The Digital Void of SPZ

I just realized it has been over 3 months since my last blog entry, and decided to write a quick update of what has been going on since my last post.

The holiday I had was very lengthy and relaxing - an excellent way for me to fully recharge my depleted batteries; A couple weeks enjoying the mediterranean sun in southern France, a trip to London visiting my brother and his family and a few weeks of partying with Steve who once again came to visit (including a cool trip to visit Leon - a mutual friend from highschool - in Copenhagen), and just relaxing in general felt very good indeed. I had been working rather hard without having much time off for a while (read: browser for Nintendo Wii) so this was needed before starting in my new job here at Aspiro AS.

Speaking of Aspiro, I have now settled in nicely here and as I write this I sit at my desk looking down at Egertorget and Stortinget subway station examining all the weird people outside. I now work on the backend for the Telenor and djuice online/mobile music shops which is very cool in many ways, especially for a musician like myself We also went on a company wide kickoff trip to Jurmala, near Riga in Latvia - which in itself is an entire chapter of good times and drunkenness

Another cool little update is the fact that I hooked up some Apple iPhones for me and a few mates, and we were lucky enough to get in on the batches right before they started shipping with firmware 1.1.1 which is as of yet has not been successfully unlocked While it does have its shortcomings, I am absolutely digging it like I hoped I would - the entire experience and features far outweighs the few negative issues for me personally.

When it comes to Domi, we're still going strong; rehearsing and playing shows whenever (our producer) Andreas is working in London, and recording in the studio when he is in Oslo. This on and off way of working, where we typically get in a day or two in the studio every two-three weekes, means it still will take a while before the album is ready... but good things come to those who wait. At least that is what they say

If you are an Apple owner, chances are you have used or at least heard of QuickSilver;

A unified, extensible interface for working with
applications, contacts, music, and other data.

While a bit hard to put into Lamens terms, QS will index all your files alot like Spotlight and give you an interface for typing in. simply put, it will then search for matches and let you launch programs, view files etc. Simply by typing in (part of) their name. Powerusers who use QS will tell you this is just the tip of the iceberg, however useful - QS also supports modules and there are tons of useful ones out there.

A new and simmilar, if only very basic, tool called Launchy has come to my attention thanks to my colleague Lasse Magnussen who recently got a MacBook Pro;

Launchy is a free windows utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager.

Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!

With this I can for instance prett ALT+SPACE to bring up Launchy and type "op" and press enter to run Opera, which would in total take me all of a second. You can also specify what folder to index and what file extensions to look for within the specified folders. QS it is not, but indeed better than the Start menu