Willy's Blurb

Long time no see!

Hm, what is new? Oh yeah, twins in february. Two babies, made by Willy and Lisa. Fun fun!

innlegg av Willy @ tirsdag, oktober 16, 2007

After the conference

innlegg av Willy @ mandag, april 16, 2007

Trysil!

innlegg av Willy @ lørdag, april 07, 2007

Trondheim

innlegg av Willy @ mandag, april 02, 2007

Vester i bilen...

innlegg av Willy @ mandag, april 02, 2007

Back from Ethiopia

The last two weeks Lisa, her parents and I have been in Ethiopia. It's her other home, as she's lived there for a total of 9 years, gone to elementary school and lived in places like Arba Minch and Yir galem. It was a great and exciting trip, with lots of impressions, sights and sounds, and extremes. The majority of the Ethiopians spend so much time doing the day to day chores, like getting water and food, going to the market, and as there isn't too much public transportation in the small towns and around, people walk everywhere. We drove quite a lot, south from the capital Addis Abeba to Langano, Awasa, Yir galem and Jinka and life along the road is just bustling: people, cows, goats, donkeys, horses, carts, people selling stuff, etc etc. And the kids are everywhere you go! And most of them shout something after you, wanting stuff, money, water bottles, or because they want to sell you something. Some even came up to me when we where walking around town, to feel the hair on my arms...hehe. Kids are kids.

To sum it up, the general life in Ethiopia seems so much more raw than in the the richer and more developed parts of the world. There are no safety nets, no numbers to call if your kid falls into the fire and you don't know that water cools it down. The line between life and death feels much finer. Since Lisa's parents spent their time down their starting and working with hospitals, I got to tour various local hospitals and see the facilities. I even went on rounds at on hospital in Jinka. It was pretty wild, and there I saw the above-mentioned case. And the hygiene conditions would probably kill most Westerners. Because the power was very unstable and just available from noon till midnight, they didn't have a washing machine for the bed linens. All was washed by hand. And it wasn't changed too often. Suffice to say, I got some pretty images burned to my retina. The blood stains...

But still, people lived their life, humans do what they must, and as we where driving, I saw smiling faces everywhere, people sitting around and talking, playing foosball and table tennis along the road. Nature was beautiful, with tons of colorful birds, eagles, falcons, hyenas, hippos, wild boars, kudus, zebras, monkeys...and of course the beautiful sunset. So yeah, there are a lot of people who live in dire conditions, and there is much that can improve their day to day lives, but foreign aid...that's another topic which I'm not getting into now.

This might sound like cliches, but this is what I felt and thought of when I was in Ethiopia. After I've gone through the 650 pics I took, I'll post them on my flickr account. Stay tuned...

innlegg av Willy @ mandag, mars 05, 2007

Happy new year!

Just an epilogue to 2006: Good year. Much fun.

Few updates:

* I just today decided to buy the most amazing piece of software on the Mac for developers evar: BBedit!

There's nothing like it in the Windows world.

* I bought a Canon EOS 400D or a Digital Rebel XTi for you US peoples. It's is an awesome digital SLR camera. Stay tune for many cool pics!

* I also got myself a Flickr account. Hello Willyo!

Ciao!

innlegg av Willy @ fredag, desember 29, 2006

I don't like to wear logos

I don't wear t-shirts or other clothes that have the company's logo on it. Why would I be a walking advertising board? They should pay me to wear their clothes.

innlegg av Willy @ torsdag, november 16, 2006

Little Steven's Underground Garage

This is the coolest radio show. The DJ is Little Steven, aka Silivo Dante from The Sopranos or longtime guitarist from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. In the Underground Garage he plays all kinds of great music, 50 years or 50 mins old with artists like Jerry Lee Lewis, Howlin' Wolf, The Yardbirds, The Fuzztones etc etc.

I came over the show on radio Tango, an alt. rock radio station in Oslo that I've been listening to for years. They've started to play his show on Monday nights. There are also different themes, like this week's the coolest director of all time Martin Scorsese. There are movie dialog excerpts and such.

Tune in to Little Steven's Underground Garage!

innlegg av Willy @ tirsdag, november 14, 2006

GMail Mobile

To use the new GMail Java app for cell phones, the language in GMail must be set to English/US. With the Norwegian language, it displays a weird error message about data communcation or some such.

innlegg av Willy @ torsdag, november 09, 2006

Sony Ericsson K800 USB drivers

Instead of having to download the entire PC Suite that contains the actual PC Suite and then this driver package that oddly enough isn't available as a single download from the SE web site, you can get it here! (Long sentence warning)

K800 USB drivers (2 Mb)

innlegg av Willy @ fredag, september 22, 2006