Karen had this tweet last night, and it got me thinking.. "You're trying to tell me that Twitter is to blame for people's lack of blogging? BAH, I say! That's a lame excuse." (sorry for sharing your private tweets Karen, I hope you forgive me..)
Why have I not blogged in a while? Well, I think for me it's most probably because I've been dead bussy with a lot of stuff happening. So why not blog about it? Well, I don't think that most people care about the fact that I'm spending insane amount of time preparing for the upcoming exams.
I've also spent some time creating a blog for Maggie and me, but it's not ready to be launched yet (and will probably be in Norwegian anyhow..). I've learned a lot from the work I've don there so far, and more to come.
I also attended the 10 year anniversary for my junior high(? Ungdomskolen). Unfortunately the lighting was to bad for any pictures since HTC decided in their infinite wisdom that a blitz or led together with the camera on my Magic would just be to much.. Anyhow it was fun to reconnect with some old classmates and I've planed to at least grab a coffee with some of them right after the exams.
Ohh, and I'm doing a bit of a redesign for this blog, trying to make it look decent in most browsers not only Opera
With the new Windows 7 just out I know a lot of you are upgrading and reinstalling your OS. To help you speed things up take a look at Ninite, not only do they have Opera 10, but also a lot of other free software you might want!
A friend of mine, Jørgen was nice enough to take us skeet shooting on Sunday, and what a blast we had (double fun there..). Jørgen, Magnus, Nils and I spent a few hours hitting the small clay targets.
The video shows us firing at a 1,5 bottle of water
Maggie and I had a trip to Sarpsborg this weekend to help my parents paint the house and allow Maggie to bake her amazing apple pie! I don't have all the pictures yet, but let's hope Maggie uploads some. Nothing exciting actually, with all the school, work and other stuff going on we both needed to take a weekend off and just relax.
After painting on Saturday we went to the movies and saw the new Norwegian movie "Rottenetter".. I've seen a lot of good Norwegian movies lately, but if you want to create a Wall Street movie you kinda need to have some cool scenes and some action in the plot, two hours of looking at a guy trying to think is just to much. I'll give it out of six potential stars, and thats just because I enjoyed the esthetics.
On the fun side: Maggie found a interresting thing on the train.. A airsickness bag.. On a train? WTF?
So, as promised I'll deliver my previous layout, messy CSS as it is. Please don't judge me.. It all started as a structured thing, but at a certain point it got out of hand. If added, it should more or less look like this:
I love Opera, and today we saw the release of the final version of Opera 10. However this is just the beginning, we already know that Opera Unite is lurking around the corner. I started sharing this brand new version with as many friends as possible and I hope you do the same! (Unlike me you might also get a Nintendo Wii out of it!)
So, what's my favorite Opera 10 feature? First off I must say that I've been using the 10 branch for so long I don't remember everything upgraded from 9.64. I remember seeing the inline spell checker for the first time though, and for me that's awesome. It works great for both Norwegian and English, and even my mom managed to understand it (although the concept of right-clicking a word for the correct spelling was replaced with her being embarrassed for misspelling a word..)
I also love all the small things added to M2. M2 is for me one of the most important things in Opera, and the reason I had Opera in my startup way before I started working at Opera. Threading, improved looks and all the small things are all welcome!
Last, but not least, thanks a bunch for the updated skin, it now looks beautiful, especially if you do some minor tweaks. See the included screen for my Opera 10 at work (only one of the monitors though), I'll do a screen from my home computer later also
Dorky title I know, but it's that time again.. Summer is over and I'm back for my last year at the University. I'm sorry for not having updated my blog lately, but so much has happened.. I thought I'd take you through last week, starting on Saturday when Maggie and I took a trip to IKEA.
I also managed to fix it so all my classes are on the same days to make sure I don't have to go back and forth between school and work in the middle of the day like I had to do last semester (yay for me!)
Maggie just came back from weeks in Tønsberg working. I have taken the trip there while she was gone, but I must say I'm glad to have her back.
Currently she is off playing with some new students through the Buddy system at the University. That's how we meet actually one year ago today we meet for the first time through the same Buddy system. This means we have a few pretty important dates coming up. Her birthday and the day we officially became a couple ten days after that.
