Asbjørn in Oslo

The end

2008-08-16T08:47:00.002+02:00

To be discontinued.

This is what I did last summer: http://asbjornonvikingtour2008.blogspot.com/

Stay updated on flickr: http://flickr.com/asbjorn_floden

My bike is back...

2008-04-19T20:24:00.002+02:00

...in my living room, and I am back on the road riding it.

Summer is coming! :-)

Video, or looong pictures, on Flickr!

2008-04-09T12:32:00.003+02:00

Flickr now accepts video, and you might wonder "why--we already have YouTube and MySpace" (and many others). From what I understand, videos on Flickr are aimed towards "pictures with duration", or pre-rendered slide shows if you like. However, I don't know whether Flickr will moderate uploaded video content, and it will be exiting to see how the video feature really works. The best way to find out will probably be to upload one, and I have an idea on what to upload... Stay tuned!

Moonlit Easter

2008-03-30T19:01:00.004+02:00

Blue Easter moon

This year, I spent Easter with Trine, Bente, Arnljot, Daniel, and Tor at my fathers cabin in Valdres. Although we had a day and a half with snowfall, we found time for cross country skiing in wonderful sunshine, digging and building a fortress (mostly the work of Arnljot), jumping from the roof as well as skijumping. And photographying the moon, which shone brightly every night but one!

My phone wants to be lost

2008-03-12T08:32:00.002+01:00

For the past few days, my mobile phone has become independent and stayed behind after I've visited friends. Or, seen in a different perspective, my disliking the Nokia E-65 is becoming unconsciously explicit as I forget to bring the phone with me when I leave.

Mental note to self: Never mind.

Online slideshows with PicLens in Firefox

2008-03-11T13:55:00.002+01:00

A colleague just introduced me to the Firefox extension PicLens by Cooliris. The extension let you browse and display online pictures in a neat interface, including integrated search with online pictures like flickr as well as a nice slideshow feature. So, if you don't have it, install it--if you don't have Firefox, install that too...

And enjoy!

Desserts, snowboarding, skiing, and bicycling

2008-03-10T15:48:00.007+01:00

35 chocolate dessers in 2008

2008 started with a decision to cook all 35 chocolate desserts in a leaflet I have by the end of the year--in other words, one dessert in every week and a half. I am currently slightly behind schedule, but picking up speed in order to celebrate my birthday with one of my favourites, namely fundue au chocolat. As part of this project, I upload pictures of every dessert on flickr. Click the leaflet to have a look.

Off-piste in Hemsedal

Travelwise, I am keeping an environmental-friendly profile with no flights so far this year, and have traveled in filled up cars and buses on my two trips snowboarding in Hemsedal. Within the city and surrounding areas, I go by metro, bus or train--also for cross country skiing. And since last Sunday, bicycling adds to my current means of transportation, though mostly for excercise until the temperature rise to more relaxing levels.

A new year of training

2008-01-27T09:22:00.000+01:00

Once my fractured rib healed in mid-January, I resumed training and participated in a swim gathering for triathletes last weekend here in Oslo. Facilitated by two (or three?) times Swedish champion in triathlon Ted Ås, Swedish ex-elite swimmer Torbjørn and finally Swedish swimming coach Henning Degermann, who has coached Sweden's Olympic swimmers, quality was highly professional. Additionally, with all coaches from Sweden, quite a few Swedes participated as well. So, in total 18 amateurs swam back and forth for no less than nine hours in less than two days! It's only now, one week later, that my left arm is starting to feel normal again. But however exhausting, the gathering was a big success--I don't immediately swim a lot faster, but now I know a few things I should work on. So when summer comes, I'll hopefully be fit to participate in a triathlon or two...

Update:
Sorry, but no pictures this time either. I do have a video of myself crawling, but don't see any reason to publish that... Admit that a decent picture of me with swimming, water splashing around, would be cool though.

Why do Microsoft move buttons to the right?

2008-01-16T10:28:00.000+01:00

I just installed Internet Explorer 7. It looks nice, but what on earth did Microsoft think when they moved some of the toolbar buttons to the right? Did they completely miss out on the idea that people stack windows, rendering the buttons invisible when a window partially overlap?

