Roffes blogg

Here’s a photo of me and Beppe. I really hope he will settle in here. He has been nice and quiet today, even though he bit my wife. But that is his way to manifest himself. Wifey didn’t show too much fear, so I have hopes that they will be good friends too.

Her er et bilde av meg og Beppe. Jeg håper virkelig at han vil like seg her hos oss. Han har vært snill og stille i dag, selv om han bet kona mi i fingeren. Men det er hans måte å hilse og befeste sin posisjon på. Bare kona ikke lar ham “vinne”, så skal det gå bra. Hun viste ikke spesielt mye frykt, så jeg håper de vil bli gode venner de også.

You can watch more pictures here

Du kan se flere bilder her.

I will start blogging in both english and norwegian. I have readers that only understand english, readers that only understand norwegian (and of course readers that understand both). I will now satisfy “everyone” and start blogging in both languages. I will write every paragraph twice just in different languages. But I will keep my menu’s in english only. The norwegian version will be in italic.

Jeg vil nå begynne å skrive både engelsk og norsk i dagboken min. Jeg har lesere som bare forstår norsk og lesere som bare forstår engelsk (og selvsagt lesere som forstår begge deler). For å tilfredsstille “alle” vil jeg nå begynne å skrive på begge språk. Jeg vil skrive hvert avsnitt to ganger og da på forskjellig språk. Men det jeg spiser hver dag skriver jeg bare på engelsk. Det som er på norsk vil være skrevet i kursiv.

Today Beppe will move in with us. I am so looking forward to it. I haven’t lived with Beppe since 1994, but I have missed having the bird around. It’s a bit sad for my father, because I know he loves the bird to death even though he won’t admit it, but with this solution he will at least have the opportunity to visit the bird any time he wants. I really hope it will work out having him in our big family. What I think will make it work is that here at our house things will happen all the time and he will be kept occupied. I think maybe my parents are to quiet for him, so that he gets bored and screams for attention and “action”. Well, only time will show. If this doesn’t work out we will proceed with my fathers plan to find someone who give hime to. There is a small zoo here in Fredrikstad (Torsnes) that we hope will take him if he won’t settle in at our house.

I dag flytter Beppe inn hos oss. Jeg gleder meg så veldig mye til det. Jeg har ikke bodd sammen med Beppe siden 1994 men jeg har savnet p ha ham i nærheten av meg. Det er litt trist for pappa da, siden jeg vet at han er veldig glad i fuglen og kommer til å savne den, selv om han ikke helt vil innrømme det :). Med den løsningen vi får n har han i hvertfall muligheten til å besøke fuglen når han vil. Jeg håper han finner seg til rette i den etter hvert så store familien vår. Det som gir meg litt tro på at dette vil virke er at her i huset skjer det ting hele tiden og han vil få masse oppmerksomhet. Jeg tror kanskje det blir litt for stille og rolig hos foreldrene mine og at han derfor skriker etter oppmerksomhet og action. Bare tiden kan vise om dette vil fungere. Fungerer det ikke vil vi gå videre med pappas opprinnelige plan om å finne noen å gi ham til. Det er en liten dyrepark her i Fredrikstad (Torsnes) som vi håper vil ta ham i mot hvis han ikke finner seg til rette hos oss.

My next blog entry, except the menu, will be with a photo of Beppe in his new environment.

Mitt neste innlegg her, sett bort fra menyen, vil inneholde et bilde av Beppe i sitt nye miljø.

I went to the doctor today. I am soon out of anti depressant pills and wanted to talk to him. I feel I need to quit taking them now, since life is generally good nowadays. I feel I am past the depression and that my down periods is just a part of my personality. I will gradually quit taking them during the next month and then be pill free again. YAY!

Today I am going to the gym again. The first time in two weeks. I both look forward to it and dread it. A break this long is a big set back and I will probably be very sore tomorrow. But I will be on a roll and feel that I am doing something good for my body again.

