This morning, at the ungodly hour of 05:32, our daughter Marte was born. Things went very smoothly (says me, who wasn’t the one who was in labour all night, but hey), and all is well with mother and baby girl. She weighed in at a pretty average 3622 grams, and measured 49 cm. All in all, a perfect little princess.
Over the years we (the #botfu residents) have had quite a few entertaining encounters with the channel’s pet insanity, a markov bot called Boop. And now I have finally decided that it was time to skim through some logs and pick out some examples of her statistically generated gibberish. This is hardly an exhaustive list, but these are the ones I came across that work relatively well even when taken out of context. Have fun.
So, it seems we have bought ourselves a new home. How’s that for a reason to hooray?
It ended up costing a bit more than we were prepared to pay, but it was a very nice house. According to our contact in the bank, things should work out nicely, though. Actually, after a bit of consolidation and parameter tweaking, we will come out with slightly smaller down payments than before.
Moving was a necessity at one point, since we’re expecting another family member soon, and we were running out of adjacent bedrooms in our current home. (We’re not too comfortable with letting Marius sleep two floors below us just yet. And I’m using that room as an office now, anyhow.)
So, there you have it. We’re moving to greener (more roomy) pastures.
And there was much rejoicing.
So, we finally got our acts together and went for it; we bought ourselves a new digital camera; a
Canon EOS 350D digital SLR. Time for my trusty, old Kodak DC290Zoom to step aside after a job very well done. Seriously, the DC290’s optics and picture quality can rival many brand new compact cameras, but alas, 2.1 megapixels is a bit on the low side these days.
Anyway, the 350D seems really nice so far. I haven’t played around with all the buttons, knobs and dingdongs yet, as there are gazillions of options, but there are also some handy presets for typical tasks, such as portrait photography (which aims to blur the background, among other things), landscape shots, night shots, etc. All in all, it has something for both beginners and more experienced wannabe photographers. I can’t wait to start exploring. 
So I gave my web site another make-over after all.
I haven’t totally decided on this one yet, either, but in my not-so-humble onion, it beats the all-white, slightly hospital-ish look of the last one.
And to all those who actually believed me when
I said that the previous one would probably be the last, my deepest apologies. Not.
First and foremost, Linda and myself went for an ultrasonic check-up today. (For those who still haven’t heard the news, we’re having another baby.) All is well, and the little creature seemed to be quite comfortable kicking around in there. Also, we semi-spontaneously decided that we wanted to know the gender beforehand this time (we didn’t with Marius), so we asked, the nurse looked around a bit, and lo and behold, it’s a girl! Estimated time of arrival; February 5th, 2006.
In less uplifting news, I was randomly walking around in Google Maps today, when I came across a disturbing little view of the globe;
Click here, and note the bright area just around the marker, and make particularly good note of the sheer scale of it. Then zoom in, step by step, until you see what’s going on. People suck, that’s what’s going on. Bah.
Tweek, my old, trusty, caffeine-addicted alter ego, shamelessly stolen from South Park, is gone. This coincides nicely with my page not being the first hit when searching for “tweek” on Google Images anymore, it seems. (I haven’t counted recently, but I saw several dozen hits (or as of lately, since I moved the image away, misses) per day for a rather lengthy period of time.)
Anyway, back to the point. Tweek wasn’t really me any more. While he usually stumbles around in a perpetual caffeine-induced bad trip, I have almost quit drinking coffee altogether. I’m down to one single cup each day, or morning, rather, to get me started. Sometimes it takes two, but one is usually sufficient. OK, sometimes I drink more, but that’s typically when we go visit someone, and they serve coffee.
Anyway, back to the point. Again. Damn it, I always digress. I’m supposed to write about one thing, but end up writing about another. Just like this. Damn.
Allright, I have other things to do now, so I’ll just drop him here. This is the new me. Say hi, Vidar.
Holy smokety poo!
Swallow the Sun, the most smashalicious death-doom metal act to hit the surface of the planet in long time has a new album coming up; Ghosts of Loss, scheduled for release August 24th (in Finland - the rest of us will have to wait until October. Drat.)
Anyway, should you happen to be into this particular branch of music, their debut album, The Morning Never Came, is the safest procurement you can make.
So I finally bit the dust and got myself a new phone. Goodbye, monophonic world of cameraless outdatedness!
Anyway, I’m very happy with this phone. It suits my geekiness very nicely. First, it has a lot of useless features that people like me tend to like, such as an FM radio, an MP3 player, a camera (capable of both stills and movie clips), a themable desktop (whee), bluetooth, IRDA, the works. Tres chiq. And I recently discovered that the “layout” (theme) files are actually tar files with a bunch of PNG and JPEG files, all tied together with an XML description file. Even cuter. And it supports VCards, and Multisync for contact / calendar event syncronization, which Evolution apparently also supports. That last bit is untested for now, though. Man, I love open standards.
(Getting gnome-bluetooth up and running went less than smoothly, though, but it finally came around(ish), despite GTK screaming some profanities during the device scan. But at least I can send and receive files, so I guess I can’t complain.)
Yes, it’s yet another rewrite of my home page. I’m hoping this will be one of the last ones, though. I’m fairly happy with how it looks so far (yes, I’m a simplicicist), although the menu on the right can use some love. I haven’t converted any of the sub-pages yet either, so there might be some breakage here and there while I’m at it.