I can understand that not everyone reads from left to right, and therefore would like buttons to display to the right rather than left. But why distribute them all over the place?

I just don't get it...

Who is Lyra Belacqua?

2007-12-21T23:56:00.000+01:00

The answer: Lyra Belacqua is the main character in Philip Pullman's trilogy "His Dark Materials", of which the first book is now on screen as "The Golden Compass" (my copy says "Northern Lights" on the front cover).

To those who know me, the following may come as a surprise, as I am more of a realist than a fan of fantasy literature. However, when my cousin Peder gave me the full trilogy, I would be disrespectful not to show appreciation and read the books--no matter how sceptical I was towards fantasy. Working my way through the pages, I learned to know Lyra beyond her capabilities to succeed with everything she engages in, and I soon devoured the full trilogy.

This was a few years ago.

Today, I saw the first part of the trilogy on screen. Preparing for the motion picture, I freshened my memory and read the first book once more--this time with even greater joy than before, and although a bit sceptical I looked forward to the movie. I even read a couple of reviews and was mentally prepared for an intense two hours with action and special effects following special effects and action...

What I was not prepared for, was the movie's failure to portray Lyra. Yes, it shows Lyra as a clever and strong girl, who is not afraid of nothing (double negation is used extensively in the dialogue...). But the story jumps from one thing to the other, and you don't get to know her beyond being a child running around sorting things out--and barely that, as you really have no idea what to expect before it happens. Faced with this, missing and shuffled scenes doesn't really matter. Even the misplaced emphasis on massive battle-scenes become secondary to the lack of insight into Lyra's being and her drive to pursue what she believes in.

The one quality that makes the movie worth seeing, set aside the special effects, is the brilliant play by Dakota Blue Richards (Lyra) and Nicole Kidman (Mrs. Coulter). Just too bad that the script and direction don't make their talents work the story...

Is walking more polluting than driving?

2007-12-17T22:17:00.000+01:00

On August 4, The Times quoted UK parliamentary candidate Chris Goodall who claims that walking 3 miles (4.8 km) adds four times more CO2 to the atmosphere than driving the distance in "a typical UK car". The calculating behind this statement assumes that a person has to eat about 100g of beef to power the walk, and beef production is polluting. The question that jumps to mind is, what about the car's fuel? Where did that come from?

Here are another few questions that might balance the statement a little (I don't know the answers to them, so maybe they don't add any balance whatsoever. And although thinking requires energy and thus adds to my emission of CO2 today, I find them both amusing and worthwhile to ask):

Who lives solely on beef? I don't question that meat production requires a lot of energy--I recall having heard already in secondary school (about 20 years ago) that producing one kilo of meat consumes 10 kilos of fodder. The problem is that I can't think of anyone who only eats meat--perhaps with the exception of people who follows the Atkins diet...
How much CO2 does the walking person emit directly into the atmosphere, not considering that she (or he) have to eat in order to walk? This is probably an over-simplified way of ruling out the cost of producing and transporting petrol, but nevertheless an interesting way of putting things into perspective...
Or what if we start off from the beginning, and compare 1) how much energy and emission it takes to raise a human being ("a typical UK citizen") with 2) the energy and emission it takes to produce "a typical UK car"-- including putting shoes and clothes on the human being, and mining and transporting metals for the car, etc...?
And finally: How much energy and emission does it take to bring the person back to nature (the concept of "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust") compared to decomposing the car (no similar expression for the car, as nobody have yet witnessed a car become earth, ashes or dust--without help from mind-bending amounts of energy).

Of course, nobody can give definite answers to any of the questions above, with perhaps the last being the exception. However, it wouldn't hurt if journalists spent two extra calories to ask questions that might help people (like me) to better understand what is actually going on.

Or maybe not, as it would require extra energy, contributing to even more emissions of CO2...?

Update:
Even more alarming than the journalists lack of questions is the teeny-weeny white-paper beef.pdf that is supposed to support Mr. Goodall's statement--it clearly says that the question about where the car's fuel comes from is in fact not at all taken into consideration...

