Hiking in Trollheimen

These are a few pictures from a 3 day trip in a cabin called Jøldalshytta in the Trollheimen area southeast of Trondheim. It was a beautiful day for hiking on Saturday and we had a total of about 20 employees from Nordic plus 15 or so wives/girlfriends and kids along. There were a couple of mt. hikes that the more adventurous people went on that took between 7 and 9 hours. The people with bad backs and injured knees like me :( stayed on this road in the valley. It was beautiful anyway but I sure would have liked to see the view from one of the peaks. Maybe next year. I went back the next day and rode the mt. bike down this road, that was really fun. The road is very rocky but it was actually easier to ride a bike on it than to walk on it most of the way.
The cabin we stayed at is run by the Trondheim Touring association and has a normal capacity of around 80 people I think, even though we had about 90 there and I heard there were 100 people there the weekend before. The staff at the cabin was great, they made breakfast and dinner for everyone and we made our own matpakke for lunch.
We slept 4 to a room in a giant wooden cabin where you could hear the people on all sides of you snoring away at night. Fortunately we were tired enough that it didn't matter. I would really like to go back and XC ski in that valley next spring if my knee recovers.

Korsbåndsruptur

I am trying my best to learn norwegian vocabulary and making some progress, but one word I could have done without was "korsbåndsruptur". When the doctor reads that to you it means you tore the ACL in your knee :(
My doctor Elisabeth was doing her best to translate all the words from my MRI to english but I sort of stopped listening after I heard the torn ACL and ruptured meniscus parts. So I guess my experiment with playing soccer so far has these results: Spit my face open on a board in the indoor gym, injured my foot which took 4 months to heal, got kicked in the ear (twice) in the same match, Sprained my thumb, possibly broke my little finger although it seems ok now if a bit crooked, torn ACL and ruptured meniscus in right knee. Which means I still have one good foot, one good knee, and a good hand left. Should be good to go by next season!
I will see a specialist soon about the knee, most likely it will need some kind of surgery but I don't know for sure yet. It doesn't really hurt anymore but it doesn't exactly work right either. It sort of feels like it is going to bend backwards sometimes which is not a good feeling really.
I hurt it practicing soccer at the end of July but the Norwegian health system is not that speedy in dealing with non life-threatening problems. It took 3 visits to the doctor before they set up an MRI and then it took 2 weeks for someone to look it at after that. Hopefully it will work out. If not I have my eye on a nice used mobility scooter for getting to work.

The Itunes shuffle

Some time last year I decided to try and see if I could get Itunes on my laptop to play ALL of the unplayed songs just using shuffle play. (These are the kinds of thing engineers think of when they are bored). There are just over 2000 songs in my library, and probably around 500 of them were unplayed at that time. Now the list is down to 10 finalists to see which will be the song that Itunes hates the most:

Road Trippin' - Red Hot Chili Peppers Californication
Where Did You Sleep Last Night? - Nirvana MTV Unplugged in New York
Polly - Nirvana MTV Unplugged in New York
November Spawned a Monster - Morrissey Bona Drag
Spoon - Dave Matthews Band Before These Crowded Streets
Country Girl - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Déjà Vu
The Spangle Maker - Cocteau Twins The Pink Opaque
Road, River and Rail - Cocteau Twins Heaven or Las Vegas
Percy's Song - Bob Dylan Biograph
Selfless, Cold and Composed - Ben Folds Five Whatever and Ever Amen

Of course the problem is that the fewer unplayed ones you have, the longer it takes for the shuffle to play one of them. I figure the last 10 might take 3-5 months before it plays them all. Another interesting thing is that I have some songs that have been played more than 20 times on shuffle mode, while these have never been played once. Not sure about that random play algorithm that Apple is using....
Feel free to vote on any of them that you think will be the last to go.....

I went to the A-Ha concert last night in Lerkendal stadium in Trondheim. I thought it was a great show, they had a huge stage with giant video screens behind it and the background video artwork was really nice. The band played great and it seemed like everyone was having a good time: http://www.adressa.no/kultur/article1525634.ece.
I was curious to see if the lead singer Morten could still hit the high notes from "take on me" and he did it! The lyrics still don't make any sense but the song is great.
It was a bit cold standing in the field for 3 hours (around 40F) but I was smart enough to wear my long underwear. Probably the first time I needed that for a September concert but Trondheim is already into the fall weather. There was an interesting mix of younger and older people there, since A-ha has been around since the early 80's. This was supposedly a "farewell" tour, but we all know that is no guarantee that we won't see the boys again in Norway.
Anyway just in case you haven't seen it lately, the greatest MTV video ever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EXxMlIExpo

