Tollef Fog Heen's blog

For the first time this summer, I'd had a few days of vacation. Not the semi-vacation-looking-a-bit-like-it stuff at GUADEC, but a real vacation. The bus trip from Oslo to Arendal took a couple of hours and was fairly uneventful, except for the fact that both the air conditioning unit in the bus was broken and the heater was on. When the sun was shining outside, it got fairly hot. Lars and Magni met me downtown and we had to get some ice cream and something to drink while we waited for Anders to show up. A chocolate shop was visited and we bought some delicious strawberries dipped in white chocolate. Yummy! Went to the cabin where we ate and sat around discussing until it was time to go to bed. A very nice evening. I also got the chance to taste some of the beer from "The naked island", a local brewery which has recently gotten nation-wide coverage in the press due to both them unsettling the near-monopoly of Ringnes, and (more important) their excellent beer.

Thursday, it was rainy and a bit cold. We decided to head to the nearby town, Tvedestrand, which has declared itself a "book town". This comes down to their wide selection of used book shops. Magni found a few books, so did Anders. I wasn't really looking for anything, and so found nothing which interested me enough to buy. We ate out in Arendal at a place resembling "Ni muser" in Trondheim -- it's some kind of a art cafe. Afterwards, we saw Harry Potter and the Prisoner from Azkaban. It came about as expected, quite ok, but not exactly the books, and a bit different due to the constraints put on a film.

Friday, I was originally scheduled for leaving for Lillesand and the Lindeberg family, but I was offered to stay the night, meet Gro(ooo) and be driven to Lillesand the next day. We didn't do so much, I read quite a bit of "The Eyre Affair", a science fiction novel. Interesting book. Gro (and her dog, Demi) came in the evening and we went out to a local bar which was rumored to have more of the good beer. I got to taste one of the ones I by then hadn't, leaving only a Triple, two Christmas beers and a Weissbier.

Magni and Anders drove me to Lillesand on Saturday, and after a while, I managed to meet up with Tor-Egil, we ate a bit of ice-cream before heading off to Kalvøen. It was an excellent party lasting for a long time and it was very nice talking to everybody again.

Sunday morning was horrible as I was tired from last night and I had barely gotten out of bed before I had to head off to catch a bus to Larvik and Karianne. The neighbour was boating into Lillesand town center anyway, so I hitchhiked with him, then caught a taxi from there to the bus stop (as it didn't leave from the town center, and this being a Sunday, no other buses were going). As I got onto the bus, I discovered it didn't really go to Larvik, so I had to get Karianne to pick me up a bit farther. It was very nice seeing her again, after her full week in London.

Monday has been a lazy day, mostly just lying about in the sun and bathing a bit in the pool. We saw "King Arthur" in the evening, after a good dinner. Excellent weather. I realize I've been missing Karianne a lot and even though she's heading off for Molde tomorrow, I'm glad we've had a few days together.

Mondays are usually terrible days. You wake up too early and get drowsy into work and don't get anything done because it's all wrong. Today wasn't like that -- I slept until I woke by myself, which is usually a good start. Then, I took the tram to work, which is even better, as I read a bit on the way to work. Good, nice, thing.

Got a bit of work done today, though not too much.. Administrative overhead. :/

Got home and helped move the construction platform used for painting the house from the east to the north side of the house. Fun, though a bit of heavy work, which I mostly enjoyed. Got back in and fixed up a bug fix for the chicken-on-amd64 problem which blocked swig. Nice, and kudos to the upstream maintainer.

Ended up sitting about with my father, Silje and Vigdis for a few hours, chatting about a lot of things, which was nice. Also some serious discussions, though not too many. Missing Karianne, but I got an SMS from her today, she still seems to be doing well.

Karianne left on early Friday morning; her trip seems to have gone well -- I have got a few text messages from her, and she talked to me on IRC while I was on my way back home.

I've spent too much of the weekend in front of a computer screen -- some work, a lot of IRC-ing, some flames on debian-devel. Nothing much really, in some ways it has been a boring weekend, yet, it's been nice to be able to do exactly the things I wanted.

I was at the movies with Anne and Rune on Friday, we saw a terrible Swedish film from 1970. It was supposed to be a classic, but it was far too slow-moving and predictable to be any fun. Seeing Anne and Rune was really pleasant, I haven't talked to either of them for ages. (That's a bit of a lie, as I have talked to Rune at least a couple of times in Trondheim, but we don't meet too often).

Saturday, I finished needling (is that the term?) my coat for the LARP in August. It's looking really good, and I look forward to playing. It will be fun, fun, fun.

On Sunday, I was kinda bored of being at home, so I headed to work. Got a bunch of work done, including at least installing and beginning to configure the new firewall. Also, I replaced the fan in the PSU (from a 34dBA one to a 15dBA one) and lowered the speed of my CPU fan a little. I really need to make that fan controller I have been talking about for too long. Amund has promised to help me with it now, so I am having a tiny hope that we'll get something done before I leave for Arendal on Wednesday, though we'll see.

