7
Jan/100
Jan/100
Reiki the movie
Here it is. Long awaited, and highly appreciated, REIKI!
I hope you enjoy this movie as much as I did. This movie is published in full with expressed permission.
18
Jul/091
Jul/091
Things to do and see in San Francisco
Out of the places I’ve been to in the US, San Francisco is definetly one of my favorites. I’ve been there 3 times, and I always seem to find something new to see or do every time I’m there. My recommendations for San Franciso are the following:
- Take a picture in front of the Golden Gate bridge (from the opposite side, with SF in the background)
- Ride the Cable Cars
- Visit Chinatown and it’s novelty and heritage art stores
- Shop for food or eat in the Ferry terminal building
- Go to Alcatraz, but make sure you book your ticket well in advance. During tourist season there’s a minimum 3 day wait, and that’s the reason I’ve never been there.
- Drive down Lombard Street
- Visit a thrift store in the Castro neighbourhood (the gayer part of SF)
- Go shopping in North Beach
- Visit pier 39, but don’t feed the seals (it’s not allowed)
- Eat at Fishermans Wharf
- Go shopping at or around Union Square
- Eat at 21st amendment and try the home brewed beer
- Take ferry ride to Sausalito (a rich suburb, and very idyllic)
If you rent a car there are several other options aswell, like:
- Visit the Redwoods at Muir Woods (North of SF)
- Visit the UC Berkeley campus
- Shop at Great Mall in Union City (The biggest mall on the west coast)
Please write me a comment if you’d like more information on any of the tings listed here, I’d be happy to help. And now for some pictures!
Ferry terminal
14
Jul/090
Jul/090
Restaurant Cyrus
First off I have to say it’s really a shame I don’t have any pictures from this restaurant, because everything was pleasing to the eye; the food, the decor, even the presentation of the wine was something else! 2 thumbs up to the restaurant, and one in my eye for not bringing a camera!
I visited this restaurant with two collegues back in July 2006 when I was in San Francisco taking a training in relation to work. I spent 6 weeks there, and during one of the weekends, me and the two other Europeans (British and Swedish) who we’re there decided to rent a car and go to Healdsburg in Sonoma Valley to visit a restaurant, Cyrus, which had been highly recommended by a sommelier we met during another restaurant visit.
Upon arrival we we’re escorted into the bar adjecent the dining room, and offered a liquid apptizer. After a while we taken to our table, discretely located in one of the restaurants quiet corners, without feeling cramped.
I have to say that the thing about this restaurant was the way the food was presented. Unlike traditional American cooking, nothing was in abundance. Needless to say, we didn’t leave feeling wanting anything and least of all to fill a void in our stomach, but the point I’m trying to make is that in some magical way they managed to make every dish a selection of smaller dishes, greatly varied in taste, yet coming together like a symphony of tastes; each dish presenting a different melody and each ingredient a different instrument.
The restaurant focused heavily on local wines. Sonoma, beeing the largest wine producing county in the US, has a great selection of wines. Some of the best wines I’ve ever tasted came from the US west coast, and some of the best wines I tasted from the US west coast I tasted during this visit. Selecting wines to match a dish composed of 3-4 smalles dishes, and an endless array of tastes was a challenge, but it was a challenge meet and defeated by Cyrus’s skillful sommelier.
In retrospect I have nothing bad to say about this restaurant. If you’re ever in Californina, this restaurant is well worth a visit. I’m told that it’s also a good alternative to the more expensive and exlusive French Laundry in Napa Valley, and it proves once and for all that Americans can cook to!
Visit the restaurant website here
To make up for not having any pictures from the restaurant, here are a few scenic shots from Sonoma in general.
10
Jul/090
Jul/090
My final flying lesson
Finally, after 2 cancelations, I flew my final flying lesson with my instructor, David Chune von Tangen. This marks the end of my normal flying lessons, and means that I’m ready for a preliminary test with the school leader in my flying club, and the skill test with a controller from the the Norwegian Cilvil Aviation Authority. If I pass those, then I’m done, and I can officially call myself a pilot.
Today we decided to fly LN-NRF, a Cessna 172SP from 2005. I love that airplane, and compared to the Piper Cherokee I usually fly it’s a rocket! It’s got a 180 horsepower engine, climbs around 30% faster than the plane I usually fly, and cruises at 120kts, compared to the 100kts I’m used to. It’s also fairly new, less than 4 years old, so if you put your nose really close to the seat back, you can almost get a wiff of that new leather scent! It’s super stable, and when you get to cruise, you can pretty much trim her out, and she flies herself. She’s also equiped with a 2 axis autopilot which flies by GPS (or NAV), so she’ll even get you we’re you’re going without to much hassle.
The weather today was not very good. There was rain, some low clouds and reduced visibility in certain areas. The cloudbase however was pretty high up, around 4200 feet, so we decided to take off and check conditions once we got off the ground. We took off and got good climb performance, around 1000 feet pr. minute, so we quickly got up to 2000 feet. We saw that the weather was ok for airwork, and we continued south to our designated training area overhead Lake Øyeren, just south of Lillestrøm. The clouds we’re getting thicker and lower at the end of the lake, which mean that we had to stay closer to the northern end.
