stigFromOslo.com

As a hobby photographer I take a lot of photos. I own a Nikon D70, and my Nokia N95 also has a decent camera, which means that when I first get started I take a lot of photos. My external hard drive has something like 38000 photos and I don’t want to loose any of them. Also, I would like to have access to them whenever I need them. If it’s at work, at home, when visiting friends and family or even when I’m out traveling I would like to have my collection at hand – either because I want to use one of them for something or if I want to show some of them to someone. But I don’t want to carry the external hard drive with me wherever I go. This is where the wonderful cloud comes to the rescue!

A few years ago, a fellow student introduced me to Flickr - the online photo storage and sharing service owned by Yahoo. I signed up and for a few years stayed on the free limited account. I only uploaded my best photos and shared them with everyone. Didn’t get many hits though, but that wasn’t so important. Earlier this year a friend of mine show me how he used Flickr for a street art photo blogging project. He’d use his Nokia N95 to take pictures of every day things he encountered on the street and upload them directly to Flickr using the phone’s pre-installed “Share online”-feature. I immediately got hooked and started taking photos and sharing them much the same way he was. It didn’t take long for my free account to fill up and I quickly upgraded to a pro account with unlimited storage and bandwidth.

And yesterday it struck me: With a no-limit account on Flickr, and several instances of “if I’d only had my external hard drive with all my photos on”-moments, why don’t I just upload everything to the cloud? Then I’ll have easy access from everywhere, I can share my photos with anyone who might want to see them and my photos are backed up – all at the same time. So today I started the tedious task of uploading 70 gigabytes of photos to Flickr. Am I going to finish this week? Probably not. And do I have a huge task of sorting, tagging and naming all my photos? Yes, most definitively. But I do believe it is worth it, and it represents my first step towards real utilization of the cloud. Now, if I could only find a smoother way of eliminating duplicates…

I have been battling the question “what shall my homepage be like” for many years now. I’ve started blogs, written home pages, gotten my own domain, started more blogs, merged different pages and blogs, gotten on Facebook, started tweeting… It’s basically been a big, hairy mess. And here is my problem:

I wanted to separate my personal life and my professional life online. As a consequence I started to blogs – one professional blog where I could post comments and articles about information security, digital forensics and other IT-related topics, and one personal blog where I would write about stuff that friends and family would be interested in. Like how my vacation was and how much I hate snow.

This worked out great for about two days, when I noticed I had another problem: Language! My primary language is Norwegian and living in Norway I mainly read Norwegian news papers. Which means I am most likely to want to comment on Norwegian events and news articles. But working with computer science, my main professional language is English. And let’s face it: There is a huge difference in audience volume when writing in English as opposed to Norwegian. So now I had to deal with that too.

The result was that I more or less gave up on the whole thing. My blogs were nothing but dead weight in cyberspace, and all I could be bothered with was a few micro-posts on Facebook and Twitter. Until today!

Thanks to inspiration from the Twig podcast, my friend Azathosk’s blog and a series of discussions I’ve had with friends, I have come to the realization that my online presence – my cyberpersona if you will – must be one! My professional and personal life is the same life, and if people just want to read half the stuff on my blog, well, then they just read half the stuff.

Therefor I have consolidated all my posts here at stigFromOslo.com and I have started to formulate in my head a project on exploring the wonderful world of Web 2.0, social media and cloud computing. I hope to bring to you a series of experiences and ideas on how these things can work together to make life more cyberpunk (in a cool way) and how social media and the cloud can work as an integrated tool for entertainment, news and practical life experience.

Stay tuned and please feel free to comment, ask questions and share your own experience and ideas. After all – even cyberspace is interactive!

In one month I’ll be starting a new job as a digital forensic specialist with the Norwegian Tax Administration. I must say, after almost two years of working with security accreditation methodology and policy I’m excited about getting closer to the technology again and to hopefully work a bit closer to code, bits and bytes. Not that I haven’t enjoyed and learned a lot these past years, but having a masters degree and not really getting to use what I know seems a bit wasteful. I just hope my new employer will welcome me equally well as my current one, and that the work environment is as good as the one I am leaving.

