Vegard Skjefstad | www.vegard.net

Yesterday / 0 Comments

Meet Hoffman

Even though I’m supposed be on hiatus, I can’t keep my fingers away from the site.

Back when I started working for BEKK, I was sent to boot camp. It’s not the kind of boot camp you think it is, though. Instead of getting yelled at, and being forced to take push ups, the company coach all their new employees through the ins and outs of being an exceptional consultant. One of the sessions during boot camp was by Aslak Hellesøy. The session was about creativity, and being the creator of Cucumber, Hellesøy knows a thing or two about the subject.

One thing that have stuck with me from his speech, was about making sure we stay creative. Hellesøy made small changes every day. Instead of taking the same route to work all the time, he took different routes. He didn’t wear the same style of clothes every day, but regularly changed his style slightly. And he rarely had the same desk at work for a long time. Instead, he changed desks often.

September 14, 2018 / 0 Comments

Hiatus

It’s been 12 years since the last time I declared hiatus. Now it feels like it’s that time again.

I’ve been posting to this site semi-regularly for almost two decades. I’ve had a few breaks, though, and both in 2005 and 2006, I went on hiatus. I needed a good, long break from the site, and it needed one from me. Whenever I’ve gone on hiatus, the reason has been that the joy of writing hasn’t really been there. If I were a professional writer, I’d probably call it a writer’s block.

Now I’ve reached that point again. I’ve got a crapload of drafts laying around, but no need to finish any of them. Every time I sit down and give it a try, I’ve only written a sentence or two before I’ve saved the draft, and gone off to do something else instead. That “something else” has usually been playing a computer game, which is something I really enjoy at the moment. I recently finished Not Tonight – which I’ve tried to write a review of like five or six time now – and I’ve also rediscovered Endless Space 2.

So there you have it. I’m off for a while. But I’m not disappearing off the radar completely. A Picture A Day will still be updated daily-ish. I’ll still be reading books. And the one-liners collection will be updated on the first of every month. You can also look me up on Twitter and Mastodon, where I occasionally spread the good word.

If you get withdrawals because of the lack of new content, you can probably find something you’ve not read before among the 2234 posts in the archive. And before you know it, I’m back to posting my incoherent ramblings on this site again.

Catch you on the flip side.

September 6, 2018 / 0 Comments

Norlan Presents: The Rauk Heavy Tumbler

Two years after the launch of their revolutionary whisky glass, Norlan returns with another magnificent creation: The Rauk Heavy Tumbler.

If you’re at least a tiny bit interested in whisky, you might already be familiar with Norlan. In 2016, they launched a Kickstarter campaign featuring a new type of whisky glass. The Norlan whisky glass looked amazing, and the team behind the campaign were masters of marketing language. With pretentious phrases like “combining design, science, and sociology for the perfect whisky drinking experience”, and “fluid dynamics modeling and bio-mimicry”, it was obvious that every hipster across the globe would throw their money at Norlan. When the campaign ended, the company had raised more than 10 times their initial goal – including $38 pledged by yours truly.

After a bit of a wait, I received my two Norlan glasses. Or, to be more precise, I received one glass, and an unofficial Norlan whisky glass puzzle. The postal service hadn’t been too kind to the package, and one of the glasses had broken into a million tiny, sharp pieces. Not a major crisis, since I’m the only one in the household who enjoys whisky. And it only took a quick e-mail to Norlan to get a replacement glass for free. Amazing costumer support!

The Norlan whisky glass is great. But I’ll be honest with you, I’ve only used it a couple of times. The glass falls into the nosing category, and I’m more of a tumbler guy myself. So you can imagine my excitement when Norlan recently announced that they’ve made a brand new tumbler as well; the Rauk Heavy Tumbler.

September 1, 2018 / 0 Comments

September One-liners

September is here. Summer is officially over, and we’re slowly moving toward darker times. But fear not, here are some sarcastic and funny one-liners to brighten your day. Want to see more? Then you should browse the complete collection of more than 1,700 funny one-liners.

“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” — Mark Twain
I got myself into this, and I’ll get myself even deeper into this.
Judge me by the people I avoid.
Golf is what you play when you’re too out of shape to play softball.
The only reason I play golf is to bug my wife. She thinks I’m having fun.
If you listen closely you can here me not caring.
I meant to behave but there were too many other options.
“I’m not great at advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?” — Chandler Bing
I would love to lose weight but I hate losing.
They say you are what you eat. I don’t remember eating a huge disappointment.
I hope one day I love someone the way women in commercials love yogurt.
Keep rolling your eyes, maybe you’ll find a brain back there.
My boss asked me to start the presentation with a joke. I attached payslips on first slide.
Everyone has the right to be stupid, but you are abusing the privilege.
You call them swear words, I call them sentence enhancers.
There are some that are wise, and others are otherwise.
Grammar is the difference between knowing your shit & knowing you’re shit.
Don’t regret doing things, regret getting caught.
I’m really good at stuff until people watch me do that stuff.
I’m not sarcastic, just intelligent beyond your understanding.
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.” — Clarence Darrow
“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.” — John Bright

August 12, 2018 / 0 Comments

Let’s Hack Medical Equipment!

Or rather, let’s not. Hacking is bad, m’kay? But if we wanted to, it turns out it’s outrageously easy to hack medical equipment.

I’m an information technology professional by trade. My work mantra is that “no matter how bad it goes, no one dies”. It have saved me from a lot of stress, and helped me keep my cool in times of crisis. The point is that even if all the IT systems are down, the data center is on fire, and the entire development team has been abducted by aliens, no one dies. At least if the aliens are of the good, not-anal-probing kind. Sure, it’s annoying that people can’t do their work, and we might lose some money during the downtime. But people can drink coffee, chat about the incompetent IT department while the problem is being fixed. And we’ll eventually cover the financial loss, because we learn from our mistakes, and become even better at what we do¹.

Since IT is an important part of every industry these days, I have many choices when it comes to what domain I want to work with. Because of my work mantra, however, there are some businesses I will not to get involved with. One is control systems of any kind where a simple software bug may have disastrous consequences. Think ATC, nuclear power plants, and the like. I’d prefer not to kill scores of people because if (x > 1) had somehow turned into if (x > 1);. Many winters ago, I spent the better part of a workday trying to figure out a baffling bug, and the ; above was the cause². Thankfully, I wasn’t responsible for making sure airplanes don’t crash into each-other. That would have been a bad day to fly.

Another industry I gladly stay away from is medical equipment. But I would have fit right in because it turns out that many of the people working in the medical IT industry are incompetent dimwits.