Jumpingmushroom » bliss

Our new media center

johnny — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:00:21 +0000

We have long been wanting a new TV, and I have always wanted a good media center system to go with it. After some research, and some extra cash on our accounts, we decided to go for it and buy the following:

TV: Samsung 40″ LCD-TV LE40B535 – Price: 5 990.-

HTPC: Asrock NetTop ION 330 – Price: 3 173,-

Universal remote: Logitech Harmony One – Price: 1 395,-

NAS (not on picture): Western Digital My Book world edition II 1TB – Price: 1 749,-

Total cost: 12 217,- (That’s minus shipping).

Pricey, but damn fun!

Samsung 40″ LCD-TV LE40B535

Here comes the sunshine!

johnny — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:56:02 +0000

Summer is here! Ive been waiting for ages, and finally its here. To be honest I was starting to lose all faith and expected it to be the most crap summer ever.

Today Ive slept long, realized Ive actually got twice my paycheck due to an bank error (http://www.vg.no/iphone/article.php?artid=559888), head into town and bought myself a pair of new, black Converse, met people in the shopping street carrying big signs saying FREE HUGS!, and hugged them both. Ive also had a caffe chock at Dromedar and read today’s newspaper, for free.

Now I’m at the bus stop, writing this using the wordpress app for iPhone, which or course could use an overhaul, but works like a charm when writing simple updates :)

I wish I had more time to update here to be honest. I have so much to write about, yet I really lack the motivation. I’m considering starting a separate blog for all my posts regarding gadgets, projects and whatnot, and just leave this place for my personal updates.

Many of the posts here contain stuff which really doesnt interest that many, which in turn means people dont come back for reading new updates.
Well see what happens. Until then, enjoy the nice weather!

Weekend and work-rant

johnny — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:15:00 +0000

So last weekend Alina and Me went to Levanger to go camping outside and visit Alinas parents. We managed to sleep over from Friday to Saturday (after being bitten half to death by insects), and spent the rest of the weekends at Alinas parents, eating and celebrating Alinas birthday.

During our stay outdoors, I managed to capture this beautiful picture. It’s the field outside HINT, close to the water.

And I’ve started to realize how much I enjoy working at Crystone A/S. I mean sure, having the support phone a whole week, having to be available 24hours a day, 7 days a week sucks, but it doesn’t really matter. I get payed well, I have some great colleagues, and an awesome boss! Today we had strawberries with sugar and cream, and when we move to our new offices, we’ll be having Wii and flat-screen :D

Also, the work environment is really relaxed. I mean, we do work quite efficiently, but still take time to kid around . This being an all-male workplace turns it into a kind of mini-LAN every day, which is pretty cool. Also, the guys are really hardcore geeks, so I finally have someone to talk really geeky stuff with and actually get an interested reply.The rest of the week will probably be spent getting our new shelves up for our dvds and relaxing. Alina will be working most of the weekend, but hopefully we’ll be able to get some people for a little party on Saturday.

Radiohead – Nude, on old hardware

johnny — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 05:39:00 +0000

This must be probably one of the most awesome things I’ve seen in quite some time!

It starts of a little slow, but enjoy…

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/1109226[/vimeo]

Alina turns 20!

johnny — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:29:00 +0000

I hope you have a most awesome day and get plenty of congratulations! Hopefully I’ll be in charge of making your day a day to remember.

“Why is it when you love someone so much that you can never find the right words to tell them?”-alb to justin

Royal visit

johnny — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:53:00 +0000

It’s a day late, but better late then never. So yesterday I had visits from a royal, more specifically, the king of the forest, the elk.
I was sitting by the window in front of my computer, eating breakfast and having a fresh cup of coffee, as I always do in the morning, when suddenly I heard quite allot of heavy breathing and stomping outside my window. First thing I see, is a big elk calf running by my window. Safe to say I was stunned for a second or two, but came to my senses and reached for my camera, so I could snap some pictures of it.

The elk ran back and forth behind our neighbors house for a little while, trying to find a way to get out, before settling in one corner to catch it’s breath. At the same time a girl came out from one of the buildings, blissfully unaware of the huge animal lurking right around the corner. Thankfully for her sake it didn’t pop it’s mighty head out and frighten the wits out of the girl, but at the same time I kind of doubt she’d even notice. She seemed way to tired to be even aware of what was happening nearby.

After catching it’s breath for a second, the elk decided it was time to move on. So instead of going back from where it came, it jumped a 2 meters tall rusty old fence and continued behind our house and into the street on the other side.

I by then had managed to snap a couple of ok shots, which I decided I’d might as well send to the local newspaper, Adressa. Little did I know they would actually call me, and do a short interview. An excerpt of what I said can be found here. Safe to say it’s exaggerated quite allot… Anyway, when I came to work I continued to keep track on the news, checking what was going on with the elk. Turns out he had continued running, and ended up getting himself stuck in a fence. The police and animal authorities sadly had to take its life.
Oh, and they also called me from the radio, and had a short chat with me.

