16 Down, 84 To Go.

It looks like I accidently completed another item on The List.

#23. Visit Canada.

With my visit to Klas in Australia I’ve also shaved off another continent on item number 50. I’ll probably make it to Africa one day, Antarctica will be more of a challenge.

In Canada we used a camcorder I brought with me from work and we shot about 90 minutes of raw video. I’m hoping to edit down to maybe 5 to 10 minutes of at least semi-interesting material and Hans Olav has provided me with a copy of a rather advanced video editing tool. The software manual is a whopping two thousand pages and I’m not planning to read through it all, but from what I gather “logging” the clips is a good idea.

The DV camera has marked each clip on the tape, so in theory it should not be much work to log the clips, but so far I’ve been unable get the editing software to actually use the marks for anything useful.

What would life be without the daily challenge?

15 Down, 85 To Go.

It’s been quite some time since I last removed an item from The List, but a few weeks ago I said those three words I’d never and yet another item bit the dust:

#5. Say “I love you”.

Who would’ve thunk it?

14 Down, 86 To Go.

Oh, inspiration, come to me… Enough about that; here is today’s entry.

By spending five and a half hours downtown Saturday night yet another item is now stricken from The List:

#95. Volunteer for a good cause.

In most larger cities in Norway you’ll find Natteravnene, or directly translated, The NIght Ravens. It’s not a goth posse as you might think from the name, but rather groups consisting of volunteer adults, who have a desire to make their neighborhood safer. Their main objective is to walk the streets among youngsters and to show responsibility and that they care, and by that prevent and reduce violence, crime and vandalism. It’s possible that this is something found in cities elsewhere in the world, too, but I looked it up and didn’t really find anything except for Nattuglorna in Sweden.

Yesterday me and Hans Olav joined the downtown Oslo chapter and went on our first watch. Whether or not we’ll do it again I don’t know. It was plenty of people out partying downtown last night, but from what I saw, they all behaved. The only thing we really did was to drive a guy from out of town back to his hotel and he wasn’t even drunk, just terribly lost and on his way towards the more shady parts of town.

Note to self: If you go to a city you don’t know, at least carry a piece of paper with the name of your hotel on with you.

Since I didn’t really observe any mischief I guess that either the concept of adults walking the streets in the middle of the night works very well or it was just a unusually quiet watch.

If you want to know more about Natteravnene, visit www.natteravn.no (click here for an English version).

10 Down, 90 To Go.

It’s now been a week and a few days since I moved out of U12 and into the new apartment. Most of the cardboard has been thrown away, the studio rig has been installed again - and I hope I will have time to use it again soon, too - and the smoke detectors are in place. After two and a half years in U12 I have grown kind of paranoid when it comes to fires, so I’ve installed no less than four smoke detectors in a 63 square meters apartment. Some people would probably call it overkill, I call it a sufficient number.

The Xbox is still working too, even if Hans Olav managed to drop it when we were moving my stuff. Looks like Dr. Xbox did a rather good soldering job despite the microscopic soldering points where he had to attach the X3 wires.

Related to the move, I took the people who helped me and their respective better halves out to dinner. Now I can remove another item from The List:

/#46. Invite someone on a $500 dinner.

Old bread and water for me for the rest of the month.

9 Down, 91 To Go.

It’s about time to remove yet another time from The List^TM:

#89. Own an apartment or a house.

I’ve now got the keys to the apartment. Quite the anti-climax, to be honest. You can see how well I’m doing with the moving in thing right here:

Show’s over! The cam is offline.

Don’t expect too much action until tomorrow evening, though. If you see the place catch on fire, please call the fire department.