I am frequently asked what grades I climb. The answer to that is fairly simple, I climb those grades that are challenging, and sometimes I climb some easier ones because the routes are fun. This, however does not satisfy most people, because they want to compare themselves. This is not only patently silly in my opinon, the answer is also not a simple one.

How do you define what you can climb? I’ve met some very different schools of thought here. Some people say that the best grade you can climb counts. no matter if you fall on the way, as long as you continue and do all the moves without somebody physically dragging you up, then that’s fair. These people usually climb for the technical challenge, and they are probably less strong han the average climber, but it’s a fair definition. Not a very common one, though.

5.14 is no different from 5.7 – the holds are smaller and the route steeper, but you do exactly the same thing! (Peter Croft)

Some people say it shouldn’t matter whether you toprope or lead, because as long as you’re not hanging in the rope, it really doesn’t make any difference, except psychologically, and psychology isn’t what climbing is about. i can very much identify with that, because I like to climb for the physical and intellectual challenge, not for the fear of falling 4 meters. I get enough endorphines out of climbing, I don’t need the adrenaline from fear.

Most people will say that in order to count a grade, you should be able to lead it. Their argument is probably that this is how you’d climb “for real”, or on a multi-pitch route, and the fear of falling is more real than on toprope.

And lastly, some people say that it doesn’t count if you use any kind of safety. Probably because, like the previous group, they say it’s not real enough if the fear of falling isn’t there. My personal opinion is that they are stupid, but the whole debate is stupid in the first place, because it’s not about being better than anybody else. It’s about being the best you can be, and more importantly, about enjoying yourself and having a good time.

“Why gamble with money when you can gamble with your life?” a partner once said to me in Vegas. (Chiloe, in rec.climbing)

Oh, and the final issue is the grading system. I grade myself according to the norwegian scale, which sounds like UIAA grades, but isn’t. My best (toproped) routes were 7, which i about an 8- according to UIAA. But it probably isn’t. I haven’t done enough of climbing outside Norway to be able to say. But at the moment, after six months of injury, I can climb a few sixes because I’m really weak. And yes, I know that this probably mean that in comparison to you, I suck.

Since I always have to go look for it, and it’s kind of hard to google, here’s a link to the grade comparison chart I use when I have to. Next time I can look it up here.

I’m leaving for England in a few hours (middle of the night) to attend André’s and Julie’s wedding. The whole thing has become pretty hectic, with E3 starting this weekend and everybody covered in work up to their ears.

60 hours in total – just enough time for a wedding, food, duty free alcohol shopping and a movie. We’re back on the 16th at midnight – just in time for 17th of May, the Norwegian national holiday.

I think I’m going to pass on the parade this year.

The Holmenkollen relay results are in. We finished 189th out of 240 teams in our group. In total, we used 76:05 minutes, which is almost 2 minutes more than last year, when we ran the distance in 74:10 minutes. I sucked, but at least I wasn’t the only one, or even the worst, on our team. chris, however, was 8th fastest in our group for his leg, and we’re grateful to have him.

In total, there were over 2000 teams of 15 runners each. Which really fills up the city, you see runners everywhere. It’s a wonderful sight.

And the saddest thing is seeing an exhausted runner come into the changing area, to find that his teammate has overslept. This happens more often than one might think, and the runners are close to tears when they go on to do a second leg, even thought they are completely knackered already.

I went climbing on sunday. The first time in half a year. I am not fully recovered, but I have to start again. I lost an entire grade. I feel like crying when I think of the walls I was able to scale last summer.

Today is the day of the anual Holmenkollstafetten relay run. And I’l finally be able to participate. In the past, E3 has always gotten in the way – I signed up last year and in the year of the AO launch, and both times I had to cancel ecause there was so much to do, and even the weekends were not holy. Well, I’m glad to say I don’t work like that anymore.

My stage is Louises gate – Wolffsgate, just 1.1 km, but I haven’t practiced at all and no idea how fast I should be running. This is of course not a good idea, but I’m hoping I an just run with the pack, since it’s only the second stage in the race and the field will still be packed.

If Christian comes in first, I’ll have to ask for directions.

It looks like my trip last year was just in time. For the first time in 11.000 years, there is no snow on Kilimanjaro. Why do some countries still pretend global warming does not exist and the Kyoto agreement should not be signed?

I finally got a new screen. Until friday, I was working on a Sony 17″ monitor, and it couldn’t do more than 85Hz in 1024×768. That is the resolution I’ve been running for almost 10 years now. I bought that screen in late ’95, when 17 inches were a lot of screen space (athough you only got 16.2 visible).

These days you can probably buy a 17″ notebook, and I’ve had 21″ CRTs at work for years. And when I got a 19″ LCD some months ago, it was just a question of time when I would have something like it at home. And here it is. Through work, I got a 20% discount on a DELL 2005FPW LCD screen, 20.1″ with a 1680×1050 widescreen resolution. I wasn’t sure if I’d like widescreen, but so far, it’s been real nice.

I turn the screen at work 90°, which lets me have two source files underneath each other, or one with very long functions. With this screen, rotating it looks a bit awkward, but I can easily have two pages of code next to each other, which is just as good. Here’s how my desktop looks. Next thing I’m going to do is hook it up to the gamecube and finish Eternal Darkness in widescreen, the way it was meant to be played.

Well, I guess they have these in other places, too. I’ve just never seen one before. It’s a separate trash container for syringes, which makes sure that once the syringe is in, no playing children or really desparate people can get it out again.

Like I said, it’s the first time I see one of them. I was doing a cache near the Oslo public library a few weeks ago when I found it. Took the picture mostly for April’s benefit.

Tonight, Windows greets me with a blue screen saying that something’s wrong with C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\NTDLL.DLL. Well, that’s just perfect. I guess that’s from installing Nvidia’s new drivers yesterday.

So I boot into Linux and google for that message, and I find a lot of confused people that don’t know what to do eiher, and a Microsoft KB article saying “Do a recovery, and if that fails, reinstall”. But my CD-ROM drive is still dead, so that can’t be the solution. Instead, I mount the windows partition and find there are copies of that file that have the same date and size, but they are different (md5sum is my friend). I take one from the DLLCACHE folder, bopy it over the one that Windows hated, reboot – and voila! Windows boots again.

Why did none of the articles I found on Google say that it’s as easy as replacing that file with the cached version? I mean, that’s a lot more convenient than going through that whole Recovery Console stuff.