All in all, quite an interesting day I must say :p

New sofa!

johnny — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:43:00 +0000

Yesterday Alina and I got ourselves a new sofa! Yeah, finally! Until now we’ve been sitting on the floor, sharing a little pillow and being at times really uncomfortable. Well I got a pretty nice first paycheck, so we went to Bohus and bought ourselves this sofa

And I must say, it’s awesome to sit in! A bit harder then when we tried it in the store, but that’s only because it had been sat in more. We also got the little island thing, and it seems we got it for free? Well there was a mix-up, so I guess we should get in touch with Bohus and tell them, but haven’t got around to it yet.

Cup of calm

johnny — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:14:00 +0000

Alina and I had our usual Sunday breakfast today, when suddenly I noticed something truly stunning. The string for my tea-bag had fallen into the cup, and somehow it was now upside down. And seeing as I had used some rock sugar, it was lying neatly onto those at the bottom of the glass. Everything seemed so calm and pretty, I just had to try and catch a couple of pictures of it.

I also captured a picture of the entire glass, but what mesmerized me most was the picture above.

Starting to get the hang of it

johnny — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:00:00 +0000

Well, more or less. It’s been my second day at work today, and it’s getting along quite nicely. It’s so much to learn, but we’re taking it nice and easy. Today, first part of the day, I worked on getting our PGP keys to work, so I could sign the applications for domain-names going to NORID (That’s for registering .no domains). That took quite a while, seeing as the program I was using (WinPT) had some strange bugs in it, but I managed to get it working in the end.
Next up I learned how the transfering of domains betwen costumers worked, and what to do if we were missing a consent form from the previous owner, or the new one. Also, I got access to the administration systems for accessing the WHM and CPanel systems that Crystone uses. (They’re basically just fancy names for a frontend that makes it easier for the users to administer their domains and webhotels).

It takes allot of reading, and studying, but as previously stated, I’m getting the hang of it. Hopefully the guy that’s been sick for the last two days will be back tomorrow, and teach me much more about how everything binds together. Seeing as right now I’m at a bit of a loss on where to look for things when a costumer gets in touch with us.

Oh, and I got an digital access-card and a cellphone subscription (NetCom) as well today ^^. The access-card is for, well, access…duh. And the cellphone subscription is for the work-phone I’m going to use. See we don’t use any landlines at work, only cellphones. So all phonecalls gets routed to the various cellphones from the switchboard. Kind of cool really :)

Tomorrow I’ll continue learning about registering domains and figuring out how the different servers work, and how to access them to find out what might be wrong. My main job over the next weeks will probably be registering, renewing and deleting domains to bring everything up to speed, while combining it with a bit of phone support on peak hours. After that I will probably be put to better use by either doing more support or being sent out to Malvik for server monitoring and maintenance. We’ll see how fast I catch on.

New job!

johnny — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:51:00 +0000

Woho! So I’m really super excited about actually getting a job that I’m looking forward to starting. I’ve got a job as a support consultant and domain registrar at Crystone Norge A/S. My work will basically involve answering phones and mails from people that have their webpages hosted at Crystones servers, and take care of domains being registered trough our site by sending forms to various registrars around the world.

Now I’m sure for most people, this doesn’t sound very exciting…. And that’s why it kind of annoys me that I have nobody to talk to about these things. All my geeky friends are in the south, and the ones here are either not THAT interested, or never free to meet up and have a chat. Hopefully I’ll find someone to rant to about all this soon, but for now it’s my blog that gets it. It’s what it’s there for I guess.

Anyway, I visited my new place yesterday and had a chat with the manager, one of the co-workers and had coffee. Everything seemed so chill and cool, and when I was there ,the guys were trying to figure out why a CMS called Mambo didn’t work on a certain server. Turns out there was some problems with the development of the system being stalled, and thereby running php4 and not 5, which made certain features of the system cease to work. Think they manged to solving the problem just by moving the system over to a different server. Also, they’re mostly running GNU/Linux on their servers, which makes it an ideal job for me!
After some hanging around, my boss showed me how some of their management systems worked and how they managed all the mail they were recieving. Turns out they had about 1200 domain registrationg waiting to be sent out. Which will be my primary job the first days (or weeks, depending on how fast I’ll be).

Not much else has happened these days though. Yesterday, after I had been visiting my new job, I went and met up with Sonja, Margrethe and Julian, and we went to Dromedar Nordre for a cup of Coffee and a chat. Weather was very nice and we spent an hour or two there, before I had to get to work and finish up my last couple of days at Norfakta A/S. I might take up a couple of days at Norfakta later on if it turns out I feel I can handle it, just to make a little extra money while working at Crystone. We’ll see :)

Today is the last day at Norfakta for now, and I’ll probably be taking it VERY cool this weekend. Seeing as Monday is a holliday, I’ll have a long weekend before starting at the new place. Man I’m looking forward to it! :D