I’ve got a theory about what Jane Q. Taxpayer considers a good photography: It’s a familiar scene shown in an unfamiliar way. I’m sure you can agree with me. A good example is the cross processing with vignette effect that has become very popular this year. I’ve fallen for the temptation of taking a few myself.

Depth of field is one of the many magical powers you get when shooting with SLR than can make the simplest scene look quite impressive. In my humble opinion, it can easily make or brake a portrait, for instance. A few years ago I got a dead cheap 50mm lens from Canon. With an f-number as small as 1/8 it enables some really funky depth of field images. But it’s very hard to get it right.

I used the 50mm lens at the wedding Anniken and I went to in Bodø this summer. Some of the pictures looked OK, but I stumbled into the oh-so-familiar it-looked-good-on-the-camera-LCD-screen-trap. When I came home and looked at the pictures on a bigger screen, they all turned out to be crap, mostly because the f-number I’d used was too small. It was also partly caused by the open bar and the fact that the lens doesn’t come with image stabilization.

So the other day I decided to take some time an play around with the depth of field, just shooting objects on my desk. Below are a few of the pictures I took. Most of them are taken with f/1.8, but the picture of the M-Audio FireWire Solo is shot with f/2.2, and I think it illustrates very well how hard it is to take an image with a low depth of field: The guitar connector is in focus while the gain knob to the right of it is not. Lessons learned: The depth of field preview button can be a life saver, and I’ll never get the combination of aperture, shutter speed and ISO settings right.

After stopping by two bike shops to get estimates on the job, it turned out the frame was pretty much the only thing that didn’t have to be replaced, so in the end I opted for buying a new bike instead. It wasn’t that more expensive and riding this bike is like always having a tail wind pushing me in the back compared to the old one.

Since I don’t have any kids to show you pictures of here’s a picture of the bike.

Nice, eh? I would appreciate it if you didn’t steal this one, either.

I don’t intend to throw away my old bike. Since I won’t be able to get any real cash for it, I’ve decided to give it away. If you need something to get you from point A to point B and you can spare a few bucks to fix only what is strictly necessary to make sure you don’t die the second you sit on it, then this is an offer you can’t miss. It’s your for free if you pick it up yourself at my place in Oslo, Norway. I’d eventually also advertise it on Finn. Because, let’s be honest, more people are looking for new bikes there than on my site. Here’s a recent picture of the old bike – your new bike:

It’s a 2005 Gekko Phelsuma. What needs to be replaced is the drive chain (it’s working now, but it tends to skip a lot and I’ve almost thrown myself over the steering wheel once already) and the rear break wire. If you do that, you’ll have a decent bike that you can use to get around shorter distances, but not much more.

UPDATE: The blue Gekko has found a new owner.

Parting with the old Gekko feels a bit weird, to be honest. We’ve been through a lot together, that bike and I. But I’d probably also have some great adventures with the new Everest Explorer. Godspeed!

I came across Max Brook’s “The Zombie Survival Guide” book while surfing reddit where I read that Bras Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment had secured the rights to another of Brooks’ books; “World War Z”. Actually, this happened all the way back in 2007, but sometimes news travels slow – at least it often takes a while before I notice things. I like Brad Pitt, at least as an actor, I have to admit that I don’t know him personally. But he is probably a likable fellow. I also enjoy zombies, but not the fast moving ones you find in Left 4 Dead, I prefer the slow ghouls you can see in movies like the excellent Shaun of the Dead*. Why? Because it’s possible to outrun, or maybe even outwalk them quit easily. The fast ones tend to kill you.

Max Brooks’ zombies are like that: Outwalkable. And when I imagined Brad Pitt in an action movie with outwalkable ghouls, I decided that I wanted to read the book before I saw the movie for once. Even though there is no actual movie being made right now, and there might very well never be, the book could to our to be entertaining. Brooks wrote “The Zombie Survival Guide” before “World War Z”, and even though the books are not directly linked with each other, the guide contains very detailed information about the zombies in “World War Z”. Because of that, I decided to read the guide first.

“The Zombie Survival Guide” is written as just that, a zombie survival guide. What to do and not to do when the living dead starts roaming the Earth. It’s entertaining at first, with a lot of detailed descriptions about the ghouls, how to behave during various classes of zombie outbreaks, what weaponry is the most efficient, and probably the most important thing to know of them all: How to kill a zombie.