Well, onto todays menu:

0630: 2 slices of kneip bread with scrambled eggs, 2 leafs of lettuce and 15 slices of cucumber.
0900: 1 carrot.
1200: 1 chicken breast on kneip bread with tomato and lettuce. 1 apple.
1530: 1/2 chicken breast. Needed a snack before dinner.
1730: (very) thin crust pizza with fresh mushrooms, taco beef, bell peppers, corn chips, mozarella, onion and red bell-pepper.
2100: 3 low fat turkey dinner sausages.

The housecleaning today will be the only workout for the day. It was more work than I imagined and my feet and back hurts. Will follow my ordinary schedule and go to the gym tomorrow.

I clean the house way to seldom. Each time I do it i think to myself: “if I just do 10 minutes of house work every day, I won’t have to wear myself out like this”. This time I am determined to do a little every day, vacuum twice a week and wash the floors twice a month. That way I hope to keep the house the way it is now. It feels so good to have a clean and nice looking home.

My wife made me very happy yesterday. When I lived with my parents, we had ha blue fronted amazon parrot, Beppe. I love this bird, and when us kids moved out, he stayed with my parents. A few weeks ago, my parents told me that they wanted to give him away to someone who could give him what he needs. Since my wife don’t like birds and we have a house full of animals and people, I have never considered the opportunity for us to adopt him. But yesterday, when we visited my parents, my wife suddenly said: “Why can’t Beppe come to live with us?”. She made me extremely happy and I think she scored a lot of points with my parents too.

So now we have a new family member soon. If my father doesn’t change his mind. I will talk to my father tonight. I have three months left of my paternity leave, so I have a lot of time to give him the attention he needs.

Well.. now I have to make dinner for my family.

I have taken a break from blogging the last two days, but here I am again. I have not given up, far from it. Yesterday I simply forgot to step on the scale before both breakfast and lunch.

I have been a bit worried about my weight during easter. I have eaten a lot of salty foods and snacks and my weight was over 152 kilos mid easter. But my suspicions about to much salt was correct, because I have had a good diet the last three days and lost almost 3 of those kilos again. The number for this week is 149.2 kilos. It is up almost 2 kilos but those, and more, will be gone before monday.

It is good that easter holiday is over. I managed to ruin my lettuce heads by putting them in the back of the fridge, so that they froze. But today I can buy new lettuce. I have missed lettuce during easter.

Today I will resume working out. I will start by cleaning the house while my big girls are at school and go to the gym in the evening.

Todays menu:

0945: 2 slices of kneip bread with turkey and cucumber and 1 slice with salami and cucumber. 1 carrot.
1400: 1 new energy bar.
1545: 1 chicken breast with 1 dl boiled rice, 2 leafs of lettuce, 1/2 red bell-pepper and 15 slices of cucumber.
2100: 3 potato balls and a carrot.

I get a lot of geek time at my computer these days. I love it. Have spent the day securing my wireless network as much as possible. My old setup was very simple to breach. I only had a 40/64-bit encryption key and no mac filtering. I also distributed ip addresses to everyone that wanted one.

What I have done now is to increase the encryption to the maximum level of my access point, allow only known mac addresses and only give out fixed ip’s to these known mac addresses. This is not secure enough against someone that really wants to hack into my network, but now it requires a certain level of knowledge, time, tools and knowing how to use them to crack my net. This wasn’t the case earlier.

I have considered securing the net more, but this requires some studying and possibly purchasing of network tools. I don’t think I want to do that. I have nothing top secret on my net and I have secured the internet access with a proxy server you have to authenticate against. So not only do you have to know how to hack mac-addresses, wep-keys and interpret the traffic, but you also need a username and a password to get onto the internet. I feel my net is quite secure now. At least more secure than most of the wifi-nets “out there”.

I also tried to stop broadcasting the ssid or network name of my wlan, but this created problems with the windows computers, since they automatically selects any network who broadcasts their names. And since some neighbor has a net broadcasting the name, it is impossible for one of my windows clients to use my net. Silly, but according to google, microsoft knowledge base and some very competent people I chat with it is not any security effect in hiding the network name as long as I use mac filter and wep encryption. And I guess they are all right about that.

