After all, a little bikeride can be quite fun. That is if you don’t have to think about what part of the road to ride on to avoid the wind to sweep you off the road. On.Wheelz’ little bikeride turned out to become a "living hell" with windy, rainy, somewhat unwanted weather. All in all we got about 60 km of road behind us, but it felt like 150.

In the evening Jorunn came by after having been to a confirmation. That is, I feel she came by a bit late. I got to watch both Pulp Fiction AND Black Hawk Down + all the extras on both before she showed up 😛 Oh well. I had a good time and it was quite ok to just be there on the sofa watching movies after that bikeride.

Don’t know much about what will happen this weekend. I only know this — tomorrow On.Wheelz have a bikeride of some length. It will probably make me tired, very tired. The goal is to be fit for the great bikeride to Oslo in June. I wish we get there, all four of us. To beat yourself in strength, length and probably go beyond what you thought you could do feels good. I wish I can keep on doing that for a very long time.

Also in other news, I got a new friend: ‘feilaigo’. She’s a beauty in all her might. Complete with a bunch of the right stuff she makes me wonder how on earth I could stick for as long as I have done to her preceding ones. Pictures will be online as soon as I feel like it 🙂

Tonight we’re going to the cinemas. Jorunn wanted to see ‘Vanity Fair’ and I’ve heard it’s good so I’m looking forward to it. Enjoy your weekend people!

The interhuman relationships at a computerparty
Orignally published on VRP/SW 8th of June 2004. Republished 12th of May 2005 on Haul.

As a 20-something-yearold I sometimes find myself at a computer party with lots of teenagers and lots of computers. After more than ten years on the Internet, and with more than 20 computer and LANparties behind me I now feel it is time to put in words a theory I have been talking about for
the past two-three years. This article describe the theory and is in no way to be seen as sience, its just my very own thoughts.

The main idea behind these parties are to create cool stuff, teach eachother new things about computers, play games, and eventually, meet people you have chattered with online. These partyes are offen refered to as LANparties, and I will use these terms overlaping each other. The idea of any such event is to have fun and connect with people. Keep that thought.
At the beginning of a computerparty everyone and their dog is a bit shy, especialy if its their first showdown at such an event. The standard attendee at a computerparty in Norway these days seem to be a 15 year old male with a loose idea of that he is the grand champion of all first person shooting games (FPSG). He is not. He may to some level know how to fire a digital welldesigned replica of a M16 or even a Glock, but that is also the very limit of the FPSG-geeks, or maybe not. Some of these gamers also have a certain something towards listening to local rapgroups, metal and even trance. That being said, the attendees at a computerparty is in no way a homogenic group of people any longer. They come from all kinds of layers of the Internet community.
Now, since we have a loose description of the average attendee, we might put in some music-composers, some graphical artists and some plain IRC-nerds. These people mix well with each other, and offen find themself chatting nicely along on all kinds of topics. There is also another group that have grown among the partygoers the past 4 years: the young, somewhat attractive female attendees. Within their limited scope the female attendees fill a role mixed up from the old game played outside in the kindergarden: “mum and dad”. They nurse their FPSG-geeks around and try to make the unpleasant loss in the semifinals of Counter-Strike as easy as possible, offen with a little massage of the neck or a quiet holding of hands. Oh how cute they are. The mix of young female attendees that offen are there just for the mere chance of meeting mr. special and the FPSG-gamers are cute. I find myself leaning back behind my laptop and giggle. (Now you may argue that I myself have been to computerparties and been spotted chatting with females there. Sure I have, but thats diffrent. I am not a FPSG-gamer, and I don’t fit into the category of young attractive females either.)
The average computerparty lasts for 3 days. Some last longer, like The Gathering, with its 5 days. The first night at a computerparty is always special. When the lights in the roof go off the first evening you can usually hear clapping among the people present. After the lights go out there are offen some kind of scene-related event with a little multimedia show. It is during the period after this event and in the early stages of the first night that the computerparty turns into a major flirting arena. Boys and girls meet up after chatting with each other on IRC, on MSN and webforums. They chat more, person to person and some end up holding hands rather quickly. When the clock passes 2pm in the morning the first pairs have gone to rest. They do that, resting peacefuly knowing that their parents think they are at one of the most innocent places in the world – a computerparty. Reality is soon to pick
that up.
There is some unnoficial statistics out there that claims that during the now 11 years of The Gathering more than 70 babies have been born in total 9 months after the party ended. That gives a nice average of 7 babies each year. I do know some of the people who have had these babies, and I can tell you, computerparties are not a innocent place any more. They are a dating scene of grand scale. This clearly shows when you put 14-15 year old males and females in a mixed environment with no or little parental guidance. You quickly get groups/gangs of youngsters who walk around looking for people to flirt with. There have even been cases of people showing up at computerparties and paying the full price for the party without a computer. They were just there for the flirting. Amazing!

