Dave Sherohman

Earlier today, a guy looking to move to Sweden found my contact information and asked for some tips on getting himself over here. In the course of our conversation, he asked for my "uncut ideas about life in Sweden," so I figured I'd share them here, as well:

Aside from the difficulties I've had with figuring out self-employment here, I don't have any real complaints.

So, yeah. We all know that Obama is trying to push major health care changes through the US Congress and it is, predictably, proving somewhat controversial and moving a bit slowly. I consider this to be a good thing, as I believe that the Founding Fathers deliberately engineered the American federal government to move slowly and actually do very little, if anything, unless it has overwhelming popular support¹.

All-too-predictably, this is leading to a wave of political grandstanding, mis- or dis-information, and loonies coming out of the woodwork (on both sides).

Studies find spinal procedure no more effective than placebo

Short version: A single-blind trial has shown that the effectiveness of a highly-regarded $3000 operation widely used to treat back pain appears to be completely unrelated to the surgical procedure itself.

Found a couple news stories which had my twitter-sense tingling:

Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security (NY Times)
Hackers Target Twitter (Business Week)

As it turned out, there was no cause for alarm, as they're talking about Twitter-the-company, not twitter-the-web-service. The short version of both boils down to "a Twitter employee's email password got cracked, which let the Bad Guys access their Google Docs account". That's not news, it happens every day, but at least the papers took the opportunity to tell the public about good password-handling practices.

This morning's email included, among other things, the second RSVP request for my 20 year high school reunion, which is coming up in early August. I really would like to attend, but it's a little far away and I decided before moving to Sweden that I specifically didn't want to return to the US for my first year living here because that's supposed to help with acclimating to a new country/culture.

I realized late last week that it's been just over six months since my move to Sweden last New Year's Eve and I haven't written yet about the general Swedish Experience. I guess I'm a bit past due, so here goes:

In response to a flurry of friends trying to add me on Facebook last night, I have finally succumbed and signed up over there. So, hi, Facebook people!

I know, I know... I haven't posted anything here in forever. I've been furiously writing code to get FishTwits up and running (well, either that or enjoying the Swedish summer), which has kept me distracted from blogging. But a story came up in conversation yesterday which I figured I could briefly share here, if only for the sake of posting something.

It was a summer in the early 90s and I was working a temp job in some NSP¹ offices in downtown Minneapolis, behind the Basilica. They were running rebate programs for converting conventional incandescent lighting to compact fluorescent bulbs or LED exit signs. Most of my work involved entering rebate data into spreadsheets. As time permitted, I also rewrote the spreadsheets' calculations to streamline the process; my improvements were accepted enough that I was never told to stop doing it, but not accepted enough for me to be allowed to pass my changes on to anyone else.

The US Supreme Court has ruled that the October, 2003 strip search of a 13-year-old girl for ibuprofen was unconstitutional. Good to see they got that right, even if it wasn't quite unanimous.¹

Unfortunately, if you read down to the final paragraph of that article, they got the secondary decision in the case wrong:

Where is the accountability if the search is not found to have been conducted "under district policy"?

I rather unexpectedly received a short letter from Annika's parents today:

For historical reasons that I've never seen explained, Swedish calendars list names for each day and "David" is today's, so they sent me four lottery tickets to celebrate my name day, just like they do for Annika on hers.