Yesterday the first real snowfall finally came to Oslo. It’s been snowing before this winter season, but it’s only been around for a couple of hours or a few days at best before it’s been gone again. But this time it looks like the snow will stay for a while. According to the forecast, the temperature won’t suddenly increase by 10 centigrade, but stay in the blue (or at least not very high in the red) for at least a week. Of course, weather forecasts can’t be trusted anymore than the guys who claim to know anything at all about the stock market, but I decided to give the weather man the benefit of the doubt and hereby officially declare this winter season’s bicycle season for closed.

Yeah, I’m a sissy. I could have bought studded tires for my bike, even more warm clothes and faced Anemoi head on, but instead I opted for a public transportation travel pass valid for a month. It will set me back less than a pair of decent studded tires and it’s always good to spend a month or so each year using public transportation just to remind me how great it is to ride my bike whenever I can. Today wasn’t all that bad, though, it wasn’t too crowded and the number of crazy and/or intoxicated fellow passengers wasn’t higher than expected.

I also took the liberty of taking the featured picture when going home from the gym last night. I tried to get it symmetric, but it turned out quite messy and it wasn’t very easy to hold my Galaxy Tab steady in the freezing cold. But the picture has snow in it!

•  I didn’t write too many entries, but at least managed to get passed the 80 mark. That’s probably were I’ll average in the years to come, the time of 200+ entries a year is long gone.
• My employer, BEKK, took me and a bus load of other consultants to Helsinki, Finland, for a week of extensive management training. Helsinki is like Oslo in many ways, just larger and with considerably more Finns.
• The sale of Android handsets exploded (700 000 Android handsets are activated each and every day now) and I released my first, and so far, only, Android application:  Where am I? I never followed up by adding features and fixing bugs, and the current Android Market rating kind of says it all. Works great on my phone, though.
• I wrote a technical piece on Glassfish Production Tuning that was linked to from an Oracle blog.
• The one-liners collection grew considerably, with new additions each month, or even more often, for at least half the year.
• The site was redesigned again, for the first time with a three column layout. I’ve done a few tweaks since the big change back in May, but nothing major. Knowing myself, there might be another redesign coming within half a year.
• I released a few new versions of my WordPress plugin; wp-days-ago. It’s not much left to do on it now, with the possible exception of making it easier to translate it to other languages. In retrospect I probably should have called it “Facebook date format” or something similar, just to make it more attractive.
• My Android phone was used to take quite a few pictures and I even wrote a Android camera app review. Since then even more camera apps have been released, so maybe it’s about time to write a new review soon.
• I spent as much time as I’d hoped to at the gym. I’m not sure exactly how many times I went, but I’d say at least 60 times. Thumbs up! My gym is a peculiar place and I wrote two entries about it, Fresh and Fit and The Gym Babes Cometh! Read both and get your ass to a gym.
• HTML5 became mainstream. I wrote an entry titled HTML5: Going Offline that dealt with the new offline capabilities of HTML5.
• Anniken and I bought a new apartment together. All the painting, cleaning and moving more or less consumed all our time for two months, but in the end the result was great and the new apartment is finally beginning to feel like home. The old one was made available for rent.
• We also went to Spain with her family, which was a great trip. It was basically the only week this summer that we saw the sun for more than an hour at the time, because the weather during the rest of the summer was rather shitty. Personally, I don’t really care, but most people do. Pictures from the trip to Spain can be seen here.
• A new, fresh drink was created: Awesome Autumn. Rum is a great ingredient in any drink, it seems.
• Steam once again managed to sell me shitloads of games I don’t have the time to play. I will have a great collection the day I retire, though – if I actually have access to the games at the time.
• I didn’t run as much as I wanted. Or, to be honest, I seldom want to run, but its great exercise. And let’s me honest here, I’m getting older and when you get older it’s even more important to stay in shape. That I bike to and from work does help (1375 kilometers (854 miles) of help in 2011 to be exact), but ever since we moved into the new apartment we are now very close to a park that can be used as a great running track.
• One of my sisters got her third child, making me an uncle for the third time as well. Good stuff.
• I managed to cross off three more items on The List: #15. Renovate an apartment or a house, #24. Participate in a demonstration and #93. Write on a wall. I’m now 1/4 through the list.
• I voted in the election. Did you? If not, then remember that you’re not allowed to complain about anything for the next four years. So vote or STFU.
• The site was integrated with some of the Google Rich Snippets, which triggered me to write reviews about all kinds of crap, from computer games to energy drinks.
• I quit Facebook. It’s 99% noise anyway.
• I moved from Spotify to WiMP. Spotify requires new users to have a Facebook account, which I thought was really, really stupid. WiMP, on the other hand, is a lesser service compared to Spotify, which made me backtrack and go back to Spotify in late December. What do I think of Spotify apps? Killer.
• After a visit to a bar in Oslo with retro arcade machines I decided to try to build my own cocktail arcade table.
• I think I saw most of the Formula 1 races. It was a great season, and I’m already anxiously waiting for the 2012 season to start. Only three months left.
• Me and the guys went to the annual Oslo Whisky Festival and had a great time.
• Google celebrated 10 billing downloads from the Android Market with some insane offers and I bought tons of applications and games.
• I had some serious troubles with vbox and the site was offline a bit. Quite a bit of work, but I learn a lot in the process.
• My music habits drifted from the alternative genre towards electronica, at least based on what I scrobbled to last.fm. Check out the entry 2011 in Music for more about some of the artists I discovered this year.