Now again, lets go back to the part with the FPSG-gamers. What is it with 15 year old nerdy boys who listens to local rapgroups and spitting tobacco after almost chocking to death by the huge bits they put in their mouths? I think that you have to look at the psychological effect of being at a closed community like a computerparty to get the grip on wh even the most nerdy FPSG-gamers and not-cute girls find someone to hook up with. By the end of day 2 most are settled in with their dates or have been planning dates for the evening. When I refer to “most” here I point to the maximum of the number of female single girls present as that number for the forseable future will be lower than the number of single boys present. The psychologial effect of putting these groups together is quite amazing. After some while the hormones start kicking in, and people who before may have seemed unattractive now seem like beauties from another world. This is because the biological clocks we humans are equiped with tell us that there is a race to survive here, the genes must be carried onto a new generation. Hence, the flirting and dating at a computerparty will be raw and uncut as both sexes strive to find their best possible partners to pass the genes on. Think about it for a moment. These kind of things happen in all kinds of closed-community environments and a computerparty is no exception.
So when you the next time bump into someone talking about how great the computerparty they were at during the weekend was, put on that soft smile and bare with them. They have been to Teenville and back again.
Orignally published on VRP/SW 8th of June 2004. Republished 12th of May 2005 on Haul.

-Anders Kringstad Hanssen, June 2004.

Wednesdays have always been both sides of the coin. On one side it’s already half through the week. On the other side it’s still three days to go. Today I finally got my new bike all ready for roll. After doing the usual stuff at Samfundet I got home at about 11 pm and added the missing bolts (mudflaps and two light bottle-handles). Tomorrow I’ll go for a spin when I’ve done my job(s) and been a good boy helping SPIST to move some hardware. During the hours at Samfundet I also discovered that there’s a niffy tool in Linux named ‘testdisk‘. It helped me reconstruct Jorunn’s bootsector for her Windows partition. Let’s just say that the upgrade from Ubuntu warty-release to hoary did not go just as I had it set to. Anyway; I think she’s happy it works now, and that she again can choose between the ‘I’m a lazy user’-OS and ‘I want to control my own computer’-OS 🙂

Have a good one!

Friday

Got to work at 08.00. All alone. Well, I had two people from software there too. They coded some project and did not talk much. Ofcourse I tried to do all the things I had put down to do this friday, but it soon dawned on me that this was trully one of the big "taking a day off" days. In fact, I only reached one of the people I were suppose to talk to, and he had his cellphone on by mistake because he had a day off.. On with the show I got to the Incubator-center to do my first day of Unix/Linux administrative tasks there. Having two jobs that close to each other doesn’t really bother me and I feel all great about doing some sysadmining again. Fairly easy going consulting business the first day. Signed a pretty standard work-contract and called it a day. Had food with Jorunn and watched Ocean’s 11. Took some much needed timeout and shut my phone off after it became clear that someone had by mistake gotten all the fibreoptic cables cut at Samfundet, hence I got a shitload of "boxDown"-messages from the SMS-service at NTNU. Yay..

Saturday
Got up at 10, only to find that my bike had been stolen during the night. Ofcourse it doesn’t cost all that much money so it was not insured. I had not locked it so I do not expect to get it back and not to find it either. Anyways.. I think that my satanic-music-loving neighbours upstairs may have a hand in this, but I’ll leave it to the past as I’m getting my new bike this week. Until then I’m loaning Andreas’ (falxx) bike. It’s a little heavier than the blackwood, but it’s an OK Merida-bike. After getting my anger about loosing the bike out on a railwaycompany-owned fence down by the road I walked with Jorunn to her house to do some cleaning. Spent some time cleaning up, then upgraded her laptop to Ubuntu hoary, only to find that I in some way must have been breaking the X-server setup as it failed to re-emerge. To make things even a bit more unfun for her I removed (by mistake) Windows from grub’s bootup menu. After figuring that I’d do the fixup on Sunday we left to hook up with Lars (N`Grath) and Jens Ådne (Quarryman) for taco at casa nerdehaven.

Taco have always made for a good dinner at casa nerdehaven, and with Magnus (meheeco), Christian (saddlark) and his girlfriend Line (no nick for her yet) also showing up it emerged to be one great evening. We ate and watched a movie. After a bunch of snacks, some crap talk about the navy, other nations and general politics etc we broke it all down around midnight.

Sunday
A day like this may bring you either up or down. Got up a bit late, at 12. Had 20 minutes to get showered and into my  clothes before my brother showed up to drive me and him over to my cousins Confirmation. The dinner was huge and I’m pretty sure I do not want to go near any BMI-measuring for the next few days.. At 17 we picked up Jorunn and she joined us for some coffee and cake. She looked absolutely wonderful in her Bunad from her hometown of Røros. With sparkling eyes and a clean cut smile she had me on a short leash I’d guess. After having some cake and some still water we left with one of my Uncles. Jorunn walked with me down to Andreas (falxx) were she got to see his and Heidi’s home before I left on the bike I loadned from Andreas. A quick change of clothes later I biked down to the Incubator-centre to do some sysadmining before going to Samfundet to reboot the main diskserver. When I got to Samfundet Tormod (tormodg) and Steinar (Sesse) had done the whole job. Ofcourse I’m not upset that they did it, but I had somewhat been looking forward to actually do some sysadmining myself as it’s fun to do such things from time to time. I guess there’ll be more time for that later.

