5 weeks ago today I was scheduled to have jaw surgery because my jaw keeps popping out of its joint (It's very annoying and can hurt pretty bad if it happens and I close my mouth quickly without thinking about wether it popped out or not). I got up very early in the morning, took the train to Oslo and a bus to the hospital. I waited, talked to a doctor, waited, waited some more, a nurse took a few samples of blood, waited again, until finally... I was told to go home since they wouldn't have time to do the surgery on my the next day after all. The person scheduled to have surgery in front of me got a more extensive surgery than planned, so they bumped me off the schedule (Those following me on Twitter already know all of this, of course).
I was pretty bummed out by this, of course, but there wasn't really anything I could do about it so I took the bus and train back home again.
In one week I'm scheduled to go the hospital again for another shot at the surgery, so to the other person scheduled for surgery the same day (June 5th), please cancel your appointment so that there's no danger of me loosing mine.
Stay tuned because I will try to update my Twitter to keep you up to date on everything regarding the surgery.

A few weeks ago I drove to the office as I usually do in the morning. At the last intersection before my office building I was turning left and noticed a car standing a bit further out than normal in the intersection, but he was waiting for me and I took a nice and wide turn around him. When I was right in front of him he suddenly started driving forwards towards me, and since I was in the middle of my turn I had nowhere to go, so he hit my car. The collision was at very low speed so fortunately no injuries or serious damage to either of the cars. Still, my car got a nice little dent and some scrapes right in front of my rear left tire, as well as on my wheel hub.
We both stopped and filled out the accident report and sent them to our insurance companies. Earlier this week I got a letter from my company saying that I was completely without blame and that my insurance will cover all the repairs. Not really a surprise since I came from the right and the other guy had to yield (and he even had a yield sign to top it off).
So next week my car will be admitted to the car hospital to get it's dent fixed and the damaged panel repainted (quite a big panel as you can see in the photoshopped photo highlighting the panel). My insurance also gives me a rental car while the repair shop works on my car, so it'll be nice to have a "new" car for a few days.

In other car news:

Every two years all Norwegian car owners have to get their car approved according to EU regulations (even though Norway is not part of the EU. Weird stuff for another blog post). A month back they found some rust on the brake pipes that had to be changed to make my car pass the approval. Earlier this week my car was in the shop getting it fixed, and that certainly was expensive enough. NOK 8769 (around USD 1350)!!! Not exactly what I needed this month (you don't need that any month, really). At least my brakes are now okay and should be okay for the EU regulation approvals the next 10 years (because my car is 10 years old this year).

Yesterday I went to Jean Michel Jarre's world tour making a stop in Oslo. I hadn't seen Jarre live for some 15 years, so I was excited to see what he would bring to the country this time around.
All in all, the concert was pretty good. He played a lot of golden oldies, as well as a bit of new stuff I didn't immediately recognize. He mostly focused on the Oxygene series, but also played some other well known stuff like Rendez-Vous and Magnetic Fields.
His stage show was also quite entertaining, with awesome white lasers and strange LED-displays with alien heads looking ominously at the audience. Compared to the stage show 15 years ago, this current one wins, hands down.
So far it seems this concert is a perfect experience and that there was nothing wrong with it, but there was.
At times Jarre played his pieces... weirdly. A few of the weirdnesses might be artistic creativity, but most of them sounded like he was in error and had forgotten what the next note was. A few of them even sounded like software errors causing the samples to be stuck in a loop. Jarre is 60 years old. Maybe his age is starting to show?
The stage direction could also have used more lasers (you can never have enough lasers), and some in-door pyrotechnics would have been very welcome. In his defense, he did use his laser harp (seen in the main photo of this blog entry), which is almost a valid excuse to not have any stuff on the stage at all.
All in all I was very happy with the concert, with the material he performed, how it all looked, and I'm extremely happy he did two encores. On a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, I'm giving this concert a 7.
It could have been much better without minor glitches and a better stage show, but that shouldn't hinder you from seeing this concert if you get the chance.

