P/S Sven Axelsson

Pipe Sergeant Sven Axelsson, who was born in 1962, joined the band in 1979 and was taught to play the pipes within the Murray Pipes & Drums. He was always interested in music and played until ca. 1981 the oboe and the basson in several orchestras. He also enjoys performing music from the rennaisance and the baroque periods using various recorders, flutes, rackets, curtalls etc.

Sven has competed sucessfully in Scandinavian piping competitions. He was also one of the pipers who started trying out new piping ideas in the mid 1980s. From 1989 to 1992 Sven worked at the Microsoft World-Wide Product Group in Dublin, Ireland. He then took the opportunity to take part in many traditional Irish music sessions and recieved tuition in the Irish flute and tin whistle from Peter Phelan of Firhouse, Dublin, and from Marcus Murphy of Belfast.

When he returned to Sweden he started a project togheter with Mats, to have the music for the band repertoire transcribed using bagpipeTeX. Sven is a great asset to the band with his broad musical knowledge and wide spectra of abusive language.

That was the official text, now, here is some real info:

I was born in 1962 in Uppsala, Sweden. In 1968 my family moved to Enköping, and then in 1970 to Karlskrona. In 1978 I moved to Göteborg, and quickly discovered that a pipe band existed that was in desperate need for me to join them. So I did...

After finishing high school, doing my patriotic duty (i.e. military service), and some other stuff, I ended up studying Computational Linguistics at the Linguistics department of the University of Gothenburg. After having spent some six years there, getting my M.A. and starting on a Ph.D., I decided that I had had enough of academic balderdash, and went for a real job.

This happened to be (quite by chance, actually) with the Big and Evil one; Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland. Here I stayed for almost three years, until the constant reorgs started getting to me for real. I finally gave up and moved back to Sweden.

I then went to work together with an old friend from high school in his computer consulting company, Evolvera AB. We did all kinds of database things for the Apple Macintosh. But, I gave up on that too, and, finally went to work for my present employer, Wordwork AB, where I'm developing all kinds of language tools and multi-media stuff. Our latest and (so far) greatest project is a program which is a kind of writers workbench. It is called Skribent, has it's own website (one which I have not made, so it's good ;^), and was developed in co-operation with Norstedts förlag, one of Sweden's largest publishing houses. Fame and fortune, here I come...

Ok, ok! So, I can't stay with a single employer, can I? I'm back with Evolvera again after a year and a half with Wordwork this time around. Oh yes, I failed to mention that I already worked for Wordwork a bit over a year before the previous round with Evolvera. Sounds confusing? I think so too.

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