Why I swtiched from Google’s blogger.com

I had to move my blog. You can now find it at http://lacretenoire.wordpress.com/.

What happened?
Google did some maintenance on blogger.com and somehow modified my password. I was locked out. I submitted a request 10 times for a new password email that never came. I pleaded with nonexistent customer support for days, all to no avail. Sometimes I got a cryptic error code with zero intelligible explanation and no promise that it was even being logged or that anyone intended to do anything whatsoever about it . That’s both bad software design and nasty PR. On the way I noticed that some of the Google internal search stuff contained dead links and other such unprofessional quirks. Pretty shoddy for a web company. I’ve also noticed that their desktop search app is inferior to grep text searching tools. Again, quite lame.

I have come inevitably to an unlikely conclusion: Google is incompetent.

Coming back to the office this morning I saw that my iGoogle account was logged in and was able to change my password. This gave me access back to my blog. But the damage is done and I've already moved on.

Ski Status monitor

Introduction

I just made a "Ski status monitor" that tracks information from Friluftsetaten about the trails you want to use. When you minimize the application it puts an icon in the windows Taskbar. Clicking on the icon maximizes the main window.

Bubble Alerts

The Ski status monitor will tell you when a trail you are tracking has been prepped. It will show a bubble alert like the following:




Highlighted Trail Updates

The main window trail listing gets highlighted when the prep status changes:



Configuration

The SkiStatus.exe.config configuration file lets you set the application configuration parameters. Trails to watch are set as coordinate points that you can find by inspecting the AJAX web service calls toward the interactive map application at http://webhotel2.gisline.no/turkart_loeypekart/. You can also set your proxy server address as well as the delay in seconds before the application polls for updated information.

Get it here

Download

Movatn - Tømte

So I finally took my own picture. The fuzzy blur in the bottom left corner is my finger over the lens of my cell-phone camera!

That's my skate ski that a few instants later was sliding down this lovely trail.

Most people have given up on skiing for the season, which is fine by me. With all the snow we got this winter (best in 26 years) skiing possibilities remain.

I'm actually at the top of the trail here. I had to take my skis off to walk the last bit up to an old mountain farm. Since the road to the farm had been plowed, the thin crust of snow had melted away leaving the bare dirt road. I walked up for the view and in the picture I am now putting my ski back on to go back downhill. It took some huffing and puffing to get up here but it's easy (and fast) going back down to the trailhead.

Here the sun was shining, the snow soft but still usable and everything was OK with the world. I'm hoping my last ski will fall after May 1. At that point it may require some walking to get to the snow but why not.

Urban ski

It's getting pretty close to the end but I still managed a pleasant skate on one of Oslo's lowest elevation, most urban ski trails. The Gaustadjordene trail goes from the city ring road up to Sognsvann lake.
I came down from higher up after taking the T-Bane train to Frognerseteren. After descending the exhilaratingly steep trail on the West side of Sognsvann, I just kept going. It's a nice wide, highly skatable path. The last 500 meters were nasty, so I took my skis off and walked but that still gave me several km's within the city proper.

Beautiful skating

Spotify

There's a new digital music service called spotify. The only link with skiing is that it's Swedish, but it's pretty cool. A basic account is free, with a few adds. Once you've installed the client, you can just search for music and listen.

More crust

Crust skating

After the bread's gone you've still got the crust! I got up early a couple days ago and went out over the fields near Oslo's water supply resevoir. We've been having daily highs in the 8-9 degree C range with bright sun. That melts the top layer of the snow. Then our cold, clear nights freeze that back up.

If you get on it before it remelts, you get to go zipping about wherever you want using skate technique (with skate skis and longer poles).
This video doesn't show crust skiing, just skating on trails, but you still get a good idea about it being pretty grueling exercise!

It seems like the Norwegians haven't figured out the crust skiing thing. They just stick on trails. Though one of them did slow down and gawk a bit when I was gliding over the fields next to a road he was driving on.

Maridalsvannet

Skied across Maridalsvannet, the lake near my apartment that supplies Oslo's world class drinking water. I'd been wanting to ski over it but never got around to it.
I decided today that it wasn't going to get better anytime before December and made my way over the crusty snow covered ice.
Nice weather today, although too warm. Looked just like the picture.

