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Tech, philosophy and random musings

13 June, 2008 by Alex

Parting thoughts

It’s Friday, and I’m leaving my computer alone over the weekend. It’s here at the end of the week I thought I’d give a quick status update on things big and small ;

  • Sam’s first steps;
  • Some more family tidbits; Lilje just turned 5, and started barnehage (kindergarten) which she just loves! Grace is going great at school, with lots of friends, and she now speaks a very tolerable Norwegian. We’ve started to use Norwegian as our main means of talking these days. Sam is a social little rascal, and now of course wants to walk everywhere. Julie is still too far away from her family to really be happy, but at least we have a few favourite things to make our exsistance herer good, such as solskinnsbolle (a kind of layered horizontal whirly bun, with a yummy egg-cream center) at Godt Brød (great littel bakery), coffee at Kaffepikene (the absolutely, without a doubt, the best darn coffee in town!), norwegian bread (how can we ever go back?) and ice-cream. Oh, and my beloved woods. I can’t rave enough about the woods! We all love it. We all love Norwegian nature; it’s simply stunning, even the simple stuff.
  • My RESTful Topic Maps framework lumbers ahead. I’ll be using it for two major real-world projects, and will verify its success or failure from that. I’m sure it will be tweaked a lot.
  • The kids are doing well, the parents not so much; the other side of the planet is somewhat problematic, as our values and views have changed so much in the last 5 years. The Norway I came back to isn’t the Norway I left. We’re contemplating leaving for Australia sooner than first thought.
  • My eyes have been a painful nightmare the last 6 or 7 years, slowly but surely disintegrating my quality of life (and, sadly, those around me; my nickname lately is “grumpy”. I’m so sorry!) where either my glasses have caused a pressure and hence headaches, or the lack of glasses makes me squint to the point of getting headaches, or contacts itch my eyes so much that I fall asleep (probably with a headache). Last month it became unbearable, with headaches (as in migraines; really painful headaches with a center right inside my eyes), and I didn’t know what to do. I’ve so far seen 7 eye specialists (4 in Australia, 3 in Norway), including a full scan of my head and sinuses. Nothing. Until last week, where in a casual conversation between my sister and my wife, the option of allergies to pollen came up, and lo and behold, there seemed to be a pattern match between my worst periods of headaches with pollen outbreaks. Last Sunday I raced to the pharmacy and got anti-histamine pills, and – ladies and gentlemen – I haven’t had a single headache since; the pills probably reduce the inflammation in certain pressure-points (top of nose, and the forehead) so the headaches don’t develop. As you can imagine, I am over the moon about this result, and I hope there might be some answers as I get myself to a doctor in July for a full checkup on this.
  • I’m doing an interesting UCD project on the side. I had forgotten how much fun and enjoyment I get from facilitating projects and meetings. I have of late immersed myself in coaching (course given through work; I’ve been doing stuff like this for years, but this time I’ve formalized it a bit more, and getting a Norwegian translation of the stuff) which seems to come naturally to me. Presentations, meetings, sessions … I’m having a blast, with good results to boot.

Ok, have a great weekend. See you on the other side.

Filed Under: Coaching, Family, Kids, Oslo, Status, Topic Maps, Ucd, Ux

25 January, 2007 by Alex

Kids growing up so fast

In the next few weeks I’ll be writing a bit about what’s going on at work, with Service Oriented Architecture, web service semantics, different layers of organisational constructs to support both business and development ideals, and project management and expecations handling.

But that’s not this post. This post is about my daughter Grace who’s six and a half. Before christmas we inherited an old computer from my wife’s sisters family, an old beaten thing we were going to give to the kids for educational games and homework and such things, and in no time I whipped it clean and hooked it into our network.

While I was at work last week I got this in my inbox ;

A secret story
a long time ago a daddy,mummy sat
soon thay found out that thay wer having
a BABY.

For those still not in the know, me and Julie are expecting our third child in July (every evening julie spends trying to find good names), and Grace is as excited as we are and decided to write me the above wonderful email, from her Gmail account no less. Not bad for a seven year old. She’ll be blogging in no time.

While I was writing this blog post I’ve been chatting with her on Gmail talk, and she says the most wonderful things. I need to spend more time with her when neither one of us is grumpy in the evening after a long day. 🙂 Tomorrow is Australia Day, a holiday, so I’m already looking forward to it. I feel so blessed with my wonderful little family.

Update: Yes, Alia, you’re right; Grace is indeed seven, not six (fixed). It seems she was growing even faster than I first thought. 🙂

Filed Under: Blogging, Family, Grace

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