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Biking in snowy conditions

Sport

Last night we have had some snow here in Oslo, and combined with a bit of wind made it a bit of a struggle to ride my bike to work. For instance, downhill from Tveita I did not feel the urge for riding together with the cars, since it was pretty much snow and salt, almost like mud at the top of the hill. Under such conditions biking is like playing in the lottery, you’re never sure which direction the bike will choose for you. So instead I did ride on the sidewalk, but not an easy task that either since I had snow all up to the pedals. But as always, “speed is your friend”, so when having as much speed as I dared and doing my best to avoid one or two pedestrians I got myself all the way down to Helsfyr without falling of my bike.

Here you can get some tips on cycling in winter conditions. Also, I pretty much agree with the first guy in the video when it comes to equipment. When my chain and the gears are broken I will not buy new gears, but instead make it into a single speed. Less to be broken, easier to maintain.

[video:youtube:Drs6pD2rDMs]

Anal bleaching on Margaret Cho

Leisure

Was watching Margaret Cho on NRK3. Today she tried one thing that I was not aware of at all, many things are a big issue when you want to stay young the Hollywood-way.

Anal bleaching is “the process of lightening the area around the anus by bleaching it to get rid of any dark pigmentation that might be a result of a lifetime of body changes.” Some light-skinned people have some degree of darker pigmentation of the skin immediately around the anus, which can be mistaken for poor personal hygiene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anal_bleaching

[video:youtube:fhyNZDGs228]

…for the record, Cho made fun of it 🙂

Tested: Hamax Sno Giant

Leisure

Last Saturday I had to buy a new snow sledge to Anders in a hurry. The requirement was that both me and him could fit the sledge. The plan was to buy a sledge with steering and such, but Alnasenteret I could only find the Hamax Sno Giant, and since it was reasonably priced I bought it.

So Sunday morning, out in the snow to test the new sledge. Fail 1, Anders is not able to hold himself, so when I pull the rope he will easily fall backwards. Fail 2: I tried it down the landingslope of the ski jump at Haugerud. I was not able to keep myself on it the whole way down, holding the handles was not of much help. Fail 3, but ok maybe not a fail – but when I tried the ski jump using the sledge it cracked…

So what I want to now is the Hamax Sno Taxi, but since I have not found any shops selling it I guess I must buy the Sno Cross sled. Anders is still way to small for it, but together we can have much fun.

Red Bull Sparkstøtting Supercross

Leisure

Yesterday Petter, Sverre and I went to see the Red Bull Sparkstøtting Supercross competition held at Grefsenkollen ski center. Crazy and a huge amount of pure fun, no doubt about that.

Around 50 teams, two on each kicksledge (sparkstøtting), one had to be the passenger and the other one the driver. The last 50 meters they both had to stand up and kick, not run, towards the finishing line.

Here a picture from the first turn.

Further downhill

And uphill

Afterwards Espen joined us for two hours of cross country skiing. My first time on skis this season, pretty bad, but that’s how it is now these days.

Controlling the fan speed of my T60

Work/Geek

Had some trouble with my Lenovo T60 becoming way to hot in the past. Not sure, but I guess it might have something to do with me having installed Ubuntu (Linux) on it. Here the other day it did in fact switch itself off because it was to hot, and when it today started getting as hot as before. So, a quick search on the Internet I found the description of what to do. Created the file “/etc/modprobe.d/options” with the following line “options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1”. Then, after a reboot I was able to control the fan speed, setting it to automatic using “echo level auto > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan”.

Thinkwiki to the rescue, the article found there

Firefox 3.5.x – Pages goes blank when loading

Work/Geek

A lot of cursing, but as always Google to the rescue, Shockwave Flash Plugin was the devil causing the problem. Just disable it and voila, back to normal. Solution found here www.computing.net/…/firefox-page-blanks-out-after-loading/..

@Update: Did just help for a while, so I enabled it and it all worked just fine. So now waiting until the next time when I have to disable it. And by the way, I do have the same problem on my laptop running Ubuntu as I have on the laptop I use at work running Windows XP.

Testing the Maven JMeter Plugin

Work/Geek

Currently testing the Maven JMeter Plugin developed by Ron Alleva. Did some testing, but quite soon got an error like the one mentioned in the comments of his post

2010/01/19 16:42:45 ERROR – jmeter.JMeter: java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.jmeter.gui.tree.JMeterTreeModel.
addSubTree(JMeterTreeModel.java:91)

A bit of struggle to actually find it, since I’m new both to Maven and diving into Open Source-code, but after I had a quick look into the code of both the actual plugin and JMeter itself it came clear that the problem was ClassNotFoundException related to Apache Commons LogFactory. With great help from Kaja I just added the following code to the POM-file


<dependency>
<groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
<version>1.1.1</version>
</dependency>

Updated my repository and voila, test running…