Back in Trondheim again after a week at the Bluetooth UPF-36 in Beijing. That was my first trip to China. It's somewhat overwhelming to go straight from sleepy Trondheim to Beijing in one day. There are 5 times as many people in Beijing as there are in the entire country of Norway. I went with 2 other engineers from Nordic and we stayed in the Intercontinental Hotel which is basically across the street from most of the Olympic venues that were built for the 2008 Olympics. It seems like they don't really know what to do with all of it now though. All the buildings have big white fences built to keep people out, although you can walk up and down the open area between the bird's next stadium and the other buildings. The hotel is very nice, partly because there is approximately 1 employee for every 2 guests. Any hotel or restaurant manager in the U.S. would have a heart attack if they saw how many people were working there. Most of them sort of standing around until somebody told them to do something. The staff was quite helpful though and many of them spoke english well enough to figure out what we were asking for. I did get admonished once by one of the bellhops for giving a taxi driver too big of a tip. The bill was 33 yuan ( about 5 dollars ) and I gave him 40. The bellhop rushed over and said "no no! bill 33 yuan you should only give him 34 now!" Well I thought a 3% tip seemed a bit stingy so I let him keep the 40.
We didn't have a lot of time for sightseeing but we did make it to the Great Wall the day before we had to come back. I enjoyed that except for the gaunlet of trinket sellers you had to wade through to get up there. The tourist areas in Beijing have some very aggressive sellers who will literally grab you or get in your way so you can't get by without acknowledging them. We hiked a long way on the wall, maybe 3 kilometers or so (uphill) until we got to a place where the restored part of the wall ended. When we got back to the entrance the guide that brought us there seemed surprised that we went that far.
"Oh, I never have a group go that far!"
(me) "How long have you been coming up here?
"12 years".
Leave it to Norwegians. (It wasn't my idea)
While I'm on the subject of tourists, is it my imagination or are Americans hard of hearing? Why are they SO LOUD? I could hear my fellow merican's coming like a herd of cheese-doodle eating rhinos from about a half a mile away on top of the wall. I pretended to be from Canada.

I was filming traffic out of the back of a van when there was an accident in front of us. Watch how annoyed the black Mercedes gets when he can't get by us. It has diplomatic plates and the special little blue and red lights stuck in the grill.

Geiranger in April

Thought I better put a few of these up before they get too old. Leif and Joel and I took a flight from Værnes down to Molde and then to Geiranger a few weeks ago. The scenery was incredible as is usually the case with flying in Norway. I put a few of the pictures here, and the rest are on my picassa site: http://picasaweb.google.com/mileslsmith/MoldeGeirangerFlight#

We got a bit lucky with the weather that day, we had almost perfect flying conditions for 3 hours which is not usually the case in Norway. We had some trouble get the flywheel to engage with the starter before we left Værnes, so we decided not to make a full stop in Molde as we weren't certain that we'd be able to take off again. That would have been bad I guess.

I think winter has finally lost it's grip in Trondheim. We were still getting snow flurries at the beginning of last week but the sun came out the last 2 days and I think we may have actually hit 50F today. Whoopee! I ran a few miles with just a t-shirt on and I don't think I have done that since last October.

There is a big week coming up for me I think. I have a 5k race tomorrow night after work, then on Tuesday there is a practice exam for the norwegian level 1 course. My head is completely stuffed full of adjectives and verbs and pronouns but I'm sure I'll forget at least 1/2 of it as soon as I see the exam. This one doesn't count anyway but it is just practice for the real final exam which is in a month.

Tuesday night is also the 2010 outdoor debut of the indomitable Nordic Semiconductor soccer team. Well perhaps that is too strong a word. The fact that I'm on the team should be an indication that we are no threat to the Champions league anytime soon. I think the goal differential last year was something on the order of 150-2, but we remain undaunted. I didn't play last year but I'm going to try and help out this season. I bought some shoes and soccer shorts yesterday and I borrowed some leg guards from Joel so I should be all set. Except for the part about not having a clue how to play soccer :)

On Wednesday I will be having a doctors appointment to see if I have a stress fracture in my right foot. See how I conveniently scheduled that appointment AFTER the 5k race and the soccer game? If you are going down, you might as well go down in flames....Cathie B if you are reading this I can see those eyes rolling!

Påske in the mountains

Easter is a great holiday in Norway. The weather starts to warm up but the snow in the mountains is still great for skiing and everyone here tries to take advantage of the 5 day weekend by heading to the hills. Leif and I decided to go back to Gålå in central Norway to do some skiing. We had been there once before but it was in January and it was snowing like mad so you really couldn't see anything. The weather was great this time, so we got two and a half good days of skiing in. The downhill area there isn't huge but the runs are fun and the snow was really perfect. We did downhill all day on Friday and then switched to cross country on Saturday. I'm not exactly sure how far we skied on Saturday, depends on which map you look at it was somewhere between 16 and 20km, plus the 2 extra km we added when we were momentarily lost :)
The hotel there is really nice - here is a link in case anyone else feels like checking it out - http://www.gala.no/EN/Default.aspx?tabid=568
The price of the room included breakfast and dinner and they gave you little bags to pack a lunch in as well, so the meals for every day are basically covered by the hotel. I'm pretty sure I was the only vegetarian in the dining room every day but they were really nice and made up a good meal for me every day. There were a lot of families there so we had fun watching the little norwegian kids running around in circles and having fun. Didn't take them long to discover the ice cream cooler in the dining area.
On the way back we took a slightly longer way home through the Rondane mts. There is some incredible scenery there as well. It was well worth a little extra time to see it in winter. There are some large plateaus there just at or above the tree line, so in winter you just see an incredible view of pure white mountain peaks across a huge flat area with a few trees and cabins poking up. More pictues here: http://picasaweb.google.com/mileslsmith/20100404#
It felt like driving through Antartica or maybe the moon covered in snow. Would not be a very good place to run out of gas either. Anyway it was back to norskkurs homework today and then back to work tomorrow. Time to get the mountain bike out - I don't think the snow will last much longer in Trondheim.
Ha det!