My mom and dad had brought my sister and her boyfriend along on their boating trip vacation. When I looked at the weekend weather forecast on Thursday that seemed to be the greatest thing in the world. So I called them up and wondered if I could come along as well, by driving to wherever they were and joining them for Saturday and Sunday. It so happened that they were bringing my sister back to her town on Saturday, and that created an available cabin on their boat, and I was allowed to meet them in her town and join them.
So I did, and yesterday at around 1600-ish we went back out to sea. We found a nice little island called Mostein (a bit north of Tjøme for those familiar with the topography) about an hours sailing at 7-10 knots and yelled "Anchor's away". We stayed there until around 1600-ish today, and went back to town so that I could drive back up to my place. The weather was also extremely perfect. Not a cloud on the sky all weekend with temperatures averaging 30 degrees Celsius in the day and 20 degrees at night. The water was also nice and warm at 24 degrees, so I did get wet a couple of times.
It was a bit hard to sleep that night, though. At 0300-0400 some seagulls started fighting. It sounded like it was right next to my porthole. The noise made it impossible to sleep. After an hour of getting annoyed by those darned birds I remembered I'd brought earplugs in my bag. I dug them out, put them in, and suddenly I couldn't hear anything but the blood rushing by my ear.
The weekend trip proved to be excellent. The big and bright orange blob in the sky has turned my skin orange, which hurts... but it was totally worth it. I shot some 120 photos (which I'll plow through, sort, crop, adjust, etc. some time tomorrow or Tuesday to be published in the photo album) and got a nice and "healthy" sunburn.
This trip was also the perfect excuse to buy a new toy, namely an iPod Touch. I wanted to listen to some music and podcasts when I was soaking up the sun, and my old MP3-player is getting... well... old... and not so fun nor technologically advanced. I also figured the iPod would go perfectly with my new MacBook, which it, of course, did.
Now I'm about to go to bed since I'm extremely worn out from doing nothing at all (as well as some seagull-imposed sleep depravation). It'll be a bit hard falling asleep, though, since the sunburn hurts (I'm sure that when I turn off the lights my sunburn will literally glow to light up the room) and my inner ear still thinks I'm out on the seven seas. Why won't the floor keep still!?

My trusty old laptop is getting noticeably older. It's not as fast as I remember it being when it was new (newer and faster computers both at home and at the office has that effect), the coverings are starting to come up, and the power supply has started failing. I was also in the need for an airline adapter so that I could use it on the plane from London to Los Angeles (only 6.5 weeks left) and those are ridiculously expensive for this old model. So I figured I needed a new laptop, and what did I end up with? An Apple MacBook! I've always been a PC and Microsoft guy, and yet I ended up buying a MacBook. Why?
First of all I thought I'd try something new. New is always good. Second I needed a no-hassle laptop that just works without me having to do much tinkering. Third, it came with a cheap airline adapter.
The next days will be very exciting learning how to use it. Experimenting with technology is exactly what us geeks of today live for, so life is beautiful.

PS: This was posted from my brand new MacBook. My first blog entry from the new laptop.

My office computer got haunted today, and the beast manifested itself in the 8-key on the keyboard (the key above the letters, not the keypad). If I had a file explorer window open somewhere in the background while working with some other programs, and I then needed to type something that included the number eight, I naturally press the 8-key, and what happens then? The file explorer window in the background suddenly jumps to the front of all windows and steals the focus. If I closed all open file explorer windows the 8-key worked just as it should, but as soon as a file explorer window was present the key magically turned into a file explorer summoner. The 8-key on the keypad worked just fine, though, without any hint at any beastly intervention.
I googled this problem for an hour without finding a single mention of anyone who has experienced even something slightly similar (if anyone has ever encountered this problem before, please leave a comment). After said hour I gave up and brought out my heavy PC exorcism toolkit. I splashed a bit of my holy water equivalent on the PC (also known as Norton Ghost, as I had several good images of my hard drive) the problem was solved. Nothing like a fresh installation of a computer to solve any problem that might show up.
So now I can use the number eight just as it is meant to be used... Though there is another number eight I'd certainly use welcome in a whole other non-technical way ;)

Space Shuttle Discovery touched down at Kennedy Space Center at 11:16 am EDT today after a successful assembly mission to the International Space Station delivering the new Japanese Laboratory Module called "Kibo" (which translates into "Hope").
Now we have to wait all the way until October 8th for the next shuttle mission, STS-125, to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

