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!"
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... ;-)
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?
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.
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...
