The home-on-the-web of Robin Laurén
In the Days of old, everybody just "had" to have a home page. With the advent of blogs, social networks and whatnot, this tradition more or less died away and these days you'll generally only find home pages for academics and vanity pages for celebrities. Anyways, i thought i would put together something of a starting point for anyone wanting to surf out my life and interests. Hello employees! Hello stalkers! Hello old friends and colleagues!
I'm a bit of an idealist. I support green values, but in a way that does not have a significantly negative impact on my lazy and comfortable way of living. Thus, i will still be taking the car to drop off the kids to school and when going to work, but i will happily switch to using the bus when (if) the bus will stop more often at the bus stop near our house and take me where i want without too many detours (and the "sight seeing round"). I'd rather work for a company which supports sustainability, both of the social, economical and green kinds. Anyway, these often go hand in hand. I lend money through Kiva rather than (just) give money away. I donate a few spare cpu cycles to the World Community Grid, but not so many that it will have a big impact on energy use. I worked for the United Nations' Development Programme (UNDP) as a UN Volunteer (UNV) both because it was fun and because i could put my know-how into real change and not only profit.
Stuff like that.
I am what some would call a geek. I have a small network of computers at home and would like to have the spare time to make it work better. But then again, i have a family that really doesn't care too much about that kind of stuff. And a house which requires some maintenance too.
I am very excited about what we can do with computers, or what computers can do for us, once properly trained. Especially, i like small computers which are low on energy use and can do a small bunch of things well. Frank Stajano speaks about Peanut devices, Don Norman about Information appliances and others about The Internet of Things. Smart homes. Smart appliances. Smart stuff.
I am interested in usability of the User centered design favour, in securiy, and especially in the yet rather new field combining usability and security into what's been coined as HCIsec. I'm sure a more marketable term (like "usable security" or "secure usability") will bubble up once this thing becomes more mainstream.
I'm a big friend of "handmade" music. My tastes range from progressive rock to ska/punk to african folk/pop music.