Flying Man

So I bought a new camera. Not as a replacement but as an addition to my current gear, ‘cause sometimes carrying a big DSLR camera around isn’t very practical. I have a D300S as my main camera, and even though the image quality is fantastic, it’s pretty bulky. Also, I was planning a trip to NYC a little while back and I didn’t want to bring my DSLR with me over there.

So, I got an Olympus E-PM1. It’s a little, cute hybrid camera based on the Micro Four Thirds standard that Olympus and Panasonic developed together, with interchangeable lenses and extra gear like digital viewfinders and flashes available. I can be just as creative as with a DSLR, just in a smaller format, which is neat. The E-PM1 is also really small, so I can keep it in my bag at all times without noticing it’s there; I have no excuse not to bring it with me. The image quality is also pretty good:

Yet again: amazing how time flies by and I keep forgetting about this tumblelog. Since my last entry (which was sometime last year if I’m not mistaken) a lot of things have happened here: I’ve left my old job at StepStone - which was an excellently timed move considering the Norwegian branch of the company was announced to be discontinued shortly thereafter - and I’ve got a new job now at a really cool company called bMenu. We deal in mobile websites, more specifically we deal in creating mobile versions of already existing websites. I love the product and how it works, and I’m really excited about the opportunity to work for a smaller company.

Also, I’ve been devoting a lot of my spare time to a personal project.

It kind of started last summer. I was going through a bit of a rough patch with depression and so on, and I needed some form of outlet, something to DO with all this pent-up mental energy I had built up over the course of a couple of weeks of feeling down in the dumps. Then one night as I was packing to go on vacation to the mountains the morning after, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. All my small ideas and notions that I would have liked to put together into a story suddenly started melting together, and became one huge, uniform idea. As it was fairly late I went to sleep, thinking it was just a crazy, brief glimmer of creativity and that it would probably seem stupid or even be gone from my mind the morning after.

But then it wasn’t. Actually, the feeling I had inside me was as strong as the night before, if not even stronger. My mind started processing through the idea, and I spent the entire day walking around with my headphones listening to music, creating. Creating the characters, the story, the scenes, the emotions… Before the day was over, I had everything planned from start to finish in my head. I knew exactly what I wanted to write, exactly how I wanted it all to turn out.

So I started writing the next day. Nothing unusual about that; I write a lot of stuff and I’ve started a bunch of projects that went nowhere after I thought I had something.

One page turned into ten pages. Ten turned into fifty, then a hundred. Other people started getting involved, beta reading the story and drawing sketches of the characters. I started making maps, flowcharts, wikis. What started as some wild idea I got while packing my underwear at one o’clock in the morning suddenly grew massive. Two hundred pages, two hundred and fifty pages. I started making playlists in Spotify with the music referenced in the story, and the music I use for inspiration while writing. I talk about it a lot more than I probably should and I’m amazed certain people aren’t tired to death of me yet.

Then, on the 31st of January, I finished part one of the book. 315 - count them - three hundred and fifteen pages filled to the brim with stories about a boy, his friends, his parents and a humongous secret between them all. It’s turning out exactly the way I want it to, and I’m currently in the process of writing part two. Hopefully I’ll finish it before summer.

I have no idea whether or not I’m going to try and have it published, but I do know that I am going to have it printed for certain people, just because they are that awesome. Particularily that one girl who has been in the process of reading and stuff since I first started it. Also my parents and some other people, probably.

Time will show.

Whenever I create something on the web, I use a grid for it. No matter the size or importance of what I’m building, because CSS grids are just that awesome. Point in case, my new CV, which uses a 1080px wide grid with 18 columns (my standard grid for making websites).

However I’ve been running into some problems with - you guessed it - forms. Inputs, textareas, buttons - you name it, I hate it. Seriously, making an input stretch to fill a container shouldn’t be this hard. Especially when I use a grid, and need to have the input field stretch over a given number of columns, this is generally a pain.

Now, you’ll probably want to style up your inputs a little, using some padding, a border, maybe an outer glow when the element is focused and so on. Which means setting a width by using the classes in a grid system will just mess up the total width when the element is rendered. This kind of ends up in the category named “things that should be easy to fix, but aren’t” for me.

So is there a quick fix? Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, as long as using CSS3 isn’t a problem. Using the box-sizing attribute in CSS will take care of the sizing issues:

.my-awesome-input {
   border: 1px solid #ddd;
   padding: 6px 10px;
   box-sizing: border-box;
   -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
   -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
}

Now, setting a width using one of the classes which the grid system provides won’t be a problem. Tadaah!

At least this fixed some of the issues I’ve been having with styling input fields. Not that there aren’t other problems around, like how Firefox won’t let you change the line-height in input fields, since they’ve added an !important to one of the rules in the UA stylesheet. Looked it up, and this issue also exists in Firefox 7. Stupid move from Mozilla - at the very least let designers and developers be able to override the UA stylesheet if needed, imo.

Whoa! It’s been… A really long time since I stopped by here!

So in any case, autumn is here once again. Yellow leaves, cold nights and early darkness ahoy! Personally I love it (mostly because I’m not such a big fan of summer), and the beautiful orange light from the sunsets really gives me the itch to go out with my camera. Sometimes, living on the edge of the forest has its advantages.

