raymondpoort.com

As mentioned earlier, I cancelled the contract for my .com domain and will migrate to (most likely) GoDaddy. This means I’ve got some work to do to prep things and try to keep downtime as low as possible by the time the domain will be migrated. This will probably be early January, certainly before the 12th, when the current contract expires!

We’ve done a lot of work this weekend, prepping the house for renting out from January. Thanks to everyone helping us out…I love you, I love you, I love you!

We moved out our belongings, painted all walls of the bedrooms and put a laminate floor in the same rooms, making them look absolutely GREAT! It was a nice family job; did it together with my father, brother and brother in law…quite a team!

Just finished cleaning the entire house, we’re good to go!

Woodrow Wilson: "You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand."

Since I will work in the dutch office coming week, I decided to uhh ‘violate’ the local IT policy in our norwegian office…just installed Skype again, after de-installing it 1.5 months ago…sorry guys, I just need to be able to have easy access to my non Norwegian co-workers!!!

Cross fingers that the Big Brother IT partner here doesn’t find out!

A requested and more than welcome change in Facebooks messaging policy:

Somewhere last week they start sending the standard email, notifying you of a new Facebook message INCLUDING the message contents!

Before you only got the notification and had to login to your Facebook account to actually read the message. Now you can see the whole message and only have to login incase you want/need to respond.

Hmm, the next step? Being able to respond to the message by replying directly from the notification email! Guess that won’t happen, since Facebook would loose too many page views that way, or?

Got a call from the tempur sales lady…apparently the factory is not able to deliver the bed we ordered in 2.20m long (WTF??)…need to decide what to do next; take the 2.10m version, the other (older) model in 2.20m or, uhmm, cancel the order?

Hmm, last nights entry didn’t get posted as it normally should?!? I’ve got no clue why, it probably got into sleeping mode…;)

I corrected this, so it’s up again!

We have been in need of a new bed ever since we left The Netherlands…the luxurious 1.80m x 2.20m box spring bed didn’t make it in the moving van and ended up at my sisters place.

Since we *love* sleeping (despite the fact I am a nightcrawler :)), we decided to go for one of the best beds out in the market these days, a Tempur bed. Last weekend, on our way to the Xmas fair in the Oslo center with my parents, we stopped by the Tempur store and…uhhh, bought it ‘just like that’!

Don’t ask me how much it costs…it EASILY covers the top 3 items on my Apple geek-wishlist (17" MacBook Pro, 24" iMac *and* iPhone)…aahhhhh!

Delivery will take roughly 10 weeks, which has to do with the ‘oversized’ 2.20m length of the bed (a must for my divine 2m body hehe).

My dutch ex-colleagues gave me the first three seasons of ‘24‘ at our farewell party in September…they said it would be nice for the long, dark evenings in Norwegian wintertime. Well, those evenings did come and got us hooked to the series!

Vaclav Havel: "The
truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances
in which it is said, and to whom, why and how it is said."

Interesting cultural mix today;

Am suffering from fylleangst on this day after Julebord…uhh, not really actually since I managed to behave (oh, behave! ), well, except from being back home around 7 this morning, oof!

After just some hours of sleep we went to a Xmas fair in Oslo City, HO-HO-HO…and this evening we celebrated the traditional Sinterklaas event.

Loads of fun!

Tonight is ‘Julebord’…the traditional Norwegian Xmas party with work. Litterally the word translates to ‘Christmas table’, the actual meaning however is: ‘drink till you drop on expense of your boss’!

The day after is apparently followed by ‘fylleangst’, in other words…the hangover and fear of what actually happened the night before (did you really yell at your boss?? How will the response be the first day at work?? :))

Am excited to learn more about Norwegian culture again, I’m outta here!!

Yesterday I got ‘hit’ with what I will call Twitter spam. It was the first time, at least for me, worth a blogpost.

Twitter, as other Social Networking apps, lives by enlarging your friend-network and growing the circle (or bubble? :)), while putting (semi-?) interesting stuff on it.

All fine and OK so far, until the moment you start seeing ‘people’ following you (on Twitter) who haven’t put any tweets up (ever) and are following 1000+ people…the site listed in their profile then turns out to be linking to an ad-page, persuading you to buy toys for your kids for Xmas…yeah, that sounds like Twitter spam to me…pity.

I really hope that Sinterklaas will find the way to our home tonight.

It’s a pretty long way from The Netherlands all the way up north to Norway…it would be great if we can continue this dutch tradition of exchanging presents!

Actually, I’m pretty sure he will find his way as I just finished my rhymes! hehe

Darn! I’ll be in NL for work in the week of December 17…normally no drama, only joy, this time however it means that I’ll miss out on Marilyn Manson’s concert in Oslo…and was so looking forward to this one! :(

Timing is really off; the week before he will perform in NL…that is coming week, when I’m still in Norway…damn again!