Well, on to the fire. Wifey, Charlotte and I went for a drive to kill some time this evening. When we were close to the fire station, a lot of fire trucks, police cars and ambulances with howling sirens passed the gas station we were parked at. My wife wanted to follow them and watch and since she is the driver in the family I had nothing to say about it.

And it turned out that the fire was the neighbor-house of where I grew up. Actually in a house I wanted to buy 4 years ago, but didn’t get it. I’m happy about that now. According to the newspapers noone has gotten hurt and the houses affected are evacuated. But it’s a bit sad to see this happen to a place I have a lot of memories from. Probably I know someone who still live(d) there too.

Well.. that’s all I have today. Except my menu. Her it is:

Menu for saturday march 26, 2005:

0930: 2 slices of bread with cheese.
1330: potluck. Way to much food eaten. Impossible to write it all down.
1700: 3 turkey hot dogs.
2200: 100 grams of wine gum and 50 grams of chips.

I am so very bored and I love it. It seems life has been extremely busy the last six months. Haven’t had time to relax and when I have had a blank schedule, Charlotte has either been sick, teething or something else energy-consuming. Now we have nothing to do, Charlotte is well and sleeps a lot and I get to relax all I want. I love easter. A lot of time by the computer.

The geek in me has gotten a lot of time and I have quality assured the web servers, tuned the logging directories, established a new gateway and a lot of other stuff I just havent gotten the time to do.

I have also set up webalizer on all of the web servers. I have quite a lot of them now, so some stats of the usage of them will come in handy.
But I have a problem. I am running of of things to play with on my network and servers. My imagination has taken a vacation. What I think is funny with computers is configuring them, setting up new services, tuning the network and computers and in general sysadmin tasks. Not a lot of games interest me and I can only read the news on the net so many times. But, I need to be bored. Maybe I will find a book and read it?

Hmm.. Did I say that? Well.. maybe its a good idea. My wife has a lot of books that might be fun to read.

0930: 2 slices of bread with cheese and salami. 1 carrot.
1115: 100 grams of marcipan.
1245: 1 bowl of unsugared rice cereal.
1645: 4 potato balls.
2030: same as 0930.

As blogged earlier, we have been to Kristiansand the first half of this week, and my goal was to blog via gprs, but it got impossible. We ate practically all the time and it was impossible to get everything written down. Especially the things we ate in the car, both a lot of it and unmentionable things as chocolate, chips, pastry, and such.

I got a bit depressed when I stepped on the scale today, but this is going to go away again by monday. My goal for the next days is to keep eating healthy and right. The gym is closed for easter, so I will only get the walks with the dog as exercise.

We were quite tired when we got home yesterday. We slept on an extremely uncomfortable sofa bed. That is, my wife slept and I stared into the ceiling. I think I got only 3 hours sleep in total the 2 nights we were there. So it was very good to come home to my good, old IKEA bed yesterday and sleep the whole night. I hate being sleep deprevated.

Today we have done nothing but surfing the net and having fun with our computers. Well, I have set up a new gateway server today. That is hardly “nothing”. I got really scared, because I couldn’t get the new one to work as one of the net cards in the old one said god night. I managed to get a gateway together with parts from the two broken computers and now it’s up and running. The old one was ancient and very insecure. The new one is much better and faster. It has only the services I need. The old one had a lot of unnecessary garbage running that got obsolete when I installed the new server a few weeks ago.

But still the gateway is an old and worn out computer, so I wish for a small broadband router instead, but that costs money and we do not have a lot of that these days. So the old, noisy PII Workstation has to do for now.

1000: 2 slices of whole grain bread with boiled eggs and a carrot.

1330: 2 slices of whole grain bread with cheese and turkey slice.

1700: Chicken wok with rice.

2130: 3 slices of bread with chicken and cheese.