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Heyoo.

I come to your computer screens this evening firstly to procrastinate from writing a 6 page essay on nationalism, secondly to tell you about what a marvelous couple of weeks I’ve had.

It all started last thursday. I went down to my basement storage  compartment to get the inflating air-matress I keep there. I arrived to the sight of my lock gone, my air-matress gone, my entire DVD-collection gone, and one of my moms suitcases. The basement floor was also covered in water, I’ll get back to that. So after a moment of “WTF” I accepted that my storage compartment had been broken into and I had been robbed. I went into the city to talk to the police (my case has been rejected as unsolveable. Thanks, useless norwegian police), bought a new padlock and went home to lock up agian.

When I returned, i noticed that while robbing me, the thieves had tumbled one of my cases of books, scattering them on the floor. On closer inspection, I saw lots of books ruined by water-damage. Worst day ever!

So I called the student-collective place I rent from, and they told me to take pictures of the ruined books and mail it to them with a list of them, and they would pay me back. So I did, and the monday after the weekend I got a responce saying the wouldn’t cover my damaged books after all. Argueing did not help.

It does get even worse, though. Because Oslo, as most cities, has a public transportation system. You get a fancy card, which lasts for one month at the time. Every month, you buy another month of travel. And there are fancy beeping machines on the busses and trams, that you beep your card infront of to activate tickets or something like that.

Well, when I moved to Oslo, I read that they could not give tickets to people for not beeping their cards every time, which was judged in court. I was also told that I didn’t have to beep my card by friends. But apparently, unlike in every other city in Norway, the month of travel-time you buy isn’t activated when you buy it, but when you beep your card on a machine. I had no idea, so I still got a ticket.

So it appears that Oslo has realized I’m here to stay, and is trying to reject me like a virus. But as a guy who won norwegian Idol a few years ago,  had one hit, got booed of stage and now is a nobody once sang, I’m standing tall!

I can’t get the embed video-thing working, so here is an anticlimactic link instead.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW_siSnPWqs

Vegard

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Greetings, glorious gonads

Gonna get going, gobstopper

Alright, I can’t write an entire blog entry with only words starting with the letter G. But it’s one of those things you have to try at least once.

What is this greatness I refer to in my title? Well, my

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has agreed to lend me his awesome

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, and I’m gonna drive that thing all the way from my current place of residence (being Oslo), to Stavanger to get my speakers and my bass and stuff. Woo!

That is all.

Vegard

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Heyooo

I just realized that it is not always easy being a Norwegian in an English mans world. For instance, one of the great vices of Norwegian people with half a grasp of our beautiful language is the dividation of words. Oh the hilarity which arises when people split a word that wasn’t meant to be split.

Why am I rambling about this? Well, brussels sprouts is the correct way to write it, as confirmed by THE ALMIGHTY WIKIPEDIA, HAIL! Alas, my silly Norwegian head twitches and wants it to be written brusselsprouts.

Now, I bet you’re thinking, why is this guy talking about brussels sprouts? Well, in about 10 hours, my plane leaves for Brussels. Oh glorious EU-capital and home of countless bureaocrats.  I am leaving, ooon a jetplaaane tralala. Well, my brotha lives there, so I’ma go visit him yo.

Brussel, Belgia: The recently renovated Atomium...bring your camera at night!

These aint no brussels sprouts.

That’s it for this time.

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A loud and glorious hello!

Chillin’ at the Youth against EU office (an organization which I am as of one month ago in the central board of), I decided to run an entry in the organizations blogg, which I wrote about 2 weeks ago, through google translate. Well, the resulting text turned out so brilliantly that I thought I’d post it here, so I can pretend to update regularely. Wall of text-time!!

“Hello good people.

I am Vegard, one of two bodø residents of the central board. Such stands
great respect. This week, it’s already my turn to blog, and
I’ll tell the story starts on Youth against EU office last
Tuesday.

For once I did not get to the office to find Jonas sitting
alone with lots of accounts ahead and thump thump music (eds. bit-pop) in the speakers.
As the day went and the relatively normal work hours glei past,
most people went home. Only three people remained in the office, namely
me, Angelica and Jonas.

We concluded that we should do something cool and socially, and Jonas had
mysterious heard rumors of a quiz on one of the local water holes, where
sometimes older gentlemen hanging and gulp down a barrel at the barrel of
adult soft drink of the best black. I’m talking of course about the shack!

Wherever we went, with stars in her eyes and faith and hope in your heart. We lose
Never stand on one of the posters hanging on the office wall, and this
tank followed us into enough shack, and guess if it failed!

