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Cross country skiing for beginners
March 2nd, 2008Norwegian cinema
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
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
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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Contour confusion
February 25th, 2008Shockingly I found myself orienteering again on Sunday. That’s twice in one week. What’s the world coming to?! We were visiting Christine’s parents in Monmouth, partly to say goodbye before departing these shores and partly so Christine could attend at least part of her sister-in-law to-be’s hen weekend. Christine’s parents then graciously offered to look after Emma whilst we nipped off up the road to the NGOC event at Knockalls Enclosure.
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Orienteering at Ocknell
February 21st, 2008Yesterday I sneaked out for a couple of hours in the afternoon to go to the Army orienteering at Ocknell. I didn’t really have my head in gear at the start. Having had to go back to the car to pick up my compass I then failed to use it on the way to the first control and paid the price. I wasted four minutes circling around the depression where the control lay. This delay meant that I then had Mark Saunders on my shoulder, pushing me on until, at number 12, I went too far right. He spotted this but overcompensated. Unfortunately he corrected more quickly. I wasted another two minutes and only caught glimpses of Mark in the distance in the last part of the course. My legs were starting to tire at this point from the strength sapping mud. Without those mistakes it would have been a great result, with them, mediocre. If, by any chance, I learn to navigate whilst in Norway then I might just be dangerous! The worst part? Making up the time by working in the evening!
Console under control
February 20th, 2008For a long time, I’ve found it intensely irritating that the console view in Rational Application Developer and WebSphere Integration Developer jumps to the front every time there are new entries in the server logs, even if it has been closed. This is particularly annoying in customer demos where it usually appears at the most inopportune moment to show a raft of red stacktrace scrolling past! Needless to say there is a simple fix. Under Run/Debug > Console in the preferences, just uncheck the boxes entitled “Show when program writes to standard error” and/or “Show when program writes to standard out”. You can also change the text colour for standard error if you find all that red a bit disconcerting!
Ripping time
February 17th, 2008As part of our preparations for travelling overseas I thought it was time we joined the 21st century and ripped our (small) CD collection. Minimal research led me to use Exact Audio Copy with REACT to generate FLAC images for archival purposes (I’m no great audiophile) and MP3s for general listening. The final stats were: 97 CDs with 1405 tracks taking up 31GB for the images and 5GB for the MP3s. Only on one occasion did I have to drop down to burst mode to rip a particularly worn CD. (I won’t say which to avoid any embarrassment!) freedb came up trumps with a track listing for every CD including Emma’s and even those for learning Norwegian!!
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