Well, that’s one way of looking at it. Another way could be to just say: Hey, I’m back! I’ll try to be a little more frequent in the future, but for now let’s summarize the most important bits that have happened up until now:

• I got married on September 3rd. It was fantastic!
• Sophie and I went on a honeymoon trip to Cyprus on September 5th and it was also fantastic.
• The plan was to get back home again this Monday so I could take an early flight to SFO on Tuesday morning to join the Mozilla all hands on Wednesday. However, the plan didn’t go so well, because the trip from Cyprus back to Sweden was delayed, and I missed the flight to SFO. So in case anyone at Mozilla wonders where the heck I am, I’m doing the best I can to work remotely while everyone else is on site.
• Oh, and during the honeymoon trip, my LDAP password expired and I haven’t been able to read mail or access my calendar since then. Resetting the password proves to be hard when all of Mozilla’s IT staff is asleep in the US.

American Bald Eagle Close-up Portrait by Beverly & Pack / CC BY 2.0

It’s been two months now since I had my EPI-LASIK surgery and I have to say I’m extremely happy with the result. I’m beginning to see things clearly now and have a different perspective on things!

EPI-LASIK isn’t like the traditional LASIK where they cut a slit in your cornea and operate with laser behind the lid. Instead, EPI-LASIK operates straight on the surface of the eye. This means that it’s much safer (no need to cut in the eye!), and as a result, you don’t risk cutting the nerves that control eye fluids, something which tends to make LASIK patients suffer from dry eyes. More info about EPI-LASIK can be found here (warning: marketing material).

To anyone who is considering going through this procedure, here’s a bit of info on how it works and what to expect:

• The actual surgery was completely painless and not at all as scary as I thought. The machine handled everything itself, and the only thing the doctor actually did was dropping cooling and disinfecting drops into the eyes before and after the laser did its job.
• After the laser was done, they put a protective contact lens on the eye. Immediately after the surgery, I could see much better than I could without glasses before.
• About 20 minutes after the surgery, the eyes started to itch and I became sensitive to light.
• The following 48 hours were pretty tough with tears running down my cheeks, extreme light sensitivity and itching/painful eyes. I spent most of the time just lying in bed listening to music with my eyes shut. (Christina Aguilera’s Hurt was played more often that I would like to admit; maybe my state of mind made me more receptive to emotional lyrics?)
• After these 48 hours, I woke up with essentially no pain at all. It felt a bit like wearing contact lenses for too many hours, which of course was exactly the case too, since I had to wear the protective contact lens for about five days.
• I was still sensitive to light during the third day, but on day four it was all gone.
• After five days (the day before Christmas Eve), I visited the optician again and could finally remove the protective contact lens. From there on, it was as if the surgery never happened!

This is easily the best investment I’ve ever done to myself (aside from making Sofie my girlfriend). So far, the vision hasn’t really stabilized, and some days my left eye is better than the right, and then the next day it has changed. I still don’t see perfectly, but it’s good enough that I almost never think about it. If Ken pushed me to give a number, I’d say my vision is at 97% right now.

According to the doctor, the healing process can take up to a whole year, so it’s too early to tell what the end result will be — we will see! But even if it doesn’t get any better than this, it’s still better than I had with contact lenses, and without the dry eyes and hassle of taking them in and out of your eyes every day.

See you later!

The Peugeot 406 has been serving me well during all these years, but recently, it’s been struggling to keep up with the little things, like showing the outside temperature on its internal display, or letting me in through its drivers door, or not dropping its exhaust pipe on the ground.

One day when the 406 was taking me to Patrick for lunch out at Tuna Park (Sweden’s most popular shopping mall!), Patrick commented on its poor shape and said it looked “tired.” I think this might have been the last nail in the coffin for the 406’s already weak self-esteem, because just a few days later it broke down completely on the parking lot at Tuna Park and wouldn’t let me start it — the James Bond feature was broken!