I’ll save you the cost of buying the book: You can only kill a zombie by destroying the brain. Decapitation will not be sufficient as the head will continue to function without the body. So destroying the brain is the way to go. Apart from that, use commons sense and you boyscout knowledge. After about 100 pages, I got tired of reading – the book had turned into just a guide and nothing more, the entertainment value was minimal. So I skipped to the last one fourth of the book, which describes recorded zombie attacks. This part of “The Zombie Survival Guide” serves as a good warm up to “World War Z”.

My recommendation is that if you want to be prepared for the inevitable zombie war and need a great book about protection from the living dead, then you should buy “The Zombie Survival Guide” and learn it by heart. If you on the other hand want an entertaining book about zombies, you should look elsewhere and just skip ahead directly to “World War Z”.

But do you dare to be unprepared when the living dead walk the Earth?

*What, you haven’t seen this movie yet? Then do yourself an favor and rent it right now. What the hell, go ahead and rent every Simon Pegg movie you find.

Or maybe not.

The Scrum sprints are compressed down to a single work day, and it turned out that the product owner didn’t know much about the project when we started. We got a technical specification before our initial meeting with the product owner, but it was all lies. All lies, I tell you! In retrospect we most likely could have turned this to our advantage and tried to “help” the product owner to understand his real requirements, but of course everything looks all too clear in hindsight. Well, we live and learn – that’s probably the point of the boot camp.

But not all is hard work here down South of Norway!

Every day I’m up at 7 in the morning for a little bit of physical education. The options are many: Running, beach volleyball, football (a.k.a “soccer”) and swimming. In my case “swimming” would mean “near-death-experience”, so I opt for the safest option: Running. Since time is of the essence and we’re 6 people in each cabin who needs to take a shower after the workout, I’ve usually only jogged two or three laps on my own personal course. Each lap is a measly 1.5 kilometers, so it’s not that far, but it’s surprisingly refreshing. Although this might sound like something that could be defined as hard work, I feel quite upbeat for the rest of the day – even though I might not look that way, I rarely do – and I’ve managed to stay away from coffee since we arrived at Lyngørporten.

In between the more serious, educational stuff, something always happens – organized by our Energizer bunny coaches. Be it more physical education, a boat trip to on the of the many islands nearby, fishing, a BBQ, kayaking or something similar. Not much time to read a book, and the three I brought with me can only be considered dead weight by now.

So to sum everything up, and I dare to sum it up even if we’re two days from departure*: It’s been an interesting and educational ride, but getting back home will be good. Real good.

As a side note, I should probably mention that Lyngørporten is a very nice resort. Modern cabins, good food, great location. Everyone here speaks English in case you lack the necessary Norwegian skills to order beer and an nacho chips. The chef is British or Australian (I can’t decided) and we’ve stumbled across both British and American visitors. Oh, I almost forgot the most important of all: They’ve got Wi-Fi.

*In case things suddenly turn to the worse, I’ll let you know.

I have no doubt that it will be a very different and quite challenging task. I’ve received some information about the first project I will be involved in and I’m joining some of the most experienced consultants BEKK employs – maybe they needed someone to make them coffee. I can do that! We’re supposed to rewrite a web application to enable the use of more lightweight and modern application servers and frameworks. Hopefully, I can contribute to that as well.

BEKK is currently in the process of employing a batch of new consultants – none of them women – and I’m spending most of my summer vacation with them to learn the ins and outs of the company. Yesterday and today we’ve been through the administration basics and an introduction to .NET. Being a dedicated Java developer, I felt a bit dirty when we were done. Tomorrow morning we’re going underground for 8 days in an orgy* of team building, business cases and physical education.

*The use of the word “orgy” here is not literal, it’s very, very figurative.

Yesterday we moved a car load of Anniken’s stuff to my our apartment. There are more cushions in the living room now than I thought possible. The number of pink objects in the apartment has also increased considerably over the last few months. Thankfully, I’ve been able to negotiate a deal where I will still be master of my own tiny domain; the two tables with my computer gear. Don’t get me wrong, though, I really enjoy both the subtle and not so subtle changes. Now official being two people living in the apartment feels great.

After I finished “Song of Susannah”, I moved from fictions to facts for a while. Diversity is good for you. I read through the second edition of “Effective Java” and right now I’m half way through “The Pragmatic Programmer”, a book that should be mandatory reading for everyone involved in software development. The Pragmatic Programmer was written 10 years ago, but most of what the book covers still apply today.