All in all, 2011 was a good year.

With this year’s wrapping-it-up-entry, I’ve decided to add a familiar twist: New Year’s Resolutions. I agree that it’s one of the more pointless things people do, but I’ve never tried it myself and decided to give it a go and see where it leads. It’s good to have some goals in life, and even though The List gives some pointers, goals with a one year window might be easier to focus on than the life long ones. So here they are,  New Year’s Resolutions 2012:

• Run more. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ll use more time on exercise, but the times I don’t really feel like spending two hours at the gym, I can jog for 45 minutes instead.
• Smile more. This is probably The One Cliché, but it really has something to it: I saw a documentary about a paramedic a couple of weeks ago and the guy was smiling and friendly to everyone. And I’m not talking that kind of friendly that makes you want to punch the guy in the face. He managed to balance it perfectly and all I wanted was to be his friend. Yeah, I even think I had a slight man crush. This year I’ll try to smile more, not to attract man crushes, but to test the theory that it’s impossible to be in a bad mood with someone who smiles at you. To help get myself off the ground with this resolution, I’ll replace my current Gravatar with a much happier one soon.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. Will I be the guy jogging in the park with an insane grin on his face?

That’s it for 2011. See you all in 2012. Happy new year!

Here are the wrap-ups from previous years: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004.

Notodden bus station. Welcome home!

But as soon as the worst of the after-party aftermath had passed, I set to work on getting everything back online. Unfortunately, it proved to be hard as the embedded network card had decided that it just didn’t want play anymore. With the network card enabled, Ubuntu (and several other distributions) simply refused to boot. With the network card disabled, everything booted just fine, but not having a network card kind of makes it hard to host anything. The motherboard had to be returned for repairs. Hallvard later suggested that I could just get a USB network card, and this would have solved my problems in a matter of hours. Too bad my mind really wasn’t working very well at the time. And now the ASUS motherboard has been returned for repairs anyway.

I’ve got a Google Apps account for vegard.net, so moving my e-mail was as simple as changing the MX records for the domain. But what to do with the site? I didn’t really want to move it to a shared host after the struggle I had with GreenGeeks two years ago. Also, I would certainly miss the joy of tinkering with my own server, even if it was just temporary.

One of this year’s more dominant internet buzzwords, The Cloud, in the form of Amazon EC2, came to the rescue.

Amazon EC2 let’s you rent virtual servers. It’s a great service, if you are prepared to put the money on the table. I was not, so I decided to go for their cheapest solution, the micro instance, and launched a Bitnami WordPress stack image to get up and running a quickly as possible. A great idea in theory, an utter failure in practice: The micro instance will throttle you down as soon as you’ve used just a tiny amount of CPU. At full speed it was great, but when throttled down the cloud instance was useless. Unpacking simple theme upgrades took forever and ever. Also, I didn’t feel comfortable with the Bitnami stack, with its default usernames and passwords and whatnot. Had I remembered to change every default setting, or was there still a back door available somewhere?

In the frenzy to get the site back online I had forgotten a very important detail: The old vbox, which has been sitting on my desk, collecting dust. It would have been a great substitute while the new vbox was getting its groove back. In fact, I’d already prepped the old vbox as a backup in case of a fatal hardware error in the new vbox. I just didn’t remember until yesterday. After a full week of struggling with EC2, it finally dawned on my that I had a fully working, ready-to-go server sitting on my desk.

