Haugesund isn’t a particularly large city, and hence is often deprived of many of the benefits of big city life. The lack of good concerts has long been a pet irk of mine. But things have apparently changed! Earlier this week, Bryan Adams came to town - and while he’s not anywhere near my cup of tea, nobody can argue that he’s not a big name. Yesterday, however, glam-, hair- and horror metal veterans W.A.S.P. dropped by, which is right up my alley!

And boy, do they still know their stuff! (I use the term “they” loosely, since the main song-writer and vocalist, Blackie Lawless, is the only one remaining of the original line-up, but the rest of the band did a great job as well.) What really sold the gig for me was the play list. Almost nothing but golden oldies, from the early 90s and back to the very beginning, which is exactly when I discovered the band. Except for one track, which was brand new, it was like a live “best of” compilation. Perfect!

The band also put the scaremongering pietists to shame and delivered nothing but a rock solid concert, almost devoid of special effects. I say almost, because the microphone stand was a sight to behold! (The local newspaper claimed that seeing the stand was worth the entry fee alone.) The band’s show in the earlier days included liberal amounts of skulls and fake blood, but that was how you provoked back then. An image like that would be nothing but cheesy these days, I suppose. (On a related note, I wish the black metal bands would lose the ridiculous corpse paint. Yes, yes, I know they’re supposed to look “dead” and all, but we all know they really aren’t!)

Conclusion: Top score from me. Minus one small point for not playing a longer set. 70 minutes (or so) was a bit too short for my tastes. Oh well.

PS! One things that certainly should not go unmentioned is their support band for the Norwegian gigs, Triosphere. Thunderous and powerful heavy metal, just the way your deity of choice intended it to be. (I guess this is a good time to admit that I tend to be a sucker for metal bands fronted by women. But only the good ones! (Good bands, that is. Ahum.)) Anyway, their debut album is out in October. Do check it out. I know I will!

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

Old news for most of whom it concerns, but I’d like to air some thoughts about it nonetheless.

My impression so far - again, as a hacker, not an end user: I like it, and I like it alot. The refreshed look-and-feel is one thing, as well as the integrated IM and Google Talk, but to me the underlying system bits are more interesting.

First, though, the device feels much more responsive. Both when navigating around on the device itself as well as when using the web browser. Good job to whomever did that.

And the new Application Manager is very nice, and having a proper package repository system up and running is invaluable. I’m very pleased they decided to drop the /var/lib/install model from the earlier versions. Also, being able to use “apt” to cleanly remove parts of the stock system, e.g. games and RSS-reader (which I’m sure are nice, but I don’t really use them) is very handy.

As for the “beta” part of the release name, I haven’t found any showstopping bugs or flaws yet, so things are really looking promising. Great work, team. Looking forward to the final release!

One small disappointment, though. It was a bit sad to see binary compatibility with ARMedslack packages go (it was incredibly handy to just drop a few precompiled binaries into /home/user/bin and off you go), but I guess the switch was done in the name of the greater good.

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.

Well, sort of. I have moved the journal and a couple of the static pages have been added as Wordpress pages, but quite a bit of fiddling remains. That’ll have to wait, though. All in all, the move went surprisingly well.

One thing, though. Don’t try to embed javascript in a Wordpress page. Ugh.

As mentioned earlier, I recently set up a blog for Linda, using Wordpress 2.0.2. Very slick, I must say. So slick that I am very tempted to migrate my site over to it as well.

Being the geek that I am, the fact that it was very easy to customize and tweak was a big selling point for me. I added a simple gallery-like function to Linda’s blog in a matter of minutes, simply by adding some include statements to one of her theme’s php-files.

So, while you all are waiting for me to move over, sit back and enjoy the slightly improved (IMHO) look of my site while I summon up some motivation. (I was just playing with my stylesheet to see what I should aim for with my Wordpress theme.)

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.)

Allrighty then. Just about every single bit of our lives have now been thoroughly wrapped and boxed. In a measly hour we will be the proud owners (debtors) of two houses, at a combined estimated value of 2.84 million NOK.

It’s slightly disconcerting to know that the ADSL won’t be hooked up for another couple of days, but I’m sure we’ll get by somehow. (I’m kidding, of course. The withdrawals will slowly suck the life out of us all! Aaah, I can feel it starting already!)