Last week all the guys in the family pitched in and fixed the roof on the family summer house. It is exactly 50 years since the place was originally built by my grandfather and a new roof is a fitting jubilee present, don’t you think?

Second day is over and I won a silver for my efforts in the pattern category. Wee! Very happy with my self. A gold would of course be better, but all things considered, I am very happy with my achievements.

The one-step category did not yield any shiny metal, but both my self and Mr. Jack Connoly was very happy with what we did, considering we went up against all the 1. and 2. dan black belts in AIMAA.

Like with the first day of this two day competition Mr. James Farrell proved yet again to be a good organizer and an efficient leader of such an event. The whole thing went brilliantly smooth and after a 10 am start the whole place was clean and empty before 5 pm. Impressive!

I also have to say cudos to one Mr. Long (I hope I got his name right). A black belt (I think 2.dan) who on this second day went in for patterns, two sets of one-steps and two groups of team patterns. And I believe he got medals for all, even after a SERIOUS beating in the one-steps. I have never seen someone going in with such force in a traditional technique. Respect, sir. Respect!

[Video: One-Steps]
[Video: Taegeuk Sa Jang]

(Thanks to Evelina for taking the picture and the two videos.)

Day one of the AIMAA Irish National Open Taekwondo Championship 2007 is over and I must say I am pretty impressed with Mr. James Farrell’s soft iron grip on the whole thing. Never before have I seen such an event fly by with such ease and grace.

Today was the day for sparring (gyeorugi) and breaking (gyeokpa). And since just about all senior black belts on scene was reffing and judging the low grades and junior, the show started with a bang to free up the high-grades. Smart move!

Another clever idea was to do sparring and breaking in sequentially for each category. That way each competitor got to do his or her stuff within a small time frame and was free to watch or leave. Naturally this freed up a lot of space as people got their thing done in a swish and got home for a nice, early dinner.

Since I was neither sparring nor breaking in this competition (I really don’t like this IFT/AIMAA style sparring with all their quiet boxing), my original plan was to hang around for my club mates’ matches, get a few good pictures, and head off. That didn’t happen.

I think was around for about an hour before I had “snuck” in as part of the floor staff, holding boards for breaking, taking time for matches and even assisting in keeping a ring organized with refs, judges, papers and competitors. In short, I had fun.

Tomorrow is the day for patterns (single and team) and one-steps (han beon gyeorugi). I’ll be doing my own pattern – Taegeuk Sa Jang – and a set of five ITF/AIMAA one-steps. My aim: To stand out with my pattern, get through the one-steps without messing up too bad, and above all – have fun. By todays yardstick, the outlook is quite bright.

Just returned from showing off the West of Ireland to my mum. She was mighty impressed, and to be frank, so was I. Three days of beautiful weather on the Irish west coast? Legend! I found even more places I have to return to…
Dingle Town
“Out of the Blue” Seafood restaurant in Dingle Town. Fantastic food, great wine!

Slea Head
Irish Waves
A few hundred meters north of Slea Head, the western most point of Ireland, I took a photo series called “Irish Waves”.

(Gallery not ready)
(Pictures from 2003)
Cliffs of Moher – probably the most famous place in all of Ireland…
Except from the Guinness brewery.

Clonmacnoise
Clonmacnoise – Ruins of an old castle and an old cloister.

Finally! Our kitchen issue has been resolved and we and our up stairs neighbors can go back to actually using our kitchens. I don’t know anything more about what caused the problem, and I’m not sure I want to. What I would like to know, though, is why the guys who built this place didn’t leave some access way to the pipes behind the wall. As you can see, the nice people who were in here day takin’ care o’ bit’niz really did just that – they punched a hole in the wall! Now all we can hope for is that the hole will be filled with something that will leave the next pair of hard working postgraduate student who move in here with more kitchen time and less water on the floor…

For some possibly simple yet still unexplained reason the kitchen sink here at my humble abode has been clogged for the past week or so. Not being the busiest of chefs I think my flatmate has had it worse than me, but then again he fled the city Friday afternoon and I believe has yet to return. For me on the other hand, skipping town to go home just ain’t that simple – I have 1200 km to travel.