I'm open for suggestions for gifts if anyone has them, although I'm pretty sure I got a perfect idea (although I might have to sell parts of my body to scientists to afford it).
Metrosexual is a neologism of the 2000s generally applied to heterosexual men with a strong concern for their appearance, and/or a lifestyle that displays attributes stereotypically related to gay men.
That's wikipedia's definition of the word Meterosexual. I've had it with this insane be a softies thing, a friend of mine actually went into a store and spent 10 minutes looking at three different shower curtains (All white, only one of them had a pattern of some sort). It's time men start acting like men and harden the F*** up. No more OC, Paradise Hotel and all that crap, start doing like me, watch WWE, play video games and for god's sake if you'r in a bar with your friends take a F***ing beer not a glass of wine.
I will never ever claim to be a bad ass mechanic who smells his own fart, that's just not what it's about. It's about being a man at some point, shopping a shower curtain is a 4 min thing once you reach the store. 1 min to find out where they are, 1 min to pick one up, 1 min to pay, and 1 min to stand outside feeling like you have succeeded with your mission.
What we need to do is find the balance between taking care of ourself and our surroundings, yet still be able to function like a proper member of society.
I admit it! I'm a addict. This is my seventh year of following the Tour, what started as a innocent past time activity in the summer has now evolved to a full fledged addiction. I'm currently downloading the stages I've missed due to work.. Following Thor Hushovd and CCT is just so fun. I'm also considering buying Pro Cycling Manager :)
After the recent (and still ongoing) redesign of my page I have got some feedback in the initial redesign post, but I thought I'd push out some of the tips and tricks I used and learned by doing the redesign.
Don't be afraid to mess around with the design :) CSS is not that hard and changing the My Opera CSS is even easier!
Tools i used:
W3Schools.com W3Schools.com is a site where you find most information about most CSS questions. Searching around there for a while will find you the answer you need :)
Opera Dragonfly Dragonfly is the tool I use to find elements I want to change. Load it up, then it's click on the element you need the name of.
Notepad++ Used for backups along the way, any notepad tool will do ;)
Kuler I use Kuler to find the colors I want to use. I don't think you can find a better tool to use if you are like me and not the best at picking out colors.
Dragonfly might require some getting used to, but the other tools are straight forward if you know some basic HTML and CSS.
Note: I'm not doing a complete this is how I did this and that, this is just a few of the simple things.
To add some shadow to your text try the following. Note that the first value "#000" is the color, the first "1px" is how much left of the original text you want it and the next 1px is how far below it you want to have it. The last value is the fuzziness of the shadow. Try it, just don't overdo it..
text-shadow: #000 1px 1px 1px;
The small + in front of the links in my posts are really simple to do. And yes, it's CSS not something I do manually for each link :) Note that this does not work in all browsers, but this layout was built to work in Opera and it somewhat works in FF and WebKit browsers.
The ":before" tag can also be used to do a lot of other cool stuff like if you have a look at the tag cloud on this page. The "Tags" text is placed using ":before".
Feel free to add up some questions before part 2 :)
I love StumbleUpon, I think it's safe to say that at least 10% of my online time is Stumbeling, either while waiting after a raid wipe in wow, or just while checking out or waiting for a new TV show. The guys behind the StumbleUpon Tools have done a awesome job porting it to Opera, and with the latest update it even works in Opera 10 Beta 2! Not safe for work though ;)
Google announced that they where creating their own OS a few days back. So I though I'd do like everyone else and give my initial thoughts..
Aside from the hard-boiled article by the Norwegian IT site "IT avisen who managed to claim that being built on Linux this OS will be Virus free and impossible to hack. Most initial articles I've read seems to be positive. So let's start of with my thoughts on Chrome OS.
Chrome is built on a Linux kernel. This means that the backbone of the new OS will be Linux just as the Chrome browser shares it's backend with Safari since they both use Webkit. This has certain benefits, as well as drawbacks. This means that the backend is strong and stable and has been tested, however it also means that no matter how hard they try they will never be the gaming base that Windows is and they will never have the look and feel of Windows that "normal" computer users know. However being Open source and built on Linux might bring more serious software to Linux and help Linux users skip the "almost as good" software they use now. (Gimp will never be as good as Photoshop and wine is good, but will never be the same as running Windows on it's own).
