Sven in Sverige

I’ve been sitting 2 weeks in Sweden now.
It’s now time to give a little overview of what has happened, and how easy going Swedish life actually is.

First of all, everyone you meet at a public place, or at least someone who offers services, is always very friendly. You get a nice smile, followed by a short happy ‘Hej’. But Swedes like to take enough brakes, so you better be on time.

So after two weeks, yesterday we finally got a paper with our project description. We have to make a ASP.NET website for consultants doing risk management, written in VB.NET. When a consultant goes to examine a building, he takes his tablet pc with the application (webserver) on it. Before he leaves, he synchronizes with the database on the internet, which will give him the most up-to-date information about the subject.

When he arrives, he has to answer some questions, like “Is the building made of wood”. Answering that question, the building will be assigned some parameters, for example “fire risk”. At the end, the consultant will be able to generate conclusions and numeric reports, and even import them into a PowerPoint or Excel 2007 sheet.

It’s a complex application, and I’m a bit sad that we still can’t start to employ it after two weeks. We still need some real life examples, and of course a (dummy) database or some kind of structure. Also, the project has to be made with Microsoft Access, which isn’t a great SQL interpreter.

Today Sebastiaan and I went to school to start with the project. But it didn’t take long because of the lack of information, … and the nice sunny day. Tommorow we’ll give it another try.
I heard that our collegues at Porto already finished their main app (wtf ?). But this won’t discourage us !

Some other remarkable things I need to say :

• There are sooo many big supermarkets in Halmstad. At the university there is Maxi, but we also have Eurostop (including two gigantic supermarkets, once cheap, one more expensive), 2 other Maxi’s around town, a Lidl, and so on..
• Rain rain rain.. except for today and the day before yesterday. In sun, Sweden is a totally different country.
• We are not alone ! We just discouvered a Dutch guy, coming from Eindhoven.
• Our student houses are full of international students. Mainly Czech, Polish, Spaniards, Germans and a couple of French.
• Warm meals are not the best quality of Sweden, but the sandwiches (”belegde broodjes” in Belgium) are really awesome
• As computer science students, we have access to a special student department for IT people. We have our own kitchen, sofas, wireless internet, and seperate rooms. I’ll try to make a picture of that.
• The international folks don’t mind to do a barbecue when it’s freezing. We just came from it, though it was very sunny.
• This morning, one of our toilets behaved weird. When I opened the door, all walls and floor were discovered with dirty toilet water. The reason was obvious. In the street a special truck was working on it. Luckely I wasn’t going to the toilet at that moment !
• A train ticket to Götheburg, about 200km from here, costs 19 euros. No student reduction.
• Going to Stockholm by lended car is cheaper than with train
• Only on Friday and Saturday there is people on Halmstad streets during night. Sebastian and I went on Sunday, we were whole alone. Though it is a student city, you can’t compare it to Ghent or Leuven
• Swedes listen to old pop music (in shops, streets). No Abba, but Atomic Kitten and other bad stuff (mainly 90ies). Norah Jones is the top favorite in supermarkets
• We are the luckiest students of the university. We don’t have finals now !

Yesterday I met our mentor Torben during the break. A really normal looking easy going professor. He doesn’t seem to have a Swedish accent when he talks English. I think we just don’t hear it because English and Swedish have the same pronunciation.

The day before yesterday I attended his lecture about the need of good tunes and notices in games. As an example he presented movie clips from World of Warcraft, a game that is well practiced at Halmstad. He says they only play it for professional reasons, but in the meanwhile they created special rooms for it! Sounds good for us I think

But let’s not forget our mission at the university. Mr. Torben told us he has the idea to create a advisory system in .NET for consultants. It will run on a tablet pc, which will have a local ms server. When the tablet pc is connected to the internet, it must synchronize new data from the internet with the questions and answers on the application.

On first sight, to be honest, it sounds a bit boring. It also has nothing to do with games. But I think the challenge will be for us that it is the first time we can create something that is not ment for simulation or teachers, but for the real business world ! And we will get all the technology and information we want, as it is a technical university.

And for the Microsoft fans : We will be using the newest XML-features of Office 2007 ! Yeah cool, kicking.. Open XML I guess ? :p Please don’t let me return as a Microsoft boy