Posts

Showing posts from July, 2008

Wordless Wednesday - New suitcase

Image
Wordless Wednesday

Now, this I'd drive!

I tripped over the car for me! It's a hybrid, in more than one way: It can run on either gas or electricity and can be recharged on the existing grid and it is both motorcycle and car! I can totally see myself in one of these things (room for a passenger, too). Speed and ease while being environmentally friendly. Now that you've watched that, go here and check out the video from the boys at Top Gear. I totally get their enthusiasm! It gave me a good laugh. (Tripped over at the Norwegian arkitekturnytt.no .)

Calvin says it for me

Image
Taken at http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/ch/2008/ch080726.gif

Hot!

Image
I have never seen my barometer this high since I got it for Christmas - a whopping 1055 mb. Can't say I've seen the humidity this high, either, (it's pointing at 60; sorry about the flash) and this is indoors! It's around 11 am and my balcony, which is in the shade on the west side of my apartment, is showing 24C/75F. We are expecting 28C/82F in the shade today. That is very unusual! The morning sun has been warming up my east-facing kitchen all morning and the temperature there is 28C/82F - which explains the liquifying coconut oil in my cupboard. It was hotter yesterday, though, at 30C/86F in the shade. When I open my balcony door, the sun hits the thermometer on it and I get to watch the needle soar over 42C/108F. Unlike the natives, I seek shade and stay still. I know we need to stock up on sunshine and that this weather is a blessing, but I'm still a California girl in the sun.

Ack…

Image
Inspiration is just not hitting me. I have truly gone on vacation and that includes the blog. I mean, it's 3 pm and I've hardly just finished breakfast. (Which looked like this today. I couldn't finish it; I had to have oatmeal. I am simply not someone who can have only fruit for one meal; yes, it's an experiment - short-lived, at that. But I solved the whole crossword puzzle! Yay!) I am now wondering if I should just make it official. Just say to heck with blogging 365 days and say nothing happening here, folks, move along. I mean, the most exciting thing I'm up to these days is watching all 16 episodes of "Surface" on DVD (9 down, 7 to go). My absence would be only temporary. I'm sure that the moment I leave the house and actually do something (besides show up at the grocery store as the Official Offerer of a Ten Kroner Piece so shoppers without the correct coin can get a cart when I'm done with my cart), I'll have something interesti

Wordless Wednesday - Honesty or irony?

Image
Wordless Wednesday - The rather large "Modest V"

Learning from the radio

Since I'm home, I'm indulging in listening to daytime radio. Radio's always educational, and so far today I have learned that the reason for low doorways on older farms was to be able to knock an intruder on the head as he entered. Having lived in such an old farmhouse myself, I instantly thought a lot of Norwegians must have been pretty tall in the old days, too. My grandpa was 5'9" and cleared the door by a good inch. Something else I have learned is that Norway has not kept up with other nations in regards to copyright expiration for music. In Norway, the expiration is after 50 years, at which point a song becomes public domain. Arne Bendiksen , a cheerful native of Bergen who has spent his life sharing both thoughtful and funny songs, is now working hard to change Norway's copyright law. Bendiksen is now 81 and songs he wrote at age 30 are already in the public domain. He no longer has the right to royalties from his own earliest work. He said in an inter

Since I'm not at work

Image
I'm still vegging. Hopefully, inspiration will strike soon. In the meantime, there's this: What Your Workspace Says About You You are an organized and detail oriented person. You have your life in order. You are hardworking and driven. You have an excellent work ethic. You enjoy your job and don't feel guilty about how much time you spend working. You have a good balance between work and your personal life. You don't switch careers often, and you intend to stay at your current job for a long time. At work, you tend to be an extrovert. You enjoy working with other people and drawing people into your work space. What Does Your Work Space Say About You? More or less accurate. That last statement is because I answered "yes" to keeping food out. I have a bowl of trail mix sitting on the table next to my desk, but people don't actually come in to my office to eat from it. I'll bet that if I had candy in that dish, they would!

In a fit of irony

Image
…there's this, since I have absolutely no inspiration whatsoever for a blog post. You Are 67% Creative You are beyond creative. You are a true artist - even if it's not in the conventional sense of the word. You love creating for its own sake, and you find yourself quite inspired at times. How Creative Are You? "[Y]ou find yourself quite inspired at times." This isn't one of them. I need more coffee.

