The Joker, the Joke and the Other Joker.

Yesterday was April 1st and with the success of last year's April's fool joke I decided to pull one yesterday as well. I sent this e-mail to all the people at work:

From: Vegard Skjefstad
Sent: 1. april 2008 09:01
To: All Employees
Subject: Important information regarding your e-mails.
Importance: High

All,

As of the 1st of February this year the new Norwegian Cyber Terrorism Preparedness Act of 2008 became active. The CTPA has been pushed through by the US via the EU and the result is as follows:

All employees who do not hold a Norwegian citizenship will have to send all e-mails they have sent to recipients outside of the Norway since the 1st of February this year to <address removed>, and CC that address on all future e-mail they send to recipients outside of Norway. The e-mails will then be automatically forwarded to the right authorities who will check your e-mails for anything suspicious. Any e-mail you might receive that contains suspicious information should also be sent to the above e-mail address.

Since we're already lagging behind, it's important that you start sending your e-mails to <address removed> today or the authorities might seize your computer, or, in a worst-case scenario, the mail server.

Best regards,
Vegard Skjefstad

We're quite international when it comes to employee citizenship, so it was a good chance that at least one of the people at the office would fall in the trap.

And what do you know, our Indian account manager/sales rep did wanted to know if he could post-pone it for a couple of days because he really had sent out a lot of e-mails since the 1st of February. Of course we all laughed at him.

So he decided to get back at me.

He teamed up with the CEO and got him to send out a confidential e-mail to middle management and me saying that our Indian friend would leave us this summer and start to work for a competitor, making it essential that we did not share any confidential information with him from now on.

I totally fell for it. The best jokes are the plausible ones.

The Big Three Oh.

Yes, on Thursday I left my innocent twenties and entered the harsh thirties. As with every birthday, I can't really say that I feel any different than I did the day before, and I don't feel any emotional crisis related to suddenly being 30 years old looming either.

It's probably because on the inside of this ragged old man in his early thirties is still an innocent boy in his late twenties.

• I'm still enjoying playing video and computer games. Still, I've decided to sell my Xbox 360, with the Racing Wheel, all the games and all the other goodies. That logic will probably be explained an a later post.
• Getting kids is still a very distant idea.
• I don't want to buy a motorcycle yet. But maybe that's what men do when they get to 40, not 30.
• Marriage is right up there with the whole kids thing.
• Politicians still confuse me.

That said, there are some signs that a grumpy old man in his eighties is also trapped inside of me.

• People who can't write and talk properly annoys me. Of course I can live with the odd grammar and syntax error - if I could not, I would have had to perform Hara-kiri a long time ago. I can also accept that when you're drunk it's hard to talk.
• If you bicycle in the wrong direction of the road I want to strike you down with my cane.
• I'm getting grey hairs.

So all of you who are worried about leaving the safe twenties; it's nothing to worry about.

For Sale: GTA IV compatible game console!

Yes, I'm at it again, selling stuff off my site. This time I'm letting go of my Xbox 360, all the extra hardware I've bought for it and every single game!

This is what you'll get:

• Xbox 360 console with 20GB harddrive, wireless controller, headset with microphone and all the cables you need to hook the console up to your TV and stereo.
• Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel with force feedback. Supports both the Xbox and the PC platform.
• Xbox 360 Memory Unit (64 MB)
• Xbox 360 Quick Charge Kit with one rechargeable battery that'll fit in both the racing wheel and the wireless controller.

You'll also get these 14 high quality games:

• Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock (with guitar - this game is bought at Platekompaniet and still sealed, so you can go to the store and exchange it for something else if you want to).
• Battlefield 2 Modern Combat
• Need for Speed ProStreet
• Need for Speed Carbon
• Kane & Lynch Dead Men
• NASCAR 08
• Test Drive Unlimited
• Project Gotham Racing 3
• Project Gotham Racing 4
• Command & Conquer Tiberium Wars
• Saints Row
• Forza 2 Motorsport
• Colin McRae Dirt
• The Orange Box

All this is yours for a mere 6995 NOK! That's over 500 NOK off the price I'm advertising elsewhere on the interweb. Why? Special price for you, my friend.

Because of the size of the bundle it's preferable that you can come pick up everything in the Oslo area, but I can of course ship worldwide at the buyer's expense.

Grab it now before it's too late!

Spring Cleaning.

Spring is in the air and for many people that means it's time to give the apartment or the house a good cleaning. I'll probably do that one day before next Christmas as well, but I decided to start with cleaning the backend of this site. There has not been many updates lately, and I would like to be able to say that I've been working on the site's backend, but I can't. Because I haven't. What have I been doing? I don't know for sure.

I've been thinking about implementing a Twitter-like social awareness feature. Of course I could just use Twitter, but I don't wanna. At least I'd use their APIs instead of the HTML widget they provide. I also want to merge the Moblog and the rest of the entries, since moblog entries are basically just like all the other entries, they're just smaller and with a picture attached to them.

The main challenge with all this is the current database structure and the PHP code the builds the site you see. Everything's a real mess because the codebase and the database have just been extended and patched as I've had the need to implement more features. Just the merging of the Moblog entries with the rest of the entries is going to be a huge pain in the ass to accomplish as it is today.

So I guess it's time for me to look at other ways to do this. A new backend is needed, but it's very unlikely that I will ever find the time or motivation to build everything from scratch one more time, so instead I'll use an implementation that already exist. The number one choice of the blogsphere these days is WordPress. With its recent 2.5 release, I see no reason why it shouldn't be my choice either. I've considered the WordPress move before, but my conclusion back then was that it would be too much work. As you probably understand, I've now realised I'm digging a hole that I will be able to climb out of if I continue using my own custom built system.

A quick search on Google reveals that there are a lot of open source content management and blogging platforms available, but the sheer user mass of WordPress means that some clever coder probably already has made the features I need that are not part of the standard installation. And if that's not the case, there is a fair change I can manage to build it myself, since everything is PHP.

Wish me luck. And buy my stuff!