After the Storm.

After three weeks of vacation I’m now back in the mud. Not only have I started working again, but I’m also on support duty. When on support duty I’m always extremely paranoid for the first day or so, checking our monitoring systems every 5 minutes, constantly looking at the inbox for e-mails and duct taping the support phone to my left ear to make sure I’m not missing any calls or texts that might come in.

To be honest, it’s wearing me out a bit, and I wish I could handle it better mentally.  I should be able to relax, the monitoring system will inform me the second something is wrong with a myriad of text messages, e-mails and whatnot, so there is no need to be this proactive.

Ah, there you go, had to check the monitoring system again. And nothing was wrong this time either. So I had to check it again. Which I did now. Nothing amiss. Still nothing.

As you might have noticed, I used the last day of my vacation to re-design the site once again. The last design, which I downloaded from some Wordpress theme site, lasted for about 9 days before I got dead tired of it. The new design I almost created myself, you can probably see that from the extreme simplicity. I lack the creative skills to create a proper Web 2.0 design, so I’m probably stuck with pre-Web 1.0 for ever. Not that it matters really. So far I feel the design is good enough. There is, however, room for improvement, like on the navigation side.

Anyway.

Here’s another pic from the thunderstorm that hit Oslo a few weeks back. Not as dramatic as the previous one, but still. Enjoy.

T-Shirts.

It’s summer, so it’s that time of the year again - about time to get some of those cool t-shirts that no one else has. I used to surf to Threadless for that kind of service, but it has turned out one of the guys at work buys most of his t-shirts from that very store, which sort of ruins the whole exclusivity thing. It’s not a big deal, though, the last time I checked Threadless they only had t-shirts designed by acid addicts. The only one I really wanted was the classic “In Case of Emergency” t-shirt, and that one was out of stock.

The interweb also hosts a wide range of other stores and sites that sell t-shirts. Both XKCD and ThinkGeek have some nice ones, but of course the IT guys get all their clothing needs covered there. Still, there are a few options, something a quick Google search for “t-shirt” confirmed.

But after browsing through the top twenty hits on Google and tons and tons of different t-shirt designs, I really can’t say that I found anything I wanted. So I guess I’ll have to do without a t-shirt this summer. Yes, I know I sound like a woman who don’t want to show up at the party wearing the same outfit as one of the other girls, but if it’s one aspect of life I like to stand out, it’s on the t-shirt level.

I don’t know why.

Wedding.

People are getting married left and right these days. This year me and Gine are invited to four weddings, but that did not stop us from going to one we were not invited to yesterday. It was not quite like in the movie “Wedding Crashers”, but still very enjoyable. Also, the bride told me it was an open reception, so I guess it doesn’t really qualify as “crashing”. On top of that we only went to the wedding ceremony, not the party itself - where it really takes off if you’re a wedding crasher. At least according to the movie, and if it’s in a Hollywood movie, it’s got to be true. We could have attended the party as well, but I had to head back to Oslo to continue to be on support duty, something that has entertained me a lot during the last seven days.

I know the couple that got married well, even though I haven’t really had much contact with them in the last few years. She is the one I’ve got the closest relationship with, we’ve spent a lot of time together, especially when things were really heating up between her and her previous boyfriend, who happened to be a very good friend of the guy who is now her husband. As you can probably imagine, there was a certain degree of drama for some time.

If I’m going to be completely honest here, and you come a long way with honesty, I have to admit I had a minor crush on this girl myself once. I even wrote a drunken rambling about it that you’ll find in the archives if you search around. Did she know? I don’t know. When things were looking really bad for her in terms of future relationships - at least in her eyes - we even agreed that if none of us were married at the age of 30, we should get married and live happily ever after. I didn’t remember that, but she reminded me after the ceremony.

I guess that deal is off.

Kids.

We live on the fourth floor in a five storey apartment building. The last floor now works as a buffer floor after a mobile network operator suddenly installed a base station cell tower on the roof. When all the people on the fifth floor have got cancer, we’re moving out.

A good thing about this apartment building is that the walls are not made of paper, so we rarely hear anything from the next door neighbours. The couple that lives above us is another story - they are very easy to hear when they bounce around. She likes to go out to party every now and then, and as we all know most women tend to spend quite some time getting ready. The first thing she does is to put on her high heals, and then she runs around for about an hour before she finally leaves. Not he most entertaining thing to listen to, but nothing we can’t live with.

For about a week now they’ve had visitors; another couple with a kid, a boy, about two years old. And he is a wild and active kid! When he does not run around in circles upstairs in what can only be tap dancing shoes, he jumps around in his concrete shoes. What did this two year old kid do to the mafia to deserve that? Continue reading "Kids."

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.