It’s now past 11 pm and I’m a bit tired. I think I’ll go to bed, all alone and hope that the sun will still shine when I get up at 6.30. Have a good one people. I’m back on track 🙂

When I came to work this morning (yes, some of us work while it’s extended weekend for most slow-goers) I opened SSH as usual and logged in at home to plug in to my five chat clients. Fine. On my GNU/Linux system I have a program named ‘fortune’ that pops up a funny/interesting/harassing/lame quote/fact every time I open a new terminal. Also this time. Todays fortune (as it’s known) were a list of famous actors and their real names. I must say I find it rather amusing what people rebrand themself as when they want to become famous. The list is read "Actor name" – "Real name". Check it out:

Boris Karloff – William Henry Pratt
Cary Grant – Archibald Leach
Edward G. Robinson – Emmanual Goldenburg
Gene Wilder – Gerald Silberman
John Wayne – Marion Morrison
Kirk Douglas – Issur Danielovitch
Richard Burton – Richard Jenkins Jr.
Roy Rogers – Leonard Slye
Woody Allen – Allen Stewart Konigsberg

Now. If I was named Konigsberg (Kongsberg is a city in Norway) I may have thought about changing my name myself, as one of my friends (Anders (Hardy)) were born and raised there. For the rest I think that even named hard to spell should be kept, if nothing else – for the sake of keeping the history about your family.

I know there is a lot of kids out there in Norway, Sweden and Denmark named Hansen and Hanssen, but I’ll think about that when I’m going to have one myself. Until then I’m me.

The new webpage.
You may have heard, you may not have. I’m on the move — from the 23rd of August 2005 my new home will be at the lower parts of the docks in Trondheim — Dyre Halses road 15, flat A4-A. To help me towards the date of moving I’ve decided that it was time for a change. Since I no longer would live in a house with a garden the domain had to be changed. The new domain have been fitted to have a bunch of symbolic meanings:

nerdehavnen – norwegian spelling of ‘geek harbour’.
nerdhaven – english spelling of ‘geek haven’.

To me the whole idea is that I’ll now live at ‘Nedre Elvehavn’ a.k.a. ‘Lower Riverharbour’. In geek writing the norwegian name translates to ‘Lower Geek Harbour’ or ‘Lower Geek Haven’, hence the new domain. The thematic things about the webpage will probably change over time. What I hope to keep a simplistic not too overdetailed style that both I myself and visitors will enjoy.

The new weblog.
So. After a month or so in silence, here is my new thingie. It’s not written by me, it’s not built with any fancy tools. It’s just some niffy package I found on the net and downloaded. The whole concept is to make sure it does what it should and allow me to what I like — publishing small things like this writing about the weblog. The new weblog have gotten a few of the old entried imported to make sure it all doesnt get lost back at the old pages. Over time I’ll probably sit down and republish most of the now hidden material from the former page. Categories have been introduced to allow me to publish things were they belong and for the visitor to select what they want to read. Not everyone is deeply interested in computerparties or may have a sore toe or five when it comes to some other subject.

Enjoy, I hope.

-Anders

Writing this from my post at Info:Desk at TG 2005 as the attendees are getting ready to move their gear out of the vikingship. It’s been five great days. Lot’s of friends, lots of talk, lots of work. It’s been fun. Very fun. I feel I’ve done my share and can look forward to sleeping some when we get on the bus back home to Trondheim.

In one week the lights are all out. 5000 geeks will have put up their computers and made their seats cosy, homely and ready for five days of fun in geek heaven. The Gathering 2005: We Are The Robots, held in The Vikingship at Hamar, Norway will be one of the largest computerparties in the world as usual. This year I will be there as a crew, serving as a member of the Info:Desk crew. My boss have told me that she’s looking forward to sending me on obscene missions to the far end of the Vikingship just to be mean. Oh well, I’ll just take it as one five day long workout.

What’s your plans for Easter 2005?

I have the privilege of having a pair of black metal neighbours. They live one floor above me, and enjoy what they probably describe as "music" or even "art". The two black metalers rarely are seen outside the house and their windows are all covered with light-stopping material.

Early this morning, (way too early in my sleepy eyes) they wake up above me. Everyones entitled to wake up when they want to, but I’d very much like to see the thinking process behind going from waking up at 0730 to doing a very loud black metal guitar/drums-rehearsal at 0745 in the morning. At 0750 they obviously had finished their rehearsal this morning and left, slamming the door so loud that who ever had not been awaken in the house would be. What a fine couple. I just love people who care about their surroundings. By the way – The dictionary reference for ‘Black metal’ reads: A subgenre of heavy metal music that uses screamed Satanic lyrics, fast guitar playing and drumming, and heavily distorted music with a focus on satanic imagery and occult themes

The next time I feel like it I’m doing a hardtrance-drum’n bass StepMania rehearsal just by my self without my headset at 0630 AM. Looking forward to that. Next monday at my place anyone?