I just got an email from the chief instructor in my skydiving club, confirming that I am signed up for an instructor rating course next week.
I will soon get an OLPC XO.
In October I am going to RIPE57 in Dubai.

Happiness spread all over the autumn, I think.

For a number of reasons I am quite happy today.

And also extremely sleepy. No idea why, we almost fell asleep before 19:30 this afternoon. So I better go to bed, I guess.

The upgrade didn't go very well. The "4 hours left" bar remained unchanged for an hour, then I had to kill the locale-gen process to make it continue. This repeated a couple of times, and it wasn't finished until after 16 today. The status bar still showed 2-3 hours left most of the day.

Then I had to try dpkg --configure -a, but locale-gen just hung every time. After trying to kill several processes, including five rm -r /usr/lib/locale, I decided to reboot the server since I didn't have time to do more debugging. Unfortunately it didn't come up properly (it was hanging somewhere behind the Ubuntu splash screen), so I had to drag my boss downstairs into the basement to open the doors for me since my card doesn't work down there and I am opposed to getting access there since I don't really need it (but do they care about other people in my situation?). After some fiddling with console cables I got a monitor hooked up, rebooted the server in recovery mode and ran dpkg --configure -a - which now worked, although it took a while to generate all the locales. No problems at all, so I used the opportunity to kill a bunch of unnecessary services before continuing. I also remember my root password now.

After the new boot the server came up again just fine. Now even more services are killed, and I think only what I really need is running. Well, I always say that, but...

The only problem now is that fsck told me that next boot would be the boot of complete file system checks. I am pretty sure I won't remember that when I am sitting in my office after the next reboot, waiting eagerly for the ping replies....

There is an Italian in my kitchen, preparing dinner for us. We'll be home in an hour and a half, and dinner will be ready on the table.

Or at least I hope so. Hopefully it's not on the floor, with the Italian crying in a corner. And hopefully the questions about where to find things will not be too complicated. Neither of us know much "kitchen English", so it could be exciting.

I am upgrading my server today. First from Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10, then from 7.10 to 8.04. The first step took about 4 hours, the next should take about 2-3 hours - unfortunately it was past 16 when I started it, so hopefully it will wait for me until tomorrow... So far I have seen a few charset problems in my screen, and hopefully the backup attempts this night will either fail or succeed. Not something in between.

Note to self: check state of bckup before rebooting tomorrow, to avoid rebooting in the middle of it.

Edit: The upgrade is finally finished.

The weekend was great. On Saturday we went to my nephew's 1 year day (happy birthday, John Erik!!) - he didn't quite get the candle blowing thing, but he could eat cake :-)

On Sunday I went to Oppdal for skydiving. I got nice three jumps with smooth landings, and my ankle is good enough for jumping. Yay!

Today it was back to work again. Now I have a headache, hopefully I am not about to get a cold. We're having a visitor from Italy here, plus the builders, and it's just stressing to be at home at the same time as them.

The Norwegian Royal Guard have made a king penguin in Edinburgh Zoo a knight. The ceremony took place today, and the penguin Nils Olav is now ranked Colonel in Chief.

Naima is apparently doing well. She and the other penguins are still further north enjoying warmer climate. Last month news brought stories about hundreds of baby penguins found dead on Brazilian beaches, and Cape Coast of South Africa the same has happened to more than 80 African penguins. The latter event happened after international legislation made it illegal to dump waste closer than 135 nautic miles from the shore. Common for both events is that the penguins swam through oil dumped from ships - not accidentally spilled, but deliberately dumped. They are not baby penguins either - there are no penguin colonies with babies outside Brazil in July - but probably young penguins who are either weak or haven't learned to avoid such dangers.