A moment in shopping

Image
I am one of those people who thinks 8 am is an ungodly hour and that being up and dressed and finished with breakfast by noon is early enough. At least on weekends. But since I had a coffee date with a friend at noon, I was up and dressed somewhat earlier and at the supermarket a little after 10 am. That was to make sure I didn't have to worry about making it to the store before they close at 6 pm. Mustn't rush coffee dates. 10 am on a Saturday is quiet and I had a peaceful walk to the store, which was almost devoid of people. Nice. On an earlier but recent visit to the grocery store, I met an English employee who showed me the stand where the reusable and foldable shopping bags were. (In spite of a stand as tall as me, the bags were amazingly easy to overlook.) One advantage, she said, was that the handles were so large, you could carry the bags over your shoulder. Good point. I bought two. Today I got that rare Norwegian check-out clerk who was both cheerful, smiling an

On protective bacteria, mysterious violins and meaningful musicians

I'm vegging. That means a lot of surfing (and catching up on reading). A few things I have tripped over that make me go hmm: The bacteria helicobakter pylori , which a few years ago was found to be the real reason for stomach ulcers, may actually be protecting children from asthma . With cleaner water and modern antibiotics, the prevalence of the ancient bacteria in newborns is shrinking, while at the same time, asthma is on the rise. Now, I've been having some stomach trouble, and thought that if I really have an ulcer, I need to have that doctor of mine give me a round of antibiotics. Now I'm not so sure. (Actually, I think I just need to watch what I eat.) The Dutch have figured out Stradivarius's secret: Wood density . Generations have been baffled about how violin makers Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù made their instruments produce such rich sounds. Thanks to the latest technology, it is now possible to look at the wood itself in the precio

Now I'll do all those

…things I meant to do before my vacation started. Like dishes, and laundry, and decluttering, and rearranging of furniture, and more decluttering, and my nails, and my yoga, and… You know how it is when you are about to shift gears? Like noticing it's only a half hour until lunch so that big project you want to start on gets put off until after lunch so you can have a bigger slice of continuous time for it. Or starting that diet you needed in September after New Year's because you know you'll be eating a lot in December, anyway. Or you're about to go on vacation which will be partially spent at home, so all tasks get postponed until vacation time. So I have all these things to catch up on, to do, to finish, to start, to make a habit of, to rekindle a former habit with, to… Oh, you get the picture. Wait, that reminds me: Finish sorting photo album and rehang paintings. But I'm vegging till Monday. For sure.

Wordless Wednesday - China pink

Image
Wordless Wednesday In Norway, it's called a Chinese carnation - Dianthus chinensis .

Legal listening

Image
(No, this is not about letting telecoms get away with illegal wiretaps .) You Are a Mac You are creative, stylish, and super trendy. You demand the best - even if it costs an arm and a leg. Are You a Mac or a PC? OK, obviously, if you don't even have Internet Explorer, you're most likely not on a PC, but what really cracked me up was the question, "How much of the music on your computer is paid for?" That reminded me of the discussion at work after we all got our iPod Shuffles . Whether on a Mac or a PC, you have to have iTunes to set up the iPod. And iTunes also offers a web store for buying music. I shop there a lot. (Buying music is my one addiction. Listening to it and ignoring the clock/housework/whatever is my other addiction.) So I told my co-workers that you can either rip your own CDs or buy music for NOK 8 a song (or albums for the price of 10 songs, usually). The youngest ones and those with teenagers at home, instantly wrinkled their noses and

The nice, little things

Image
"It is the little things in life that comfort us, because it is the little things in life that bother us." —Pascal [1] After a couple of summers of not bothering with flowers on my balcony, I felt inspired this year and bought pansies, which are not only a favorite flower, but also a flower I manage to maintain. So after enjoying my one window box for a while, and since I won't be leaving home for weeks at a time this year, I indulged in planting a second window box, this time with Chinese carnations, a flower I'd had success with earlier. It is one of those oddities in life that the people who enjoy doing dishes bare-handed often wear gloves while digging in the dirt, and vice-versa. I use rubber gloves when washing up, but I love feeling the soil between my fingers as I break up lumps and set the little plants in holes I've dug in the dirt. So, on a hot summer's day 10 days ago, I pored fresh soil into my empty window box, set the carnations in it, then

Mobile Me

Image
It's been a somewhat nerdy Sunday. After successfully solving all the sudoku puzzles in a couple of newspapers, I then tackled the computer. Apple has upgraded and changed its online service "dot Mac" to "Mobile Me" . So I spent a little while this afternoon upgrading to a cloud. When that was done, Apple offered me yet another store to shop in. *swoon* So now I'm looking for the next great to-do list app. On my aging Zire 72 (now used only for more sudoku games) I had HandyShopper , the neatest little app and best reason ever for sticking with the Palm OS. It isn't just a to-do list; it's multiple databases. And it is free. One can only hope that it will reincarnate on the iPhone/iPod Touch. But until then, I'll be surfing the new store for alternatives. Whee!