But it gets even better, as the document actually says that "we have gradually become aware of the huge amounts of grain needed to feed our animals". I don't know the definition of "gradually", but someone actually thought this out and delivered the message to me and a lot of other kids some twenty years ago...

The one good point in the document is that sharing a car is still good, although with an incredible argument: "if there are two of you, and you share the car, then walking would be eight times as bad for the climate". In other words, although we've known it all the time, it is good to share a car-ride, but now because it would be twice as bad (for the climate) to walk! Go figure.

All these negative comments aside, there is in fact one underlying positive message in Mr. Goodall's statements: Modern food production is very energy-consuming, with the brute example being prefabricated food conserved in refrigerators. So the moral is: grown your own food, or buy it fresh from your neighbour.

Bon appétit!

Re-ripping my CD's in FLAC with Easy CD-DA Extractor

2007-12-09T23:34:00.000+01:00

I guess the title says it all: after discovering that Easy CD-DA Extractor embeds album art (or CD-cover pictures) into FLAC music files, I am now using it to rip my CD-collection in lossless FLAC format.

Actually, I stumbled across this fact somewhat accidentally today when I used CD-DA Extractor to rip a new CD and then updated the music index on my Sonos player (a techie way of saying that I added the CD to my Sonos). The CD-cover showed up on the Sonos screen as if I'd used iTunes to rip, despite the fact that there was no "folder.jpg" file alongside the FLAC files--based on lengthy discussions in the Sonos forums, I believed the "folder.jpg" approach to be the sole way to show album art for FLAC music files. Somewhat surprised by this discovery, I started digging in the FLAC format documentation and found that the format can hold quite a few pictures as metadata in each music file.

So, to repeat myself once more: I am now ripping my CD-collection all over, but this time in lossless, open FLAC format. Geeky, you say...? ;-)

An Online Photo Frame for Grandma?

2007-12-03T07:18:00.000+01:00

I take digital pictures, and so does the rest of my family. I would like to show some of these picture to grandma, but that is difficult unless I print them or bring my laptop computer to her. However, printing is expensive, and I can't really leave my laptop at her place--not even if she'd manage to use it. In addition, and I regret this a bit, I don't stop by her often enough and the result is a large number of new pictures between every visit.

This is where a digital photo frame might come in handy. A digital photo frame is simply a small monitor with a picture-like frame around it and a small computer behind it, usually including some amount of storage for pictures and controls for flipping through them.

A photo frame for grandma should be easy to use, preferably with big, easy-to-read physical buttons on the front so that she can easily navigate between pictures, and get tactile feedback as she does. The photo frame should also run on batteries so that she could bring it around the house--although quite vigorous for her age, she doesn't run around her house anymore. Thus, the frame should be small and lightweight rather than big and heavy. In addition to these qualities, the perfect photo frame would be online and automatically download the latest pictures from a pool to which I and the rest of her family can upload pictures.

Philips 9" PhotoFrame

Finding a digital photo frame that meets all the requirements above has proven to be very difficult. Philips has quite a few models, all of which runs on batteries (for about one hour), but none of which has wireless network capabilities, nor buttons on the front.

NT-700 with visible buttons

Digital Spectrum, on the other hand, has both wireless frames and one frame with buttons on the front, but none with both WiFi and batteries (their NT-700 has the buttons and battery, and although the buttons aren't physical it is the only frame I've found with any controls visible from the front). And this is how it is all over: after considering a dozen or so, I haven't found a WiFi-enabled photo frame that runs on batteries, and only one (the NT-700 from Digital Spectrum) with visible buttons on the front.

In the end, I guess it all comes down to visiting a store and have a look at a real life product. Maybe a digital photo frame for grandma doesn't have to run on batteries? Or maybe it doesn't have to be online? The only dilemma remaining now is where to go: to an electronics market or a photo shop?

Should I abandon lossy audio compression?

