Norway Day - also known as 17. mai!

I have lived in the UK for 3 years now, but this year was the first time I really got to celebrate 17th of May (Norway's national day) over here. The lack of other Norwegians around here has made 17th of May a dull day.. until now!

I had a great time with the Freesiders (freeside.co.uk) in the park, we had home-made flags, pepsi max, ice cream and Norway Day cake! Only missing a parade and a bit of snow to make it perfect.

Norway Day cake - yum! (Photos: Stuart Hicks)

People gave us a few weird looks, but we were happy to yell "Norway's!" when asked "Who's birthday is it?".

(Looking at this photo, who can blame them for giving us weird looks?)

Thank you Freeside for the best "Norway Day" I've had in years!

GSOC update

Just a small update on my GSOC progress.

What I've done so far during the community bonding period:
- Gotten to know the tools I'll be using and installing everything I need
- Started working on the first feature I'm implementing (change font size using the volume buttons) and have made some progress
- Gotten my blog added on planet maemo (*wave*)
- Introduced myself in the Facebrick thread on talk (http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=49216)
- Registered on gitorious

It has been going a bit slow as I still have university commitments, but will soon be done with the last bits and pieces there :-)

For next week I'll continue working on the volume buttons and integrating it with Facebrick.

GSOC 2010

This is a bit late, but I have been busy with coursework and my dissertation lately, so here it comes :-)

I have been accepted to GSOC 2010 for Maemo and will be working on FaceBrick - a Facebook client for maemo / the N900 over the summer!

The main features I will be implementing are sending and receiving normal facebook messages through the application and a desktop widget which will be linked to the main app.

FaceBrick is done in Qt/C++ so I'm looking forward to working with that :-) Will be a nice change to the .NET marathon I've been having at uni!

I will be posting regular updates on how this is going as soon as I get started working and http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=49216& is also somewhere to watch.

Ducklings!

I think my favourite time of the year is when the park across the road gets filled with these wonderful small creatures.

Poor duckling couldn't find its mother, luckily they were reunited a few minutes later :-) 

I thought it was weird that it looked so wet and shabby, but apparently ducklings don't only get oil glands when they get bigger (which is what makes them "waterproof" and able to float), so the only reason ducklings are able to swim around is because they hide underneath their mother and get oil from her.

The whole family "Duck"

After having enough bread, she decided to take her kids for a swim instead.

Family swim trip

We also spotted a duck with *15* ducklings, can't help feeling sorry for her having to try keep all of them under control :-)