En-why-ronment

The company I work for, Alstom, held a seminar today over environmental issues.
We are as a nation (well "they") in a quite unique situation
among the worlds 214 countries. 99% of our 120 TWh of power
is generated in hydro-plants wich would make Norways power
production the cleanest one in the world.

Invited to the seminar was, outside our own office, the political spokeswoman for FrP (Fremskrittspartiet) the most far right of the established parties as well as the one responsible for environmental issues in the most far left and green of the established parties - SV (Sosialistisk Venstre) on top of this our own responsible for CO2-capture techonolgy and an ex-IEA (International Energy Agency)

It was in some ways a two-part day. Half was pure techonology and forecast-talk from our side on what we have in the pipeline for technologies to clean CO2 and what the need for it is the coming years.

All-in-all to sum that up: if our pilot plant @ Mongstad in collaboration
with Statoil turns out well this company will be around and well in the top
on the market for another 30 years :)

The other side was the general overview of the situation.
This was the new part for me and the interesting part,
mostly represented by the former IEA employee.
(and in the end a small statement on where the parties have their views)

Perhaps it is time to wake up and not just sleep it all away:

Where concerns about the world getting warmer
The people thought they were just being rewarded
For treating others as they like to be treated
For obeying stop signs and curing diseases
For mailing letters with the address of the sender
Now we can swim any day in november

Dont wake me i plan on sleeping

Postal Service - Sleeping In

The most intereting points made was some random fact I picked up

*1250 new power plants will be built in China before 2020

*15.5 billions of ton of CO2 exhausted per year and an incentive is going around 20€ per ton at 2030 if we continue to increase the polution in this speed.
Giving a market to trade with incentives of around 3 000 M€
(2005's exhaust levels were somewhere around 9.2 billiond of ton)

*To reach a goal of a 50% cut in todays CO2-levels the developed countries
will have to cut our CO2-waste with 80-90% to allow for the developement countries to increase their levels with some 65% since they can't really halt all their progress

*Norways power production could easily be boosted by another 10% by just upgrading current hydro plants. Wich today have technology dated back as long as the 1950's,
(another part of our business area @ Alstom)

What all of these shows is that this company'll be around for some time.
Time to tie oneself up with some loans on housing, cars and everything else now then!

Adam H - Design Engineer of Alstom Power Norway AS

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Gotta stay true to my tradition to make lots of threads into a
yin and yang mish-mash of different topics. This one is on the topic: They say jump you say how high as Zack chants in Bullet in the Head. This time my dear sister T told me to jump, and I am not the one to argue on her advice and guidance. Remains to see if/what/when something happens though.
(Hmm this last little rant didn't leave much info did it? Surrounding myself with an air of mystique just to appear more interesting :P And hopefully I won't screw things up all too much and something good might even come out of it.)

A rose is a rose is a rose

I stop and smell the roses...
For a second I am free
For a second I expose myself
I expose myself as a dreamer
I expose myself for her to see
But she is nowhere to be seen
She is no one in the scene

---

On a c o m p l e t e l y different subject.
Bought myself a new piece of armor today - yes armor!Cause a piece of metal worn for protection can't really be
labelled anything else.
I can't really see any other sport where you need to wield metal parts
to keep their bodies out of harm. It would be fencing then :)
(And the piece mentioned, was a simple Twins groin guard / suspensoir)

The Cold War

Forget what you have been told about Cold War, East and West,
USA and her allies against the Communist Threat.

The Cold war is instead

one man's battle,
one man's destiny
one man's mission

Today I armed myself with the most vicious weapons
mankind has ever seen.
With endless posibilities to wreak havoc
and bring death to whatever viruses lurk in me.

My arsenal:

C-vitamine pills x60
Oranges x3
Kiwi x3
Purple coneflower-extract (Röd Solhatt)
Garlic - which if no one didn't know don't taste all that good raw
Fisherman's Friend
Whisky - limitless :)

Hopefully I can get ahold of some large amounts of sleep,
shorter walks and some light weightlifting
so I don't decay all too much.

I will get rid of this Cold soon enough!

Stabbed

While browsing through my mp3-catalogue
I stumbled upon a track that sent nostalgian shivers down my spine:

The Knife - Silent Shout

Live footage, The Knife @ Arvika-06

The hour is late
The sky is dark

The scene is set
The show is on

They serve the bass
They serve the melody

We get esthetics
We get ecstatic

We were We
But now is now
And I am I

Memories of an Arvikian Hilltop in retrospect,
Vintergatan 2006.07.14

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Sidenote:
Thåström did at the same festival a wonderful interpretation of
Nationalteatern's "Bara om min älskade väntar"
Little did I know that the same song was first performed by Dylan

If today was not an endless highway,
If tonight was not a crooked trail,
If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,
Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all.