I had to tow it to my sister’s car dealer and I realized that even if they can probably fix or work around this problem, it might be time to start looking for a replacement. I was also told that I should be happy if I could sell it for anything more than 1,000 Euros…

After some thinking and investigation, I’m now a proud owner of yet another French car:

Citroën C4 HDI 1.6 EGS (2007, diesel). My third car.

I love it! It’s very fuel efficient, it has a very neat 6-speed semi-automatic gearbox (Citroën calls it EGS), and maybe most important, it actually lets me drive it! It’s classified as an environmental friendly car in Sweden — the CO2 emission is 120g/km — but right now I’m still enthusiastically trying to find reasons to drive it, so if you count the distances I’m driving it without a meaningful destination, the CO2 emission is a lot higher.

I was proudly nominated by giants of the Internet age: Patrick Finch, Asa Dotzler, Mike Beltzner, Abdulkadir Topal, and almost, almost by Chris Hofmann. For that I am grateful. Now, on to the seven things:

1. My IRC nickname djst stands for my full name David Johan Sebastian Tenser. I started to use the acronym when I was 12 years old and a friend and I played with Deluxe Paint on the Amiga 500. I was a fan of Michael Jackson and was inspired by his company name MJJ Productions, so I created a logo for my fictional company DJST Productions. Here’s a wire-frame version of it (unfortunately the only one I have left after a tragic hard drive crash):

When I finally created an actual company in 2007, picking the name was easy. However, I have to say it doesn’t sound as nice when Swedish sales people call me up and ask if they’ve reached the company De Gee Ess Te Pro-duck-chens…

2. I haven’t been at a hairdresser in over eight years. I cut my own hair, usually very frequently to maintain a constant length. Sometimes my mom cuts it when the back hair gets too uneven. I estimate that this has saved me about 1,280 Euros, or the equivalent of over six hundred juicy Double Double Animal Style burgers.

Every so often, the frequency drops noticeably.

3. I used to write my own music between 1995 and 1997 on a Roland W-30 workstation. Because I was writing techno/trance inspired music and there were no lyrics, naming the songs was not easy since I couldn’t really relate to anything but the feeling the songs gave me. One song, which marked an important milestone because it made use of my newly bought Alesis Quadraverb multi-effects unit to add reverb to some of the tracks, is called Incoming Enemy, to Patrick Finch’s great amusement! In late 1997, my mom brought a computer to our house which pushed my music making interest aside for another creative interest: software programming.

4. Between 1999 and 2002, my programming skills developed and I was successfully selling a shareware text editor called Texturizer. Originally, as with many other software projects, Texturizer was only created to scratch a personal itch, but I was encouraged by an online friend to start selling it online. The program got great reviews by ZD-Net, vnunet.com, and other websites, and it was featured in the UK magazine Windows Answers under “The best freeware and shareware tools ever!”

Here’s a part of a review in a magazine that made me very proud at the time: “Run Texturizer, and we’re confident you’ll never use Notepad again. [...] Texturizer is so ruthless it even features a walkthrough showing you how do do away with Notepad. Sounds like Microsoft has been beaten at its own game.” – PC Answers, August 1999

5. In 2007, I recorded a short video clip with Swedish TV host and celebrity Katarina Hultling. I met her randomly on a cruise over the Baltic sea and didn’t realize it was her until I asked her if she knew Katarina Hultling (probably subconsciously recognizing her) and getting her answer that I was looking right at her. I got very enthusiastic and insisted that we would shoot a parody of her actual commenting of the 2006 Olympic curling final when Sweden won the gold medal, and I would be the enthusiastic side-kick. To my pleasant surprise, she liked the idea!

I’ve proudly shared the epic video clip with most of my Swedish friends, but I won’t publish it along with my other videos on Facebook out of respect to a fellow celebrity.

