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 FishTwits and I met up this afternoon with a web designer, who sounded like a pretty good guy. He just moved to Sweden about a month ago from Indiana and the topic came up of what you say to someone when they sneeze here. ("Prosit.") I commented that I never seem to be able to get the stress onto quite the right syllable of Swedish words, at which point he asked where I was from.

Apparently, my Minnesota accent was just enough that he wasn't quite sure whether I was an American or a Swede who spoke really good English.

Since moving to Sweden, work has been a bit of a pain to come by (which is a story for another post), but I have managed to join up with a pair of students in the University of Lund's Masters of Entrepreneurship program to build a startup together. Their final presentation was this morning, so I was up (relatively) early to attend that as their third partner and CTO.