In a strange culmination of coincidences my life has been filled with zombies lately. Go figure.

I recently read Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide, a hilarious tongue-in-cheek guide to - well, guess! I recently ordered a copy of the more serious World War Z by the same author, having read some very promising reviews of it.

Furthermore, I recently got around to watching Død Snø, a new Norwegian horror movie about zombies - nazi-zombies, even! Good, campy and very gory fun.

And to top it off, this morning, a large number of Twitter-users down under reported a large-scale zombie outbreak in Sydney during a power outtage. Chaos, confusion and hilarity ensued. It even showed up in the media and in a news feed from the
NSW Police Department. Good times!

(English readers; Pardon the norwegianness of this article, but since it’s about a book written in Norwegian, it’s not very useful to you unless you can read it anyway.)Jeg har blitt bitt (eller sm-tygd p, om du vil) av en ny grublebasill, i min mening en svrt s verdig arvtager til Sudoku, nemlig Hidoku (eller Hidato, som det ogs er kjent som, men det er et registrert varemerke, s…)Boken er p 131 sider, p norsk, og inkluderer 100 oppgaver av varierende vanskelighetsgrad med lsning, samt en veiledning i metoder og strategier for lse oppgavene. Det hres sikkert vanskeligere ut enn det er, og jeg anbefaler alle prve seg p et par oppgaver fr de gir opp - du finner et par eksempler hvis du velger forhndsvisning av boken. Det eneste du m kunne er telle. Det er gy og sunt for hjernen. :)Boken er finne her: http://stores.lulu.com/vidarino

Linda recently bought herself a QuicKutz Silhouette plotter/cutter (a re-branded Graphtec CC200-20, actually), and I thought it would be an interesting project to get the device working under Linux. And it was! After a few days of intense observation (my first real USB-sniffing project) I had most of the protocol pat down, and I hereby present graphtecprint v1.0 (a somewhat odd name, considering it?s not really a printer, but since itself claims to be I?ll just go on and humour it).

So, finally, after close to 25 years of not owning a video game console (the previous one was a Philips Videopac G7000 system from the early 1980s), we finally took the plunge and got ourselves a Nintendo Wii system. It was bundled with Wii Sports and one freely selectable game, so we chose Super Mario Galaxy, which has been getting great reviews. Also, we threw in the Cars game for Marius, which instantly proved itself an enormous success. Ka-chow!It’s been really fun so far (The “physics” in Super Mario Galaxy is a real mind-bender!), with the possible exception of having sore muscles in places we didn’t know existed. Then again, Linda and myself shook hands on trying to stay fit and exercise more this year…

(I didn’t bother with a mod chip yet. And I resent the hardware manufacturers for making me need one. Being able to make backup copies of my legally purchased games to avoid damaging the originals should be a mandatory feature, not something you have to (in their eyes) break the law to enable. Yes, yes, I know it’s meant to hinder piracy, but copy protection shouldn’t be an obstacle to paying customers. So there.)

Here is the latest and greatest version of LastFMProxy so far. The previous version had more than a few quirks, and hopefully these have now been taken care of. Changes are mostly related to charset issues, but new features include ?audioscrobbling? (submission of tracks to your Last.FM profile) and much faster metadata updates; they should be about ?live? now. Download links, changelog and readme here. Happy listening.

A few more nano-reviews:Boogie NightsAn oldie (1997), but very much goldie from Paul Thomas Anderson, the brilliant man behind Magnolia. The latter has been a favourite of mine for years, so it was about time I got around to watching this one. The two movies are similar in many ways, and I recommend both highly. Like Magnolia, it’s a lengthy drama, but with some good humour sprinkled on top. If you don’t let the running time or the genre scare you away, you are in for a big treat. (If you’ve seen the movie you may giggle now.)

Little Miss SunshineA heart warming comedy about a dysfunctional family on a road trip to enter cute, little Olive into a beauty pageant. Sounds cuddly, doesn’t it? This was a pleasant surprise, because the humour in the movie was much, much darker than what I had expected - sex and drugs play dominant roles in the plot. So go see it.

I watch a lot of movies - or try to, at least, but I rarely write anything about them. I thought I would try to change that, so here are some short reviews of things I’ve watched recently.

(While movies have long been one of my primary interests, my recently renewed interest in the art came about as a result of stumbling across movielens.org, a site where you can rate movies you’ve seen and get recommendations back, based on the ratings of people who appear to have a taste similar to yours, also known as collaborative filtering. It seems to be working fairly well, so I recommend you go and try it.)

