It’s a tradition at Funcom that we have a team in the annual Holmenkollen relay race. We’re not expecting to win it – it’s hard enough to find fifteen nerds that want to run at all, you can’t expect us to run fast. But this year we finished in 1:14:02 hours, a record for the company and 4:22 minutes faster than last year. It was a pretty crazy day, and I’m glad everything worked out so beautiful in the end. I think it’s safe to say that everyone had a blast!
Alke asked me to fill out this one. Okay, here we go then:
1. Which film have you seen more than ten times?
I haven’t seen any film that often. I’ve watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Leon a lot, though.
2. Which film have you seen more than once in a cinema?
The Sixth Sense, once in Brasil and once in Germany.
3. Name an actor that would make it more likely for you to watch a movie
Kermit the Frog
4. Name an actor that would make it less likely for you to watch a movie
Keanu Reeves
5. A film you regularly quote from
Withnail & I: “You should never mix your drinks”
6. A film-musical where you know the lyrics to all the songs
No way.
7. Music from a film that you have sung along to
Zoltan Spirandelli, Der Hahn ist tot
8. A film that everyone should have seen
The Straight Story is a beautiful film. But I have also recommended Das Leben der anderen to everyone who wanted to listen (and a few who didn’t).
9. A film that you own
According to the movie industry, I cannot own any of their films, just pay for them. As a consequence, I don’t own a DVD or VHS player. So the only valid answer to this one is probably Steal this movie
10. Name an actor who did not start his or her career in film and surprised you with his acting?
Somehow I have a feeling the interviewer is fishing for Patrick Stewart here. But I’ll say Humphrey Bogart. Although I really don’t know enough about actors’ past lives to answer this.
11. Have you ever seen a film at a drive-in?
We don’t have those here.
12. Ever made out in a cinema?
Yes.
13. A film that you’ve always wanted to see, but never gotten around to?
Many. Mongoland springs to mind.
14. Have you ever left the cinema because a film was terrible?
No. But I should have done it more often.
15. A film that made you cry
I’m a very emotional movie-goer, laughing out the loudest and crying first of all the viewers. Just to give you an idea, I cried in King Kong.
16. Popcorn?
Yuck.
17. How often do you go to the movies?
About once a month, but that depends on the schedules of my friends, since I don’t watch movies alone. I’d go more often if they did. I catch as much as I can of the film festivals in Oslo.
18. What is the last film you watched in a cinema?
It’s actually been a while. Rocky Balboa. And yes, I cried in that one, too.
19. Favourite Genre?
Despite the answer to the last question, I like intelligent movies like Memento.
20. What was the first movie you saw in a cinema?
The Jungle Book. What percentage of my own and later generationn have started with a Disney film, I wonder?
21. What film would you rather not have seen?
The Proposition was a monumental waste of time.
22. What was the strangest film that you liked?
Me and You and Everyone We Know. I got free tickets for this, otherwise I probably wouldn’t have watched it, and I would have missed out on a great film.
23. What was the most frightening film you have ever watched?
I watched Alien late at night when I was 13 or 14 years old, and that was pretty scary. Not scared enough though, we watched it back-to-back with part two which turned out to be lame and not frightening at all.
24. What was the funniest film you’ve ever seen?
That’s hard to quantify. More recently, I laughed a lot in Over the Hedge.
My little sister showed off her desktop because a contact of hers said “show me your desktop and I tell you who you are”. Not sure there’s a lot you can see from mine. These are my two PCs at work:
This is gorilla, the machine that I develop The Longest Journey on, and a low-end testing machine for other stuff and as an X server for debugging the Anarchy Online server. It was also the machine I used for most of my work on Dreamfall.
This is orangutan, a dual-core AMD running XP64. I use it to develop the Anarchy Online client on.
At home, vishnu is from a time when I didn’t name all my PCs after near-extinct species. It’s an AMD 2400+, the PC that I develop Eressea on and my main workhorse. With a GeForce 3, it doesn’t play many games.
My laptop, rhino, is a Pentium 150, and the only one of them running Linux. It’s right beside my bed and makes it easier to stay in bed all day on weekends.
And now I’m curious to hear what those desktops (not the PCs) say about me.
Out in the Norwegian mountains, far from the internetz, I found this little gem: JIMM is ICQ for mobile phones, with rather low hardware requirements, so even my older Ericsson k700 can handle it. And suddenlyI was not so far from the internet anymore.
