We were out for pizza and a few beers last night and while walking from the pizza restaurant to the bar we passed one of the local banks. They clearly feel the wrath of the financial crisis, as you can see below. The sign above the window reads “Nordea presents its customers”.
Santa figured out you had been naughty and gave you a gray rock to chew on?
I, apparently, had been quite a nice fellow this past year. I have refrained from sharing silly invites on Facebook - might be just why he put me on the nice-list.
I am very pleased with my Christmas “outcome” this year - lots of useful stuff and quite a lot of fun for the little boy in me as well 
… and there were plenty of other nice things I got. Now it’s just the matter of remembering who gave you what and remember to give them a thank you before it’s so late I can thank them for my birthday gift in March at the same time… :-/
Today it’s time for relaxation, more eating and then I am going out with some friends in Arendal tonight! Gonna be a blast!
Hope you all had a nice celebration!
I know it’s Christmas and everything - everything is supposed to be joy and happiness. I still have to comment on a news report from last night on the Norwegian channel TV Norge.
The news report is on the recent fires that have taken several lives. Lately an old Pakistani woman died in one of the fires - she tried to get out through a smoke filled hall way and down the stairs. Sad story, but lets get to the point.
The representative for several foreigner organizations in Norway have used the oportunity to require that firemen become multilingual - or that translators are hired by the fire departments to avoid situations where foreigners do not understand what the firemen are saying. Seriously? Ok, so you have a hall way full of smoke. Smoke is bad. Smoke will kill you. You have a fireman outside your window in a basket signaling for you to approach the window and get out. Now, which do you choose? Clearly, foreigners who do not understand Norwegian would choose the smoke filled hall way, because apparently when you do not understand Norwegian, you are automatically ignoring any instinct of danger and simply jump in the arms of Mr. Death.
Come on? Is this really the image the foreigner organizations want their press contacts to give? That foreigners in Norway simply have no means of knowing what is danger or safety - or understand what is dangerous for them in any possible way? I hardly believe that the inability to understand Norwegian was the reason for the tragic death of this poor Pakistani woman.
And seriously, which is better; learn to speak the language of the country you live in - or at least learn some basic english - or make the fire department waste thousands on the most stupid suggestion of 2008?
Do you want the goverment to appoint you a personal translator when you go on vacation abroad as well? Give me a break.
Enjoy your holidays - and if you do not know how to use the fork, I suggest learning English and looking it up on the Internet.
Happy holidays, all! Time to eat yourselves fat and happy!
I have taken the trip home to my parents for the holidays. It’s great to be home - enjoying all the good food and the Christmas spirit
Ho! Ho! Hooooo! Meeeeeeeeeerry Christmas!
The news of a new version of Spotify just came down the wire, and this new version is Scrobbling!
The ability to scrobble what you play to Last.fm has been one of the most requested items over the last couple of weeks and it’s great to see that the developers are listening to the community and fanbase that is starting to build around the application.
For those of you unfamiliar with Spotify; it’s a music service where you install an iTunes-, or Songbird-, like application on your computer and access music from the huge repositories of owned by several of the largest record companies. The downside is that you do not get to copy the music to your devices, but it’s one hell of a service for listening to music on your computer!
I got an invite (the service is still in closed Beta) a couple of weeks back and I have been using it constantly since that. It even runs on Linux with Wine, which is great. A few glitches here and there - the most annoying one being that the playback keeps stopping now and then and you have to restart the app. Once they fix that, and the app is out of Beta, I will be surprised if I don’t pay up those 99 NOK per month for ad-free music and the ability to share lists with friends.
I am sure Spotify will be at the top of Best Application of 2009 - it’s definitively one of the best things that has happened to music for years.
I think in many ways the relief you feel when you manage to fix a hard-to-find bug can be compared to the feeling of intense pain going away - like painkillers when you have a terrible toothache.
I have been working on locating and fixing a bug in our crawlers at Integrasco, on and off, for the last couple of weeks. It has been a terrible stress factor and each day spent tracking data through the pipeline and debugging the code to pieces has yielded nothing. The error never occur in development, only in production - and at what seems to be a completely random pattern. All of you who know a bit of programming probably feel a cold breeze down their back right now - it’s a horrible situation to be in.
Luckily, this issue was not so severe that it has been stopping crucial parts of our system, but it had to be fixed. Today I finally discovered the source of the problem and I don’t think I have felt so good and relieved for a very long time. It was like I had been walking around with this toothache, crawling through the hot, burning Sahara desert, and finally reached a kind native with painkillers in his pocket - I guess you can only understand if you’re a developer
It’s been a few weeks since I have been really excited about going to work the next morning, but now I am really looking forward to getting in to work tomorrow and finally crush this bug with my Great Bat of Bug Crushing!
Had to share this, ’cause right now I feel great (might have something to do with the three beers I have just consumed too, actually…)!
I logged on to Facebook the other day and suddenly started getting several notifications about friends making comments about my personal life, apparently.
There has been a lot of talk about new Facebook viruses lately and I wonder if this is part of it? Are we going to start spam filtering of Facebook as well now? Either way, I find this a big what the f…! See for your self:
After strugling to get my domain released for transfer for over a week now I have finally managed to make the move.
The site has moved to a new home with a Norwegian hosting provider - this should speed up the site quite a bit for most of my readers
I have also made some changes, and this blog is what you will see when you enter www.jaranweb.com - please update your bookmarks and feeds! I will try to make a forwarding for blog.jaranweb.com, so your old links will work as well, but I guarantee nothing
I am also planning on installing Redmine on this new hotel to better manage and promote my projects - not that I have very many, but I have a few ideas which would benefit from better project management tools.
I also upgraded WordPress to the new release, version 2.7, so let me know if you find any strange irregularities.
Let’s hope this new home will treat me well
Aleksander put forward the idea of a backpacker trip through Europe next summer and I immediately though “why not, lets do it!”.
So the coming summer, we will be roaming around Southern Europe mostly by train I guess, seeing most of the places we both have been wanting to see for a long time. Aleksander have made a map on google showing a preliminary version of our trip. We’ll possibly fly to Paris and then move down along the west cost of France, into Spain, maybe Portugal, back up the east coast of Spain, into France over to Italy and down to southern Italy. If anyone has ideas for places to see, or cities that we have to visit, please advice!
Also, if you have room for 2 awesome guys from Norway for a night somewhere along our route, please feel free to speak up Yeah, Arnaud and Isa, I’m look at you! It would be cool to see you guys, anyways 
Europe, baby!
As every previous christmas that this blog has lived through, I publish my wishes here on my blog so that you more easily can go out and buy me stuff
