The Blog of Jonas Martinsson

"So ferry, cross the Mersey, 'Cause this land's the place I love, And here I'll stay." Gerry and the Pacemakers Today, I've been living abroad for exactly 10 years. It's a time as good as any to share my first-hand experiences on immigration. Immigrants are individuals like me, sustaining themselves in a foreign country. But, I am not an immigrant . I am an emigrant . On a good day, I'll agree to be called a migrant , so let's use that term going forward as it's neutral. The distinction between the terms is important, as it contains the crux of uprooting yourself and replanting your existence in foreign soil. An immigrant is identified with her new country, while an emigrant is identified with her old country. I am not an immigrant because I belong to my old country. Despite having chosen my new country out of free will, I am not integrated, and I don't strive to be. I fail the primary directive of any successful government immigra...

I have previously written about my obsessions with task management, and various productivity techniques to fight off procrastination. In the past, I expected to holy grail of personal productivity to be found in an organized list with appropriate metadata for each task. Much like MS Project but on a personal level. This is why I was so pleasantly surprised to find out how much I love Any.do 's daily planning feature. In an otherwise bare-bones implementations with hardly any metadata for each task, and other features not completely ironed out - the daily task planning is divine. This is what made me switch from my trusted Toodledo to Any.do. Any.do's daily planning feature does everything right. It pops up a friendly and appropriately obtrusive reminder each morning to plan your day. With interspersed motivational messages it is a reminder that you should be in control of your to dos and not vice versa. In combination with a super-attractive and to-the-point GUI, the dai...

Phrase Finder , a quick solution I put together for finding popular expressions that include a specific phrase, is no more. Yahoo made true of their promise to shut down their free Search API, and with it Phrase Finder. I am sad to see it go, because I regularly used it myself. There are no plans to bring it back to life at the moment.

Today, more and more people find themselves living in a foreign country. Be it a temporary state or a more permanent situation (as for myself); regardless, the world is becoming more global and multi-cultural. Or is it? And what exactly is culture? These are some of the questions that is being answered in Geert Hofstede’s cultural research, which now spans five decades. The book is a goldmine for people who are puzzled by culture clashes, and want to increase their understanding of cultural behavior. And who isn’t puzzled by cultural enigmas these days? No matter where you live, you just have to turn on the TV or head down to your local market or restaurant, and you will be exposed to foreign culture. Cultures and Organizations: Software for the Mind, Third Edition It turns out that the environment where we grew up ingrains eternal values in us. These values can be analyzed and measured, with averages calculated per country to quantify regional differences. This is exactly what...

Maybe I am just getting old. But I simply don’t get the concept of RockMelt , the newest flockesque browser/social-thingy on the horizon. It crams IM, social networks, and a web browser into one glorified application. I quietly ask myself how I would ever be able to get work done in an environment with that amount of cognitive overload? When accessing a web page I would be bombarded with information from the social sphere. Reading a longer article in that browser would be a feat worthy of the deepest reverence. On the surface, it seems nice and innocent enough to save a couple of Alt-Tabs to access my social networks. But the Alt-Tabs are there for a reason: to separate different contexts. 95% of the time when I am on a web page, I am there for a reason, and I don’t want to be distracted by other stuff. I believe the way forward is to simplify the user experience and use separate applications for web browsing and IM/social, so that the IM/social interactions can be turned off when ...

My yearly Sweden vacations are ever so offline. Checking e-mail is 15 kilometers away, and an unexpected liberator in that. So how does this affect me? Well, last year's experience made me discover Honore's "Slow", a short book about simplifying your life, and taking time to smell the roses. During this year’s vacation, I hit the Swedish book shops with the intent to find similar titles. But I was disappointed with seemingly shallow follow-ups trying to ride the success wave of Slow. Hours of book browsing later I came back empty-handed, disappointed not because I couldn’t find what I wanted but rather because I didn't know what I was looking for. Some days later I received a gift from my mother, a book with exquisite drawings and fine writings from a Swedish lake in the Mälaren area ("Sjö" by Gunnar Brusewitz). I was extremely pleased with the gift and started to ponder how removed I had become from nature. Living a city life, commuting to a cubicle,...

I’m now back from a relaxing vacation, doing close to nothing. The return to a hectic business life is a stark contrast. This has led me to set out a plan of doing less this year. But don’t get me wrong. Last year, I had great strategies, plans and goals for FeedJournal as well as for other personal projects. But looking back, nothing much moved forward. I can find no other reason for this than that I was feeling bogged down by the weight of my commitments. That’s why I this year plan to do less. By this logic, I hope to accomplish more. As an example, the long promised rewrite of the FeedJournal Publisher interface will take the back seat to a revamp of the existing interface, which by all means is working well. Improving what is there requires some magnitudes less effort. I hope it’s as simple as that.