Until the battery went flat. Got some good snowboarding done, too.
A list of things I have done in my attempt to become Norwegian.
That’s just off the top of my head, the list is woefully incomplete. And even after all that, I still feel I have a long way to go. My list of things that I haven’t done is probably as long. And the list of things I’m not even aware of that are part of every Norwegian’s common culture is even longer. It’s hard to become truly integrated.
The battle in Partôr during week 510 provides an excellent opportunity to do some profiling on Eressea. The whole turn took at least twice as long as usual, and gprof blames a single function for it. I knew this function was bad. The problem is, it really needs to be called this much.
I looked really hard at the usage pattern for the function this morning, and I think I can build a small cache with some information and reuse it for subsequent calls. Anyone dying in the battle invalidates the cache, but still, I figure I might be able to save some 75% of the actual work. Man, I’ve looked at this one at least twice in the past and never seen this!
I was at an India-themed costume party last weekend. Marcus took some pictures of me before I left. Costume was a success. Thanks for the idea and the blue paint, Tommy!
Der Spiegel ist schon lange immer weniger lesbar. Diese Woche haben sie ein Norwegen-Quiz, bei dem mit vor lauter Un- bzw. Halbwissen doch schlecht wird. Mal ein paar der dümmeren Schnitzer:
Knapp 50 norwegische Kronen sollte man [für einen Hot Dog und eine Cola] schon einplanen, damit ist der Snack immer noch billiger als ein Bier in einer Kneipe.
Falsch. Ein Hotdog mit allem Zubehör plus Cola kostet an der Tankstelle 36 Kronen (4,45 Euro). Das ist übrigens genausoviel, wie fünf Minuten vom Osloer Bahnhof in unserem Lieblingsrestaurant ein halber Liter Bier kostet.
Mitglieder [des norwegischen Wandervereins] erhalten günstigere Übernachtungspreise in den 430 bewirtschafteten Hütten und können sich Schlüssel zu unbewirtschafteten Hütten ausleihen.
Fast richtig, aber irreführend. Der DNT (Den Norske Turistforening) ist kein Wanderverein, sondern ein Tourismusverband. Mitglied muss man nicht sein, um in einer der Hütten zu übernachten, obwohl die Preise für Mitglieder in der Tat günstiger sind. Das lohnt sich aber erst ab einer größeren Anzahl von Übernachtungen wirklich.
“Bokmål” heißt “Büchersprache” und ist heute das offizielle Schrift-Norwegisch, das von den meisten Einwohnern des Landes geschrieben wird.
Bokmål ist mit 85% die verbreitetere der beiden norwegischen Schriftsprachen, aber nicht das offizielle Schrift-Norwegisch, sondern nur ein offizielles Schrift-Norwegisch. Das ist Nynorsk nämlich auch. Insgesamt ist die norwegische Sprache aber eher ein abendfüllendes Thema.
Ansonsten: Das Thomas Dybdahl hier angesagt ist, ist nur noch bedingt richtig, sein letztes Album “Science” hat nur noch mittelmäßige Kritiken gekriegt. Besser, weil aktueller und wirklich im Radio gespielt wäre hier vielleicht ein Verweis auf Marit Larsen gewesen.
Generell ist das ganze total nutzlos. Wer die Antworten kannte, bekommt den Eindruck, daß hier aus einem billigen Marco Polo Reiseführer stümperhaft kopiert wurde. Wer hofft, etwas über Norwegen zu lernen, der bekommt ein paar Fetzen Halbwissens mit, die ihn im Urlaub dümmer aussehen lassen, als er es evtl. ist. Vielleicht weiß er aber ja wenigstens, dass es nicht in Schweden liegt.
ABA Games (aka Kenta Cho) makes some really cool old-skool games. Great music, fast action and seriously, what’s not to like about these graphics? 
I had almost forgotten how cool these games are. I used to play Tumiki Fighters a lot while waiting for my compiler to finish, but not since I last changed projects. Now last night lanwin talked to me on IRC and asked me about the D Programming Language and it triggered the memory, so I downloaded that and a couple of other games. Looks like Kenta Cho has been productive, and there’s a lot more goodness on his site than I remember. Torus Trooper looked great, but they all have that Zen-like scrolling shooter feeling with lots of bullets everywhere.
Link for a list of the games I’m talking about.