The Fountain
This is one of the most fascinating movies I’ve seen in a while, to be honest. It’s a visual and thought-provoking story that spans a 1000 years, touching on subjects such as life, death, love and mortality. It is beautifully shot, perfectly cast and the soundtrack is fantastic. (Those who have seen Requiem for a Dream should know that Aronofsky knows how to score a movie.)

Adaptation.
Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, the duo behind the brilliantly funny Being John Malkovich are back in one of the most cleverly written movies ever. Seriously. It’s about the movie’s very screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, and his quest to adapt a book to a screenplay, and the challenges therein.

Deja Vu
Denzel Washington is back to save the day in this popcorn-friendly action flick, which actually isn’t all that bad. I’m usually not too crazy about what mainstream Hollywood puts out, but this one has a somewhat interesting plot that manages to keep my interest throughout. I’m reluctant to say more, as I wouldn’t want to spoil anything, but if you want a movie that’s entertaining and doesn’t take itself too terribly seriously, this just might do the trick.

Now, if that subject doesn’t make you want to run away screaming, you’re a sick, sick person.

Anyway, allow me to explain. last.fm is a 100% free internet radio station that actually plays music that it predicts you will like, based on what you already have listened to. Very clever and highly recommended. I have discovered more new bands that I could possibly count based on their recommendations.

Allright, moving on. About my pants, in the last.fm community, there has been an incredibly silly game going on there for a while. The rules are simple:
- Play 25 random songs from your collection
- Add the words "in my pants" to the song titles
- Mark the best ones with bold
- Post the results in your last.fm journal

How could I possibly resist?

Here is my contribution:

Swallow the Sun - Don’t Fall Asleep in my pants
Kamelot - Center of the Universe in my pants
Trivium - Dying in Your Arms in my pants
Dimmu Borgir - Dreamside Dominions in my pants
In Flames - Worlds Within the Margins in my pants
Dark Lunacy - Now is Forever in my pants
Swallow the Sun - Too Cold of Tears in my pants
Opeth - Death Whispered a Lullaby in my pants
Kamelot - Serenade in my pants
Samael - Reign of Light in my pants
Norther - Death Unlimited in my pants
Graveworm - Dreaming into Reality in my pants
Dimmu Borgir - Blood Hunger Doctrine in my pants
Communic - Frozen Asleep in the Park in my pants
Sirenia - Save me from Myself in my pants
Searing Meadow - Infamous Lines in my pants
Satyricon - Delirium in my pants
Pain - Play Dead in my pants
Process Of Guilt - Motionless in my pants
In Flames - Food for the Gods in my pants
Shape of Despair - Angels of Distress in my pants
Trail of Tears - As it Penetrates in my pants
Tristania - Pale Enchantress in my pants
Swallow the Sun - The Giant in my pants
Blind Guardian - War of Wrath in my pants

Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone if you accidentally snicker at any of these titles. It will be our little secret.

Wow, I really suck at this blogging business, don’t I?

Anyway, here is today’s random selection of brain lint.

On new year’s eve I proposed to Linda, and the crazy wench accepted! We’re doomed! Aaah!! (I’m joking, dear. Ow. Stop. OW!)

Red wine and my recently acquired movie quiz book go together like … two things that go together really well. Especially the red wine. That goes together exceptionally well. (Certainly better than the beer I had last weekend, when we celebrated Michael’s (a friend of ours) 30th birthday, which brought me a insaneously hidderous headache, despite only consuming a few of them.) The quiz book was a great bargain, too. It cost me NOK 10.00 (approx EUR 1.25), and it contains 1800 questions (most of them pretty hard), and hopefully the same number of answers. We’re working on finding out.

In more technical news, I’m hoping to have fibre (FTTH) pulled through my wall soon - as in a few weeks. After moving to Karmøy, my ADSL has acted up quite a bit, dropping the connection every Nth minute, but only staying offline for 30 seconds or so. Enough to be annoying, nonetheless.

Music! I have discovered Dark Lunacy, a great melodic death metal band from Italy. Great stuff. Also, only a few more weeks until the Karmøygeddon Metal Festival kicks off, under which I plan to see Kamelot, Scar Symmetry and Communic. (May 5th on Byscenen, for those who may be interested.)

And I need more disk space.

The size of our family has increased yet again.

One of Linda’s online friends recently found a litter of kittens in her garage and announced the find online, asking for adopters. In a dramatic surge of mushiness, Linda managed to talk me into rescuing one of them, and this saturday we took a trip to Stavanger to pick him up. After a lengthy debate about names, we finally settled on Laban, after a friendly little ghost from one of Marius’ books. Disappointingly ungeeky, but such is life.

And in an unprecedented display of generosity, I have uploaded some pictures to Flickr for your enjoyment.