Bob Dylan - Tomorrow is a long time

Keep rollin' rollin', rollin'

Since last friday I have managed to go:
Oslo-Karlskoga-Oslo-Dublin-Belfast-Oslo-Falkenberg-Uddevalla-Oslo
Believe it or not: I LOVE IT!!

A rolling stone gathers no moss

Publilius Syrus, ~100 B.C.

I cant really see myself living life otherwise (...today)
Sure I will have a slight reaction on this and stay quite
calm this weekend and just have a little trip to Uddevalla, Sat-Sun.

I remember sometime, was it this winter.
When I for a straight week or so slept in different beds
for seven nights - no not with seven different people.
And it felt great, if not for anything but the joy
of actually being welcome in so many places -
and hopefully am I as welcoming to the same number of people.

And speaking about welcome ... The Walléns ...
A family that makes hospitality an institution.
Hopefully I will have a chance on repaying it in some way some day.

Walléns singing Håkan Hellström @ Midsummer

---

Falkenberg then -
I think a vast majority of the readers have heard all about it,
but to sum it up for the last 25% (Yep that would be you Wolf <3)
Especially since two of them were attending the event as well :)

Well it was great fun. Got down there at noon friday,
spent the day @ sea and had an awesome night out.
Saturday was just a repeat of fridays success -
more people, more drinking, more fun!

Note to self: I seriously need to change tactics
and start attracting girls in stead of men :/

Parts of the crew - Raz, Jonas, Jenny, Madde, Hugo, Andreas @ Skrea Beach

Spooning - as visualized by professionals

Hot chics! Linnea, Isa, Jenny, Zarah, Madde

Fredrik my fellow blogger showing class,
Mr JayQue showing some indie-style

Well ... me :)

Uddevalla being conveniently placed in between Fbg-Oslo
it deserved a stop and seeing the talked about Walléns is always a pleasure.
Nothing beats a good night's sleep in the Adam-room

Note to self 2: I need to stack up on an outfit suiting
the theme for this weekends party - "Astrid Lindgren, slightly sleazy"

Random sand art @ Skrea Beach
Artist: traces leads toward Christian

Øya -07

Crowd surfing Sjøsiden stage, Justice playing

Gogol Bordello
Gupsy Punk from the US.
Well quite listenable, but nothing I'd put in the player voluntarily.

CocoRosie
Two sister doing experimental music, much like the knife
with a song resembling Björk's if you ask me

El Caco
Norwegian heavy rock/metall.
Not much to add, they do it quite ok
with a sound similar to my personal favourites in this genre
Freak Kitchen - so that ain't a bad comparison.

The two lads in Justice

Justice
This is where it peaks.
It's French. It's beat. It's melody. It's great.
Tried listening to them briefly on album but it is a
completely different act while playing live.
And the finshing set with Prodigy's Smack my bitch up
moving in to RATM's Killing in the name - well then I am sold.
This is the greatest surprise on my musical heaven this year.

Merci!

The New Young Pony Club
Hard to label, hard to comment. 80-ish chick in purple dress and
punkish haircut deliveres some 80's influenced pop.
Nothing I fell for at first listening.

Tool
Too bad I haven't listened to them more on forehand,
think that might have helped.
But the gig was technically well done.
A great laser-show (*pew* *pew*) all in all a decent finishing act.


Thanks a lot for this year Middelalderparken!

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good

Set off for Belfast and a short 48h-visit to our
Sea water-treatment plant there.
Once at Gardermoen Airport me and my manager
slipped in to the SAS-lounge (him having a Gold-card)
for a beer and sallad waiting for the flight.

Once at the gate our tickets were automagically
upgraded to business (again the Gold-card) and we could
enjoy a warm meal, free drinks and comfortable seats,
while our dear collegue (who actually is the Project Manager)
suffered the discomfort and meal-less economy-class.

Most important of all is the details ...
Can't stop admirring the napkins we where given for the dinner,
there was a button hole in one of the ends
to be able to attach it to the shirt,
as well as a little mini clothespin to fasten it.

The Bad

Well once in Belfast, more specifically Carricfergus
some minutes drive outside,
we settled down in the hotell and had dinner.
Eager to try the local kitchen I ordered "Cod & chips" -
a giant piece of deep-fried cod and 9 (!) fries stacked in a box
served with mashed peas.