Luckily some are saved - both stories report zoos and research institutions cleaning them - but a paper written 20 years ago (Penguins oiled in Argentina, 1987 (non-free article, but at least a reference)), Dr Dee Boersma estimated that a total of 30,000 Magellanic penguins die along the coast of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina every year as a result of oil pollution. The situation is somehow improved now, and with a population of 3 mill Magellanic penguins migrating along the South American coast twice every year, only 1% of them die due to waste (which doesn't mean 99% survive, though!).

The last news I'll report here is hardly news - a 40 million years old penguin fossile has been found in Peru. The species is called Icadyptes salasi and was 1,5 m (5 ft) tall - that's about to my ears. This pictures shows its beak, compared to the one of a King penguin.

I am looking for an addon (or option) in Thunderbird that will let me mark an email for follow-up on a certain day and time (I know you can do that in Evolution), and then alerts me when it's due.

The alert must be within Thunderbird, not within a calendar - I already have too many calendars, and they are not integrated into my email client or its interface. The alert should also be clear and obvious, and not depending on me scrolling to the right part of my mailbox (right now I have 25 messages in my inbox, and since I use Classic view with message pane I don't see all of them at once). Preferably I should also get alerts about messages in all mailbox, specifically the sent-mail folder. I often want to follow up messages I haven't received a reply to.

I am a conservative user, so I am not very willing to change behaviour - thus no Evolution, no calendar, no task lists, no change in message views.

Does such a plugin or addon exists for Thunderbird? Tips on how to achieve it in other clients are also appreciated, but the more I will have to change, the less willing am I to actually make the changes. So if Evolution can alert me in a proper way, I could be willing to spend time and make it work for me, but if all it can do is to show far up in the message list that I should have followed it up, I am not.

The solution has to work in Linux (Ubuntu 8.04).

It's not only the Olympic Games about now. In Maubeuge, France the World Parachuting Championship has been taking place. Norway has four teams there. Right now it looks like Skywalkers, the national freefly team, will get silver medal in the competition. Congratulations! The other teams are also doing well, but just not quite enough for medals.

The results are under "Live" and "Scores". Click on the little icon next to the points in the round for videos of each jump.

My favourite team is Slovakia. The winners in FS (USA) got 25.7 points in average per jump, the Slovaks 4. I love them. Finally a World Championship movie I can relate to, can compare myself to the (lack of) presision, to lousy exits and tumbling all the way down. Round 4 was exceptional, though the others are also in a similar league. You make me happy, guys :-D

For those who are still not fed up after watching all the World Championship videos, here are the videos from this year's Go Vertical at Voss. I wasn't there myself, but it doesn't exactly look boring.

I ended up with a very short day at work today. The plan was to get up early, leave early and be at work around 8. Of course this cunning plan didn't quite turn out like this - I didn't get up when the alarm went off, Anders also wanted to drive with me, we had to wait for the builder, then we had to go somewhere to pay for building stuff, and finally I was at work before 8:45. Not that bad, but when leaving at 14 every minute counts :-)

After a very short day I left a bit after 14. pamoreno was arriving with a bus around 14:10, and since I neither knew exactly which bus she'd be on (she would travel from our house and straight to work, and it was hard to find the exact times through the town for this particular vehicle) nor did she have a mobile it was important to be there on time.

To make the story short: of course I wasn't :-P I was a few minutes late, and there was no Paula at the bus stop, and she didn't come with the next bus either. I thought she might have walked towards my building, but it's a different pedestrian road so I wouldn't meet her. So I drove back, and asked the reception if they had seen her. Nope, she hadn't, but she would call me if a confused Chilean should appear. (Yay for nice reception staff who knows "everyone" in the building - she even remembered me from when I worked there between 2002 and 2004.)

New hunt for Paula. This time she was in the bus stop! But it's hard to get from the bus stop to the parking lot I was at, so I pointed and tried to indicate that I would drive to her and that she should remain there.

Which she didn't :-P
So once more no Paula at the bus stop. But at least I had seen her, so after a little detour to turn around I managed to actually catch her at the bus stop.