Summer have arrived in Norway (although it's taken a short break now). It has been hot and the beaches have been crowded. This reminded me of a little thought experiment you can try on your own the next time you're on the beach.
While you're there, grab a handful of sand. How many grains of sand would you guess you had in your hand? One hundred thousand? A million? Even more? Now try to think how many grains of sand there are in total on that beach. A number you can hardly imagine, right? This number would actually be close to the number of stars in our galaxy (roughly 3 x 10^11, or 300 billion).
Now look at this latest photo from the Hubble Space Telescope. What you are seeing here are galaxies. And lots of them. And this is just a very tiny bit of our skies. Try to imagine (even how hard it is) how many stars are in only this photo. Then try to imagine that the sky is actually filled with galaxies like in this photo. How many stars would you be up to now? I don't know about you but I can't really imagine the number we're up to now. But one fact remains: There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on the Earth. Not only grains of sand on the beach you're on, but on all the beaches in all the world. That's a lot of sand, and that sand doesn't even cover the number of stars in the universe. We truly live in a very big universe.

Sources:

Google Answers
Larger photo (6000 x 4260 @ 33MB)
Even larger photo (10816 x 7679 @ 125MB)
Bad Astronomy Blog

Last night NASA successfully landed the Phoenix Mars Lander in the northern plains of Mars, where it will investigate whether the site could once have supported microbial life. This is a feat on its own, but Wil Wheaton just tipped me off (via Twitter) to the latest blog entry from Phil "The Bad Astronomer" Plait where he shows us another great feat. Not only have NASA landed on Mars again (The current odds for a successful landing is about 50%) but they've actually managed to photograph the Phoenix parachuting to the ground using the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is so awesome I don't know what else to say.

UPDATE:

I uploaded a better and high resolution photo of the descent. You truly get a sense of the scale in this new photo. Although it looks like Phoenix is heading down that crater (10-km-wide crater "Heimdall") it really is 20km in front of it.

UPDATE 2:

I uploaded a photo of the Phoenix in it's permanent landed position. Although not as awesome as the descending photo, it is still pretty mind-boggling to see the probe sitting on the ground like that, with the heat shield and parachute some distance away from it.

Since I'm going to California and Nevada this summer I figured I would need a GPS so that I can find my way around all the roads. Last week I ordered the Garmin nüvi 770; a GPS for cars. It came with both European and U.S. maps (so I'll never get lost again). It also has an FM modulator (so that I can tune the car radio in on it), Bluetooth (so that I can use it as a handsfree for my mobile phone), as well as a MP3-player (so that I can fill a memory card with music and play it all through the radio).
I've played with it all afternoon, and gave it a short test drive an hour ago, and I'm very impressed. It is very easy to use, the guidance is clear and there's no doubt where I'm going, and the MP3 playback worked like a charm.
I'm very happy with this purchase and I'm sure it will pay off bigtime when I'm in the USA in august/september.

Some of you may have noticed the new page in the menu on the left. For those who didn't notice anything, I've now added the photo album functionality. I've finally finished the programming and all that is left now is to transfer all the photos from the old website over to this new album... and to fill it up with new photos, of course.

I've recently noticed that Twitter is starting to become the next big thing. Articles about it have started popping up in online magazines, newspapers, and even good folks like actor/writer/comedian Wil Wheaton has started blogging about how good it is.
I registered on that site well over a year ago, so at least I found out about it before all the hype started. I don't use it as much as other folks do, but I can clearly see the novelty of it all. And this is my main problem with twitter (though it might have something to do with me getting too old not being as young and hip as I used to). For me it's nothing but a novelty. I'm not saying it's a bad service, and I will try to use it more to get into the movement, but the practical and useful purpose of it all is lost on me.
In any case, feel free to check out my (rare) updates about my everyday life on my Twitter profile.

... other men can make real.
My favourite quote from French author Jules Verne. This quote is very fitting today as the European Space Agency's (ESA) new Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) named after the previously mention author completes its docking procedures with the International Space Station. This is of course a big leap for ESA, but an even bigger one for space travel in general since this ATV is fully automated and docked with the station completely on its own (not like previous freight vehicles like the Russian Progress which still needs human interaction to perform the docking). This opens up new possibilities for space travel and hopefully enables us regular people to go to space in the not so far future.