The lesson today was the final D-block lesson, meaning IFR flying. For those not familiar with this term, IFR is short for Instrument Flight Rules, and means that we simulate IFR flight by me flying with a pair of view blocking goggles that only allows me to see the instrument panel. This excercise is designed to familirize the student with flying when there are no visual reference points to fly by, meaning no visible horizon, and no visible navigational landmarks.
The plane is equiped with a GPS, so navigating was fairly easy, but coordinating the plane without visual reference point however isn’t! The danger of flying in IFR conditions is that your mind tricks you into beliving that your airplane is at a different angle than you think, and you end up flipping over or going into a spin. It really is hard to trust only the instruments, and I’ve experience vertigo several times under “the hood”.
We ended the flight with a short trip over Oslo, and the flew back to our base at Kjeller airport.
9
Jul/090
Jul/090
200 billion stolen from space
The avatar of the character Ricdic
It was a strangely terrestrial expense he was to cover, the man who stole 200 billion Inter-Stellar Kredits (ISK), from his bank in the game Eve Online. Ricdic was just going to pay his mortgage. Maybe if he spent a little less money on online gaming and a little more on mundane things like food, loan-payments etc, he wouldn’t have to rob a virtual bank to pay his real life mortgage!
The amount is worth roughly $5100 in the real world, making the exchange rate roughly ISK 39.215.686,27- to $1. As a funny fact, I checked the exchange rate between Zimbawban dollars and US dollars, and it’s almost the same, at 37.456.777,- makine ISK worth about the same as Zimbabwan dollars in the real world!
More in Norwegian here or in English here.
7
Jul/090
Jul/090
Berlin for New Years 09
So this is an old happening, but I didn’t have a blog at the time, and I’d still like to share the experience simply because it was a good one!
My friend Torstein’s father owns an apartement in Berlin, and Torstein had courtly invited my girlfriend and I to stay there with him and his wife Hilde for new years. Personally I had never been to Berlin, hell I had barely been to Germany, so I was not about the let the chance pass! To add to the story, this is the same Torstein that has me hooked on foie gras and perversely delicious variations of shellfish. Naturally he planned a few restaurant visits along the way, from a fancy twist on Austrian cuisine, to the big blowout at Facil, a Michelin star restaurant well known for their awesome decor and equally awesome food!
During our stay we went shopping at B5 outlet mall, we visited all the sights like the Jewish Holocaust Memorial and right next to it the Myth Germania exhibit, showcasing Hitler’s plans for the rebuilt Berlin after the war. Hitlers bunker is situated right next to the jewish memorial, but it’s only marked with a small plaque to avoid neo-nazi pilgrimmers flocking to the site. Getting around was easy as Torstein and Hilde had been smart enough to rent a car for the duration. We used it quite alot, and I suggest anyone who goes to Berlin to do the same, atleast for a day or two.
We ofcourse visited some of the typical tourist places like Brandeburger Tor, the Berlin wall and Potzdamer Platz. We also went by the new Hauptbahnhof, the main train station, with trains in 4 stories, going everywhere in Europe.
That the Berlin people are free-spirited became evident during a visit to the the Badeschiff. The badeschiff are several barges turned into a bar and a swimming pool. During the winter they’re covered and heated, but even then they have an outside area. As we changed I passed a woman walking out of what I thought was the mens dressing room, turns out it was uni-sex. Not only that, but when came down to the pool, we saw that we we’re about the most dressed people there. Most of the guests we’re nude, and luckily not 50+, but rather our age, in their twenties. We didn’t quite find our inner nudist while there, but we didn’t mind that the rest of the people did. Alas no, I don’t have any pictures from here…
New years celebration in Berlin is a perverse thing! It was fckng cold (-20c by night). and we took to the streets to join the party. Short story even shorter, the Germans are quite friendly, and even more so when they have something to celebrate. On the tram we met two girls, Julia and Alexandra, who tipped us on where to go to really see the party up close. We ended up on a bridge, can’t remember which one, but spirits we’re high and fireworks flew low and it was just like blitzkrieg, except everybody was happy and incredibly enough, noone got hurt!
All in all we’ve got great memories and good pictures, which you can see the rest of right here!
Berlin for new years with Torstein and Hilde
15 Photos
6
Jul/090
Jul/090
Aerial fire watch
One of the tasks delegated to the many of the flying clubs in Norway is to fly fire watch flights. Basically the landowners pay the fire departement to keep an extra watch over the their woods, and the fire departement delegate the task to the flying clubs. It’s a cheap way to allow for early detection and damage reduction in case of fire outbreaks, and it also works as a deterrent towards campers illegally building fires.
Nedre Romerrike Flyklubb (Lower Romerrike Flying club, NRFK) which I’m a member of has the is responcible for the Oslo and Akershus county fire watches. We fly a route which normally takes around 2 hours, stretching from Mjøsa in the north east to Drammen in the south west. It’s a beautiful flight on a nice day, and the good thing about the fire watches is that they’re usually flown when the weather’s dry, thus usually very good.
