two more sleeps till i fly

bounce, bounce, oh wait 12+ hours in airports.. sigh, oh well, bounce, bounce...

:)

and Let it snow, let it snow.

yep it is snowing in Iceland.

This is not as common as most people think... and my parents are off in Australia where it is nice and warm, being summer there...

There she blows...

Well winter i think has officially started, we just got our first winter storm of the year.

High winds, sideways rain and all, limited daylight...

I want to be a monster!

sigh that time of year again

Well the great birthday is coming again. this year i will be 6 X 9 :)

it is a year of knowing everything :P

Sunsets and other new pics

Can hardly tell where the three lamp posts.





That is all..

Be Proude to be Canadian!

Great video, and thanks sis for the cool like!

Le Photos...

The photos are up, see if you can spot the removed people and wires, and posts, and oh yea a whole freaking Crane!

good news, good news, bad news

Well back from France and I had a wonderful time. Got some good pictures.

My i-pad was waiting for me.

My bike was stolen while i was away, found the lock cut around the tree.

more later...

Last day

Well it is the last day here, we fly out tomorrow.

Yesterday was a busy day. Started the day with a half day trip to versie(sp?) And the in the after noon I had a bus tour of the city with a cruise on the river afterwards.

Ended at the tower, didn't go up as the lines looked to be a couple hours long.

Caught the metro rail back to the hotel

Going to rent a bike today

The three person 225kg elevator

The elevator in my hotel has three person elevator, and considering the number of stairs to get to the fifth floor...

I am glad, granted it was either me or my suit case in there it is nice to have a elevator :)

Today is the last day of the conference, tomorrow I have a tour to verislle (sp?) And then a bus tour and river ride ending at the eifel tower. Don't know what I will do on Saturday.
More to come from Paris!

I am in paris

Well I am here, didn't prepare very well. Ended up following two other guys from iceland that are going to the conf also.

Have now been on the rail and metro here in paris :)

More later

Pathfinding to paris

Well next Tuesday I fly to pairs for a conference and then have 2 days vacation. According to Google I am 1:32.14 walk to the Eiffel Tower and on the way I pass the Lover.

The conference I am going to is put on by AIGAMEDEV.com and is there annual conference on AI and game play.

All told next week should be a lot of fun, except the 4:00 am wake-up to get to the airport for a 7:40 am flight :(

The secrets of Time.

Came across this really neat video of how we perceive time and how it influences the kinda of person that we are and how we relate to others. At the End he also makes a interesting statement about education and video games. One of the things that he mentions is that most kids become adults they have played 10,000 hours of video games.

A TED video that is watched said that if you spend 10,000 doing anything you become a expert at doing this. Most kids also spend 10,000 hours in school by the time they become a adult, so you can say by the time a child is a adult they have a good education and are well educated in video games.

One of the points this professor makes is that kids have become rewired for interactive learning, you put them into a classroom where they have to sit there and listen to a teacher. They go 'that's boring' and one statistic is one child drops out of school every 9 seconds in the US.

So if we took traditional school teaching and reworked it so the same knowledge is presented in a interactive way, would students become eager to learn again.

In any case this is good food for thought, recommend that you watch it, he is a not bad white board artist also.

blub bloob blib!

Translation from drowning: Swimming going good!



Still swimming been 3 times this week and am up to two 20 min sets of laps, taking about 1 min per lap, yea I am slow...

I was having problems getting into the motion of swimming and turning you head to get air. But have solved that holding your breath for the full length of the pool works great!

Just kidding I have a mask and snorkel and swimming with the snorkel makes it a little easier and I don't keep getting a lung full of water.

One thing I have noticed is that I don't go as fast as I did when I was a kid and the extra weight that I have makes it harder to tread water. I have kinda a weird body makeup. I have most of my weight on the gut, but my legs are relatively fat free from biking all the time. So the legs are much more dense and sink while the top part of me floats better. So when floating my feet always sink and my head bobs up, unfortunately it appears that my buoyancy level puts the water level at my forehead :(

Progress meeter: 6 lbs.

Of biking and swimming

Diana dragged me to the pool the other day and this got me thinking of swimming to help lose weight.

so yesterday and today i started out with a nice 2 hour bike ride around by the light house and then off to kringlan, then on the way back I stopped at the pool and swam laps for 40 min (there was a few breaks in there)

Now the trick is to keep it up with either swimming twice a week or a bike ride twice a week and both one day each weekend.

it will be pain full but good for me. I hope.