Chrome is not currently a good platform for gaming. I know some gamers love Linux, but the fact remains that most gamers prefer Windows since it's just so much easier to get a game working without third party software like Wine. I would also be surprised to see Office on Chrome OS anytime soon as I guess Google Docs will be the Office clone of choice since Google wants Chrome to be a web application platform. The idea is awesome, and it is a step in the dirrection I think computers are heading towards, and with (again with the streaming game pushing?) upcomming sites like OnLive some of my initial concerns will be solved. I just don't think a straight jump to a web application OS is the way to go, I think we need to slide into it through at least one generation of new operating systems.
Where will we see chrome then? We will see Chrome on mini PC's. HP and Dell are looking into porting it to notebooks and mini PC's. To be honest the only reason why we see Windows on these computers is the fact that the Windows based mini computers had better specs than the Linux ones.
Do I like it? well, I don't know yet. If the new Google OS means more web applications that follows standards that improves the web, then I love it. If it means a new "Ubuntu" Linux something, then I really don't care that much. I love technology, but I'm a gamer at heart, so as long as it's easier for me to play my games on Windows, then I'll stick to it (and as a consequence so will my mom, dad and the few extended family members I help also).
This image is the header of the soon to be annual summer party at my family cabin. I'll be heading out to a friend of mine for a few days for some R&R before the big summer party on Saturday, the day before my birthday.
I just hope that the weather is nice for the first time in 13 years. Seeing how it's been 13 years straight of rain on my birthday in the middle of the summer!.
When I say I'll be offline I guess that's not completely true seeing how I'll bring my laptop and my phone, but I'll try my best to stay away from it all.
When I get back I'll see if I can continue my work in progress "how to do simple CSS" guide. Stay tuned and get tanned everyone! It's summer!
I have done some more tweaks to the design of my blog, it should more or less look the way I want it to now unless you use IE
So, I did a redesign of the blog. The design is made to work in Opera10, but I have tested in IE8, Safari4 and FF3.5 also. Everything more or less works. (IE screws up the most, but if you want to solve those problems take a trip over here to get Opera.
Any bugs except the following? (Or fixes if you like)
IE: Menu is all messed up, it only shows the first letter of each item.
Safari: no mouse over on the menu
IE: Sidebar on the bottom all messed up with items overlaying each other (related to "position:")
FF: Title's on blog posts sometimes have a messy look
IE: Top menu seems to have a bad hair day..
IE: Buttons sometime miss placed (again "position:" related)
IE: lots of small placement bugs.
FF: Not full support for "content:" this makes some parts look crazy.
The list is probably longer, but /care.. It looks more or less like it should (still need some minor tweaks) in Opera :)
So, to finish of the little report from @media. Day two had a bit more development focus than day one. And after a long walk home the day before (Espen and I spent over one hour walking the Thames back to our Hotel). We where good to go for day two with (at least for me) soar feet and a eager to learn more!
Douglas Crockford was first off talking about quality. A harsh look at routines and work flow for larger projects. Having his background from Yahoo! he sure had a lot of experience and held a really educational talk that I will cherish next semester at the university!
Chris Wilson followed as the next speaker up. Talking about the web, although a lot of it seemed to be "I'm sorry for that" and "Don't sue me for this" (Seeing how he works for a certain company in Redmont).
Molly from Opera followed with a talk on HTML5 featuring a cowboy dressed Bruce Lawson. A hilarious but yet good presentation on the future of the web (expect more on HTML5 to come).
Following up on the last post, it's time to get the next one going. We had a quick lunch at a Brazilian place, imagen that Patrick! (And thanks for keeping Sushi alive) After some discussion about the first half of the speakers it was time to head on back to the conference center for day one part two!
Dan Rubin was up next talking about designing virtual realism. This might sound a bit flakky, but the idea was to use images and breake up single colors with either texture (pref from real life images as CGI just isn't that good and always will look fake) or by adding noise to the colors to breake the monotone look of it. I did try to play around with his ideas at home last night and I must say that he had several good points.
So, I've been away for a few days. Where where I? I had the great fortune to be able to attend @media in London. Together with Espen, Truls and we meet up with the Open the web team!
