Today’s stage had a lot of mixed terrain. I wonder if the people who planned this route (the north sea cycle route) had a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve. Sometimes it seems like they send you sightseeing, with signs pointing all the way through a city past every museum. Then the route follows a busy road with no bicycle track, only to go into a forest some time later, where you fight your way up and down the hills on gravel paths or worse.

Today I’ve had a little bit of all that, especially the gravel roads. Those slow you down tremendously, and the only thing I’m really happy about is that I didn’t go for slick tires after all. It would have been no fun on the gravel, and even less fun in the hills yesterday.

A night in a hotel definitely did me good, though. I started early and refreshed, and initially had a lot of energy and made good time. Then came first a long ferry trip, then gravel, then some really nasty hills, and at about 40 km in Valle, I was getting quite exhausted. Still, I made it to Krager?, just before the rain set in again, and in time to watch the exciting finale of today’s Tour stage. Poor Kurt-Asle, he really deserved to win this for all the work he did.

I’ve had a really good day, weather-wise. Physically, I’m not too happy with the last 20 km, and to be honest, I am getting slightly bored. I feel I’ve packed wrong, I should have left the camping gear at home and packed less clothes, washing shirts every few days instead. So my options for tomorrow are: Either go the 65 km to Arendal, the next train stop from here, and go back to Oslo from there. Or continue, if I get the spirit back again. Or take the train from Krager? tomorrow morning, if the weather is still as bad as it is right now. I don’t think another day of cycling in the rain will raise my spirits much. All in all, I’ve got 210 km on this trip (68 today), and today’s average was only 16-17 km/h, with top speed of 50.4, down some hill with good visibility and no wind.

Today is day one of my trip along the norwegian coast. I have reached Moss after 3.5 hours cycling time, a little over 65 km. I’ll let that be the
distance for the first day, since I am woefully untrained and have no idea
what my limits are. Clearly, I am not Tour de France material.

The geek in me has prepared for this trip not by excercising, but by
investing in gadgets. The cycling computer is great fun. Some numbers for
today: 66.67 km trip length, 47.3 km/h maximum speed. I tried keeping my
average speed between 20 and 21 km/h, there is a decaying average built
into this thing. By the end I noticed it was getting harder to stay in that
window, I’ll take that as a sign to call it a day in the future.

Thanks to Frank, I am also completely connected. My palm is email,
webbrowser and blogging tool thanks to the old GPRS phone I have. More
gadgets. Setting all this up last night seemed more important than packing,
but I realize that a little more thought could have gone into packing, and
a little less into trying to talk IMAP over SSL from the beach. Which is
where I am now, actually. The weather forecast lied about the rain, again.

I’m spending almost no time packing, but a lot of time setting up my
various devices so I can blog, read email or surf teh web from the road.

I’ll be bicycling around the coast of southern Norway. No internet
except through the mobile phone.

Bloody typical – Downtown and West Oslo is available in High Resolution, but just where I live the resolution goes down.

The summer is here. After a day in the sun with friends and beers, I’m as red as a lobster. I never learn.

I think I’m spending today in the shade. With aloe vera and the remote.

The days are way too short, and the nights are even shorter.

I want to port Anarchy Online to DirectX9. It’s built with DX7, which means I can’t use PIX, and I get really jealous each time I see Morten play with that. I also want to improve the background streaming code for AO even more (I’ve done some changes for the 16.0 patch, but there’s so much left to do). And I want to work more on the NPC scripting language.

Of all the things I’ve done this year, the few small NPC logic changes have been by far the most rewarding. Seeing Colin and Yngvild pick up the ball I pass them and run with it, stretching the limits of what we’ve previously done with NPCs in ways I didn’t even imagine is making me feel really proud. I have at least two radical ideas to increase the potential there – but there’s just no time!

I bought yet another brand of climbing shoes (my fifth), Scarpa. Leif-Henning wears them, and according to Yvonne they are “very agressive”. It’s funny how everybody has their own marketing speak, and uses it without thinking anything of it. I’m sure I do the same with games – casual, FPS, immersive, …

Of course now it’s been raining for almost a week.

According to a recent proofpoint survey, 36% of all U.S. companies emply staff whose job it is to monitor the email of their employees. Yes, that means snooping through outgoing mail to see if you’re using your email for evil. A further 26.5% say that they will employ such staff in the future.

There are more scary numbers in that survey. It’s another item in a long list of things that make me feel I can never work in that country. I’ve got to stay in Europe, where snooping on email is illegal (well, in some countries at least – not in Denmark, apparently).

Finally.

I found that I remember all the movements, but the body isn’t in the same shape as it used to be. Morten was having similar trouble, although he still did slightly better, I think. We did Halvveis (5) and Zappfes smørbrød (4-) to warm up, and later Hit og dit (6), and Ingen heksekunst (6+) to see how much we remembered. It was the best day of this week.

Now my other pair of shoes has holes, too; I need to go shopping. Preferably before the I go again (which could be with Mona on saturday, although the forecast now says it won’t).

I tried getting my climbing shoes repaired today, they need re-soling. There’s a shoemaker in Oslo that fixes climbing shoes, and I called him on monday. He has given up the shop, I was told, and is now working in Sandvika – a 20 minute train ride outside of town. So I called the shoemaker in Sandvika, told them what I needed, and they told me what office hours were. Fine, I thought. This is going to be easy.

Today I was there. The shoemaker shop exists, but the particular shoemaker who fixes climbing shoes doesn’t work there – yet. He bought the shop, and he’ll get the keys in july, they told me. Why in bog’s name didn’t they tell me that over the phone the day before? I specifically told them I wanted climbing shoes re-soled, something you need equipment for that they didn’t have. What was the point in making me waste my time and money on that trip? I really don’t get it.

So now I have pair of shoes that isn’t getting fixed until july. Luckily, they were an impulse buy I did when my old Boreal shoes were still pretty good, so I’ve got those. The feel a little wide, the toes have lost all their pointiness and I don’t like the rubber – basically, the Red Chili shoes are excellent stuff, and anything else just isn’t the same.

The good news is that there might be a chance for climbing tomorrow. The forecast is optimistic, and promises sunshine with some clouds and 15°C. It’s about time we get a day without rain.

The game continues to progress slowly, but it’s progressing. Today I finished the work on rivers and simple fortification (walls, gates and loopholes), and added them to the movement rules. I had to move the movement rules (haha) to another place in the code, the original design wasn’t good enough to share the code between some different places, but it’s still easy enough to make changes in the code while it’s so little.

Another piece of advice: Keep a log of your ideas. You can do that in a textfile, but I use an outliner (old-fashioned software to organize your notes hierarchically) that I keep on my palm to write down ideas. I have a lot of ideas which I cannot immediately use, and I am getting forgetful, so I like to write them down. Before going to sleep, or on the bus in the morning, I like to go over those notes and think about them, which can lead to implementation ideas that I add, and I refine that list of notes constantly. When a feature feels like I can implement it, I sit down and try it out. Next up: probably more unit types, like the phalanx.