I flew this flight with Kjetil Kintel. He was the Pilot in Charge (PIC) and I was the observer and had the right seat, the radio and the camera. We got some very good pictures from this flight, and even though it’s basically unpaid work, it really is a nice way to spend a couple of hours. It also looks good both on my CV and in a photo album, as shown here:
We didn’t see any actual fires this time, but I got to familirize myself with the route, and all free flying is a great thing in my book!
5
Jul/091
Jul/091
Luna Café – Good lunch, fair price
Hedda and I decided to go out to eat sunday lunch and we ended up at Café Luna. Luna is a lounge style café with a turkish and middle eastern menu. They’ve got both traditional pizza, meze and sandwiches.
We decided to make it simple this time and just have a 1 course lunch. I ordered a lamb sandwhich, while Hedda had köfte, which is turkish style meatballs. The service was good and the food came reasonably quickly, and as you can see it was a solid portion for lunch:
Lamb Sandwich
Köfte
The lamb was served on a skewer over a foccacia style bread, trimmed with salad. It went well with the yogurt dressing. The price was also good, and for a total of kr.262,- (€28) it was a good deal.
The interior of Luna is modern but inviting. It’s got a real lounge feel to it with wall decoration and frescoes on the walls. They mix old and new with some old style cushion seats in some sections, while having a neon light at the bar. The bar looks well stocked, although we did not go ape there on this occation.
La Luna
The bar
To sum it up, it’s always nice to discover a good place to eat for the first time, and it’s an added bonus when it’s in your own neighborhood.
Luna Cafe
Darres street 2
0175 Oslo
http://www.lunalounge.no
5
Jul/090
Jul/090
Solo flight in the rough
As a part of my flying lessons I have to do two solo cross country flights, the short and the long. The last post about this was about the long cross country flight, so here is the short one.
I have to admit I was really nervous before this flight. Previously I had only done solo flights in the close proximity to the airport, doing airwork, landing excercises etc. This flight was a round trip to Stafsberg at Hamar, an airport a little over 60nm or 110km from Kjeller, my home base.
I the a brief with my instructor, looking over my operational navigation plans, and the flightplans I had submittet prior to the flight to be assured rescue services if I for some reason shouldn’t make it to my destination without beeing to announce distress.
I got in the plane, started the engine, did the checklists and taxi’d onto the tarmac. At the end of runway 12 I looked across the straight line of pavement reaching some 1100m in front of me and then pushed the throttle to full. I went through the takeoff checklist and called out «RPM >2350, airspeed increasing, airspeed 55kts: rotate». I was airborne…
I set the course for Sørum, my outbound reporting point. As I crossed the border to outside local airspace I felt nervous and quickly had to decide whether or not to proceed. I decided to not let my uncertainty get the best of me, to suck it up and fly!
As I established cruise I did the cruise checklists. I calculated Estimated Time Overhead (ETO) to know at what time I could expect to be at each navpoint in my navplan and I contacted Oslo Approach on the radio to open my flight plan. No response… I called out again «Oslo Approach, student Lima November November Alfa Romeo», but again I got no response. I decided to proceed regardless, and to alert nearby traffic of my presence, so I tuned the radio to 123.500 which is the frequency used outside controlled airspace almost everywhere in Norway, and on a lot of unmanned airfields as well.
I passed Wormsund and turned slight north by northwest up Vorma. Even through I had three navpoints along that stretch of river, I decided to focus on the last one, Minnesund which I had barely in sight. I flew up the river and got to Minnesund exactly on my ETO. I then tried contacting Oslo Approach again, and finally got through.
Even though I was now over half way in my flight I still decided to open my flightplan. Oslo approach said they had heard me earlier but that they didn’t get any callback on their responses. I opened the flightplan and continued over lake Mjøsa. By the way, Mjøsa Norways largest inland lake.
As I got to Stange I had Hamar in sight. I still didn’t see the airport but I had been there before so I had a general idea of where it was relative to the city core. I closed my flightplan with Oslo Approach and reported in on Hamar Traffic. There we’re no other planes in the circuit, so I did a low pass over the airport at 1000 feet, noted the wind direction and approximate speed (which was next to none), and got on downwind parallel to the landing strip.
As I landed I felt great! Seriously, there is no greater feeling of accomplishment than when you beat your fears and push through, and I did just that. To add to it the weather along the route was overcast with some rain and quite heavy wind shears in some areas. For instance, on my return flight I was looking from something in the backseat, and a wind shear knocked me into a 45 degree tilt, and I had to fight pretty hard to get back into level flight! I did however manage to return unscathed, and I did get some nice picture along the way as well. Take a look:
3
Jul/092
Jul/092
Scary weather in Oslo
It all came down at once. All the stored fury and wrath of the skies, let loose for about an hour before it cleared up again. For a small aircraft pilot this would have been death. If the lightning didn’t catch you, then the wind would have, and if not the wind then the visibility would have. Not exactly VMC conditions.
Today heaven was hell, and here is my photo evidence:
The weather can be truly fascinating, can’t it?!
More pictures and information can be found in norwegian at VG or Dagbladet.
Pictures