Hunch

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I'm moving on

June 11 by Rasmus Andersson, tagged spotify, life and facebook, filed under spotify

Moving on

After four years of giving birth to and developing Spotify I’m moving on to a new adventure: In October later this year I’m starting as a product designer at Facebook — a journey of innovation, design and the future of the internet.

Leaving Spotify is indeed very emotional — my little baby — but at some point you have to let the bird out of it’s cage. I believe Facebook is a very interesting entity which is changing the way we look at the internet in large — I’m thrilled and very happy to become a part of that.

For me, working with basic human needs (music, social interaction, etc) in an aspect where peoples lives are being improved, has always been the focus of my professional life, thus both Spotify and now Facebook.

The time with Spotify has been the best in my life so far; the people, the laughers, the time we cried out loud, the times of frustration and the times of pure happiness. Being part of and seeing a seed of a world-changing idea grow up to be a industry changing, world spread “thing” is something which can’t be explained. An awesome feeling.

During the end of this summer I’m moving to San Francisco, marking the beginning of an exciting journey with Facebook. As I’ll be a new swede in town, let’s hook up (and maybe I’ll learn a thing or two about the area).

Life, I love you

June 1, 2008 by Rasmus, tagged illustration, life, music and random

Life, I love you illustration

A Most Peculiar Night

August 21, 2007 by Rasmus, tagged life, stockholm, story and text

Theme song: La Niña de Puerta Oscura

I programmed a bit for the first time, in a very long while and thus stayed waay to late at the office. At quarter to ten, I left the building at Humlegårdsgatan and headed for Tunnelgatan. It closes at 2200 hours, so I still had time to walk through it. On my way through, I pass by a uniformed man with 200 keys strapped to his waist. He talked on his cellphone, looked at me for a short while and continue talking. When I reached the end of the tunnel, I realized that man I passed earlier, just locked the tunnel end. The big iron gates was sealed with two big locks. I quickly turned around and walked back, to the other entrance. I now noticed I was alone in the long tunnel.

The key-loving man almost closed the last gate when he saw me running towards him and I merely managed to not spend the night inside that scary tunnel. Man, I was relieved. Had to walk up the David Bagare hill. Later down at Sveavägen I felt the hunger. And oh what a hunger for food it was. Last meal I had was lunch! Damn. Had to get something to eat. So, I stopped by 7-Eleven and picked up a bulgur salad.

When I got out through the door of 7-Eleven and stopped a the road crossing, leading to the other side of the road where I must walk, I see a man waiting for the traffic lights to turn green. He obviously want to cross the road, just like myself, but in the opposite direction. But that didn’t catch my interest. What did catch my eyes what was he where holding in his hand – a hot dog! Look like the most delicious meal I’ve ever seen. The hot dog stand was right next to the man.

The lights turned green, we both crossed the road in opposite directions. And just as I was about to shout “a big delicious hot dog, please!” the man in the stand shut the door and closed. Right in front of me!

So, I continued my journey back home.

Nothing of interest happened for the next kilometer or so. But when I reached the darker parts of Tegnérlunden, a figure emerged towards me from the shadows, waving his hands like saying “hey, you, hold it right there”. Turned out he was a very humble Latvian guy, who was visiting Sweden. He told me he met the most wonderful girl and got her number. We stood there and talked for a while and I helped him get her on the line. He had no idea what telephone number prefix Sweden has.

We said goodbye, I wished him good luck and my pace was retained. Now heading down upplandsgatan. Began thinking about I should have had film in my camera and snapped a shot or two of the strange yet very pleasant latvian guy. My thought quickly turned to the Mamiya 6 120-system. I’m currently speculating in buying a 6×6 camera and the Mamiya 6 seems to be just what I need.

In the display window of Schönherrs Photography shop, something catches my eye. I pass it by very fast. Halt my steps and… Hey, wasn’t that a… no.. I took a few steps back and heck! A pristine Mamyia 6 with ALL THREE lenses. Haven’t seen it before and I’m passing by that store every day, so it must be new. Now, this is kinda strange, but even stranger was the price. Almost exactly the amount of which I earlier today sold my old PowerMac for. Couldn’t believe it. If I’d been a bit more superstitious, I would certainly have thought this was meant to happen. But the only thing I could do was to stand there and think. Think on and on about this very basic set of variables and facts. The store was of course closed, it’s late, so I continued walking home.

The Vasa park is a somewhat scary place at night time. Only a few lights in the outskirts and sometimes a few youngsters mocking around with each other without a destination. But this evening I literally walked into an old date. What was she doing there in the middle of the night?! Haven’t seen her since our date. Maybe half a year ago. Turned out she was meeting a friend nearby and was later this year going travel for a while. She had a thick book with letters reading “Philippines”.

We made an easy goodbye, wished each-other some luck. La Niña de Puerta Oscura just finished playing in my iPhone and Seu Jorge kicked in, following me all the way home. And now that I’ve written this down, it’s time for me to enjoy my dinner – a now very delicious salad from 7-Eleven.

Being synchronized

June 4, 2007 by Rasmus, tagged life, productiveness, sync and synchronisation

I have three computers which I need to have in sync; my Mac Pro at work, my stationary iMac at home and the portable MacBook. Except from those excellent tools of the 21:st century, I also have my cellphone which address book needs to be synchronized.

At work, we use Google for mail & calendar. My own business (or: private setup) uses IMAP and has no centralized calendaring system.

Being the OS X lover I am, using the Google Mail html interface is a royal pain in the ass. Alot of files being attached, often larger than permitted so I have to send through my private mail. Text area dows not work like rest of OS X, gmail fails to read <url in brackets>’s, and so on.

The solution was pretty simple: Use gmail POP-access with the (new?) option “Archive” and have Apple Mail retrieve and store everything on central server over IMAP.

Gmail is one-way; we can pull stuff out if it, but never put them back (into it’s current state). The central server is based on IMAP which is a synchronizing protocol. Good for us. We use it as the central storage, with clients having their own local cache.

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Scalable
  • Extensible
  • Integrates nicely (clients)
  • Easy backup
  • Portable

Cons:

  • Gmail inbox not synchronizing
  • Single-point of failure (server dies everything dies)
  • Complex to set up
  • Gmail web interface will not be part of the synchronization (yet still you will be able to access all mail and see which has been moved to the central server and which has not been)
  • Needs at least one Apple Mail client to do the synchronization

This setup fits me well and deploying a new Apple Mail client on a new (or old) computer is as easy as tar-ing and scp-ing a folder from A to B. I can as well seamlessly combine my different accounts.

Next step…

…will be to do the POP import directly on the central server and setup a separate account (which will be a proxy-like “rasmus-gmail@myhost.com” account) for retrieving mail.