fjellstad.org

I spent my Christmas in the country of my birth, Vietnam. It was an interesting experience.

People keep writing how going back to the country they’re from gives them such religious experience. How it fills an emptiness which they usually didn’t know existed. I didn’t get that feeling at all. Don’t get me wrong, it was a nice trip. Wonderful food. Interesting people. But it wasn’t that much different than going to any other exotic place in the world (except I understood the language, more or less). I’m not sure I’m supposed to be disappointed or happy.

I felt a sense of home when I moved back to Norway. And even now, I miss California and everything I knew there. If Norway is my cultural and emotional home, then California is at least my home away from home. And Vietnam? Not sure where I would put that.

It did make one thing clear though. I need to go back and visit California this summer

I just broke down and bought myself a TV. I haven’t owned a TV since I moved back to Norway, although I have watched some TV when visiting the old folks.

It’s been an interesting experiment. I can’t say I missed it too much. I don’t really watch TV too much anyways (most of my free time is spent on the Internet). I do miss watching movies whenever I feel like it. Watching it on the computer is not the same as watching it on the big screen while leaning back on my couch (much more comfortable than my office chair).

What really changed it was that i got a serious case of the flu (swineflu?) this past week. Really boring. Problem is, didn’t feel well enough to sit in the chair reading article after article. OTOH, didn’t feel like reading a book. Didn’t have a TV to watch. Made for really boring sick days.

Since my apartment is wired for IPTV, and the mediabox is basically a Windows Media PC with built-in DVD, I don’t really need to buy a DVD player. The only problem is that the stupid DVD player is wired to be region 2, and most of my DVDs were bought while I lived in the US (region 1). Very annoying. I might build another media box and just rip all my dvds. Haven’t really decided yet.

While I was at it, and buying the TV, I ended up buying a PlayStation 3, mostly for the Blu-Ray player. Hopefully, I can do some gaming too, but don’t really see any games I might be interested in yet…

I’ve been geeking out lately. Watching Big Bang Theory while listening to Jonathan Coulton and reading Wil Wheaton‘s Just A Geek.

I think part of it is that I miss living in Silicon Valley. I miss being a geek among geeks. Going to The Tech Museum, being among fellow geeks when watching Star Trek or any other science fiction movies. I miss the cons, whether it is Comic-Con or JavaOne or SDWest. Or spending a day at a local Fry’s. It’s very comforting.

Although I don’t really miss the work hours and the uncertainty of working in the US, I do miss working for an engineering company (even though I don’t feel like IT is being second-class citizen at my current company). Granted, having Norwegian vacation time means I could pop into Silicon Valley at least once a year. Still, I miss it.

Probably need to get out more.

I’ve been working in Norway for six months now. It’s been an interesting experience, especially compared to my work experience in the US.

Salary
Salary in Norway and the US is about equal in monetary terms for software engineers. Now, it’s worth mentioning that as I write this, the USD is historical low compared to the NOK (although not as low as it was during the summer). Since most things are cheaper in the US (at least in CA), the actual purchasing power is better in CA than in Norway.

Benefits and bonuses
Healthcare is about the same in the US and Norway, the difference is who is paying for it. In the US, health insurance is paid for by the company you work for while in Norway it’s the State. Which means that in-between jobs, in Norway you would still be covered, while in the US you wouldn’t. The service is about the same (choose your own doctor etc).

As part of the package in Norway, I do get mobile phone and high-speed Internet access, even though I don’t work from home (the mobile has pretty much replaces the office phone for everybody in the company). These seems to be standard benefits in Norway these days. At least all the companies I interviewed with had it in their standard benefits package. I don’t believe high-speed Internet has become standard in the US, unless you work from home.

Vacation time is much better in Norway. In the US, I got 10 days of vacation each year. In Norway, I get 4 weeks (20 days) a year (plus 5 days if I have saved enough working hours). Meaning I can actually get away when I have a vacation (instead of a long weekend, which seems to be more normal in the US). Sick leave is not included in these four weeks of vacation. You also get the standard maternity/paternity leave in Norway (not existing in the US).

Working hours is a little saner in Norway than in the US, but I’m not sure it’s because I’m working for relatively big company, or because it’s just part of the working culture (not that many people work past 17:00)

There is a 3 months notice of leave in Norway (or at least at my Norwegian company). That’s somewhat weird coming from a State where employment is at-will. At the very most, I don’t think you have more than 2 weeks notice even at the most generous companies in the US. Not sure which is better yet.

Technology
Oslo is mostly a bank and telecom city. Along the coast, it’s mostly jobs in the oil industry. Silicon Valley is a lot more diverse when it comes to different industries.