Skate skiing

Got me some skate skis now. No nasty and sticky klister, just glide wax! I've been practicing this technique with some old, too short for classic skis I already had. Works great in any snow except loose fresh stuff.
As luck would have it, we just got 10-15cm of that last night. But I'm not complaining: went out classic skiing yesterday evening. Tonight I'll see what the snow looks like and take the right skis accordingly.

Korsvoll Skole - Ullevålseter - Frognerseteren and back

The snow has come back! Where I live it's heavy, wet stuff but it's great higher up. Went today for my favorite little workout trip. I was the first one in Oslo today going uphill to Frognerseteren, so I had to cut new tracks. It snowed heavily the whole way up and back.
Those who'd taken the subway up there were starting to pass me coming the other way as I neared my destination. They were going for the almost all downhill trip back into Oslo by the Sognsvann lake. I came back the way I'd come up, by a bit steeper but less known route.
Wax has become super important now. Where in times past, you just put some blue extra on or green if it was really cold, these days the wrong wax will stop you dead in your tracks. You'll either get no grip making it impossible to go uphill or accumulate snow under your skis which will stop you just as well.
Today's trip took me through different climate zones and required different wax for each one. I started in birch, pine and poplar forest and ended up in pure pines. At the bottom I was slipping pretty bad but refused to put sticky red wax on because I knew that it would stop me in my tracks with under ski snow accumulation higher up. Was I ever glad to have supported a bit of slippage lower down when I got a couple hundred meters higher in elevation! I had to fight to keep my skis clear but never had to stop to scrape.

Klister

Difficult period in my life. Fingers are sticky with klister. Klister is nasty sticky glue applied to skis instead of kick wax for getting a grip on melting snow.

It's for trying to hold onto something going away.

As T.S. Eliot writes in "The Wasteland" :

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow

Now I'll have to pick up the pieces of my life I dropped because of skiing.

Will have to make amends with abandoned friends, do some housework, wash other things than ski clothes and figure out how to still stay in the best shape of my life.

Korsvoll - Ullevålseter - Frognerseteren - Ullevålseter - Hammeren - Korsvoll

A pleasant moderate elevation gain-loss trip. There were still hoards of people out in spite of the light falling snow. Dog and sprogs, the whole mess. The trip from Ullevålseter to Frognerseteren was therefore surprisingly and mercifully empty.
It's funny what perception does. There's a steep drop on the trail not far from Frognerseteren. The first time I went down it in December I was surprised to be still standing (and alive!) when I came up the slope at the other end of it. This time what had been so foreboding in my brain was a bit of a disappointment. I actually poled off to get a little more downhill speed and did feel some g-forces as I came up the steep at the opposite end of the slope. Fun, going up a sizeable hill with no effort, but not that terrible, exciting and frightening thing that that drop had been in memory.
This trip clocks out at 21k making me an even 50k for the weekend. A bit lazy for me since I've done more than that in a day. But I have force in my legs again and must admit that I enjoyed the two short trips this weekend in spite of the crowds.

Korsvoll - Ullevålseter - Bjørnholt - Kikut - Sørkedalen

A quick, 29k trip in glorious weather. 70% of Oslo's population skis, and they were all out today. Strangely, however, the most pleasant leg of the trip, from Kikut to Sørkedalen (summertime picture of the view down into the Sørkedalen valley), was pretty empty. After some nice, long steep uphill after the Bjørnsjøen lake you get rewarded with one of the longest downhill runs I've experienced. Never out of control steep either--just good and fun.
I decided to be a bit lazy and not do a ski version of the Bataan Death March this weekend. I've done one short and pleasant trip and I'll do the same tomorrow. There comes a point when you keep pushing your limits that it ceases to be fun or pleasant. Time to calm down a little.
It should snow tomorrow so I'll have some fresh stuff to work with and a little more peace and solitude too. Should probably get over 60k for the weekend but who's counting.

Tasty Living in Moose Central

Went for a quick ski tonight and saw three more moose. Coming back I was inspired for dinner. This was a bit of a simple improvisation but turned out very nice on rice:

Moose fry:

1. 1 Onion
   
2. Some ground moose
3. Red currants
4. Rice
   

I sautéed a diced onion in some olive oil and then added the ground moose. That looked like it needed something so I added some frozen, destemmed red currants. A little salt and pepper and I had myself a delicious, quick meal.

