Apr 18 - Stockholm, and Östersund

On Wed 9 Apr I flew to Stockholm for 5 days, to visit people at Ericsson's Computer Science labs (who paid for the airfare & accomodation, which was very nice). I gave 2 seminars to them, on Wed & Thurs. Had quite a lot of interest, and had a very lively debate after the second for several hours. There's quite a bit of interest in what I'm doing (which is investigating a safer version of their new programming language Erlang), and they were very appreciative of my input, whilst not agreeing with all my suggestions (which is fine - I'm happy to get the feedback, and its helped me to decide what to work on next). So that was really good. On the Fri I visited the Swedish Institute for Computer Science, and chatted to some people there, before a final visit to CSLabs. So from a work perspective it went extremely well. I had time for some sightseeing on Sat & Sun (though the weather was very mixed - was snowing Fri & Sat morning, but cleared up after that). Walked around central Stockholm, and went on tours through the City Hall and the Music Museum (which I was very impressed with - both from the range of instruments & history, as well as a large number of hands on displays & instruments - thought it was very well done). Then finished off by walking back to the hotel through the old town. Sat evening I went to dinner with a couple of people on exchange from SERC in Melbourne (where I worked before coming to Norway), and we had a very pleasant evening. Sun I went to see the Medieval Museum - built round the remains of part of the old city wall and some buried boats, before walking up to the old observatory and wandering round before flying back. In all a very productive trip.

Was very busy at work Mon to Wed the following week, playing with the new ideas I developed during the trip. Then on Thurs 17 Apr I went on an excursion with some of the 4th year Telematics students, organised by my colleague Svein. The main purpose was to visit Ericsson's facility in Oestersund, Sweden - about 4 hours by coach due East of here, which was quite interesting. On the way back on Fri we stopped at Åre - which is a major alpine resort which has hosted the world cup. I got in 3 1/2 hours of downhill skiing - and whilst it was somewhat icy, there was still lots of snow, and some very long (and steep!) runs. I was very pleased with myself, as I didn't fall over at all! The others had a much briefer go, as they went to lunch & another talk (in Swedish) which I skipped. I was pretty tired, but very happy with the trip.