• Det står ingenting på denne lappen – There is nothing on this ticket
• Overbevist – Satisfied
• Vellykket – Successful
• Du er nødt til å… – You really have to…
• Ta en blund – Take a nap
• Kan jeg få en sånn – May I have one of those/these? (Whilst pointing at something)
• Kjempeflaks – Really lucky
• Kollisjonsputer – Airbags
• Jeg må tidlig opp – I have to be up early
• Litt skuffa – A bit disappointed
• Vidunderlig – Wonderful
• Jeg er lei av… – I’m sick of…
• Jeg vil du skal… – I would like you to…
• Åpenbart – Obviously
• Ødelegge – Destroy
• Takk og lov! – Thank goodness!

*vis words that I like:

• Sannsynligvis – Probably
  
• Tilfeldigvis – Accidentally
• Forhåpentligvis – Hopefully
• Heldigvis – Luckily

* P.s. When I write på engelsk I am borrowing a format that I really like, used by Kari in her Norwegian blog. I urge you to subscribe to that one too!

In fact, I applied for a job for the Norwegian “Russ service” web service (russ.no) which would have been pretty cool, as then I would have been russ@russ.no

Anyway, the reason I started writing this was because of the Russ is not short for Russell blog post which I’ve just read, do take a look and think of how it is for me and my name during this time of celebration and chaos.

What’s it all about?

It wasn’t so long ago (well, a little over a year) that I fully embraced Linux as an operating system, at least on my work PC. I remember one of the main reasons I was sticking with Windows was the relatively poor support for the market leading games.

A few months ago I was introduced to Hedgewars, in my opinion the best open source “Worms style” game out there – and I can honestly say that nowadays I am playing it much more than any of my “high end” games! I was a massive fan of the Worms series of games a few years ago, I’m pretty sure I haven’t come across addictive multi-player gameplay so good. Here are some of the reasons:

• It’s free. Yup, it costs zero. Thus it’s not that difficult to get friends to join in, even the stingy ones.
• It works on lots of platforms (Win, *nix, Mac), and doesn’t need a top end pc to run. It just works.
• It’s bloody good fun, and the game mechanics are extremely close to the original Worms game, and when things aren’t quite right…
• … they are fixed. The game is actively developing at a rapid pace – bugs are fixed fast and the team behind it are constantly adding maps, weapons and game features.
• It’s an open source project – one of the reasons it made it onto this blog.  Nobody is trying to profit from this game, like all open source projects this one just thrives on participation. Play, contribute, distribute, discuss – whatever you do it keeps the spirit of  “free software” alive.

Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough

Download the game and come and find us! I’m Rooster, commonly playing with a team called “monkeys”. Also look out for zegenie and his Star Wars and our suicidal Icelandic friend Bjori with his team of “special” hedgehogs. We tend to have a game around lunch time (we have work to do as well you know!) and sometimes later in the day if we’re working late. Pop into the Hedgewars channel on Freenode (IRC) and give us a shout if you fancy it.

The site has no content, other than a lovely picture of Elefina, and as far as I know it’s only linked from this blog, although I only added that link a couple of days ago.

Already the site has had hits from Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur), Brazil (Rio de Janeiro), the US (Mountain View, California) and Germany (Bonn).

Google analytics tells me that one person came as a click from this site, and three from Google after a search for “Elephpants” – which kinda makes sense.

If you are responsible for any of those clicks, please do let me know – as I am intrigued as to what makes people “click”.

Next year I turn 30, and with that I look back at my 20s and wonder about all the promises, hopes and goals I had set myself. What were they? Did I achieve any of them? Are they too late to salvage?

All in all, I’m in a good place now – despite the Irritible Bowel Syndrome which has set new eating challenges for me, and cooking challenges for my better half, I am fit and healthy. I am in a well paid job that I enjoy, I live in a beautiful country with new and exciting adventures, I have embraced new sports (volleyball, skiing, snowboarding) and my technical development is on a rapid upward slope.