The first day we got to London, found our hotel near Tower Hill and started to explore the city. My initial plan was to buy a pair of sunglasses since I never got around to it last year and I felt it was about time I got some real glasses not the 50NOK glasses I usually buy. So having found a awesome pair of Ray bans I was super psyched. Then after a quick stop by the hotel to meet up with Truls and Mikkey we got in a cab to BBQ at Henny's (Who lives in London). Getting out of the car I lost my first pair of glasses (about 4 hours after buying them). However it's hard to get bummed out when there is so many great people to hang out with. I'm glad I had this opportunity to get to know Chris, Bruce, Henny and Molly better since it's not that often they are in Oslo. We called it a night early so that we would be good to go the day after as the conference started at 08:00.
So, I was at a party on Saturday. Before I left I was playing around with Unite and a old broken IDE disc with lots of mp3. I never close my browser, so Unite was still running.
Sverre mostly played up trance, so I got a bit tired of it and decided to see if he had some better music. Well, no luck in his WinAmp playlist, so I fired up Spotify. As I did that I realized that that was pretty much pointless as his Spotify Playlists was about the same and Jeremy from Spotify gets boring at a party pretty fast.
Except from the fact that I'm having problem swallowing water since my throat is so swollen, today is a awesome day. Opera Unite was shared with all of you!
We have already seen a lot of cool playing around stunts and I hope we will see a lot more in the future! I can't wait to get home and fire up my unite services on my home computer!
Natural evolution of most technology, as with most fields in academics usually floats between two extremes. The Operating System part of my last post had some hints into this. In the beginning before the interwebz really hit big time a lot of people though that super servers with thin clients was the bees knees.
Well, seeing how we are using computers now we are not using thin clients connected to super servers anymore (if we don't take in account some aspects of the Web). Most of the processing power required for let us say gaming is done on the actual users computers. The birth of services like OnLive changes this and puts the hardware part of gaming back to the big computers allowing complicated programs to be run on a computer not really capable of doing this. Check out this Onlive demo for proof.
I've always had lots of ideas on the future of the web. Working at Opera I've been so fortunate as to receive even more technical insight trough the extremely talented and passionate colleges I have here. To start this somewhat philosophical post I think I need to start off by telling you a bit about my background for rambling away like this..
I have a education in Technology, Organization and Learning with focus on Human interaction in IT (Meaning Human/computer, but also human/human in a IT related setting). I've also done a marketing path through BI. I started playing around Online back in 1996 after my dad got a modem through his work as a programmer. Discussing the future of the web with him got me interested in IT and not architecture as my plan was since kinder garden.
Ok, so after a while with little or no really interesting updates from me I think it's about time I pull myself together and start blogging a bit again! To celebrate this I have done a minor update on the design, so that it's not as narrow (double meaning, phun intended..) anymore. After finishing of my exams last week and having a pretty rough patch last week with lots to do and being sick with more or less a constant fever of 39+ things are starting to get the way they should be now.
So, time for another summer holiday. I'm waiting for my new phone a HTC Diamond 2, until then you will have to wait for some pictures. Anyhow! Espen and I finally got our new office together with Amnith! It's nice being able to work without a entire floor of people running past your computer at all times.
So, after a few days of intensive work we finally got Opera 10 Beta 1 out as planed! There are a lot (Until yesterday I though typing "alot" was perfectly fine, it's not) of cool new features in the beta!
Maggie and I started the day with egg and bacon (Maggie made it when I tried to get out of bed). After that breakfast of awesomeness we got on the bus to start our plan.
You might recognice them. The one on my left is HRH The Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and the one on my right is HRH Crown Princess Mette-Marit of Norway
Some blogs are just different. I would like to point out one I enjoy alot here on My Opera. It kinda differs from most other blogs, but I learn alot from it and would like to give you the option to.
This sign was found at Torsov in Oslo.. I think they are trying to say that they sell "Burger" and not Berger..
I admit it! I'm a addict. This is my seventh year of following the Tour, what started as a innocent past time activity in the summer has now evolved to a full fledged addiction. I'm currently downloading the stages I've missed due to work.. Following Thor Hushovd and CCT is just so fun. I'm also considering buying Pro Cycling Manager :)
Opera planla å utfordre Windows
This image is the header of the soon to be annual summer party at my family cabin. I'll be heading out to a friend of mine for a few days for some R&R before the big summer party on Saturday, the day before my birthday. 
Stole this one off 
WIDGETIZE