Kjetil's Blog

I left Opera by the end of June, since I got an opportunity to work more with my big passion, the Semantic Web. I've now gotten started with a consultancy called Computas. Now, time for a little update, so that you all know where I went.

I'm just getting started here, and there is a lot to do. My first real paying project is still somewhat in the future, we're currently negotiating a contract. I really hope we will get that project, if we do, it will take advantage of a lot of interesting semweb technology, and it'll be open source, so no need to be secretive, which is something I like. But that's if we get it. Fingers crossed.

Other than that, we've moved across the town, into a new apartment that we're very happy about, and finally sold our old apartments.

So things are new and good!

Orienteering is one of my favorite spare-time activities, and there are competitions in Norway that are organised as competitions for businesses. Well, it is the first time I run with "Opera" behind my name, and the event was the regional relay championships. The level is not quite as high as in conventional competitive orienteering, but nonetheless quite bad. The first team to pass the finish line were a bunch of friends that ran for a company that one of them owned, but none of the rest worked for him... So, you could argue that there is buying and selling of good runners!

But we shouldn't diss them, we're pretty happy with our 12th place, as Frode ran one of his first races since he was a kid. Anbjørn did a good first leg, and has blogged and taken photos of the event.

I myself didn't do a great race. To be happy, I need to feel that I run steadily, but I was hesitating and reading the map too slowly, and also the 4th and the 9th controls were close together, and I was for a long time on the way from the 4th reading as if I was going to the 9th. It wouldn't be a disaster, but it turned out that the route choices would be significantly different, so even if I ran straight into the 4th, I lost a couple of minutes. That's not that much, so a middle-of-the-road race this time.

A bunch of Opera Employees went to Riga in mid-march, and over 17th century beer, I was writing postcards, when we came up with the rather geeky idea that I should be sending a postcard to myself in SMTP. Geeky, huh? If you need to say "sure, since I don't know what it is", well, you're right... :-) Well, SMTP is the language your mail program talks with your mail server and mail servers talk among themselves. Not that I tend to use it myself, I use a mail program too, but my superficial understanding is sufficient to write it without looking up the reference. Almost.

So, this is how it looks:


It can be enlarged too. It basically says that it is sent from Riga, the sent address I set to my personal address, and the to address is my opera.com address. What, you say that's not how it was done with snail-mail? They better catch up, shouldn't they? ;-)

So, the postcard was posted in Riga, on the 8th of March. The next pic shows me posting the card with the Freedom Monument "Milda" in the background. So there...



I haven't had time to check the snail mail here yet? What do think the chances are?