However, and here’s the thing… What happened to all the dreams about climbing E10s, winning orienteering competitions, completing marathons in under 3 hours, being as fit and strong as I can be? The truth is, I slacked off. My strongest climbing years were over 5 years ago – at the time I thought I was on the up, but really I was hitting the peak (excuse the pun).  My best running was over 2 years ago – again, I thought it was the start of my climb to triathlons, marathons, ultra-marathons, iron man! In reality it was the best I could do without much effort – and my lack of effort since has of course meant that if anything I’ve become worse.

The year of the runner

It’s time to “catch up”.

After 6 years of trying, I have my guaranteed place for the Flora London Marathon, and if I’m training for that, why not a few more? So here’s the list so far:

• 15th March – London (Silverstone) half marathon. The perfect time to run a half marathon in the lead up to the full marathon.
• 9th – 13th April - Jan Kjellström International Orienteering Festival. I missed this last year, only two weeks before London so I’ll have to be careful not to overdo it. (maybe just run the short courses)
• 26th April – The Flora London Marathon. This is the big one, what it is all about. I Have been waiting for this for years!
• 16th May – The Gothenberg half marathon
• 20th June – The Midnight Sun marathon (Tromsø, way up North in Norway)
• 24th October – Blodslitet (Literally “blood exhaustion” – or maybe for fun “bloody knackered!”)

I’ll come right out now and say that I’m hoping for good results – I don’t just want to get round these races, I would like to be hitting 1:45 or less for the half marathons and 3:40 for the full ones – although with the crowds and atmosphere at the FLM I think I’ll be happy with anything under 4:00. Silverstone will be the marker – it will decide my pace for the races to come. Depending how the training goes in the next couple of months, I hope these targets get even lower.

So if you see a very tall, thin shape pounding the streets of Oslo in the near future wearing some ridiculous streamlined, dayglo running gear – that will hopefully be me. If you don’t, please feel free to kick me, spam me, throw things at me and remind me that if I don’t train, I’m a loser.

We approached along the road, as described by page 53, looking for a locked car park 150m from our path up the steep hill. It was ok to park along side this car park, so we were told… except it doesn’t exist any more – obliterated in what we now realise was probably the new apartment building built into the side of the hill.

After driving up and down the road, between the two solid way-points on the map that we knew we should be between, we settled on a small car park with what looked suspiciously like climbers’ cars. Next to these cars, was a very small, steep path which wound up the hillside. Perfect. About an hour later, and a few litres of sweat, we headed back to the car.

Luckily for us, it was a beautiful day, 6pm in Oslo at this time of year can be pretty warm, and it didn’t disappoint us today. We drove up to the top car park at Grefsenkollen, and after little help from some grumpy truckers, and avoiding the couple who looked like they were doing something they shouldn’t be, we (just Torkjel and I this time) headed into the forest for another look, this time attacking from above.

More sweat later, after zig-zagging across the hill, we eventually hit the lower road again. Still no climbing in sight! After a short jog along the road, we found what looked like a promising path up into the broccoli, so we went for it, only to end up at a solid platform with several discarded “engangsgrill” disposible barbequeues – we had found the viewpoint. Now according to our trusty guidebook, the crag was a little “up and to the left” of the viewpoint, but that turned out to be a lie… So we fetched the girls, parked up at the top car park again and led them to the viewpoint, where we enjoyed our own barbequeue and soaked up the sun and the view, and I got to play a bit with my camera.

During our feast, we spotted a guy who looked like he knew his way around, and Torkjel approached him to ask the ultimate question “dude, where the hell have you hidden the rocks?” (well, I wasn’t there but I imagine that’s what he said…) and he said “they are just down there, to the right“. So Torkjel took off on a little recce, and sure enough he came back with a big grin on his face, we had found the crag, and it had only taken us about 2 hours!

All in all it was a great evening. We got a good workout in the forest – I love orienteering so running through trees was no chore, we had a barbequeue with a stunning view of Oslo, and we climbed 3 good routes, all before 10pm.

• Beinbrudd - Bolted, Russ led Cecilie second, Torkjel third
• Svaet I – Traditional protection, Russ led Torkjel second, Cec third
• Svaet II – Toproped central line variant

More pictures are available in the gallery at gallery.walkandclimb.co.uk and via Facebook for those of you looky enough to be friends Cecilie has also blogged a bit about this here.

