Present Perfect

Oslo, continued

We ended up not getting much hacking done at all. The whole trip ended up being more of a get-together trip than a full-blown hackfest. Which is fine by me, in a way. Wim didn't get back to us, so we assume he stayed in Helsinki while he was there anyway instead of trying to claw out a way to Oslo.

Snowboarding

On Saturday, we went to one of Oslo's skiing slopes. Both Leif and I had snowboarded before, so we got ourselves a board while the others, most of whom had never ski'd before, got skis. Christian and Owen took care of teaching them the basics of skiing while Leif and I went straight for the pistes. It was extremely foggy and snowing, so it was hard to have a lot of control of where we were going. But on the other hand, the snow was excellent and fresh, so I finally got the off-track experience that I missed this year on the previous ski trip. We took a few trips below the elevator, with quite a few jumps on the tracks and several high drops.

I had such a good time I didn't even stop for food but just kept going. After a while my goggles were totally useless and I ended up skiing without eye coverage. That hurt a little but at least I was more in control of my trajectory. The others ended up stopping some time earlier. Erik seemed to get the hang of it by the end of the day, even though he managed to go over the side of a red slope.

Traveling

It's Sunday and we're going home. It amazes me how people drive here in Norway. It feels more like rally driving than anything else, continuously jerking the steering wheel while skidding over the icy roads. I don't think I would really enjoy driving that way, but it was entertaining nonetheless. It's even more scary when the airplane you're in is taxiing for takeoff on similar icy roads at the airport. But it's a pretty sight to see another airplane rev up it's engine and see gusts of snow being blown from the tarmac.

Back to work on ALSA

Getting back to work after some time off always sucks. Tons of e-mails to go through, tons of things to follow up on and sort out, and so on. Having a major deadline tomorrow doesn't help either, but luckily it got shift a whole week.

My main problem is working out how I can record S/PDIF from our mixing desks on the Hammerfal 9654 cards we bought for this. Luckily Paul Davis, who wrote drivers for the Hammerfall, has responded promptly to all of my questions,

ALSA itself is pretty hard to figure out. It's not easy weeding through the docs and figuring out which are still relevant, and lots of important nuggets are hidden away in other documents.

Hope I figure this out soon enough.

Dental work

One of my fillings broke free during my skiing trip and today I went to the dentist to get it fixed. The tooth got refilled without anaesthesia (luckily, the tooth has had root canal before). Then she cleaned up plaque and toothstone from all of my teeth, and I really HATE that. It feels terrible.

Then I went out to console myself by buying a bunch of CD's. I feel in a sharing mood so here's what I got today:

Grant Lee Buffalo - Storm Hymnal, Gems from the vault of

I love this band, and I have a bunch of the B-sides, but I still felt I had to get this double CD anyway

Faithless - Sunday 8 PM

Got it cheap, wanted it before

Gomez - In Our Gun

Got this even cheaper

Ben Harper - Diamonds on the inside

Anything by Ben is a must-have, so this was a no-brainer

At The Drive-in - Relationships of command

One of those acclaimed classics people should probably own, not sure yet if it's true though. I like Sparta, so why not try this too...

2-Meter sessies

A bunch of unplugged recordings from Dutch radio/television. Including Coldplay, Jayhawks, Tom Helsen, Stereophonics, Ben Christophers, Tom Barman

The Folk Implosion - The New Folk Implosion

I really liked One Part Lullaby. Apparently this one is totally different, but I'm pretty interested in it

Jeff Buckley - Grace

I end up buying CD's I really love cheaply to give away just because they're cheap. This particular one is going to someone I know who has a copy of the CD. I figured I had two options, either shoot the person in question or forgive them their transgression and make sure they have the real original disc.

I should do something about my uncontrolled spending sprees someday.

Oslo, continued We ended up not getting much hacking done at all. The whole trip ended up being more of a get-together trip than a full-blown hackfest. Which is fine...