The photos are taken with my Nokia E71, and are therefore not of good quality, but they suit their purpose. For photos taken with a mobile phone I'm actually quite happy with the results.

So I've gotten the cold. I've been worn out all day, my nose is running and is also clogged up. I do suspect that my allergies might've had a hand in it since the birch pollen falls heavy from the birch trees. I don't suspect this is the H1N1 flu, though, so don't worry.
I've been really lazy at updating my blog lately, and it seems I have to get a bit ill to write.
A lot of stuff have happened to me lately, so I just have to find the strength and inspiration to write about it, so more to come soon... soon-ish... maybe... I hope.

In case you actually got fooled about my big news yesterday, it was all a big scam. If you didn't realize, yesterday was April 1st, which is the excellent day in the year where you can make up whatever you want and claim it to be true.
Obviously, Lucasfilm has not contacted me to write for the upcoming Star Wars live action TV-series. No matter how much I want this to be true, it's still a figment of my imagination.
I hope I actually managed to fool a few people out there, though I doubt it. I do have a lot of great ideas, though, so if Lucasfilm actually wants to hire me, I'm all yours.

Someone has actually found the script for my infamous Star Wars fanfilm on my server, and they actually liked it. They sent it around, and what goes around comes around. A few weeks ago it came back to me with a major seal of approval; from Lucasfilm itself! (though not directly from George Lucas).
They liked my writing style and ideas and would like me to join the writing team for the new Star Wars live action TV-series coming out later this year. Of course, I can't say much about this with a very strict Non-Disclosure Agreement tying my hands, which also prevented me from telling you about it before the 2nd quarter of 2009. I can give you this little teaser, though. A female bounty hunter who has Force abilities, will get a decent story line outside of my own Jedi Refugee universe.
Stay tuned for more information as the writing process continues and progresses into production. I'm an open person and always open to suggestions, so if you have any good ideas please leave a comment.

Today is Amnesty's "Freedom of speech day": A movement to illuminate the lack of freedom of speech around the world. They encourage everybody to do something related to freedom of speech on this day, and this is my contribution.

I found this site, where you can make your own hero, through this blog. The hero I made for myself didn't exactly turn out to be a big surprise to me (or the people who know me). It's a good idea, though, and I hope someone will pick up this comic book idea and call me in as a consultant.

I've started taking lessons to learn a new subsection of my music skills. I've started playing the cello! After some 20 years of playing the euphonium it was about time to pick up some new skills. I've always admired string instruments, and during the last year or two I've admired the cello more and more, up to the point of wanting to learn how to play it myself. During the last months I've come to the conclusion that a cello is really the string equivalent to a euphonium. After all, whenever we play classical pieces in my orchestra, the cello parts are always given to the euphonium. That's when I figured out I wanted to learn how to play the cello.
I started taking lessons a few weeks ago and are still at the stage where I'm playing scales and trying to strike the correct strings, but I'm noticing progress.
Stay tuned for international tour dates with Yo-Yo Ma!

A bonus shout out to my mom. Happy birthday!!! :D

Photo by Anthony Thomas

Last night at around 11pm I went to a dark place. Not the dark place in my mind, but the dark place where I took the Aurora photos a few years back. This was another space hunt. Not for Aurora this time, but for comet C/2007 N3 Lulin.
The comet was just barely visible to the naked eye. I could see it a few times, but it was very very hard. When I looked at it through my binoculars it popped right out, so even if you can't see it with your naked eye don't let that discourage you from a similar excursion.
My only failure on this excursion is that I don't have a telescope... or a motorized and tracking tripod. The photos would have been much better had I had that equipment, but it was still fun to take photos of it and see the tail pop out.
This was a chilling experience since the temperature had dropped below freezing, and it's hard to operate a camera with gloves, so at the end of the excursion (about an hour later) I was very glad to start up my car and get some heat back in me.