The site is now hosted by the old vbox, or slave.vbox-host as it’s been called. It’s not as powerful, needs more air to cool down, uses old-fashioned spinning hard drives and is connected to the internet via a not-so-stable Wi-Fi connection. But it works, and it works better than my EC2 experience.

We’re still aiming for the states next year as well, but we’ll only be away for two weeks because we all have obligations of sorts back home. So, what to do during the remaining four weeks?

There’s a first time for everything. So next year Anniken and I are going on a cruise, of all things possible.

Yes, next summer we’re going on a seven day cruise of the Tyrrhenian and the Mediterranean Seas, taking us to Turkey and Greece, among other places. It’s an (almost) all inclusive feast and we’ve got a balcony view – getting the early bird package enabled us to upgrade to a pretty nice upper deck cabin. The only things not included are sightseeing and beverages, but I’m sure we can get some sort of pass that’ll enable us to maintain a respectable blood alcohol level without having to walk around with any money. It’ll be the most expensive vacation I’ve ever been on, but seeing all the great cruise chips that visit Oslo every summer, I’m sure it will be worth every penny.

That still leaves me three weeks of summer vacation and I hope I will be able to spend the majority of those three weeks sitting on my ass in front of my computer, or perhaps relaxing in a hammock on the balcony, with the barbecue working on a couple if nice steaks and a Summer Surprise or Awesome Autumn in my hand. Unfortunately, this kind of vacation isn’t too compatible with Anniken’s idea of the perfect vacation, but I’m sure we can agree on something.

The outlook for the summer of ’12 is pretty damn good.

More like September 3, 2011. I am disappoint.

In early October I returned to the Fresh Fitness gym to discover it had gone through a rather surprising transition: From being Average Joe’s half empty gym, it had turned Almost Average Joe’s packed gym. Unless I pop in on Sunday morning, the place is usually crowded, very often with the same people. There are some guys I’ve seen every single time I’ve been there since October and I’m beginning to think I might have to greet them soon. But greeting people could turn into a avalanche of social obligations and before I know it I’m someones best man in an Indian wedding. I really don’t have time for that, so I think I’ll stick to not greeting anyone.

There are even some gym babes – women who seemingly just hang around without really working out – scattered among the rest of us now. Unfortunately, the gym babes have displaced the ones who made Fresh Fitness Average Joe’s gym: People who could really need the exercise. That’s a shame, really, because there were a lot of them present earlier this year. Another problem with the gym babes is that since they just hang around looking at people, they notice you. My exercise plan takes me on a tour through most of the stations and I’m sometimes getting conscious about these women thinking I’m following them around. I’m certain it might look that way when I surface in their general area repeatedly, but it’s all a huge coincidence. I swear.

What would socially awkward penguin do!?

I really enjoyed the festival this year, and focused on quantity rather than quality when nosing. Ola has always laughed at me for trying weird whiskies, but this year I think it really paid off. Amongst the many different brands available I found Buffalo Trace, a mild, but complex, American whisky. It’s quite possible that I enjoyed this one the most because it was the first one I tried, and drinking whisky for an entire evening can be quite the ordeal for an tastebuds.

We also tried the whisky bar, where they use whisky in drinks. This is considered sacrilegious by the most hard core whisky drinkers, so the bar is hidden in a corner of the conference floor. Going there is frowned upon, but we took our chances and came back happy. I don’t remember the names of any of the drinks, but but if you’re ever offered a drink that contains whisky, fear not – it’s a good chance you’ll like it, even if you’re not a whisky drinker.

Some of the distillers and importers can be quite pretentious when describing their goods, and here’s the most over-the-top description I found this year (translation by me):

Eagle Rare Single Barrel 10YO has a dark bronze color. Early in the scent picture one can find grain, toasted wheat bread, honey and tobacco leaves. The scent then goes on to become ripe banana, charcoal, almonds, butter, melon. Eagle Rare has an incredibly complex taste picture and you quickly feel that there is a lot to be found. You will discover the taste of raisins, grape fruit, charred oak and candid almonds. The closing is long, sweet, moderately flaming and pleasantly oily.

Moderately flaming and pleasantly oily. All righty, then.