The technology used is also much more diverse in Silicon Valley, where you can get work doing C++, Java, .Net, Perl, Python, what have you. Most of the jobs advertised in Norway was basically either Java or .Net (C#) jobs. Couple of companies, like finn.no, was Perl jobs. UNIX (Linux) and Windows are both present in Norwegian companies

The people and Work
The US, being the melting pot it is, is really diverse. At least in Silicon Valley, you basically get to know the world.

Norway is pretty diverse too, at least when dealing with technology. I work with Norwegians, English, Vietnamese, Bangladesh, Indians. Oslo might not be as diverse as San Francisco, but London and Paris is just a hop away.

English seems to have become the lingua franca when it comes to dealing with technology.

Engineers being engineers, there aren’t that much difference between an US nerd and an European nerd. Both are interested in technology and discuss it. Work culture itself (when thinking about the people/technology aspect) is not that different.

The company I work for seems to be really focused on the health of the workforce. When in the US, most tech companies have free soda and chips, the company i work for now is really encouraging us to eat healthy (free fruit basket once a week, free tea, coffee and water, but no soda), and have a balanced work life (discourage us from working too much overtime). In the US, it seems more companies are working people to death, mostly because there are other desperate people out there waiting for you job. It’s going to be interesting to see how the environment in Norway changes if there is a recession in the next few months.

Since public transport actually (more or less) work in Norway, I can take the train to work instead being stuck in traffic every morning and evening for hours. I love that part.

Conclusion
I do like working in Norway. I’m not as stressed as working in the US (mostly because of the visa issues I had when working there). There is some excitement in working in places like Silicon Valley, and stability in working in a country like Norway. I miss places like Fry’s Electronics or huge bookstores like Barnes & Noble or some of the more corner bookstores like the one in Mountain View. Working public transport really reduces the stress level.

Maybe it’s too early to make a definite conclusion, but so far so good…

I forgot my password.

I had this brilliant idea of protecting the documents on my laptop with encryption some time ago in-case it ever gets stolen. And of course, encryption is useless without a good password. And now I forgot the password. And the backup doesn’t cover the latest stuff…

At least I decided to cut down on the number of unique password I have to remember. If only I could figure out what the password was for this particular set…

After 14 years in the US, I’m going back to Norway

Hmmm… 8/8. 8 being a lucky number in Asian mythology, or stuff or something. Forgot about that.

Thinking about redesigning my website again. I want to do some more AJAX on the site, and I really need to rewrite the gallery section. Right now there is no text, and the gallery sucks… Probably would have make some more server side scripts, then.

Currently in Norway visiting the old folks. I’m going a little crazy. Need to get out, back home, to the US. I miss my car and TV, and just being alone. I really need to cut down how much time I spend in Norway.

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been almost 6 months since I updated this site last. Time really flies when life is interesting. Not that I’m going to write much about that here (what do you think this is, MySpace?)

I’m not going to be able to graduate this spring as originally planned, mostly because I didn’t finish one of my required classes. Not fun. Looks like I will be graduating March next year. Oh, well…

I bought a new laptop, when the old one started dying on me (sorry, but a system shouldn’t shut down because of overheating just because I’m compiling the Linux kernel). I’m more or less happy with the buy. It’s a very nice system.

Otherwise, I spent the day today, learning about subversion. In fact, I moved the all the homepage files from CVS to subversion. One of the reason I hadn’t moved to subversion before was because there didn’t seem to be very good support for it in my favorite editor, Emacs. Fortunately, subversion does come with en Emacs extension that lets Emacs manipulate subversion repositories, even though it’s not as nice as the default revision control controls in Emacs (no ctrl v v).

So far, I really like subversion. It does let you do stuff that was hard to do in CVS, like deleting or moving directories or files. On the other hand, subversion does seem to impact your project layout, something that CVS never did (ie. branching and tagging is not meta data in subversion, but rather a copy of your trunk, intersting concept). I need to play with it some more before I know if I really like it, but so far so good.

I’ve been back in Norway for almost a month now. As much as I love my parents, living under their roof again is a pain in the ass. Now, maybe if you are from one of those Asian countries, you don’t mind living with your mummy until you get married, but I just find it really restricting. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living alone for so long. Or maybe because I spent a year at home least year. In any case, I’m thinking of spending a week off somewhere on the European continent, not Norway. Prague sounds nice, or Dublin… Haven’t really decided.

I recently purchased a iPod Color. Really happy about that. The battery actually lasted the whole trip from San Francisco, USA to Oslo, Norway, with stop-over in New York, a little over 12 hours trip. The harddisk is big enough so that I didn’t have to listen to the same song twice during that time. Pretty nice. The only thing I didn’t like was iTunes jukebox. Don’t see what’s so impressive about the program. It might have been great when it first came about, but something like amaroK has pretty much surpassed it now. It doesn’t matter really, since I spend most of my time in Linux, so I essentially use amaroK all the time. amaroK also automagically converts the music I have stored in FLAC format to mp3 that the iPod can play, something iTunes can’t.

I so love my toys…