The lovely redcurrants I used came from some bushes I found in the forest and harvested this past summer.

Fra Grua til Grinda i Korsvoll

Did a 53k slog from Grua back to my appartment in the Korsvoll neighborhood of Oslo. Went through light to moderate snowfall the whole time. On the train I realized that amongst ski-people, I belong to the lunatic fringe: only two other skiers got off the train at Grua.
One of them took the same trail as I did. I let him get ahead and lay tracks for me (the prepared tracks were full of new snow). That guy, an unassuming, slightly balding fellow in his forties reading the paper on the train did a hell of a lot of good work for me. I appreciated it and followed the tracks he laid down quite religiously.
The trip went smoothly in spite of the weather. I think, actually, it went well because of the weather. The trail that crosses the Bjørnsjøen after Kikutstua and goes to Skar is a single track (photo above) whenever it gets off the ice of the 5 lakes it crosses. And it's dramatically steep in some places. Even in loose, powdery snow I was inevitably at some points on the bleeding edge of in control. Were there anyone coming up the trail, I would have been forced to butt brake. But, such as the weather was, there was very little uphill traffic, thus letting me blast down the trail at ludicrous speed.
Another positive point: the Norwegian weather website yr.no did a great job with their hour by hour weather forecast. It started to snow like all hell at 16.00. At that point I was back home. I'd planned my trip to fit a fairly clement weather window. It would have been pretty bad to do this route in such heavy falling snow.
No blisters this time. My secret: take along an extra pair of dry socks and change them mid way.

Nordic adaptation strategy no. 1 - fårikål!

This is not a hospitable country for hairless bipeds. You either need heavy fur or a good strategy to survive here. Norwegians have done a fairly good job of devising adaptation strategies. They, for example, invented skiing. Snow is a major hindrance to travel. But on a good trail a decent skier can manage 50Km at an average speed of more than 12Km/hour. Much faster then walking on dry ground.
Norwegians have perhaps done less brilliantly with diet adaptation. Someone famously called lutefisk the food equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction. But they did invent fårikål.
Fårikål literally means lamb in cabbage. It really is that. Making it just requires cooking in the most primordial sense of the word: cut your cabbage into wedges, lay down layers of fatty-bony-cheap cuts of lamb then cabbage in a big pot, throw in a little salt and whole peppercorns with each layer. No more prep required--5 minutes max. Just leave it on a low flame.
Then go ski. Ski for 4 hours. Come back home and from well down the block the siren call of fårikål will enchant your nose. Go inside and it's almost unbearably good smelling. I had a hard time waiting the time needed to rip off my ski clothes before eating.
I think sports nutritionists have now debunked the carbo-loading theory, that you should eat a lot of spaghetti before running a marathon. I find carbo-binging roughly equivalent to sugar binging: a quickish high then a crash. Good, nutritious slow cooked fat is far better body fuel. And great comfort food after a hard cold night of ski fraught with rampaging moose danger!

Hi there Mrs. Moose!

I was out skiing late last night and came nose to nose with a big Moose. I really wasn't paying attention ahead of me and I mistook the beast for a weird looking skier stopped on the track. When I got within smelling distance of the thing and realized what it was, it took a couple of aggressive steps toward me. I did an instant U-turn and poled myself back down the hill fast.
Then began the waiting game. These things are normally reputed skittish. Not this one. I tried pleading with it to move. It ignored me and continued munching on tree stuff with its giant body blocking the whole trail. I tried yelling at it and waving my sticks. Munch munch munch. No effect. I couldn't really go around it because that would mean slogging through 1.5 meter deep loose powder. The moose also recognized the difficulty of going off trail and was happy staying on the hard packed ski løype.
I spent 5 long minutes waiting and freezing. Mrs. Moose finally decided that a tree slightly off the track looked tasty. I then skied by and back home. On the way there I spotted a mother moose and its young. Those two were far more reasonable and quickly scurried off as I approached.
There are no more moose burgers in my freezer. I'll be stocking up.