2007-11-25T21:17:00.000+01:00

The last couple of weekends have been calm, and I've had time to reconsider a couple of things, one being whether I should abandon using AAC for my digitised music (stored on a NAS and played through Sonos).

Until now, I've been using iTunes and Tunessleeve to copy my CD's
in AAC-format and download album covers from the Internet. But, after comparing a lossless (WAV) version and a lossy (AAC) version of the same classical music, I began to seriously considering a lossless solution. And then FLAC (free lossless audio codec) came back to mind. After browsing around, I've downloaded J. River Media Center, which successfully copies a CD to FLAC, looks up info (track names etc.) on the internet and downloads the album cover automatically. Sounds perfect, right? And except from that I have to copy all my CD's once more, it is a nice solution. Except from one thing: the database from which J. River downloads CD-info seems to miss out things like production year and stuff... So now I don't quite know what to do--again.

In the vacuum of a perfect solution, I've had time to explore Adobe Lightroom and uploaded a couple of pictures to Flickr--of which I personally prefer the slightly manipulated one of some frozen roses.

Update:
Bjørg tipped me about CD-DA Extractor, and it appears to be a viable alternative to J. River Media Center. The user interface is awful, but CD-info is better than J. River.

Sailing in Greece

2007-10-28T15:51:00.000+01:00

Sun Odyssey 49

Last weekend, I went sailing with Kaj, Knut and Leo in Greece. We flew from Oslo to Athens on Friday afternoon, and left the Lavrion harbour on Saturday. Our first stop was Mericha on the west coast of Kythnos. On Sunday, we continued south around Kythnos and back up at the east coast where we stopped at Loutra for the evening, taking a dip in the open air mineral bath. The initial plan was to return to Lavrion and fly back to Oslo Monday evening, but strong winds prevented us from leaving Loutra and we spent Monday looking around on shore. Tuesday morning, the wind had calmed down and we left early and had a wonderful journey back to Lavrion along the eastern coast of Kea, and we caught the flight in perfect timing.

Usability at Yggdrasil

2007-10-16T23:47:00.000+02:00

After an amazing weekend in Oslo, comprising massive partying on Friday, an awesome game of squash with Christian and Hans Jakob on Saturday, a calm and social evening at home serving exquisite foie gras de canard with matching Alsacian gewürztraminer to Jan Walter, Gunn and Karl (and Erika), a visit to the Holmenkollen ski museum on Sunday, and finally a nice Sunday dinner with Bente and Arnljot, Monday and Tuesday sported the annual Norwegian conference on usability: Yggdrasil! (Note: "Yggdrasil" is originally the name of a tree in norse mythology, though I don't know why the usability conference bears the tree's name.) The conference takes place in Lillehammer, centrally located in southern Norway.

This year was my first visit to the conference, and I got a really good impression. Luke Wroblewski from Yahoo opened the conference with a plenary session introducing the challenges of today's rich and social applications on the internet. His speech was blazingly efficient and equally difficult to summarize, but my notes disclose at least a few topics: people find your content through different social applications, like accumulators such as del.icio.us and Digg, profile pages on Facebook and mySpace, blogs, and of course various search engines including Google. Content is still king and should get the most space at your page, while adding links to relevant content further enhances the page's value to the user. Luke also mentioned a couple of ways in which you can ensure content quality in social applications: either by making it easier to submit content that is good for your application (the example he used was an online creature design tool that made it easy to design nice looking creatures but difficult to design ugly ones), or by making it a bit more difficult to submit content so that only those who REALLY wants to contribute goes to the effort of clicking through several screens (which by the way reminds me of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, which in this context says that an enthusiastic user is less likely to stop an ongoing task when encountering an obstacle, whereas users with cursory interest will drop out unless encouraged to continue the task).

Cher James-Tanny held the second plenary session, talking about how communication has evolved and will continue to evolve. Her main prophecy was that we'll see fewer words and less text, exemplified by reference to the SMS language of abbreviations as well as visual communication such as the LEGO build instructions (small kids can't read, so the instructions are all illustrations).

