I like learning and trying new things

I am a post-most, who has tried or done a lot of what is possible to get to try and do in the lifetime I have gone through so far. I am hopefully also a pre-"a lot", that is I hope to get the chance to continue trying and doing a lot of things for many years to come.

I have had a couple of houses out in the suburbs of a couple of cities, I have been living in apartments in the center of some cities, both in Sweden and abroad. I enjoy both having a house and having an apartment. Both ways of living are different, and both have its own advantages. I have two children who has now past the age of teenagers and are likely to experience a lot of new things the coming years, hopefully of the positive kind. I live together with my wife and her kid, and sometimes with my kids (I am divorced and my kids have their own living, but have spent most of their time before that with their mother).

Hobbies

During my spare time I have tried many hobbies. Currently the house and the wish to improve and change the house is taking the main time. Before playing golf and trying to figure out how to win money on the stock market was the main focus.

Lately, kayaking has become more and more of an interest, together with my wife. This is not only a hobby, but a nature experience as well as good exercise for old people. With this hobby came also recently a GPS (Oregon 550, combined with RoboGeo, to easily create tracks from excursions).

I have had many more hobbies, (like playing pool, playing bridge, martial arts, fishing, ...) but if you like me have the tendency to become fanatic, then old hobbies are always replaced by new hobbies. I would love to spend more time on a lot more things than I do, but it will have to wait until I can get more spare time.

Calling music a hobby is exaggerating, but I am very fond of music and have experimented with playing myself. It seems that there are frequently limits to that, either imposed by neighbours when living in an apartment or as now my wife. Considering that my audio equipment consists of a number of really big Dali speakers with a B&W subwoofer, connected to a quite powerful Denon 7 channel amplifier, you have to be interested in music in order to appreciate the amount of sound this equipment generates. But with age, the hearing has becom less good, and with that, the music does no longer feel as vibrant as before. The positive side of that is that I can enjoy the music also using an MP3 player (an Archos 605 WiFi, which is big enough to also show videos) without noticing too much quality loss, which I always considered a problem before.

Playing around with pictures is also an interest that is accelerating. I bought a good DV video camera many years ago, a Sony. And then I bought the SONY HDV video camera recently (Sony HDR-HC1). I own both Pinnacle Studio and Premiere (both was bought together with hardware capture boards, Pinnacles own board, and a Matrox board). I have since then upgraded Premiere and added Photoshop to the list. These, together with an Olympus My800 digital camera, and lately a My tough 8000 waterproof camera, give me a lot of opportunities for playing with multimedia in many ways. Also, the very good software HDVSplit helps a lot to get it into the camera (for DV I preferred Scenalyze, wish it supported HD as well). I have recently gotten an interesting update to a program I have been using, movavi video suite (I have it for my mp3 player). It now contains slide show creation, and thus I have added slide shows of trips to the web site (although I ended up using proshow)..

I really should do less knowledge hunting...

I really should spend more time with my family and my friends, but time always finds me on the run trying to accomplish something new, most likely involving learning something that I have never done before. I have been using a high tempo for so many years that it is hard to sit down and enjoy more than short breaks in a highly pressed schedule. I work as an operations manager for a consultant company, and this is a job where you can easily spend a lot of time, too much is happening all the time...