Robert Jacobsen

Next week, or to be precise, next Tuesday, I have an exam in Discrete Mathematics, and I am not quite certain how ready I am for it. I mean, I feel like I know the stuff, but I haven't really gotten to do many earlier exams to test myself yet, so my feeling might be totally wrong. I'll try to get started on doing the earlier exams tomorrow, and hopefully I'll be quite ready for the exam by the Tuesday.

I was supposed to read quite some today, but I woke up with a sore throat and I've been feeling quite tight in my nose. Ad notum: How the heck is this put in English? "My nose didn't feel quite good?", "My nose had some booze men inside it?" (Yeah, poor pun based upon the Norwegian word for "bogeymen" which is "busemann"), or ... what? I can't come up with anything that sounds remotely reasonable. In either way I've been feeling kind of groggy and resultingly there has been little reading for the exam. I tried to do a small session a couple of hours ago, but I had to capitulate as my head just said no.

Since it's mostly exam reading, apart from some hours of working and playing every now and then, what time I read and what time I sleep doesn't matter much. I try to keep the days somewhat normal, but it occurs that we'll go to bed at 0300 and sleeping to 1200 (which most likely will be the case tonight, for instance). We don't have much except the exam next week on our schedule, so why not?

On a side note, apart from my nightly scrabbling, the snow has finally arrived and lasted for more than two hours. We've had it somewhat white outside our window for the past couple of days! It's awesome. I love it when Anniken plays the christmas songs and it snows humbly outside our window. It's been many years since I've been so hyped for christmas.

Hmm. How to end this post? Many ways comes to my mind. Perhaps in the middle of a sen

Originally posted by Wikipedia:

An old Irish folk tale tells of Jack, a lazy yet shrewd farmer who uses a cross to trap the Devil. One story says that Jack tricked the Devil into climbing an apple tree, and once he was up there Jack quickly placed crosses around the trunk or carved a cross into the bark, so that the Devil couldn't get down. Another myth says that Jack put a key in the Devil's pocket while he was suspended upside-down.

Another version of the myth says that Jack was getting chased by some villagers from whom he had stolen, when he met the Devil, who claimed it was time for him to die. However, the thief stalled his death by tempting the Devil with a chance to bedevil the church-going villagers chasing him. Jack told the Devil to turn into a coin with which he would pay for the stolen goods (the Devil could take on any shape he wanted); later, when the coin/Devil disappeared, the Christian villagers would fight over who had stolen it. The Devil agreed to this plan. He turned himself into a silver coin and jumped into Jack's wallet, only to find himself next to a cross Jack had also picked up in the village. Jack had closed the wallet tight, and the cross stripped the Devil of his powers; and so he was trapped.

In both myths, Jack only lets the Devil go when he agrees never to take his soul. After a while the thief died, as all living things do. Of course, his life had been too sinful for Jack to go to heaven; however, the Devil had promised not to take his soul, and so he was barred from hell as well. Jack now had nowhere to go. He asked how he would see where to go, as he had no light, and the Devil mockingly tossed him an ember that would never burn out from the flames of hell. Jack carved out one of his turnips (which was his favourite food), put the ember inside it, and began endlessly wandering the Earth for a resting place. He became known as "Jack of the Lantern", or Jack-o'-Lantern.

Today many celebrate Halloween, but its not particularily celebrated in Norway. Nonetheless, the local greengrocer had some pumpkins for sale so me and Anniken purchased one each and carved them. The result is below, I think they turned out quite nicely. :-)



Happy halloween all!

After coming over this Friday's shock, we went down to try to fetch a pizza from the local pizza shop, but it was for some reason closed half past eight on a Friday evening. What's up with that? Instead we went to the grocery store and purchased some Fjordland, which is pre-made food that you only need to boil in your pans and voilá you have an advanced meal.

We've also been chilling out quite some with World of Warcraft, where we've started levelling a Warrior and a Priest, me being the latter. It's alright to do something else until the expansion, but everything seems to point to the pre-expansion patch coming this Wednesday, so whether we'll continue to play on our small alts or do something else, I am uncertain. We are now respectively level 27 and 26.

A song has struck my mind as pure beauty. Somewhere over the Rainbow and the version Israel Kamakawiwo'ole performs. It's awesome in every way. I've embedded it in the bottom of this post so you can watch it yourself. Anniken was so surprised that I hadn't seen Wizard of Oz, so we followed the yellow brick road and watched it last night. Although I think Kamakawiwo'ole, the man with the name that just rolls ever so good on your tongue, has the best version of the song I've heard until now.

Well, that was this week's most bloated blog title. At Friday I attended a meeting with my project group. It went alright and I acquired the tasks of "designer & developer", which I am quite happy with. All the other members also have "developer" in their titles, but they have "documents" also. In brief resume, we can say that all are d&ds in some way.

After school we drove to Skien with a short stop by IKEA where we purchased some gifts and some accessories for our appartment. Initially we had planned to stop by a restaurant by the road, but since we got a bit tight on our schedule, we dropped it and are planning on stopping by there for a little meal when we are driving home this afternoon. Later that night we went to a friend of Anniken, whom had recently gotten herself a new appartment. It was huge. About 100 square meters. We ate delicious lasagna with Pink Floyd's PULSE concert played in the background. We chatted and watched TV-shows until about midnight before we went home to sleep.

Saturday was a more or less relaxing day. We slept long, got up, ate breakfast and went to the city to look for shoes for me. Amazingly I found a couple which fitted perfectly. I had to pay 1 100 NOK (=~135 €) for them, but it was totally worth it. The current ones I have are not worth much due to their diminishing quality and comfort. I also got myself a pair of jeans and 12 (!) pair of socks. Dressmann really had a good offer on socks.

Later that night we ate fårikål which was simply delicious. I also worked a bit on my mandatory task in programming, which I completed with no mentionable stress. I am curious about how they can expect that the generic 1-year student can program a sorting algorithm in their second work in Java programming. I managed it easily though.

Today we've done little since we got up, we ate breakfast and are soon going to aunt Lilly for a visit. Then we're going to Anniken's mother to eat dinner (yesterday was here at her father's house). Then we're going back home to Oslo again. Eventhough it's relaxing with a weekend in Skien, we always end up having a tight schedule in some way. I'm not complaining. It's always nice to get to do many things. :-)

Today has been a nice day. I woke up at 11, figured that the world was still here, and has not been doing too much useful stuff. The lecturers are at some kind of a seminar today, so there were no lectures, and I am done with my mandatory work in programming, so it has been a relaxing day.

I have installed Firefox 3.0 with Ubiquity which I am going to test out for the time being, and I figured that Fronter actually has an HTML editor. It does not work in neither Opera nor Chrome, so I have never noticed it. Ubiquity is fun and great for some things, and perhaps there will be a similar extention to Opera later on? I can only hope.


This is the laptop bag I purchased for 499 NOK (about €60). It fits perfectly with my MSI Wind, and I can have a book in it as well. Seems perfect. :-)