To spice things up a little, Hallvard recommended that I read “The Road”. You’ve probably heard of or even seen the big screen adaption featuring Viggo Mortensen. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world where we follow two unnamed characters, the Man and the Boy. An unexplained catastrophe has destroyed civilization and killed off almost all life on Earth. The days are gray as the sky is covered with ashes while the nights are pitch black. The two move south on The Road, with a vague hope of finding warmth and other people.

The Man and the Boy, father and son, spend their days walking The Road, engaging in short conversations with each other. They roam through abandoned houses they come across, looking for whatever might help them survive and reach the coast. Every now and then they encounter other people on The Road, but these encounters normally just last for a page or two and then the Man and the Boy move on south.

In the beginning of the book, we get small flashbacks to the days before the unexplained cataclysm and the years following it. One paragraph early on in the book describes the moment when the catastrophe happened, but does not follow up and I find myself wanting to know more and wishing that the book had taken another path at that point. I want to know more about what caused everything, and the rest of the book becomes a hunt for hints about the past. Unfortunately, few are found.

Following the Man and the Boy becomes a bit repetitive after a while. They walk the road, run out of food, look for food, find some food and then repeats the process. All this is of course a very good description of what life at the road would have been; a constant fight for survival where your only focus would be to move on south and to find enough food to be able to do it. There is, however, a good reason why the book is only 300 pages that you will read through in an afternoon: More pages and the whole thing would have become unbelievably boring in the end.

The Road will entertain you for a while, but when you put the book you probably won’t feel you’d missed out on anything if you went for a walk that afternoon instead. The book has received rave reviews across the board, and I have to be honest and say that I am a little disappointed after finishing it. It once more goes to show that you should not read reviews before you read a book, watch a movie or listen to music – make up your own mind about things without first hearing other people’s opinions as they often color your own opinions a lot. At least I think that’s what works for me.

In other words, if the same is the case for you, reading this review was a really bad idea.

* I wouldn’t be too surprised if I’m sitting in front of a computer the day I finally buy the farm.

4 cl White Rum
2 cl Gin
Lime
Ice
Schweppes Lemon

Preparation:

1. Fill half the glass with ice, either cubes or crushed ice. Personally, I think ice cubes work better, but it might be because I’ve never tried with proper crushed ice, just slush ice.
2. Cut the lime in four and squeeze the juice from all four pieces. Put two of the pieces in the glass.
3. Mix the Gin and the White Rum in the with the rest.
4. Top with Schweppes Lemon.
5. Add a straw.
6. Profit.

Going back was nice. Even though there are now 9 years since I left, it mostly looked the same. The pub/night club where we used to hang out every now and then had been demolished because the owners wanted to build a hotel. Unfortunately, they’d forgotten all about getting the right permits for building a hotel and when they finally applied they didn’t get them. They used to have a night club, now they have parking space.

Even though the weather changed rapidly during the weekend (sounds familiar), we got to experience Grimstad at its finest – sunny summer in the South of Norway. I went home to work every summer when I studied and left the city when the really nice weather and the tourists came. But this time I even got to go out on a boat! With a life jacket, of course. We also went to Cafe Galleri where they served sub-par drinks but played some nice music. We even met Stian and I stumbled across Guro, who I lived with in a shared apartment for a year or so. Unfortunately, there was no time to hang around and chat. Gotta be moving, you know. Next time!

The rest of the weekend we spent drinking beer and Akvavit, playing Yahtzee and Trivial Pursuit, and me and the missus totally rocked in both games. Fearing that no one would believe that I was able to beat anyone in Yahtzee, I brought proof with me home: The results are hanging in the kitchen, feel free to come over to gaze at my unreal accomplishment.

I was thinking about post some pictures from the trip, but just now realized that Anniken took our camera with her to Nesodden yesterday. Maybe later, then.

Now for something not even closely related to traveling: I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, and you probably haven’t, but I’ve added a Facebook Like-button to every page (not blog entry), for instance the one-liners. Since I like visitors, why not click on it and promote the one-liners on Facebook? With half a billion people on Facebook right now, it’s bound to attract some new visitors. That’s right, I have no shame.

What, don’t have a Facebook account, you say? What’s the matter, don’t you enjoy social pornography?