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It’s Monday night and…my bags are packed!

I’ve got everything I need to leave tomorrow for a week of work in NL, followed by three weeks of cocktails, sun, sea and beach in Bali (no bombs please!) and Jakarta, yay! The first two weeks will be pretty tough, we’re staying in the Hotel Novotel Nusa Dua Bali, check it out…oof, life ain’t easy, eh? 😉 Our friends Axel & Beike booked the same hotel for the last weekend and we’ll join them back to their home in Jakarta for the last days of our trip. 😉 I’m so excited to see them again!

It is quite special too; this will be the third time for us to follow Axel to an amazing place where he works. First there was Miami (groovy!), last year we went to Lybia (trippy!?!) and now Indonesia (funky, yay!)…hehe, I wonder where he will ‘take’ us to next time… 😉

Last Thursday the registration for the Birkebeinerrittet 2009, scheduled on Saturday August 29, started. Thousands of people were sitting behind their pc at exactly 09:00h and at 09:01,06 all 16,500 available places were taken!! OK, OK, some thousands were reserved and filled already for those who competed more than five time, but still, it *is* just 66 seconds…unbelievable! Despite my 25Mbps internetfeed, I wasn’t able to get in fast enough and as of now I ain’t in it… 🙁 yet I should say, since I do have another way in; as ‘foreigner’ by using by dutch address, hehe, good that I still have a house in NL. 😉

It’s November 1 and as per today I should have my winter tires on the family-car…unlike last year when the sun was out and the streets still black, it does make sense to have the sticky tires on this year; the sun’s still out, but the streets are white! 😉

There are more people in need of a tire change though (norwegians got nuts the first days the snow comes in!), that means big lines at the tire-shops (one guy told me to ‘come back in a week’!) and I haven’t been able to get mine done. Wish me luck Monday morning…

Hehe, I’m trying to find a place to change to winter tires and will then leave to sunny Bali coming Friday! Damn, ain’t that trippy?

I’ve had my first team meeting today, a good brainstorm session earlier this afternoon and we’re now getting ready for dinner in the city. Seven engineers with various backgrounds and skills, the obvious geeky talk every now and then 😉 plus some interesting ideas how to get the work done…they’re the fuel of the company and I see them as heroes…it’s gonna be fun to work with them!

Main topic for discussion today was the snow arriving in Oslo. You would think that Norwegians are used to it, but no, the first day snow hits Oslo people go crazy…I went to work today by car, summertires still on and got stuck in huge traffic, mainly caused by people that shouldn’t drive a car in the first place! Man, it was a great experience to drive on the highway, there were people stopping without apparent reason, switching on their emergency lights and waiting for the snow to pass (no chance!). The best thing to see was this BMW 645 and the owner changing tires to cope with the snow conditions…on the friggin’ highway I tell you!! Amazing!!
It was great to be out there today 😉

The temperature dropped below zero today, quite a difference with the 12 degrees above that we enjoyed last Sunday…wintertires are mandatory from coming Saturday,  the same day as when 60kph becomes the speedlimit on the Oslo ring…I guess it’s safe to say that winter is getting unavoidable close now, bbrrrr! (and, YAY, skiing galore! 😉

Official Google Blog: “Even before we introduced Google Earth back in 2005, the team had long dreamed of being able to carry the Earth around in your pocket. Well, today that dream becomes a reality as we introduce Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch.”

Get it, it’s great!

My baby has her Birthday today, 34, a true ‘threenager’! It won’t be forgotten; she managed to celebrate it 5 times this year… 😉

We’re gonna have a dinner for 8 tonight celebrating Kissy’s 34th Birthday tomorrow. Food and drinks are gonna be great (I trust Kristel’s cooking and the wine selection) 😉

For the music during the night I’m gonna try the iTunes ‘Genius’, it’s supposed to be great in selecting songs that fit together…well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating! 😉

I just came back home after two rather busy days out traveling.

They started yesterday with getting up at an aweful 4am (aahhh!) followed by flying to NL, meeting, lunch, meeting, meeting, driving to Brussels, dinner at 10:30pm, beer, some more beer, a convenient 6h sleep (double as the night before), breakfast, meeting, lunch, driving back to NL, arriving at the airport 30 minutes before departure and still catching my plane (indeed, flights are becoming bustrips! 😉 )…intense days, overall good results and having fun with colleagues (as always), life ain’t all that bad!