After the opening plenary sessions, the conference sported three parallel sets of sessions, and a total of four simultaneous workshop sessions on Tuesday morning. I participated in the workshop session about "designing from the inside and out"--design with focus on the most important unit of information, how you get to them and what you can do with them. The prime example here would be Flickr, which is all about pictures, but with various tools for finding and using them in different ways.

Also worth mentioning is the last session I attended, which was about how Fast Search and Transfer has tried to develop a social music service for use on mobile phones. However, various obstacles such as technical incompatibility between mobile phones, slow response (not "instant play" as your current MP3-player), music licensing issues, and expensive network operator pricing models, the concept is not yet operative as the ideal design suggests. Yet, a couple of early examples exists through ezmo and moox. So, look out for your friend's instant recommendation for a song when you're on your way to work sometime in the future!

Cultural autumn

2007-10-11T22:55:00.000+02:00

Contemporary dance in a box of glass

It happens every year: after a summer with people playing around outdoors (well, except this rainy summer...), autumn comes and although people tend to withdraw to their warm houses, culture pulls them back out to refill their cultural conscience with exiting exhibitions. This year, CODA Oslo International Dance Festival pulled me out to see contemporary dance in a box of glass downtown Oslo.

Model of the Holmenkollen ski jump

One week later, Jan Walter and Giulia brought me to the architectural exhibition "Culture and risk" at DogA, and between panels with descriptions of risky architecture in the Nordic countries, a model of the new Holmenkollen ski jump appeared!

If you're in Oslo, the dance festival is off now, but the architectural exhibition is still on for another five weeks until it closes on November 17.

Phones don't float, but birds do

2007-09-24T13:25:00.000+02:00

This weekend, I lost my mobile phone into the water while sailing in a regatta. But, as opposed to the seabirds that have appeared all over the Oslo fjord these days, my mobile phone didn't float very well and as my Internet connection is down for the moment, I am currently not available except by personal attendance.

According to local newspapers, the strange birds are white-breasted guillemot ("lomvi" in Norwegian), but I have seen both these and another rare kind of bird in the Oslo fjord and surrounding areas this weekend, and I suspect the journalists haven't reached the whole story yet.

Anyway, the birds are all over the water (I am sorry for not having a picture of them -- the closest I get is this picture of a shrimp trawler docked at the city hall quay). And by "all over", I mean they aren't afraid of anything and are easily hit by boats. I guess that's part of the reason why they also appear in relatively large numbers floating upside down.

It's getting colder

2007-09-19T08:10:00.000+02:00

It is getting colder in Oslo, and last night I pulled out my winter duvet from the closet. Temperatures have been reported dropping below zero (Celsius) in areas outside Oslo, but this morning I overheard someone at the metro saying it was minus one degree in Oslo last night. Or to use her own words (translated from Norwegian): "if it rained it would snow!"

Ouch!

2007-09-17T16:31:00.000+02:00

I just started feeling a bit bad. I've kind of disbanded this blog, but checked in now to have a look at the stats (bottom of the right-hand column) and saw that people are in fact visiting. So I guess I'll have to put in a bit more effort here again...

I'll start with a brief summary of what has happened this summer (click the links for pictures):

I spent my vacation trying to get a tan by my mom's summerhouse/cottage in Norway (near the city Fredrikstad). Then I visited Stefanie and Mitsou, Kristina and Laurent in Strasbourg, before traveling by TGV to visit Jan Walter in Tours (recommended sight: Chateau Chenonceau). Then a brief stop in Oslo before flying north to visit Regina and Peder, as well as Hege and Dag Ragnar, in Bodø, including two trips to the Lofoten islands and one trip hiking the Lurfjellet mountains just south of Bodø. Eventful and lovely vacation!

Afterwards, I've spent most of my days around Oslo, with the exception of a visit to the U.S. for training, including one weekend in New York (recommended sights: Rockefeller Center and MoMA), and one weekend in Chicago (recommended sights: The Cloud Gate and the Art Institute). Cool!