The first round did the hopeful trio if the group name was Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles to scrape together the pipe of 2 points, out of about 30
possible, and came to a proud 11 space of 11 possible. Joy roar
and High Fives were a lot of the corner of Bula, where we have three
mukterer set, and we were sure: the next round, which was called “Trivia”
where we take us back! And guess if we did, we were able to answer right
on so many issues that we still had an impressive two points after this round
too. Not without reason we changed group name to “the relatively untalented”.

Last round was even worse. We pride ourselves three European opponents must have
escaped us into a fierce debate about Dublin 2 Convention and the
headless immigration policy leads to, for suddenly the man said on the
speaker “now comes the last song in Round 3.” Of course, we reacted
all dedicated kvissdeltakere do: Huh? Has the round started? We
apparently got a consolation point when the points were counted, we had
sharp 3 points. Of the 70 possible.

After the last round, we changed its name to “Gamer we do not golf?”. We got
minimum points, hence we won the somewhat unorthodox popkviss-round. We lose
Never!

C’mon c’mon all veia from Youth against EU office.”

Nice, huh?

The name of the game is figure out what the story actually is.

Vegard!

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I know I promised to review my new phone and netbook to ya’ll, but actually this is my first oportunity to sit down, relax with ice cold, nasty coffee, a bad radio show, and the smell of new car, to review at least one of them! (Yes, I’m at work, and there is absolutely nothing to do… And if you didn’t read the title, this entry will be about the HTC Desire Z!) It wont be to long or complicated, so dont worry!

So, what do I have to tell you about this phone? Well, to be honest I’m not very impressed, yet! But again, I love the phone, it’s android that’s bothering me the most… Frankly, I don’t know which version I’ve got, but it sure as hell is buggy and slow! A lot of the programs and apps for the Z is awesome, but yet again even more buggy than the OS itself. Sure I were to expect this, but not to this scale. Lately the whole thing has just been turning itself off once a problem occours, or locking everything up, so that I can’t do shieet. Also Android has a bad file system and using the menues are somewhat rocket science. While I play scientist, not to many programs are running, and the only program allways enabled is the 3G data transfer service, still Ive got to charge this beast every 10th hour. Sure I should expect. This from technology as new as this, and even so I’m happy with my new baby!

So i told you things are badly organized, yes? Exactly! Every single freaking program is just put into the main menu, and there aren’t possibilities for sub menues, as far as I’ve figured out. The good thing about it is that 20 seconds of insane scrolling gives you a good overview over what’s installed. Menues brings me to contacts, don’t ask me why, but for me this seemed logic… Contacts, well… WTF? Why the hell would they mess up this critical and important part of a phone? Every single contact gets doubled, tripled, fripled or worse, based on your SIM contacts, phone contacts, facebook contacts, twitter contacts, etc…
so every single freaking time I want to find a contact, i got to scroll through all the dupliicates. Fortunatly, you can link duplicates, sadly this demands more memory from the phone, and every time you use the “phone feature” it wants to know which of the one billion numbers you want to call. This is the only thing bugging me enough to want to chrush my phone against a telephone pole! Still, that would be a waste of the 4100NOK I’ve spent on this thing. Lets just pray this will get better in close future.

Now, maybe you’ll want to know why I still love my phone? Hah! Thats what I thought! You’re dying to read further in this crapppy entry… So, the main thing I love about this baby is the QWERTY flip out keyboard, oh my god how I love it. If It haden’t been there, I would’ve never written this from my phone. Touch keyboards are just annoying, and my chubby fingers don’t work well with’em. Second is the variety of awesome apps, and the bright an nice screen it’s got makes the apps and everything I do even better. Right now, I’m using the Word Press app to write and post this. Gebious little app. The possibility to make my own WIFI and connct my laptop to is great, also using WIFI in general, but that is old news on most cellphones nowadays. Headphone jack is nice, and an USB-charger is genious, saves me at work, since I’ve got an USB plug in the taxi.

All in all, this is a great mobile device with clear sound, good camera and speakers, bright screen with a good resolution, many posibilities, QWERTY and lots of other stuff. Downsides with the battery usage, contact organizing and menues. Still, in 2-3 months this will most likely be improved in the upcoming android updates. If the contacts doesn’t get properly organized by then, I will kick some developers arse. I would not reccomend it to novice users, but rather to those with more than a basic understanding of technology, and with interest or knowledge to program and fix some bugs themselves. Be prepared Bjørn! Don’t get your hopes up, but you’re about to get into a new and exciting era of smartphones, though I suspect you’ve got a feeling on android from your old tattoo.

Finally I got a customer! So this will be the end.
Upcoming: Samsung Galaxy Netpad review.

As you were!
Steinar

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