The previous entry taken into account, it is slightly astounding that I've been hired as an audio-visual assistent for the NOTUR 2005 grid computing conference in Trondheim Monday/Tuesday next week. What does a AV-assistent do, you ask? Basically I make sure people get to run their presentations, I'm responsible for the technical side of things. All the more puzzling, the person who recommended me for the job is my boss who spent an hour helping me get my presentation underway last week. :D

Last but not least, I decided to enter the poster competition (didn't even know it was a competition at first) for best student poster. So I spent the better part of my weekend working on my poster and I'm quite satisfied with the outcome (if you find spelling errors I'll flame you :devil: ). Here it is in png format and pdf format if you wanna check it out (it's huge btw, A0 dimensions).

Ps. Luca Dirisio kicks major butt!!! See my audioscrobbler profile to verify I'm hooked on that album at the moment.

I was supposed to hold a presentation today on the big project I've been working on the past 5 months. This is 2005 so obviously no overhead, it's strictly laptop+projector. I did my presentation in Impress, part of OpenOffice. This morning I came to work an hour and a half ahead of time to prep and check that the technical setup is functional. Well little time to prep as I had to wrestle with the feckin projector for an hour. I tried all kinds of resolutions, settings in the projector's menu and nothing helped. All the while it would display just a part of my screen and refuse to do anything else. After about 15 minutes I had my boss over to look at it and he couldn't figure anything out either. After an hour he went to get his laptop to see if there was any difference while I suddenly had the impulse idea to try Windows. Well what do you know, as I booted up Windows and reset the resolution, bam, there it was, whole screen displayed and no more nonsense. Now won't you explain to me how a VGA signal differs be it from a Linux
os or Windows? It's the same friggin signal!!! :wth::wallbang: Evil
evil stuff! :mad:

I don't have an office suite in Windows because I use it strictly to play Championship Manager ;) But I exported the presentation to flash format and ran the presentation out of Firefox. If you wanna see how lame it turned out, here's the flash movie. If you want to steal my uber cool slide design, here's the powerpoint version. Also, how sad that the figures look so crap, they're originally vector graphics so they should be spotless but idiot Powerpoint/Impress (because they're both just as bad) doesn't handle vector graphics so I had to rasterize them and then they were automatically rescaled to fit the presentation. :wallbang: See for yourself and compare, these are the originals scaled to 600 pixel width.

Right so something is over, you know there's very little chance you will pick it up. You quit or the other person quit and that's how it is, the post-relationship situation. What do you do with "left overs"? When I look in my address book I see some left overs. Sometimes it's almost like I don't want to look because I don't want to see a name that used to mean something. Have you ever been there? What do you do when you encounter such a "break up", do you remove all traces so that you don't remind yourself of it? Or do you think maybe it'll come in handy sometime to have that address, it would be hasty to get rid of it now?

I now have a couple of those entries I'm considering throwing out but I haven't yet. Does that mean something? Probably that I'm slow to deal with these things, that it takes a long time before I can say I'm not thinking about it anymore. Is that a bad thing? Should I be quicker to forget?

To change the subject completely, I was looking at some photography sites the other day and decided it was time the world would see my holiday snapshots, so I registered an account at the mainstream deviantart and the more upscale caedes.

Have you heard people say this? It comes up in arguments from time to time, as a statement meant to galvanize the argument for one side. "They had the guy's confession on tape AND they had his finger prints all over the apartment. YOU do the math". No, YOU do the math. Math is hard and it takes a lot of work, it's not fun either. Why should I do your math, do it yourself ffs!

First things first. The Norwegian music industry has been incredibly lame for a very very long time. Only now is it starting to pick up. But there is a change happening when listening to the morning radio I hear a Norwegian song that I like just about every week. Hell, it used to be once in 2-3 years but now it's actually happening from time to time.

So right now I'm trying Ravi & Dj Løv - E-Ore. I have no clue what to make of that title btw. Anyhow, it just dawned on me why music in Norwegian doesn't work. Flat out, categorically rejected. Most Norwegian artists don't bother with that and go English, go mainstream. Some choose to "embrace their roots" or whatever shit excuse they have. :rolleyes: In any case, you can't sing in Norwegian, it doesn't fit. And I just realized why I will never like any song sung in Norwegian (or Polish for that matter). Because there's no way I can sing along with it. It sounds so corny. Music has to be something special, it's not just the same daily life stuff. English has been granted that status and is a legitimate language for song. But Norwegian lyrics don't sound good, they sound lame. And granted that this lyric by Ravi & Dj Løv is not particularly intellectual, it still applies widely. It has to be English or some language adequate for song.

All the same, there has come a shift, my eyes are now open to Norwegian music, who would have thought. :eek: