Vegard Skjefstad | www.vegard.net

Yesterday / 1 Comment

Let’s Try Gutenberg

The new Gutenberg editor will be introduced in WordPress 5.0. It has received a lot of bad reviews, so I decided to give it a spin myself.

The new WordPress editor, code named Gutenberg, is introducing the concept of blocks as a way to structure a post. It’s not a revolutionary way of structuring things, really, since everything you see on the internet is made out of blocks, or HTML-elements as they are called.

Gutenberg makes it amazingly easy to get an impressive amount of control of each HTML-element, though. The block you read now, for instance, is an ordinary HTML paragraph element. But the new editor makes it very easy for me to control the content of the element. I can quickly change the font size, text alignment, add a drop cap, change the color of the text, add custom CSS classes, and a myriad of other things.

This is a massive step forward compared to current visual editor in WordPress. I’ve avoided that editor like the plague, and written pure HTML instead.

3 days ago / 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