www.vegard.net

This year, like last year, I’ve discovered a few new artists that I thought I’d share with you. It’s more electronica than last year’s list, which didn’t feature a single artist in the genre. The reason why this has changed in 2011 is that I’ve grown into the habit of listening to some chill electronica when I get to work in the morning. The office is almost empty, with the exception of one guy who I suspect is actually living there, for the first hour of the workday and an empty office and some electronica is a great way to start the day.

Everything, including the pictures, are nicked from Wikipedia, Last.fm and even Facebook.

Carbon Based Lifeforms

Carbon Based Lifeforms (CBL) are Johannes Hedberg and Daniel Segerstad, both born in 1976 and based in Göteborg in south-western Sweden. They met at the age of 15 and are still, amazingly, working happily together, almost 20 years later. CBL itself was formed in 1996, as an offshoot from other projects, but soon became their focal point, culminating in their first release on ‘mp3.com’ in 1998.

It is hard to categorise CBL’s music but the best description might be that of a groundbreaking mixture of acid, techno and house music. The term ‘acid/ambient’ has also been coined; perhaps a respectful nod to the great pioneer Brian Eno.


Continue reading "2011 in Music." →

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Notodden bus station. Welcome home!

Once upon a time I made a piece of blogging software written in PHP. Inspired by Blogger, I named it “Bugger”. Childish, but an appropriate name: It was a buggy bugger. Still, it did its job well and since I was the one responsible for everything, I had a rather intimate relationship with the code, making the software easy to extend when I needed new features. Open sourcing it was never an option, though, anyone else trying to maintain the code probably would have gone crazy – the curse of many one-man projects.

About three years ago, I called it quits, buried Bugger and switched to WordPress. To be honest, I’ve never looked back. WordPress is, like Bugger, written in PHP and has, unlike Bugger, a thriving community of developers and designers who release tons of WordPress themes and plugins. I’ve written a plugin myself, wp-days-ago and I’m hosting my own WordPress installation on vbox-host.com.

In short; I like WordPress. Now I’m going to my first WordCamp in January next year. The first ever WordCamp in Norway will be held in Oslo, more information is available on the official WordCamp Norway site. The speaker list so far includes Isaac Keyet, John James Jacoby, Zé Fontainhas (all three Automattic employees), Magnus Jepson (WooThemes) and even a guy from my employer.

Right now there are only 58 54 48 tickets left so if you are an avid WordPress user, quickly grab a ticket – they are quite cheap – and get ready for WordCamp Norway 2012!

You might have noticed that I’ve been trying to add new one-liners to the collection at the beginning of every month. Here’s a quick Christmas bonus for you enjoyment:

  • I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.
  • Good girls are bad girls that never get caught.
  • Behind every successful man is his woman. Behind the fall of a successful man is usually another woman.
  • A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.
  • My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
  • Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes misery easier to live with.
  • When in doubt, mumble.
  • Jesus loves you, but everyone else thinks you’re an asshole.
  • I like work. It fascinates me. I sit and look at it for hours.
  • You’re never too old to learn something stupid.
  • A TV can insult your intelligence, but nothing rubs it in like a computer.
  • Haikus are easy. But sometimes they don’t make sense. Refrigerator.
  • Keep the dream alive: Hit the snooze button.
  • To err is human, to blame it on somebody else shows management potential.
  • People tend to make rules for others and exceptions for themselves.
  • Materialism: Buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people that don’t matter.
  • The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
  • Alcohol doesn’t solve any problems…but then again, neither does milk.
  • The trouble with being punctual is that nobody’s there to appreciate it.
  • What if there were no hypothetical questions?
  • True friendship comes when the silence between two people is comfortable.
  • A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
  • Whose idea was it to put an “S” in the word “lisp”?
  • Be careful of your thoughts, they may become words at any moment.
  • The farther away the future is, the better it looks.
  • This isn’t an office. It’s hell with fluorescent lighting.
  • My drinking team has a bowling problem.

Ah, December. The social month; with dinners, parties and all kinds of get-togethers. This, in addition to some unscheduled overtime at work have left very little time in terms of spreading the word on the interweb. And just to top it off, vbox went tits up in the early hours after this year’s Christmas party at work. My trusty vbox hosts this site and seeing it offline of course broke my geeky heart, but I was too busy laying in bed in fetal position, trying to remember my name and how to speak to really care at the time.

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.

Continue reading "A Trip to the Cloud." →

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Today in...

2010: Nexus One?
2007: Back at the Movies.
2006: Message.
2006: Winter Wonderland.
2005: Wedding.
2004: Port Knocking.