Mexico Day Four

Well day 4 was a half day and then a long flight. But the morning was like most mornings up and having breakfast, went to the beach.

Halldor was doing yoga on the beach with his wife.



Then stood and took photos of Kenny and Diana playing in the surf.

My little camera does not bad at full digital zoom. :)



Chatted for a bit then they convinced me to go back in with them :)



Before we left it was a picture perfect moment, made you really not want to get on a plane. :(



And then when we got to the airport with 340 CCP waiting to get checked in the airports computers crashed... so they wrote boarding passes by hand. "In case there is a joke in here somewhere it takes 8 people to make a hand written boarding pass :(

Saw this guy on our way out :)


That was the end of our Mexico adventure, back to the land of volcano's and liquid sunshine. :)

Mexico Day Three

To day was the "work" day, we started the morning with a seminar on how to make new ideas and how to take said ideas to the next level of implementing them?

Not much photos from there, Just our tables glorious leader.



There was one cool thing they handed out Nerf darts and we where to right Ideas onto the dart and fire them off into your coworkers.

After the course the darts made it to the pool and a 3 hour Nerf war!

Loads of Fun had by all.

Near the end of this I saw Perla and co heading to the beach in there belly dancing costumes. I had to follow and take some photos.




The best picture of that was ...


Then that evening we had the grand gala, to get there we took a bus to a boat, then a hour boat ride to a private island. The water was a tad rough and several people where sick by the end of the trip.




Dinner was good, and the setting was great, but it did start to rain a bit.



There was a stage show of fire juggling and stuff, then we saw the new trailers, and this years crop of funny videos that are made in house.

The boat ride back was much smoother and allot of fun, if the ride out had been like that then people would have been much happier.

When we got back to the hotel they had set up the lawn area with table and a bar and the party continued late into the small hours.

Went to bead so I could get up early and enjoy the next morning before the flight home.

Mexico Day Two

Day two started by waking up about 5:00AM mostly because of the timezones and then i rolled over and went back to sleep...

About 7:00 AM i got up and headed for breakfast, met people from work and got ready for the canopy tour... Well that didn't happen they had neglected to tell anyone that there was a 250 lbs weight limit.

So I spent the morning with my underwater housing for my Canon G11 and took pictures from in the pool.




Anne borrowed my camera for this picture.

This is anne.


In the afternoon I had the Green Zebra jeep trip. It was fun and I got very dirty and dusty. Not many opportunity for pictures but allot of fun.



At the mid point of the ride we stopped at a ranch for tequila tasting and nachos.





The evening was sitting around the pool and visiting with people.

Mexico Day One

Well the first day was really a continuation of the previous day. As we had just arrived at 6:30 AM. The hotel staff was awesome, staying up way late to check us in, and they had sandwiches and drinks waiting for as we walked in the door 15h late.



I stayed up and had breakfast at the hotel, the Triton restaurant was cool and open air at the same time. The birds just flew in and apparently have learned that anything on the dirty dishes tray was open game. They would actually sit on the back of a chair and not touch a plate on the table, but where all over the clearing trays.



At 8:00 I got on the buss for the tour to San Blas. It was a two hour drive so I slept on the bus for that part. But before we got out of the city I saw some construction where they where installing this.



Before we got to San Blas we stopped at a crocodile farm. To get to it we had to take a 30 min boat trip. The boat trip was through canals and along the way the guides spotted many animals. How i have no idea cause as they parked the boat right under them it was still bloody hard to see them.



Once we got the the farm the biting began, there was MANY MANY mosquitoes :( but we saw crocks!


I saw a jaguar :)


ps. The camera slipped into the cadge, my hand did not and the cat was watching me the whole time. I am sure that if I had moved another six inches the cat would have had a snack!

Once we where done with that it was on the San Blas. The old fort was a big disappointment as you got shuffled through it very quickly and the fort was way to spiffed up to get a good feel of how old it was, and the rest of the ruins where being "preserved" so you couldn't go there. They had also cemented the canons into the walls :(




For lunch we went to McDonald's, there we had authentic Mexican food, it was Good. The town was nice also and there was a bit of a outdoor market.





While we were walking around this guy came out of a registrant and putt a funnel into the manhole cover and started poring something in, while talking with the police officer.



You would never get away with that the police would be way to suspicion of you in north America. You would probably get charged with illegal dumping.

That night we had our arrival dinner around the pool at the hotel. They had a mariachi band playing and dancers.





After that it was drinks and socializing.