Some time ago, I had my laptop repaired and the motherboard replaced. After a while, I started to wonder where the sound went. Today, I was bored of not having some kinds of sounds, so I popped the laptop case open and discovered that the technician who had replaced the motherboard had forgotten to replace the cable for the loudspeakers. (Though, to call them loudspeakers is quite an exaggeration. They make sounds, period, nothing more.)

After replacing the cable and closing the case, the laptop was a happy beast again, now with sounds coming out of it. It's annoying that those who fixed it didn't do the job properly, they probably have a check-out list of some kind which the forgot to follow, or they were just being lazy.

(as per the 20 Questions to a Better Personality test)

Wackiness: 22/100
Rationality: 62/100
Constructiveness: 60/100
Leadership: 44/100

You are an SRCF--Sober Rational Constructive Follower. This makes you a White House staffer. You are a tremendous asset to any employer, cool under pressure, productive, and a great communicator. You feel the need to right wrongs, take up slack, mediate disputes and keep the peace. This comes from a secret fear that business can't go on without you--or worse, that it can.

If you have a weakness, it is your inability to say "no." While your peers respect you, they find it difficult to resist taking advantage of your positive attitude and eagerness to take on work. You depend on a good manager to keep you from sinking under the weight and burning out.

Doesn't sound too wrong.

Most of the day is spent at work, but I manage to do some other stuff as well. I've been seeing Karianne in the hospital each evening, and she's getting better again now. We've decided to not go to Hemsedal this weekend, we can just do that later, sometime.

Steinar (sesse) and I were supposed to go DDR-ing today, but we managed to hit the one day of the year they closed early, so we ended up going down to the waterfront and eat ice cream and chat instead. Very nice. Biked home afterwards, visiting Karianne on the way -- hopes are she will be out tomorrow.

Yesterday and today has mostly been chaotic. Lots of small things to be taken care of, including more registrar work. Most of that should now be up-to-date, and I hope to keep it that way. Ate shrimps by the dockside today, which was nice.

It was nice getting back after GUADEC, seeing Karianne again. I had missed her a lot; we're not used to not being together. Thursday was was her birthday, so I got her some roses, a bottle of sparkling wine and a card (since her present is a bit heavy to carry around, so she'll just get it when we come to Trondheim). Went to Bodil's were we had a good time and watched "Love Actually". I've seen it once before and loved it a lot then. It's a very sweet and cozy film.

On Friday, Bodil and Eirik threw a small party. It had rained a lot during the day, so we didn't barbecue (as we had planned to), but had a good time nonetheless. Håkon came by and we talked a bit -- he's an interesting person to talk to.

Saturday morning, Karianne woke me up. She had severe pains in her stomach so we ended up taking a cab to the hospital. After a bit of waiting and such, she got diagnosed with gallstones. Icky, icky, icky. She got a bit more medication, which then caused her to relax a bit more and at some point the pain went mostly away and we took a taxi back to Bodil's. Slept a bit more.

We were supposed to eat lunch with my mother, but I had to cancel that. Then I called my father and got him to pick us up, which, after a short discussion, he agreed to. Got home, placed Karianne in the sofa while I helped erect a construction tower (stillas).

Sunday, we slept most of the day, which was really, really nice. Karianne was still a bit sick, which was not so nice. Monday, I was home for a few hours between work and moving the servers. Also, crashed into bed Tuesday morning at about 0800 and slept until 1230.

I visited Karianne in the evening, she was mostly fine, in a bit of pain but not really bad. More bored, it seemed. Went home and ate prawns with my father, Vigdis and Stein. Nice.

We were going to move all the servers from our old ISP to a new one, and in order to prepare a bit for all eventualities, we moved a single server on Thursday. It was a good experience, and we discovered stuff like the fact that the network was broken. Or rather, it wasn't up yet. One of the people from the network provider was there and we chatted a bit before deciding on we would leave the server in the rack and he'd call me if he had any problems getting the network up and running. It was up sometime on Friday, so that was nice.

Friday, we ran about finding missing pieces we needed for the move. In addition, I got some more registrar work done. An SSL certificate was ordered but it got hung up somewhere in Thawte's system.

Monday, we ran even more about, this time actually finding the parts we needed. The servers were shut down at 2200, we finished getting them out of the rack and into the trunk of Amund's car a little after 2400. Getting the servers into the new rack didn't take too much time, but configuring everything correctly took a while. We had some issues with Apache's virtual hosts and DNS, but it got worked out. I also managed to misconfigure the mail server (or rather, its DNS entry) somewhat, so the route ended up somewhere in Italy. We finished at about 0730, and even though everything wasn't triple checked, we were so tired that going home was the best option.

As I came into work at 1300 today, Tuesday, I got a pile of stuff thrown onto me: the mail server didn't work properly, a few hosts were misconfigured and so on. Fixed this and sent in the two change requests to NORID so we ended up with three DNS servers operational again.

Had some food with Anders and Amund at Peppes before fixing tying up some loose threads. Ended up discussing my fan control project with Amund before going home.

Am I the only one who is annoyed at the late, broken posts at Planet Debian ?

Please people: fix your feeds.