Hotel California

I've been vegging, watching Italian murder mysteries set in Sicily (beautiful), reading British murder mysteries set in Cambridge (beautiful), and catching up on the latest episodes of favorite series, including "Dead Like Me" . I am fascinated by series and movies that deal with the afterlife, but what prompted me to write, is my desire to leave a number of internet groups, also known as networks (like Facebook). You see, in one episode of "Dead Like Me", the main character states that she was never a joiner. She was never a member of any club, and couldn't really see the point in joining. I was never the member of any club, either, unless I had some specific need to be, like joining the German club because it meant hanging out with the kids in my high school German class, or the Glendale lodge of Sons of Norway because it gave me a connection to Norway (I have no incentive to join the Bergen lodge; I don't have Norwegian relatives in the US). My hig

Needing to chill

Image
Today was the first day of my two weeks alone in "customer reception" where I felt was on top of things and even had some time to goof off (meaning, surf the 'net). It's been busy, but busy's good. Busy is far better than bored. (I can't believe how fast these two weeks have flown!) In other news, I'm not really in a writing mood these days. I want input more than I want to output. I want to immerse myself in my books, in learning something, in musing over it, and letting stuff digest, without the distraction of racking my brain for something to say - especially before I'm ready to say it. Still, I do want to keep up a daily blog, but you may find yourself subjected to more stuff like this for a while: You Are Electronic Music You are energetic and expressive. You love feeling alive. You never get sick of your favorite things - they're what makes life special. You don't take tradition or conventions too seriously. You live for

Keera Ann Fox goes to the moon

Image
I'm sending my name to the moon. My name - Keera Ann Fox - gets a ride with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter , on a microchip. I love the idea of getting to send my name. Makes me go back to the giddy days of the 1960's and the space race and those who first orbited the moon. Go here and send your name to the moon, too! You have until July 25. (Thanks to Neatorama .)

Wordless Wednesday - Giving gigabytes

Image
Wordless Wednesday My employer has given each employee a 2GB Special Edition iPod shuffle; Apple donates part of the price to the fight against AIDS in Africa.

The end of my roll in the universe?

My blog title is a bit more dramatic than the reality behind it, but it does echo the thought that ran through my mind as I read about the EU suggestion to register and quality-control bloggers. The member of the European parliament (MEP) who made the proposal, Estonian Marianne Mikko, sounds like she wants to ensure the right free speech without inviting slander or outright lies published by unaccountable bloggers due to anonymity. But the reactions in Sweden and Norway suggest that Mikko's desire to monitor the blog world may end up throttling it. From the EU Observer May 2 : Ms Mikko also worries that who the authors of weblogs are is not always made clear to readers, and that there are regular concerns regarding the impartiality and reliability of blogs. What is the legal situation of bloggers regarding source protection? Should they adhere to journalist ethical codes? Where is liability assiged [sic] in the event of lawsuits? As a result, the MEP also calls for a clarificat

Swiss cheese nation

Image
The easiest way to make a straight road in Norway, is by tunneling through its ancient mountains. Easy, but not cheap. You see, with all the bedrock that makes up Norway, you have to blast through tons of it, anyway, and the advantage to tunnels is that they can shorten a trip and also give a reprieve from the weather. Tunnels in Norway are fascinating. They are generally dark and you see the raw rock of the innards of the mountain you're driving through. Other places I've been where I've driven through tunnels (like Hamburg or Los Angeles), the tunnels have had their entire walls and ceiling covered in white tile. Only recently did someone come up with the idea of painting the insides of Norwegian tunnels white. What a difference it makes! The photograph, stolen from my local newspaper, shows the effect. That photograph is from "my" tunnel, by the way, a relatively dinky two kilometers long, that gently slopes downhill from Fyllingsdalen to the Bergen side. T

