My mate Per Arne Troset attempts to ski across a lake.

Apologies for the swear at the end. I am not normally like that.

Something I have believed for some time has been put into words by DHH. Last three posts have all be 37Signals related. Makes me look like a bit of a fanboy. Dont care tho, its good stuff.

Web Designers should do their own CSS

Ive recently got me a samson audio microphone complete with pop filter for recording screencasts for oentries. As a side note screencasting for the mac is pretty good for explaining how to make screencasts on the cheap.

After making your screencast, they are a considerable size. Theres no point hammering your wee vps or shared server delivering this content. Its a better plan to rely on Amazon S3 to do this for you.

A quick easy way to do this is to get the s3fox firefox extension to upload your media files. Its pretty good but still a bit flaky.

• Create a new bucket (you need to do this through command line api)
• Go into S3 Fox open the bucket and upload your files.
• Right click on the files and set them to be publicly viewable.
• They are now available on http://s3.amazonaws.com/[bucket_name]/

Now your app webserver can sleep happy and spend its time dealing with app requests.

From Seth Godins post

Howdy. Its now been 5 months since Helen and I moved to Trondheim in mid Norway. We made the move in the dead of winter then there was only about 5 hours of proper daylight each day. Opting to be able to take more stuff with car (2 bikes, 2 snowboards and a pair of skis on the roof) rather than flying we embarked on a 3 day nonstop journey. We had various challenges to overcome on the 22 hour nonstop overnight drive from Haugesund in the south to Trondheim a lot more north. Most of the challenges were snow related:

After we arrived in Trondheim we were happy to have made it. The we promptly left by train for a week in a ski resort in northern Sweden for new year with friends, snus and jagermeister.

The we finally started life in Trondheim. Thanks to the Glasgow city race, I had met a woman by the name of Turid Arnesen. She has sorted us out big time here, from lending us skis to teaching us Norwegian.

We have joined the local club Wing OK which is the elite club to join here. It also has a strong medlemmer (members) section. There are loads of trainings planned, almost everyday in the winter there was some sort of training on. This was totally different from Clyde in the UK where there would be at most 2 trainings in a week. However, in winter we live on the edge of a huge xc ski resort (which I never realised until we got here). It looks like this:

We live here (I always wanted to live on a map):

There is snow everywhere in winter, except for by the sea; so that is where the orienteering takes place. Its amazing having both mountainous snow terrain and the seaside within a few miles of each other. Its easier to ski in winter than orienteer (half of trondheim seem to ski) so I did a lot more of this than running training but still went to the orienteering training.

Coming from a science and engineering background, languages are not my strong point. Learning Norwegian has been a mind expanding experience and I would heartily recommend learning a second language if you havent already.

As with most things there are pro’s and con’s:

Cons
The food in supermarkets is rubbish and overpriced.
Flights are more expensive than the UK.
The car market is a joke, again super expensive.
There is nothing open on Sundays.

Pros
Real seasons – summer is totally different to winter.
Lack of people – overpopulation is not an issue here. If you want to build your own house, you still can.
Orienteering is like football here – well not quite, but there are loads more people doing it.
Quality of life – Norwegians believe in family time. They work set hours and spend the rest with their families. There are no points for staying late here. Also there seems to be loads of public holidays. The work ethic in the UK is unhealthy. The Norwegians have got it right.

Have a fun summer and hopefully I’ll see you at the Oringen!

I have upgraded to the latest and greatest version of wordpress. Hopefully my xmlrpc will now work..

If you are on BT, Talk Talk or Virgin, Russia could know what you are up to.

Phorm and your ISP

Email is a plague on our modern lives. Mine is growing exponentially all the time and it sucks time out of your day. I have been spending less time on email by checking it less. I try to go for three times per day and deal with most emails on the spot.

One thing which has been getting me recently is the need to send an email to someone. In doing so with gmail this results in checking your incoming email which results often in me getting distracted and going off on some sort of mad tangent.

I decided to get an offline mail client and configure it with gmail. I went for Thunderbird and it has a nice wizard for setting up gmail pop access. I then changed the settings so it never checks email, just sends it.

Top Class! I can now send emails in isolation. The way it should be.

If you fancy writing any guest posts to talk about something you are interested in or something you have done please contact me and we can get you some content marketing on the go.