The Norwegian alphabet has 29 characters and for the past couple of weeks I’ve been struggling to find a good way to type Æ, Ø and Ã… on my UK keyboard (particularly as my manager’s name is Jørgen and I think it only polite to spell it correctly!). It’s a laptop keyboard so no numeric keypad making character codes difficult to use and after a while you tire of using Character Map or cutting and pasting the whole time. Windows’ UK Extended keyboard layout unfortunately doesn’t stretch to these characters (apparently it was added in SP2 mainly to support Welsh). For a while I tried using the US International keyboard layout which gave me shortcuts for these characters but messed up other important characters like ” and @ so I had to keep swapping layout. John Sullivan’s UK International Keyboard Layout finally came to the rescue – a standard UK keyboard layout with sensible shortcuts for these characters and lots more besides.
Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category
UK international keyboard layout
Wednesday, March 5th, 2008Cross country skiing for beginners
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008
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Norwegian cinema
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008I decided to make the most of being temporarily childless and headed out to the cinema last night to see Om forlatelse. My Norwegian not having progressed in leaps and bounds, it is fortunate that only the title of the film (Atonement) had been translated. As with most imported TV programmes (except those aimed at children), subtitles are used in preference to dubbing. I found it pretty easy to ignore the subtitles and only came a little unstuck during the scenes in French where they had removed any English subtitles there may once have been. My French, fortunately, is marginally better than my Norwegian so I could still just about keep up with the plot. Cinema-going would appear to be a popular pastime here with most of the screens sold out. It’s good to see that the programme also contained a healthy mix of Norwegian films but you can still see why English is spoken so well here. Oh, and the film? Excellent. Must make the effort to go more often.
Look on the bright side of life
Friday, February 29th, 2008One advantage of it having taken quite so long to get out to Norway is that we don’t have to experience the bleak mid-winter. The shortest day is around Christmas at just under six hours but, even though we’re only at the end of February, daylight hours in Oslo are now only half an hour shorter than those in London. In another three weeks we’ll have more daylight here. Come mid-summer there’s nearly 19 hours of daylight in the capital. Christine’s thinking of running the Midnight Sun Marathon in which case we’ll get to see the full 24 hours in Tromsø.
Oslo arrival
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Well, I finally made it out to Norway yesterday. The journey itself was pretty uneventful – nobody blinked at the size of my bags and the only hold-up was whilst I worked out how to start the hire care (it seems you need to put the clutch right to the floor in a Yaris before the ignition will even turn). The sun was shining as I drove down to the IBM office and the temperature a positively balmy nine degrees. Although there was plenty of snow in the fields around the airport there was little in evidence in the city centre and none further south. Sadly the weather took a downturn today and the rain has removed the white coating from the hills surrounding the city centre.
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Norway bound
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008Most of my friends and colleagues will by now be heartily sick of hearing the phrase “it depends… we may be in Norway by then” (but probably not as sick as I am of saying it!). For those who don’t know, I have, for the past year or so, been trying to arrange an assignment with IBM to the Nordics. Having settled on Norway about five months ago we (myself and the local management teams on either side) have been battling against the numerous internal processes involved. I’m therefore relieved to say that, as of yesterday, we finally have approval to proceed. Lest they change their mind, the current plan is that I head out to Oslo next week, with Christine and Emma following along once accommodation is sorted. We’ll then be out there until sometime around August, returning to the UK in time for Christine to restart lecturing for the new University year. Now there’s just the small matter of getting packed. Oh, and I should probably dust off those “Teach yourself Norwegian” books we bought months ago!!
Lack of connectivity
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008I’m staying in the Melia Galgos in Madrid this week. One of the reasons I selected it from the IBM approved list was because it promised internet connectivity. Sadly this hasn’t really proved to be the case. The wired connection in my room stays up just about long enough for me to accept the terms and conditions and what, at the time, seemed to be a very reasonable rate of 8€ for 24 hours. Unfortunately it then proceeds to go up and down randomly every minute or so before eventually giving up completely. The hotel sent someone up from “technical services” who proceeded to restart my browser and then my machine to no good effect. He then pulled the plug on the router which fixed things but only long enough for him to get out of the room. I then tried the wireless access available in the lobby which worked fine until I tried this evening when it failed to give me an IP address. I’ve now had to resort to using my 3G card. 🙁
Driving tour of Madrid
Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008Work took me back to Madrid this week. The trip didn’t get off to all that an auspicious start. I had hired a car as the customer is based some 20km out of the city centre however I had agreed to pick up one of the local team at the IBM office in town first. Unfortunately, at the airport Hertz were unable to provide me with any form of map, instead giving me the simple directions to “follow the signs for Madrid and then take the Avenida de Americaâ€.
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