Religionsdebatt: Trenger språk

Vel, jeg rotet meg inn på en religionsdebatt på news. Jeg hadde mye på hjertet, men valgte i stedet å poste noe av det her, i stedet for der. Utgangspunktet er altså Richard Dawkins . Tilhengerne hans sier bl.a. at Dawkins forholder seg til rasjonelle vitenskapelige metoder. Jeg påstår at Dawkins ikke forholder seg til vitenskapelige metoder, ellers hadde han tatt høyde for all data ang. religion. Han har i stedet valgt å fokusere kun på ekstremistene innenfor religion. Og det er det jeg har problemer med å godta hva gjelder Dawkins' forskning. Så til det jeg skrev som jeg fant ut passet like greit her: USA har ingen statskirke, ergo ingen majoritetsreligion (om man ser bort fra kristendom som et hele). USA har langt flere små, uavhengige trossamfunn enn hva f.eks. Skandinavia har, og med det mener jeg trossamfunn som har medlemsliste, møtelokale, osv. Det gir langt større valgmulighet og det kan også være grunnen til at folk som er lei vanlig kristendom ikke må søke ateismen, sl

Intelligence as virtue

I always knew I was smart, and I appreciate it. I don't want to lose my brain. But I'd like to expand other qualities, like courage and compassion. Your result for The Best Thing About You Test ... Intelligence Intelligence is your strongest virtue Intelligence (also called intellect ) is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that encompasses many related abilities, such as the capacities to reason , plan, and solve problems. And you? Your brain shines. All 7 virtues are a part of you, but your intelligence runs deepest. It is likely you're a smarty-pants. And it's likely (but not necessary) that your discipline score is high also. It takes a certain resolve to maintain all those neural thingies. Intelligent famous people: Einstein , Shakespeare, Da Vinci . Your raw relative scores follow. 0% is low, and 100% is perfect, nearly impossible. Note that I pitted the virtues against each other, so in some way these are relative scores

Weight, the final frontier*

Comics are educational. Today's User Friendly comic got me curious, and I ended up learning something new about the kilogram - or rather, how one keeps a standard of weight so we know whether or not we have a kilo (as we "locals" say). I got curious about the reference to the roundest objects in the world, so I went a-googling and found that there is a reason besides "because we can" for creating the spheres: "The kilogram is the only remaining standard of measurement tied to a single physical object: a 120-year-old lump of platinum and iridium that sits in a vault outside of Paris, France. But the mass of this chunk of metal is slowly changing relative to the 40-odd copies kept by other countries, and no one knows why or by how much." So researchers charged with policing units and measures, called metrologists, have come up with several suggestions to redefine the kilogram. […] One proposal, pushed by an international team called the Avogadr

Grass farming

I grew up in an era where there was a call of "back to nature" (the influence of the flower children of the 60's), where more and more humans stopped defining all the members of nature (from bacteria to whales) as having the quality of good or bad. We had embraced ecology and the awareness that our own value system has nothing to do with the natural order, and that the natural order is perfectly set up and not to be meddled with. So I ended up not hating the lion for killing the cute antelope, nor thinking the antelope was all that cute. Rather, they just are, and one can admire the grace and ability of each species to make the best of rather tricky and life-threatening situations without labeling. Ah, evolution... Also, when I was growing up, organic farming was getting (back) into fashion, and I never lost faith in it. Happily, I keep coming across all kinds of reasons for why working with nature as it is - rather than inventing and using chemicals and genetic modific

Wordless Wednesday - Graffitis

Image
Wordless Wednesday

Filmed on location on a computer

Image
I found myself wondering if the actors in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" ever left the sound stage. But who cares. It's Indiana Jones! It's been almost a year since I went to the movies, but as an Indiana Jones-fan, I just had to see the fourth movie on a big screen, like I had the other three. The opening sequences were frustrating, with a tired-looking and -acting Harrison Ford, but once they whisked him away from the Nevada desert, Indy was back! In spite of predictability ("How many punches can Indy take without falling down? Oh, thirteen dozen, give or take."), some totally non-Indy and badly animated rodents in the beginning (also happily left behind in the Nevada desert; the ants were better), obvious breakage of laws of physics (and geography), and the crystal skull looking like plastic because the actors handled it like plastic, I enjoyed the movie. The plot was good, the chase scenes likewise (again with the military and