Even though I enjoy the odd glass, I really don’t know anything about whisky, which is a bit quite embarrassing. To top it off, I’ve only bought a single bottle of it all my life, a The Famous Grouse Blended Scotch Whisky, which sits half full in my liquor cabinet. I can hear Kristoffer¹⁾ laughing all the way from the other side of the country. So, to actually be a little prepared for tomorrow, I decided to read up on some basic whisky knowledge. Here’s my quick “Whisky for Newbie Nosers” (which is mostly ripped off Wikipedia):

First, let’s start off easy with a video. It’s a few minutes long – and a commercial for Johnnie Walker – but it’s very well done. And it’s got bag pipes. I love bag pipes.

Whisky is an anglicization of a Goidelic name (Irish: uisce beatha and Scottish Gaelic: uisge beatha) literally meaning “water of life”. Interesting, since the word aquavit, another great liquor, is derived from Latin aqua vītae, which is also “water of life.” From this I choose to understand that drinking both whisky and aquavit is really good for your health!

Whisky is made from fermented grain mash. Different grains are used for different varieties, including barley, malted barley, rye, malted rye, wheat, and maize (corn). It’s is aged in wooden casks, made generally of charred white oak, except that in the United States corn whiskey need not be aged. The typical unifying characteristics of the different classes and types of whisky are the fermentation of grains, distillation, and aging in wood. Indian whisky is an exception, where grain fermentation is not a requirement and the most common basis is fermented molasses.

Malts and grains are combined in various ways:

• Blended malt is a mixture of single malt whiskies from different distilleries. If a whisky is labeled “pure malt” or just “malt” it is almost certain to be a vatted whisky. This was formerly called a “vatted malt” whisky.
• Single malt whisky is whisky from a single distillery made from a mash that uses only one particular malted grain. However, unless the whisky is described as “single-cask” it will contain whisky from many casks, and different years, so the blender can achieve a taste recognizable as typical of the distillery. In most cases, the name of a single malt will be that of the distillery (The Glenlivet, Bushmills, Nikka), with an age statement and perhaps some indication of some special treatments such as maturation in a port wine cask.
• Blended whiskies are typically made from a mixture of malt and grain whiskies — often along with neutral spirits, caramel and flavoring. A whisky simply described as Scotch, Irish, or Canadian Whiskey is most likely to be a blend. A blend is usually from many distilleries so that the blender can produce a flavor consistent with the brand, and the brand name (e.g., Chivas Regal, Canadian Club) will usually not therefore contain the name of a distillery. Jameson Irish Whiskey is an example of an exception, as it comes from only one distillery. A mixture of malts (with no grain) from different distilleries (more usually called a vatted malt) may sometimes be referred to as a “blended malt”, and a mixture of grain whiskies with no malts will sometimes carry the designation “blended grain”.
• Cask strength (also known as Barrel proof) whiskies are rare, and usually only the very best whiskies are bottled in this way. They are bottled from the cask undiluted or only lightly diluted. Rather than diluting, the distiller is inviting the drinker to dilute to the level of potency most palatable (often no dilution is necessary, such is the quality of single cask whiskies).
• Single cask (also known as Single barrel) whiskies are usually bottled by specialist independent bottlers, such as Duncan Taylor, Gordon & MacPhail, and Kentucky Bourbon Distillers, amongst others. Each bottle of a single-barrel whisky is from an individual cask, and often the bottles are labeled with specific barrel and bottle numbers. The taste of such whiskies may substantially vary from cask to cask within a brand.

Whiskies do not mature in the bottle, only in the cask, so the “age” of a whisky is only the time between distillation and bottling. This reflects how much the cask has interacted with the whisky, changing its chemical makeup and taste. Whiskies that have been in bottle for many years may have a rarity value, but are not “older” and will not necessarily be “better” than a more recently made whisky matured in wood for a similar time. Beyond an age of a decade or two, additional aging in a barrel will also not necessarily make a whisky “better”.

Most whiskies are sold at or near an alcoholic strength of 40% abv, which is the statutory minimum in some countries – although the strength can vary, and cask strength whisky may have as much as twice that alcohol percentage.

So, there you have it – everything you need to know to avoid looking like a total idiot if you ever start discussing whisky with anyone. I don’t know about you, but I’m really looking forward to a really greasy burger at Beach Club and then three hours of whisky sampling tomorrow.

1) Dude, if you’re reading this, you should really come next year. We’ve got a spare bed you can use. Bring the missus.