webcams, so we think we are set for now.

I am really impressed by GooglePlus Hangouts and really urge you to give it a go. It allows you to connect several people at the same time, shows all their faces at the bottom of the screen and automatically focuses the big screen on the one who is talking. With additional options such as the youtube plugin it allows you to play a song in everyone's background, creating almost a pub-like atmosphere. When everyone is provided with a drink (unfortunately Google doesn't help with this obligatory step yet) it is as good as it gets.

My intuition tells me that this type of socialising should be common in Sweden. After all, the drinks are expensive and it's cold outside so I'd expect people would be keen on the idea of chatting with your friends from the comfort of your own home. How right am I about this? Please respond in the comments!

I might invite all of you to join me on a hangout once and meet some of my readers! Would anyone be interested?

Actually visiting Lund for the first time!

Image via CrunchBase

Last week I posted about how we are planning to visit Lund for the first time. I also wrote about the good feeling I had about a series of job interviews I had with Nokia. Well it turned out my intuition wasn't wrong and Nokia has now invited me to visit them in Lund at their expense!





I'm visiting on Wednesday, 15th of May from Ljubljana to Copenhagen, with a crossover in Frankfurt. Not only will I be in Sweden for the first time, I will get to see the Frankfurt airport for the first time as well! My flight back is also on Wednesday so I will only be in Lund for a couple of hours, but I hope I will get to take a walk and see some of it - hopefully the weather will allow for it!

Can you recommend me something I simply must see/try while in Lund? Perhaps a unique Swedish candy that will blow my mind?

The plan to visit Lund together with my significant other is still in place. We will still need to find an apartment  but now I will get to see it first! If anyone would like to have a cup of coffee on us you are very welcome - get in touch!

I am so grateful for this opportunity and am really excited - in fact I can't wait for Wednesday.

In other news I have been interviewed by časopis Delo, one of Slovenia's largest daily newspapers. The article only appears in the print version, however I have been allowed to share it with my readers. If you speak Slovenian please take a look (pdf).

Related articles

• Planning: Visiting Lund for the first time (helpmemovetosweden.com)

Planning: Visiting Lund for the first time

I have a good feeling about our first ever bike-date!

Today is a national holiday in Slovenia and that means I finally have some time off! I'm using the time to relax, read a great Terry Pratchett novel, then complete the day by taking my wife-to-be out on a date-night. And since we're getting into the Swedish spirit we are making it a bike-date. We are quite excited, it will be our first!

The job hunt is going well, I think. I had a series of what I feel were very successful interviews with Nokia and I have high hopes. That means that we are slowly looking into the "find an apartment" phase of our project. We can't really start apartment hunting until I get a job, because we don't know what we will be able to afford. On the other hand we are anxious about the plane tickets - we don't want to wait until the last minute.

We're planning to visit Lund for about a week, spending the time looking at apartments and of course getting to know the city and its inhabitants. We plan on staying in a hostel or perhaps trying couch-surfing.

We haven't tried couch-surfing yet.
Is it common in Sweden?

Hopefully we will arrange such accommodation that will provide us with a good starting point for exploring the city and of course apartment hunting. In my mind that means it will be located somewhat central and will provide excellent wifi. If they provide a bike renting service as well that would be excellent! This is another area where I would greatly appreciate your help, dear reader! Care to recommend anything?

As for the dates, we still haven't decided. It will probably be around mid-June. Are there any events in Lund/Malmö in June that would help us decide? We would love to experience the local culture and perhaps some of Lund's night life. I think that our schedules are still flexible enough to move things around a bit if the opportunity calls.

It would mean the world to us if we could meet with you (yes, you!) We hope to make new friends in Lund and I can't think of a better way than by inviting you for a cup of coffee. Would you be interested in having a nice chat and perhaps showing us to the cool part of Lund?

Jag och min sambo kommer att besöka Lund i ungefär en månad. Har du lust att en kopp kaffe? Hoppas att vi kan möta!

I will be delighted to hear any other recommendations you may have concerning Lund. Please respond in the comments or email me!

Related articles

• The job hunt's pace is picking up! (Job progress update #2) (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• Job progress update #1 (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• The game is on! (helpmemovetosweden.com)

Language school is worth the cost! [Swedish progress update]

Learning Swedish was right up there among "Find a job" and "Rent an apartment" on my priority list since the day we got the news. A language school seemed like a good idea so I did some investigating and found a few that offered an introductory Swedish course right here in Ljubljana! One even replied to my inquiry so I've enrolled. The only problem: Classes started in a month's time...

When your world is about to change you don't sit around and wait! And I didn't: I started learning Swedish on my own. I tried mimicking youtube videos and using a Learn yourself Swedish product and it looked like I was making progress! While I wasn't going to be fluent any time soon, I was feeling quite good.

It all changed on Thursday, 25th of April. Not only did I have a job interview with Nokia on that day (more on that later), but my Swedish course started as well! Our very first lesson was scheduled for 18:30 and going there I was feeling quite smug. I thought it was going to be a short introductory lesson where the teacher will introduce herself, we will learn a few sentences I'd have already known and we will be on our way. Boy was I wrong!

