Me and my wife Pernilla in Venice, Italy
I was born February 1, 1974 in Nordmaling in the north-east of Sweden.
Nordmaling is a small town with a population of about 2000 in the
town and about 8000 in the region as a whole. This is where I grew up
and attended kindergarten and my first nine years of school.
Since Nordmaling has no high school I commuted for three years between
a city called Umeå (about 50 km north of Nordmaling) and Nordmaling, while
I took Science at Östra Gymnsieskolan. This is also the time when I
turned to a little heavier music and played the guitar in a band, Solid Ivory,
for a while. Apart from the studies life consisted mainly of bands like
Guns N' Roses, Metallica, Megadeth and so forth, for a while.
After high school I moved to Umeå to attend the University of Umeå, where I
took Computer Science for 4.5 years. The last few years I chose to concentrate
on Cognitive Science which is a mix of a broad variety of subjects such
as Computer Science, Philosophy, Human-Computer Interaction, Neurology,
Psychology, and so forth. During this time I also took the time to design a
web-page on an author that has interested me a lot,
Edgar Allan Poe, and this
grew to almost a half-time job since there was a lot of interest in Poe on
the net.
The last six months of my university studies I spent in a city called
Sundsvall (about 250 km south of Umeå) at Telia Engineering, as it was
known back then. I wrote my masters thesis here, entitled
"The Inquiry on the Merits of 3D Internet Browsers".
After the thesis was done I applied for a job at the Aeronautical Research
Insistute of Sweden and got a job there at the Swedish Air Force Air Combat
Simulation Center, or FLSC as it is abbreviated in Swedish. I still work there
today with flight simulation for the Swedish Air Force, where we train the
pilots and weapons controllers in combat tactics and peace support operations.
In early 2000 I met my girlfriend, Pernilla, and we bought ourselves a
three-room apartment in a suburb to Stockholm called Kista (where a tiny
little company called Ericsson have their headquarters). We got married
in June 2006 which also lead to me changing my last name from Nilsson
to Hallqvist.
When I am not working I like to do anything creative, such as painting,
writing poetry or short tales, writing music, playing the guitar, create
something on my computer - graphics or programming (or both!) I am also
very interested in ice-hockey, especially in my favorite team
Björklöven
from Umeå, which are not doing very well right now - but they'll be back!
qrisse@poedecoder.com