My internet provider, a small one in the village I live in, told me that I’m pretty unlucky to have a problem with connecting to the Net specifically this week; they normally have three operators at work, but two are on holiday and one had a funeral today…it basically means that the internet at my home is still down, two days in a row now, and it will ‘hopefully’ be fixed somewhere tomorrow…DAMN!!

Thank you WordPress for releasing the WordPress for iPhone app, it enables me at least to share my frustration with y’all. 😉

The internet at home has been down the whole day…I only found out after I came back from work and wasn’t able to get tech support anymore. Better luck tomorrow the lady said, it blows since I needed to get some work done tonight…
It’s amazing when you think of it, the Net became such a big part of life in just 10 years orso…ha, and the unavailability made me go to bed just after 22.00h! (am also dead tired which is the actual reason for hitting the hay so early…;))
Heyhey, give it a couple more years and an internet outage will have the same effect as a power outage years ago; baby-boom 9 months later?!? (no plans here though, still in practising-mode ;))

Today was my first day in the new position! Well, kind of; I still have some ‘previous life’-tasks to finish and to handover, obviously. It’ll keep me pretty pretty busy the coming weeks, how I *love* new challenges! 😉

Anyway, in November I will have three weeks in Bali/Jakarta to ‘recover’ and charge the battery…hehe, no drama here! 😉

…I can’t reveal what I am up to today, but it’s gonna be great! I have written and deleted a lot of words in this post already, and decided to shut up for now, I would give it away otherwise and I can’t let that happen!!

No big surprise; we’re the happy owner of a new Apple MacBook! The machine is now in NL and should be hitting home on Sunday, cool! Kissy returned from the States today and was able to setup the notebook herself (she’s a smart girl, and well, Apple makes things easy too) and got her first Gmail chat out to me, yay!!

Can’t wait to lay my hands on the device!

Coincidentally I (finally) got the tax-return in yesterday; it was a bit higher than expected and matches the purchase of the MacBook…ain’t that karma? 😉

I have tickets for the Norway against The Netherlands soccer game at Ullevål stadium tonight! Hmm, which team should I support?

Statistically and looking at the most recent games, the dutch should easily win, they simply have the better players…but you never know; Norway is always difficult, their type of play is hard to break, at least for the dutch.

We will see, either result would be fine for me…but if you have a chance to see the match on tv, go watch it and be on the lookout for ONE orange colored guy standing in between the norwegian fans! (yes, I got a ‘norwegian’ ticket 😉 )

Apple CEO Steve Jobs today revealed new MacBooks in the special notebook event.

Most of the details were ‘known‘ by the community already, and it is great to see them confirmed. I won’t write about the different models, the new way to produce notebooks with a precision unibody enclosure from a solid piece of aluminum, new state of the art NVIDIA graphics, brilliant instant-on LED-backlit displays and new large glass Multi-Touch(TM) trackpad…THAT information is available on several tech–sites or via the video of the Keynote. 😉

The new MacBooks look great, and timing could not have been better; the new notebooks are available from today and Kissy coincidentally flew to LA today…YAY!!

I have been holding off some months now…one 13-inch MacBook please! 😉

Being away from home and not ‘enjoying’ a 30-45 minutes commute to work doesn’t do me good on keeping up with my favorite podcasts. So, again I’m behind on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code and others such as No Agenda, tech5, The MacCast, TWiT and The Gillmor Gang.

Hehe, if you’re looking for me this week, look for the guy with his earbuds in! 😉

More information (and even pictures!) of the new Apple MacBooks (& MB Pro) are published on various websites. Apple once again seems to be unable to stop the information from getting out there, before they release new products in the special event…

They used to be so good at that; Steve Jobs pulling a surprise out of his sleeve during his presentation (his famous last ‘one more thing‘ sentence), I guess that having so more attention to Apple products worldwide makes it harder to stop people in the production facilities and/or Apple Stores from revealing information to the (internet) community.

My feelings at the moment are hard to describe, mostly they are of disbelieve…Marcel’s death is hitting deep, very deep…

So many questions left behind, most of all, the WHY he did what he did. A tragedy for everyone around him; family and friends who were there for him with understanding, a helping hand and love…history repeated itself in a way, it could not happen, this can’t be true. Yet it is, and again that same why remains…

He must have had his reasons, reasons that no one, probably not even he, could comprehend. Reasons that exceed the human brain and heart in which he must have felt so trapped. No one really could get through, and he could not get out…

I hope he now found what he has been searching for for so long, his peace…it’s up to us to find ours…Marcel, you’re in my heart, I love you!