I’m going to be posting more here again, hopefully. I’ve been struggling to get my new website online, so this will have to suffice for now. Finding the time to finish building the site and then coding it up for Wordpress has been hard as I have a lot of other stuff going on. First there’s university and work, then there’s taekwondo practice. I’m working on a book as well, which I’ve been writing on for the past two months now. Reached 200 pages last weekend, so I’m really happy with how it’s working out.

I’ll see about posting some code today as well.

A couple of times a week I have lectures at the University of Oslo’s old quarters. It’s an old, musty building where the exterior walls are plated with black marble, with a teeny-tiny bookstore and coffee shop located on the ground floor. To get there quickly, I usually walk through this amazing, quiet block of tall buildings. In autumn, you can hear the orange and brown leaves crunching under your feet as you walk down the paved road. In spring, the fresh air gives you a nice chance to breathe before sitting down in that cramped lecture room for two hours.

I’ve walked there tons of times. Sometimes with a cup of hot chocolate, sometimes with a fresh kiwi smoothie. Usually while listening to Zero 7 or Samantha James, or something in that genre. Sometimes I’ve even walked there with my “prodigy”; a 13-year-old boy who enjoys photography as much as I do, and hence goes on photo treks with me. Once we practiced there; trying to improve the depth of field in his photos using the columns on one of the buildings there. I love that place.

Had we walked there today, we would probably have been killed, or at least injured badly. Yes, I am talking about the government buildings in Oslo, where some bastard decided to bomb everything to pieces today, before running over to a summer camp for young politicians with a machine gun disguised as a cop.

Norway has been struck by a terrorist attack. Jihad? Radical islamic groups? Local assholes with nothing better to do? I don’t know. The police doesn’t know either, but it happened to us this time. It wasn’t as heavy in casualties as in New York or Madrid or London or a lot of the other places, but it happened to us. Driving home from my grandmother’s place made me realize just how paralyzed we are right now. Not a single car out on the road, nobody walking their dogs, no kids on the soccer court playing in the hot summer weather. Not even a police patrol car.

That’s just how hard this hit us today. And suddenly we understand why things haven’t been, and won’t ever be, the same in New York or London or Madrid. You don’t quite get it until you’ve felt what it’s like firsthand.

I hate you, whoever did this. I hate you for taking away a place I held very dear. I hate you for killing all those people. I hate you for going out there and shooting down a bunch of innocent kids. I hate you for making me feel sad and upset and furious and sick to my stomach, all at once. I hate you for making me think you could have killed me, or that 13-year-old kid, had we been standing there with our cameras, capturing the beauty of summer in the city.

Someone needs to go Jack Bauer on your ass. And I’m glad we caught you tonight.

That is all.

Full set on my Flickr

Never thought I’d be lucky enough to get to do a Pokémon photoshoot, but heck, I’m not complaining. I’m a big Pokémon fan, and if I ever had to wear a onepiece / kigurumi, it’d be this awesome Pikachu variant. Thanks to Jarl Erik for letting me do the photoshoot, I had a blast!

@ this photoset.

Jon Wong, the new intern over at ISO50, really wowed me with his book Explorers of Tomorrow. I love the vintage feel, and if this book had existed back when I was a kid I would probably have gotten lost in the pages, reading and dreaming about space travel for hours. I love the typography here too (there’s just something about combining serif fonts with futuristic imagery that I love), and the images used fit the mood perfectly.

via ISO50.

Totally posting from work~!

Today’ll be another crazy day with work and taekwondo practice virtually on top of eachother. Considering I have to take the train home and then get transport from home to practice, that should leave me about… one hour to eat, relax and get changed into my uniform. Yup, gotta love them there Wednesdays.

I am madly in love with André Beato’s typographic works. Typography is so very very hard to get right in a poster, and considering my work is usually abstract, I don’t get to play around with it much. This does inspire me to give it a whirl, though, so don’t be surprised if I post some random letters on here soon.

Also remember to check out today’s BCB comic.

Finally got that work page set up, and fixed some other random stuff on this tumblelog. So now we’re up and running I guess. Never did hear about the “ask me a question” feature until today but it seems intriguing so I’ll give it a whirl. If you got any questions for me feel free to post them and I’ll answer to the best of my ability. Of course, NSFW questions and other bad stuff will be ignored.

Taekwondo practice today was good. Basic techniques, forms, one-step sparring and self defense. I still gotta work on my strength and speed, and GAWD my flexibility. I gotta start stretching more. Back to work tomorrow, gonna see if I can’t get some screenshots of some customized job listing templates to go on my work page. Made a lot of cool stuff for a lot of big clients, so it’s only fitting I display my craft, I guess.

I’ll also start working on a custom theme for this blog soon. I like the one I’m currently using, though, so it’ll be a tough switch. I’ll also see about linking my domain name to this tumblelog. As long as I’m using this as my primary internet hangout, why not. Just gotta find some more cool kids to hang out with.

I did get one follower today, though! No idea who you are or where you found me, but thanks. You’re cool.

Yo. Believe it or not, I actually took the time to set up a quick page listing my work. Go check it out, pronto!