Fine with that, but the wonderful diet continued at breakfast.
We were served a traditional Eng. breakfast with
white bread, jams and some warm servings -
eggs, bacon, beans and a very interesting sausage.

The grease-feast continues as we head to the snack-bar
at the plant for a quick lunch,bacon sandwich sounded
like quite a decent option. I can give you the recipe -

2 pieces of white bread
Large amounts of butter
4 huge pieces of bacon
Tomato sauce

Bacon Sandwich á La Kilroot Power Station Snack bar

I don't wanna be whining overly much but
I do find it interesting that normal decent healthy food
is so hard to come by.
But it leaves me with an explanation to why the regular
UK football hooligan looks the way he does :)

Ireland 0 - My prejudices 1

The Ugly?

Well the food was one area where me prejudices didn't let me down.
Two areas where they did was housing and women.

The housing was, in stark contrast with my visions, not boring.
It wasn't even all brown and grey. Of course there were some but in general
Ireland and Northern Ireland was greener, happier and more cosy than I'd expected.
In fact, during the two hour drive up to Belfast from Dublin I didn't
hardly even see a gas station in the landscape.
Ireland 1 - My prejudices 1

The women ... well I had a premade opinion here as well,
with my experiences and sightings in London at hand.
I had thought them all to be grey mice in boring clothing
and brown straight hair.
To my surprise they were a notch hotter :)
Not to say the streets were crowded with supermodels
but they were just normal girls and women in all ranges.
Ireland 2 - My prejudices 1

The men ... well here my prejudices didn't let me down
all that much. There were the random Pat, Tony, Colin, Ian
Taken straight outta the pub or football arena.
But all in all easy to get by and quite talkative.
Ireland 2 - My prejudices 2


And finally a little culinary sidenote from Geoffrey -
Guiness can be served to any type of food,
he demonstrated this by having a pint for his Oysters and Scampi =)

It did at least taste good served with a Shank of lamb and mashies...

---

*Pics to be added during the morning*

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I have been shot

Just doing a short write-up on todays shooting.
Got off at noon for Våtsjön/Villingsberg - east of Karlskoga
to meet monsieur Esko.

The goal was just to do some random photos in different settings
to fill up the portfolio and get to know each other before
what hopefully will be a grand thai-session someday in the future.

We did some shooting until late in the afternoon,
hopefully Esko will start editing and picking the better ones quite soon

I won't even start to explain Why? or even try to deny I like it,
standing in front of the camera felt great!

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With this said I am off to Northern Ireland and Belfast tomorrow,
looking forward to it indeed - both to see our plant there
and of course to set foot on Irish soil.



//Cheers!!

A Night Out at "Ute"

Went to an amazing nightclub yesterday-
come to think about it, it was quite similar to the theme
in the epic movie about the Butabi-brothers
with the outdoor-club thing.

DOUG
Well, you make the outside of the
club look like the inside. You
know, you put down a rug outside
and some couches and pipe out some
music. People will love it. But,
then on the inside.

STEVE
Oh, this is the good part.

DOUG
... Looks like the street. You
know, you park some cars inside, a
mailbox, street signs, and that
way when they come in, it's like
the outside is the inside and
inside is the outside.

A Night at the Roxbury

It was an alley where they had set up a bar,
hung some covers between the house to prevent rain from coming in -
which they, honestly, didn't succeed 100% with as the night would prove.

The place was quite logically just called: Ute ("Out" in Norw.)
The crowd for the night was by coincidence a large part of
media-Norway (or at least the summer stand-ins from that business)


Great fun, great people, talkative chics and a relaxed atmosphere
makes it a strong 8 outta 10 on the "night out"-rating system

One a sidenote, I just want to kill the rumour that me and my friend -
named James Christian for that evening are NOT working as fish packers :)


Oh ... and the random bonus,
and the actual cause we walked downtown in the first place,
was that I got to go in to a Strip Bar - Wiiieeeehhh!

Even though the errand ther weren't as sinister as it may appear since
my friend just wanted to check in and correct some mistakes on a receipt
he apparantly had gotten from that club on a previous occasion.

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Weekend incoming now!

Time to head back home and celebrate two other brothers
and them turning 25 & 27. Gratz in advance J&J :)

Hopefully sunday will be interesting as well ...
Trying to make some of my photo-plans come through,
report and what we get of results will follow shortly!


/Peace