Mats Bengtsson

Mats Bengtsson home page

Mats Bengtsson mib over the years

I created this page to contribute

Indicating contribution through a picture pf puzzle pieces fitting together

I have found a lot of information on the network, which has helped me with many things. It has been regarding my job, our customers, my audio equipment, my home cinema, my trades on the stock market, my apartment, my house, kayaking, multimedia, ...

There are many many examples, and I have gotten a fantastic benefit out of it. Thus I decided I had to try to contribute myself, even if I do not really know with what, or how. I am likely to update the pages seldom rather than often, and I will still be taking a lot more than I give, but at least I have showed my intention.

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 am still trying to spend every vacation on a place I have not been at before, and I have been lucky to get to travel a lot in my job, so I have gotten so see a lot of different places and cultures. Both things that fascinates me.

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 both enjoy having a house as well as having an apartment. The two ways of living are different, and both have their own advantages. I have two children who has now past the age of teenagers and gotten their own homes and are likely to themselves experience a lot of new things the coming years, hopefully of the positive kind. I live together with my wife and her kid (I am divorced and my kids have their own living, but have spent most of their time before that with their mother). Until recently I also lived together with my cat, Simon. Unfortunately he passed away after what seem like a conscous decision from his side that it was now time.

Hobbies

During my spare time I have tried many hobbies. Currently it is the house and our summer cottage. The wish to improve and change the house is taking much of the time. Before I used to play golf and tried to figure out how to win money on the stock market.

Mats Bengtsson who choose kayak to be able to handle waves Lately, kayaking has become more and more of an interest, shared with my wife. This is not only a hobby, but also a nature experience as well as good exercise for old people. With this hobby came also recently the return of another old hobby, photography, and 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, ...). If you like me have the tendency to become fanatic, then hobbies are pursued intensely. Later old hobbies are replaced by new hobbies which in turn are pursued intensely. 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 become less good, and with that, the music does no longer feel as vibrant as it did 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. Quality loss was something I considered a major problem with mp3 players before, when my hearing was better.

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 (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 first an Olympus My800 digital camera, then a Panasonic FT2 waterproof camera, and now lately an Olympus TG1 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 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 the job or 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...

Headlines

Never trade stocks without having tested your system. In fact, most trading systems are not profitable if tested over many stocks. Full story...

Do not invest in heating equipment without having compared the alternatives, not only to current situation, but also to each other. Full story...

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