6. There is not a single physical sport I’m known to be good at. I was one of those kids who didn’t want to play football because I sucked at it, and as a result, I kept sucking at it. Today, I occasionally enjoy playing badminton and table tennis, but I am sure I will never be even remotely good at it.

7. I am, however, a somewhat decent singer. I’m known for cursing loudly about the (admittedly very addictive) game Sing Star because you don’t score well if you try to sing like the original singer in the song — instead, you get higher scores by singing like a bloody .mid file! You probably won’t hear me sing unless I’m drunk, by the way.

There you have it — my seven things! Now, the ancient rules of engagement:

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

In alphabetical order, I hereby nominate:

• Seth Bindernagel — Wake up, A.M! Liberate your seven things!
• Stephen Donner — QA superstar, excellent writer, and great friend.
• Justin Fitzhugh — The man that speaks so fast I can only hear half of what he says. I can’t wait to read some stories from him instead!
• Chris Ilias — Half-Greek wedding crasher and SUMO team member.
• Paul Kim — Shock us! I expect nothing less.
• David Naylor — Journalist, photographer, and proud member of the Mozilla Eskilstuna community.
• Doug Turner — As one of the first people that welcomed me when I joined Mozilla in September 2007, he immediately surprised me by being such a nice person.

Today, December 2, is exactly 18 days before the winter solstice occurs; a day I’m always looking forward to during this time of the year. Because on December 20, I can finally, once again, say: “Nu går vi mot ljusare tider!”

Or as Patrick Finch’s great grandmother used to say:

We shalln’t see the days so short any more.

The person on the opposite side of my compass is George W. Bush. Where do you stand? Take the test!

After about two years of active development, I started to get more interested in software development in general, and open source in particular. I quickly got involved with Mozilla and decided to create a simple website for Firefox (then called Phoenix), which was hosted on texturizer.net/phoenix. The rest is history.

The reason why I bring this up today is because I was pinged this morning by Adam Barlam, the server administrator who helped me a lot with the hosting of Firefox Help. For example, during the release of Firefox 0.9, the server host was having serious bandwidth and performance issues and we had to take out some of the heavier PHP code and add caching mechanisms to survive — just like we do today with SUMO by the way. If it wasn’t for Adam, the server would have suffered from frequent outages, as the Firefox project quickly became incredibly popular compared to the bandwidth and server resources texturizer.net was equipped with.

It’s always nice to catch up with people you’ve known for ages, so I was excited to hear from Adam this morning. Apparently, he is now the owner of a company called Barlam Enterprises, who among other things create web sites and offer IT services for other companies. As a testament that he still knows what he’s doing, in just five minutes he fixed an issue I had for a long time with the RSS feed of my blog!

Adam, thank you for helping me and Mozilla host the early Firefox support documentation, and for fixing my RSS today!

During this first day in Sunny California, anno 2008, I made the following notes:

• Baja Fresh is still teh fresh. Seriously, plus plus one one.
• In-N-Out serve more fries than you can possibly ask for, yet you still somehow manage to eat it all up.
• The Wild Palms just got wilder by replacing their mixed fruits with American pancakes. Just the Super Size Me upper edge I needed.
• Dollars not only look like Monopoly money, they even have roughly the same value.
• Stephen Donner’s neighbors sometimes make unmotivated but seemingly exhausting ten-feet swims.
• Ruby is as cute as ever.

It’s good to be back. Really excited about meeting everyone at Mozilla tomorrow, including of course all the new people!

During the first two months, I worked from the Mozilla office in Mountain View, California, which gave me a good kick-start, and introduced me to some of the finer American traditions; for example, donuts, Baja Fresh, and In-N-Out! I also got to know a bunch of amazing people — more people than I could mention in this blog post.

Today, I feel privileged to have my hobby as my full-time job, and it’s been an awesome ride so far. In fact, it’s been so hectic and fun that I forgot to blog about this until now! I plan on increasing the blogging frequency for 2008, which is going to be an exciting year for sure.