So I stayed in with no greater plans for the kitchen than breakfast and a possible late night snack. Friday passed without too much hassle, though the dishes remain. For Saturday dinner I settled for the local free delivery – ham and mushroom pizza. Simple, affordable, and quite OK when washed down with a can of beer.

Later that night, Saturday that is, I decided to finish off that last can of beer I knew was in the far corner of the bottom shelf in the fridge. I had about 40 minutes left of a Poirot movie and was getting thirsty from all the mysterious shooting and cold, logical thinking. (Also, I had been eating Pringles.) I hit pause and swung out the door heading for the kitchen… And was met by a pool of water half an inch deep – not including the height of the carpet – covering the whole kitchen area and half the living room area. The sink was full and overflowing with odd colored water.

It took me three turns with the bucket – probably close to 40 liters – that the maintenance guy had left “just in case” when he was in last Thursday to try to fix the soon-to-be-smelling problem. (Obviously to no avail. And the plummer he had called for had yet to show up.) I even had to sacrifice one of my two bathroom towels to get at least some of the dirty water up from the carpet and down the toilet where it belonged.

Not knowing where the water came from (I hadn’t been using the kitchen sink all day), I feared that the monster of greasy wateriness would return and take over even more of the flat. And as the hour was well past 1 o’clock, I took a stroll down to the security guard to let him know what was going on. He joined me back and together we reasoned that there was nothing we could do but wait and hope. He would leave a note for the maintenance guys to return and have another look first thing Sunday morning.

As said was done. As sharp as 10 o’clock as anything can be on a Sunday morning the same maintenance guy who was in on the Thursday came knocking the next morning. He was quite surprised at the amount of water that had left it’s tracks after finding it’s way back up to an unscheduled tete-a-tete with our wall-to-wall carpet and quickly restarted his search for the secret monster lair.

He struck water (!) on his first attempt. Seems the my unwelcome guest originated from the kitchen sink one floor up and had carried with it the remains of what had been a late, 2nd floor dinner. Both sinks were quickly declared off-limits.

Having neither appetite nor will to make even the simplest of breakfasts I hopped the first bus to town and spent the whole day taking advantage of one of the things this city really knows – Sunday shopping. I didn’t really buy anything, but I’ve had two large coffees, one foot-long Subway, a pint of Guinness, a glass of wine, a Chicken curry (in which I found a hair and had it returned for a new plate – with out hair but with cold rice. Not going back there any time soon!) and a Jameson on the rocks. No clogged sink is gonna keep me hungry!

Oh, the beer, by the way, was left in the fridge. It will be enjoyed once the coast is clear – pun intended.

There is a saying “The devil is in the details”. If you look closely I’m sure you, as me, will find that there is a little piece of heaven to be had as well.

With two exams to go of the worst exam rush I’ve experienced in my education career I find my self sitting in Starbucks in down town Dublin, quite satisfied after a good Italian dinner, and with a scolding hot cup of black Esteema coffee on the table. The slides I am reviewing for my Advanced Data Communications exam – 18 hours and 10 slide sets to go – switching from eureka-level revelations to 4th century Chinese calligraphy.

But what is that I hear – one of Pink Floyd’s good, old forgotten treasures comes streaming out of the speakers hidden far up in the ceiling. I look out of the window and in the dark, rainy evening, past the idling taxis and forgotten phone booths, shines the testaments of history and identity that is the towering Trinity College and the majestic Bank of Ireland.

Surely, it is among the little things men shall find their paradise. Even if only for the duration of a song.