And finally, I've been race-sailing the Norwegian championship for the 11:MOD class (pictures by Fredrik). Also a lot of fun, but please don't ask about results... ;-)

Unsolicited mail

2007-06-26T09:07:00.000+02:00

If you have an e-mail account, you've probably received one or two (million) e-mails with offers to buy viagra, cheap software or invest in a business so good that you would have kept it secret if you had invented it yourself. In other words: Spam. Until I opened the anonymous envelope I received yesterday, spam has been an electronic phenomenon to me.

The envelope contained a letter telling the story of some rich farmers somewhere in Africa. As the local government, or was it the mob--I can't remember, had taken over (and/or burned down) their farm, the unfortunate farmers had to leave as refugees. Thus, they flew to South Africa, seeking asylumn with some 20 million dollars in cash as hand luggage. However, as refugees they cannot deposit money into bank accounts. Therefore, they offer me 20% if I can help "transferring" their cash into their bank account.

I didn't have to read the letter to understand that it was a physical breed of spam. Neither do I have to convince myself to refuse the offer of 20% revenue. Actually, I'm facing a totally different dilemma: Should I file a complain to the postal service who didn't filter out this unsolicied mail? After all, I do subscribe to the "no ads in my mail"-service! Or, should I file it to the Norwegian National Authority for Investigation and Prosecution of Economic Crime?

What is art?

2007-05-08T22:39:00.000+02:00

Reading on Ken Rockwell's well-written web page about photography, I came across a small test that evaluates your art gauging skills. My curiosity about this art thing triggered me to take the test. It takes about two minutes to complete, so why not give it a try? You'll find it here, at modestypanel.

Photo upgrade

2007-05-07T00:43:00.000+02:00

It's been quite a while since my last post now. There are several reasons for this, but the major one is that I've been occupied playing around with my new digital camera: about three weeks ago (or was it two?), a Nikon D200 entered my life and I've been busy showing it various places in Oslo. It's been nice getting to know the solid little fellow, and although there is something wrong with one if it's eyes (the 28mm) the other one works perfectly fine (the 50mm). I've just uploaded a few good glimpses on Flickr.

In line with the sturdy D200, Karl-Inge convinced me to buy Adobe Lightroom for managing my pictures. Although I've had some mixed feelings about getting attached to a professional memory hog from Adobe, it certainly has its advantages over Picasa. (I know, Picasa is free and shouldn't be compared with Lightroom, but I cheat and do it anyway.) To me, the most obvious advantage is the extremely powerful function for tagging pictures with keywords--I learn new things all the time, and today I just learned that Flickr imports the tags I create in Lightroom! Combined with an export function that generates filenames based on picture title and automatically starts Flickr Uploadr, uploading pictures to Flickr now is a breeze! So, look out for more pictures...

Danm car!

2007-04-14T23:59:00.000+02:00

I've been out bicycling again. As easter passed with a minor cough I had to disband my plans to bicycle a lot, and therefore today's trip with some Rye triathletes was much longed-for.

The trip started just as last time, following Griniveien before climbing over Kolsås to Lommedalen. This led to a re-run of the descent where I hit 65 km/h, so I figured let's try 70! For a while it seemed I might manage to break my previous record, and passing 60 was a breeze (literally...). But then, I caught up with a car and had to stop acceleration. Neither could I pass it on the fairly narrow and curved road, so I got stuck behind the car driving just above the 60 km/h speed limit.

Forest ride

The trip continued in hilly terrain, and expecting to find a "back route" to Asker we found ourselves bicycling through the forest only to turn at a radar station near Rustad. Judging by the surrounding buidlings, we thought the radar was completely abandoned and inactive, but all of a sudden there were noises coming from it! Sounded like some engine, and we concluded that the radar is still in operation. Hope none of us were fried from sitting directly underneath it...

Rolling again!

2007-04-01T18:08:00.000+02:00

Pause at Blakstadtangen

On the last day of March, I had my first real bicycling trip this season with Line and Dag. In magnificent sunshine we had a nice trip around Kolsås to Blakstadtangen and back to Oslo, 73 kms in total.

Update:
Forgot to mention that I sat a new personal record with top speed at 65 km/h. Looking forward to hit 70 later this summer... ;-)