We went to the airport, and sat down with a late lunch after security. When I was younger, they were quite strict about boarding passes when going through security - I am not sure non-travellers could come inside, except if they were accompagning kids. But nowadays there are no restrictions, as long as you obey the security rules. Luckily it's quite simple to leave all the explosives and knives and guns in the car when you are only going for a coffee inside :) I didn't even need my handcream or lip gloss!

After almost two hours it was time to say goodbye. But we know we will meet again, in a way it's always been like that, at least as long as we are young and healthy. We know we can afford going to the other side of the world to see each other later, too, or we can meet somewhere between. A trip to a warm island around equator wouldn't be too bad, actually.

I had planned to go to a meeting in the beer club tonight, but my ankle is aching so I took two Ibux and stayed home in stead. I can have beer here, too, and it's not as far to walk down to the cellar as it is to walk from the bus stop to the pub, which is on the other side of the city centre compared to our bus.

One thing I did was pretty nasty. I was in the garden and noticed one of the plants I bought a week ago was quite miserable. A very quick inspection showed loads of slugs on it! I didn't inspect it to find out what kind of creatures they were, I just went to the supermarket to get salt and a new bucket. I tried to pick them and drown them in the bucket (with salt and some water at the bottom - don't look), but gave up as they were rather small and very many. I decided the plant was dead anyway, and put all of it into the bucket, pouring a kilo of salt over it and filled the bucket with water. I have no idea whether it's enough salt to kill them, but I plan to just pour all of it into the bulky container with building waste we'll empty soon (I think - or did they fix it today?? I think the car could park further in now...). Nasty.

pamoreno arrived on Friday evening, so I have spent most of the weekend with her. After sleeping in a bit (but not very long) on Saturday we went downtown. The vague plan was to taste some food at a local food festival, but we never really got that far. My head was hurting, so we aimed for coffee and sat down in the town square to enjoy it. A British guy with an Asus Eee PC sat down at the other end of the bench, and I had to tell him about my envy for his PC and we ended up chatting for an hour. Very nice :) He and his partner lived in Netherlands, and were cycling from Kristiansand to Trondheim and back again. When they started praising the local cycle roads in Trondheim I had to ask him if he was serious - a guy living in Netherlands praising our cycle roads? It turned out he wasn't really comparing them to Netherlands, but more to the cycle route along the coast. Almost none of the route has cycle roads, most of it is along regular roads with little traffic and not all drivers were very understanding about cylists.

Afterwards we headed for Magne's birthday party, which started at 14 in the afternoon (we arrived fashionably late at 15:30). Quite early, so I wasn't sure what to expect. What we got was loads of delicious food, wine and drinks, cakes and snacks. And when the jet-lagged Paula and I left at 22 the party was still thriving. According toe h irc logs Magne went to bed around 4:30 - a 14 hour long birthday party is not bad!

Today we went to the Museum of Natural History and Archaeology to look at an exhibition about homosexuality among animals. Quite interesting, although it wasn't very big. I hope they make a web presentation later, it shouldn't be very hard actually. We also had a look at a polar exhibition as well as at the biological exhibitions they have. The horrible octopus I was always scared by when I visited the museum as a kid was still there!

Afterwards I did some garden work (some weeding a day make the garden o-key, or something), before we headed for my mum at Lundamo. She never Paula when she lived here 13 years ago, so it was about time!

Now we have had dinner and are enjoying some local or homemade beers. I have just introduced the combination of stout and chocolate, and at least both of them are disappearing. Cheers!

pamoreno has arrived! I picked her up at the airport and we have enjoyed a bottle of wine and pizza and girly chat for a while now. Yay!

Except that work was stressing, with lots of interrupts and questions. Luckily a few clueful users as well ;-) After work I vacumed and cleaned the house (windows are quite messy), did some laundry and folded about five machines of laundry before driving to pick up Paula, and also visited my grandma. Puh.