Notes and study materials from the first ŠOLT lesson.

The first lesson was intense! It took the whole scheduled 3 hours within which we went from "Hej! Jag heter..." to pronouncing words like "Sjuksköterska" and finally to forming our own descriptions of a fictional character. We even got homework!

My take-home assignment included inventing a fictional character and describing him with as many adjectives I can think of. It should include most of what our lesson covered, namely where he is from, his marital status, what languages he speaks and what his job is. This is what I came up with:

Möta Oscar Svensson. Han är från Linköping. Han är förlovad och har inte barn. Oscar arbetar som busschaufför. Han talar svenska, engelska och lite danska. Han och hans sambo gillar att gå till teater men de aldrig tar bussen.

Long story short: I've learned a lot. I have a very competent teacher and I'm learning together with 5 peers including a reader of this blog (Zdravo Aleš!) who appears to be another Slovenian interested in Sweden. Now I am completely sold on language schools: if you're trying to learn a foreign language be sure to enrol in one!

Related articles

• Swedish is starting to sound familiar [Swedish progress update] (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• Language lessons or should I say Jag heter David! (helpmemovetosweden.com)
• The game is on! (helpmemovetosweden.com)

Making baby steps towards a finished thesis

Gotta love The PHD Comics, right?

I haven't yet finished my formal education: While I have been working at INDA for nearly 5 years I have also been studying Computer Science at University of Ljubljana. Officially I'm still a student!

With the project Sweden going on the question I hear a lot is: What about your degree? My intention was always to finish my studies and get a degree, but with the rigid bureaucracy of University of Ljubljana I can't graduate before the end of September, in spite my good intentions and time crunch. And that in combination with the fact that the lack of a degree isn't really hurting the job search process, means I'm in danger of dropping out!

Well I have decided not to let that happen! I here and now publicly announce my goal to graduate before 1st of October, 2013. With so few obligations left it shouldn't be that much of a challenge. If I make baby steps and do something about my thesis every week I should be there in no time!

I have two classes left, both of them due for completion at the end of this semester, but more importantly I still have to write the text part of my thesis. I have given my thesis some though and I have decided I'd love to do more research in one of my favourite fields of computer science: Soft Computing.

Warning: The next few paragraphs are more about computer science than they are about moving to Sweden. If that's not your cup of tea there is no shame in skipping them!

I have been fascinated by Genetics Algorithms since quite early in my academic career. Even though I didn't take a class on it since last academic year, my first attempts at solving problems with genetic algorithms date all the way back to my high school years.

I have to thank my friend and school mate Smily (who is doing some mighty impressive stuff of his own) for talking me into my very first introduction project, finding a linear equation for X using GA, that turned out to be heaps of fun. After that I used genetic algorithms for tackling the travelling salesman problem, and after that the project I'm submitting as my thesis.

A screenshot from my thesis project
NeuralCars

NeuralCars simulates a playground where agents (controlled by a artificial neural network) learn how to drive around a race track without human intervention. The process starts with a completely random weights in the feedforward neural network (10-8-8-2) but sure enough, given enough time selective breeding will create agents with impressive driving skills!

I've opensourced the project a while back, so you can check it out on Google Code. Compiled binaries are avaliable for download in case you'd like to compete against Skynet's getaway driver :)

So with the software part of the thesis nearly completed (my mentor did request a few changes) I just have to take the dive and start writing the text! Hopefully the pressure of public failure will keep my eye on the prize!

In other news I am being interviewed by Radio Sweden today! Thank you for creating enough buzz for the mainstream media to pick up on!

Can one get good at phone interviews?

On Thursday I had two job interviews and even though I think they both went reasonably well, I have a much better feeling about one. And the main difference? One was in person, the other was a phone interview over Skype (no video).

Not only did I have a phone interview, I had my first phone interview. That may strike you as odd, but according to my experiences phone interviews aren't really popular in Slovenia and I haven't worked for a company abroad before. All that is of course changing now when I'm looking for a job in Sweden.

I don't think that the interview went badly, but I couldn't get in the zone, I wasn't properly focused and I even caught myself making long sentences that must have confused my interlocutor. If I summarise: I just couldn't be myself.

I'm usually quite good at interviews, there is just something about talking about myself for an hour that I enjoy... And I often feel like I made a connection during the interview, not unlike the feeling you get when you've made a new friend.

Nothing pleasant like that happened this time though. And even though I know it is possible that it just didn't go as well as I've expected it too, I can't help but suspect the phone is to blame here. I felt annoyed during the pauses my interviewee made to write things down, and I couldn't shake the impression he was just following a script. It didn't feel like a real conversation.

Even though I never appreciated the idea of a video call, I'm quite sure it would make a world of difference this time.

Am I'm over-thinking this and is this just what the phone interviews are like? Are phone interviews just worse different than in-person ones? Do you feel you are a good phone interviewee? Any tips? Please respond in the comments!