The crag can be easily seen on gulesider.no – refer to the picture below. The yellow x is the viewpoint, the blue line is the crag, and the red circle is the approximate location of the hole in the fence that you have to crawl under to gain access to the crag! It’s easy to spot from the road if you are driving past – it’s the only part of the huge wire fence you could imagine crawling under, and has obvious erosion where many a climber has trodden before you.

I didn’t bother to take GPS coordinates while I was there, but my guesses from Google Earth, based on the Gulesider arial photo are as follows:

Viewpoint:
59°57’23.94″N  10°48’0.04″E
Crag:
59°57’22.03″N  10°47’57.34″E
Hole in the fence:
59°57’24.44″N  10°47’54.06″E

If anyone wants to correct me on those, please feel free! I’ll be sure to verify them myself the next time we are there – but if you do spend 2 hours trying to find the crag, I hope you have as much fun as we did in the process!

Another point to note – which I’ll expand on next time we visit with a bit more time, is that a lot of the routes seem to be bolted now with new Petzl Limbolts. The guide book indicates that all the routes are trad… I’ll take a better look next time, and maybe save someone the trouble of taking along a lot of gear for their first visit!

Russ.

I just read this article http://www.slate.com/id/2190872 and it was almost like I’d written it myself, so if you want a better understanding of me, and many millions of people like me, take a read… It’s pretty spot on

• Monday – cycle to work, then to norskkurs? Hmm, maybe I’ll have to think about that second part, since I don’t really want to be sat in a classroom smelling like I’ve just run a marathon…
• Tuesday – Volleyball
• Wednesday – same as Monday
• Thursday – cycle to work, climb in evening
• Friday – rest
• Weekend – Hoping for some climbing/orienteering or at least get out for a run in the forest

My “diet” has been going ok – finding more and more things to keep me full, but generally just relying on endless amounts of fruit, rice cakes and smoothies to keep me going during the work day! Still don’t feel 100% but cutting out the dairy has certainly helped.

After a couple of weeks without lactose I’m starting to feel a bit better, my stomach has settled a bit and more importantly I haven’t feel so tired and malnourished for the last few days. As a vegetarian for almost 20 years I’m used to being picky about what I eat, but avoiding lactose (chocolate!!) has been very tough.

Things still aren’t perfect, I won’t go into the details, but at least my general outlook has improved and now I feel like I can start training a bit. It’s probably too late for the Gothenberg Half marathon which I have entered, that’s on the 17th May so doesn’t really give me enough preparation time. Last year I only gave myself about 2 weeks of training before doing the race, but I had been much more active in general back then so it didn’t go too badly.

The orienteering season has just started, and the weather is looking better and better so there will be opportunities to climb soon too – so I need to get my ass into gear, as my fitness level has taken a steep dive since I came to Norway.

I hope that by recording my training plans and progress online, it will motivate me and give me realistic targets to chase. Also anybody that wants to join me will be more than welcome.

Since this is the first plan – it will include tomorrow (Sunday) but future plans will be Mon – Sun as I don’t want to get accused of being one of those “week starts on Sunday” types

Plan for week 5th May 2008

• Sun – Fixed orienteering course in Østmarka (details in this pdf) or if the weather is bad – climbing
• Tue – Cycle to work, volleyball training
• Wed – Cycle to work, cycle from work to norskkurs in city centre, probably train home
• More to come… (Mo has friends visiting so not sure about the weekend)

Other than some Java training at university, and the odd borrowed third-party classes (notably phpclasses.org) my PHP background up to this point was purely based on procedural style programming. I’d worked on some big projects, some I’m proud of and some I really want to go back to and rewrite from scratch, a sentence I’m sure you will hear from many “code monkeys”.

Symfony for me, was my first breach into the much hyped object oriented style PHP5 – and a whole new way of thinking. In the following articles, I hope to share with you the experiences I have had, with PHP5, Symfony and any other related technologies that I stumble across.

One of the things I have realised in the last few weeks, is that when searching for answers to problems that are not well documented, the most common results are in the form of developer blogs. Some of these have been invaluable to me and I’d like to credit them here, I’d also like this to become one of those blogs – since some of the answers I have sought have not been so easily forthcoming.