I built this for Christmas 2010, but waited to put it up for the world to see. It just feels like a more personal gift that way. Big thanks to Dennis for the awesome photos.

I am Jawsus, here me ROAR!

… and…

No, Fox News. You are the eels.

… deserves to be at least one app. Soon in an app store near you!

I ran across Command Line Fu by David Winterbottom some time ago and fell in love immediately. It’s a place where people like me share their best command line tricks! After following it for a while I noticed it had an API. Since I most often browsed the site from my phone, I decided to build a simple app for the site. Said and done: it really made it easier to browse the commands. Success!

Command Line Fu in the app store is my humble tribute to geeks everywhere. I hope you enjoy it.

If only, I though, there was an app that let you quickly and easily print a message on your phone. Then I could just hold it up for her to read.

Long story short: I built it. Its named Simple Prompter, and it’s awesome. Simply enter your message, set size and scrolling speed if you wish, and hit GO! Presto: a simple prompted message. Thank you, Simple Prompter!

I’ve found it very useful, and so has a few others. If you want to buy it (and sponsor me a small bit) it’s available on the app store.

This will be a very unstructured rambling post about life, identity and making choices. I will try not to make it a “look at me, I’m awesome but sad because I can’t choose”-post. I make choices, and I think about them, and I’ll try to jot down some recent thought processes here. It’s a post about work, and the meaning of work in life.

Things have been well the past months. After leaving IKEA for a job I didn’t get, my freelancing got a good boost. Suddenly I had a bunch of awesome things to do. And I was able to go to several new interviews, for pretty awesome jobs. And still, I wonder: when is it good? When am I happy?

I got confused, I have to admit. I got to work on these awesome projects in my own business. I had the chance to take these awesome jobs at these awesome places. Should I? Should I not? Why? Why not? It all culminated yesterday. After going to a follow-up interview to get to know more about the most recent job – which seemed great, by the way – I really had to wheigh pros and cons. And worse than that, I had to try and compare lifestyle with lifestyle.

On one hand, a stable job. Secure income. Fun organization. On the other, freelancing. No regular projects or income. Very random things to do. How do you choose?

Having to face this made me realize that I’ve got an insecurity that I didn’t even realize I had. To make it easier to understand, I refined my insecurity to two things:

1. Work identity
2. Long term goals

When it comes to identity, I realized that the decision was made more difficult by me not having – nor wanting to have – a proper “title”. Depending on whom you talk to – or even when you ask me – I’m a programmer, a communicator, a project manager or even a photographer. But I can’t choose one. This is awesome when it comes to making my own stuff – but absolutely horrible when it comes to taking a job. For one thing, it means I like doing everything – but isn’t as good as a person dedicated to that one thing. It also means certain people tend to see certain sides of me. A project manager thinks I could become a very good project manager (if I fill in some blanks), and a programmer sees potential in me (if I decided to dedicate myself to it).

These are things I’ve heard, and yes – they’re true. But I can’t help but feel that I would do myself, my clients and a prospective employer a disservice if I suddenly became a specialist instead of a generalist. There has to be a place for someone who is a pretty darn good programmer and project manager. And LEGO builder. And interaction dude. And writer. And photographer. And… you get the point.

Sometimes it makes me feel like I’ve got awesome super powers, sometimes like I’m miles behind everyone else. I just don’t know what to do with this, or how to best cultivate it. And that leads me to the second point: long term goals.

I have none. I’ve been living for the moment all my life. If I felt like doing something, I did it. If i didn’t feel like doing something, I didn’t. (Except if I had to because of work/school/something else – then I just buckled up and got it done, kicking ass on the way.) But what I now discover, is that I lack a feeling of purpose. I’m just not working towards anything.

This have had an immense effect on the choice between employment and self-employment. How do you know what suits your life situation best if you haven’t decided what life situation you want? Here’s a hint: you can’t. I figure if I work out my long term goals I should discover what my ideal life situation is, and what jobs (and thus, work identity) helps me achieve that. Here goes nothing.

Oh, and the job? After thinking about it really, really hard, I decided not to take it. And felt like an ass doing so. You know when you date a girl, kiss her and have taken her bra off, and she says she loves you? And you say “Baby, I like you but not that much”?

I was that guy. And the job that girl. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again. Time to think things through, for real.

The site is essentially hard coded HTML/CSS/JS – but in a WordPress theme, to easily allow content changes. The lovely Peter Dovrén and fabulous Emilia Blom are responsible for design, while I did all of the coding.

The site is built to be a temporary solution. It is a well-functioning WordPress theme though, so if Claes wants to he can use the theme again to quickly change its contents.

The theme is named Easy Peasy Portfolio. I built it with people like me in mind: love creating stuff, but hate tedious updating of websites. It attempts to streamline your workflow in several ways:

• By automatically generating galleries (from flickr sets, by uploaded pictures in WordPress, or manually entering URLs)
• By including an Easy Peasy Mode, that cleans a lot of the clutter from WordPress interface
• By having a super duper easy to use options panel that lets you customize basic stuff you otherwise have to code for
• And, you know, generally rock!

Now, there’s a lot to do still. The theme is only in its alpha version. That means it works (hey, look at this site!), but there are a few bugs, the code isn’t optimized, and a few features aren’t fully implemented. Working on it, promise.

Still, if you want to have a look at it you can download the alpha version of Easy Peasy Portfolio on GitHub. Have at it!

This is a faster, niftier and in all ways better version of the scaler found at Swooshable.

It’s not appreciated by everyone. That’s understandable, and it’s definitely something a prankster must take into account. It’s never okay to hurt another person. For a prank to be at its best it must border on the ridiculous, but still – on some level – possibly be true.

But Linus! is the concern we had today, how can you toy with people like this? They might take offense! Yes, they do, sometimes. When that happens it’s a hugely failed prank. It all usually boils down to one main fear:

Someone might not understand that it’s a joke, and I’ll look like a fool. This’ll lead to people hating me/me not getting the job/another horrible situation because of the misunderstanding.

But I still honestly believe pranking is an awesome thing – especially for the person getting pranked. Hard to follow? I understand that, especially now.

There’s the obvious reason that the world would be insanely dull and stiff if we couldn’t joke with each other every now and then, but there’s actually an even better answer than that. Humanity. We are human, and showing it is a great thing to make others like you better.

I’m going to simplify the world slightly to better convey what I mean. Here’s the thing: our society is loosening up. For the first time in a long while, people are allowed to – have to, really – be themselves. David writes about himself on social networks. He shows where he is by using location services. I notice this, and likes or comments that Dave just had a fantastic lunch. It feels like I get a sneak peak into his life. I get closer to him by knowing what he does. It helps me understand him.

And I know that he isn’t perfect, because I’m not. If David does something wrong, realizes and apologizes, I probably like him better for it. Hey, Dave is a swell guy! At least he admits it when he is wrong, and I really like the other stuff he does.

That’s crisis management 101 for you. Admit that you’re wrong and do everything you can to rectify it as quickly as possible, and you’ve saved a lot of your precious behind. We dislike BP for the oil spill, but we hate them for being nonchalant about it.

The same thing goes for pranking. Get pranked, and you actually show me you’re a human being. You have relationships with people, real friends and family, and I get to be a distant part of that. And I like you better when you have friends – that means you’re like me and not a soulless robot.

There are those who prefer to control their appearance, and they have the right to try and do so. You probably shouldn’t prank with these people an awful lot, chances are they wouldn’t like it. But regardless if they want it to happen or not, more and more information about them and me is becoming available to everyone else. This means we’ll have fewer ‘perfect’ humans in the future, and more humans. Maybe that makes us all perfect?

At a short seminar I was at recently Joakim Jardenberg discussed WikiLeaks and the consequences whistleblowing has for companies. He meant that this is happening more and more, and there’s not much to do about it but adapt. He meant that organizations must be honest and do good shit. I prefer be human and do awesome stuff, but it’s the same thing. And it’s not just applicable to organizations – it’s applicable to individuals as well.

So my point is this: the fear that someone might misunderstand and hate you is extremely small compared to the chance that we’ll have a good time and that people will like you more. And I think it’s totally worth taking that chance – it’s part of becoming awesome.

I totally failed to convey this point in the discussion, by the way. There’s a lot you have to take into account when talking to someone. Our main mistake was that we both broke the number one rule I have in discussions: Don’t try to argue that you’re right, but ask questions to understand the other person. In the end he got mad while I got sad. Crappy, but the best we can do is to learn from it and become friends again tomorrow.