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).

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.

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.

Eek, time is running away from me again. It has been close to two months since my last confession. Eh, blog-entry. (I still hate the name “blog”, by the way. Just so you know.)

Much of my spare time has been spent offline lately. Partly due to us trying to convince Marte to kick the habit of demanding food during the nights - a probject which we declared a failure after about three weeks of little to no sleep for any of us. Our excuse was that she wasn’t putting on enough weight, so maybe she actually needs the extra meal.

Oh, and speaking of Marte, no less than two teeth popped up just before the weekend!

In other news, we are redecorating the top floor of the house. Luckily I was mentally present enough to remember to take a “before”-picture before we had actually disassembled the whole room. And equally clever taking an “after”-picture before we went and filled the room with all sorts of crap again:

(No, Tim, the one with the horrible colours is the “before” one. )

Bands that rock these days: Scar Symmetry, Trivium (thanks, Mel!), Slumber

Pi, our gerbil died today, peacefully curled up in her sleep, a few weeks shy of four years old. Her health had been declining steadily for a few weeks now, so we knew it had to happen sooner or later. I suppose the recent heat wave gave her the final nudge into peaceful retirement.

Anyway, she had lived a long and full gerbil life. She was mother to no less than nine children, and grandmother to god-knows-how-many. (Five of her children were given away to friends and a pet shop, and one of the ones we kept was lucky enough to get to provide genetic material to one of my sister’s females. So Pi’s family tree has got branches way into the unknown. Which is kind of cool to know.)

Thanks for sticking around, Pi. It’s been great knowing you!

Hmm, I should update my journal a bit more often. I always have a ton of things to say, but when I finally get the round tuit working, I can’t remember any of them.

Anyway, I have finally discovered Flickr. (You can also find my latest few entries in the sidebar. Click any to zoom.) In turn, this has sparked my enthusiasm for all things photography again (I have these waves of burning interests that come and go, you see), which I consider a very good thing. Accomplishments in this field includes buying a stepdown ring for my camera (Canon EOS 350D), so that I can use my 49mm Hoya macro kit with it, without having to hold the lenses in front of the motive. Also, I have finally gotten around to setting up my own (hence very amateurish, but it works) studio. A slightly outdated picture can be found here. Outdated, because I now have a much larger reflector screen available as well.

So, I have finally managed to persuade Linda to start blogging! (Note how shamelessly I take credit for something someone else did. Truth be told, it was her fellow scrappers that did it.)

Anyway, her site is to be found here. It’s in Norwegian, but such is life.

Whee, today is Linda’s birthday. Happy birthday, love. *smooch*

Interestingly, all the family members’ ages match up in some strange and beautiful ways today. Linda is 5² years old (25), and I am 2⁵ (32). Marius is 2.5 years old, and Marte is 0.25. Clearly, the numbers 2 and 5 will be tremendously meaningful to us in the near future. (Too bad we moved into house number 23. Although that’s interesting all on its own.)