Skippy walk

I've always been a skippy walker. Classmates called me "skippy". I reacted badly, which only encouraged them.
But now I've figured out the purpose of my skippy gait. With very minor changes a skippy walk becomes a good cross country skiing diagonal stride. The skip comes from a little hop off the back foot propelling you forward onto the front one. When skiing the "hop" gives you good compression for forward power. After the hop you just let the back foot follow through into the "kick". Repeat process with the other leg, gliding forward each time on the front leg.
So to all the nasty little brats who made fun of me: a retroactive shut the **** up, I can ski better than you (not that many Southern California people ski much, but anyway....

Skiing Havnabakken hill

Went out for a little night skiing on Havnabakken hill just down the street from my house. First did a 10k warmup on some nearby cross country trails and then skied down the street to this pleasant ski hill. Havnabakken hill is nicely lit by some lamps and the city lights below. In a addition to being a fine ski hill, this place has one of the best views of Oslo anywhere. Stayed out going up and down the slope until 1am.

Back in Siberia...

Boy, you don't know how lucky you are! Back in Siberia...
My favorite neighborhood trail hasn't been groomed in days and the snow's still wonderful. Temperatures in the minus teens keep the crowds down too. Did a fast little 10k this afternoon. Explored a single track turløyper. I've probably been there on foot but didn't recognize it. Everything looks so different with a thick layer of snow. Happy, happy, happy, gliding around wherever I wanted to go.

In a warm place dreaming of snow

I'm currently in Southern Spain and so off the skiløyper. Found a great ski video from Australia. Really good telemark skiing on regular skate skis with crazy fun jibbing and jumping. The video mentions that the footage comes from the only snowfall they had all winter:



Everything's relative. For me the wait seems long but I'll be back on the snow in Oslo next Saturday.

Stryken - Kikutstua - Skar - Hammeren - Ullvålseteren - Nordberg

So, I did it. Took me a train way the hell out of Oslo to Strykyen. The train trip from Kjelsås was free. The controller said she'd come back to me to sell me a ticket but never did. Was already in a giant peleton when I got off the train. At the trailhead it was too cold to wait so I had to resign myself to staying in it.
The first couple of kilometres were solidly uphill with a lot of herringboning. Good for making anyone with doubts about his endurance regret marooning himself 40km from Oslo. I felt perfectly remorseless.
I shortly came down a very steep slope into a road crossing and got my first taste at ski jumping going over the berm. Landed it and then had to sit down and butt brake just from the shock of not being dead. Word to the wise: watch out for that crossing.
After that things flattened out. Alternated forest road with lake crossings with decent snow.
Eventually came to the big lake just north of the one Kikutstua sits on. Some spots crust, others really soft but still OK going. Got ahead of my peleton and was happier for the lack of company.
Back on land came quickly to a fork with Kikutstua at 0.5km and Skar at 9.5. I decided I could pass on the Kikutstua ski cameraderie and ditch a few potential road mates. I had plenty of food and water and felt neither the need to warm up or rest.
The pleasant double trackset skiløype ended abrubtly 500m after the junction. Plowed mountain road. Disturbed a Norwegian couple kissing to ask them how far to a proper skiløypa. 800m. Shit. Took my skis off and walked it. No fun skiing on cleared roads. The Skar trail began again over a lake. Crusty snow this time. When off one lake it degraded into a single track to the side of another lake. A lot of uphill weekender type traffic. Flat terrain, so this was bearable. But when back in the forest the single track decided to go abruptly downhill.
I pass a lot of people going uphill so I can't be too bad. But I'm crap downhill. Plow as I may on steep slopes I accumulate speed I can't get rid of. This meant butt braking more often than I'd like to admit when I encountered uphill traffic. That was a wretched 2-3km.
Finally got back onto a big lake. Lots of traffic but bad snow. There were holes in which you could see water. I think I felt the ice move beneath me. No one seemed concerned. Skied as fast as the crappy crust would allow and got off that.
Came to a pleasant double track road. Coasted downhill the last 2km to Skar. Came there to the packed parking lot that had supplied my uphill traffic displeasure.
From Skar took a fairly pleasant løype to Hammeren. Only had one trackset but there was plenty of room for two. Flattish terrain so didn't matter much.
Hammeren to Ullevålseteren is home terrain. Ullevålseteren to Norberg by the Ankerveien is my backyard. Felt much love for the 18th century timber and mining magnate Peder Anker as I worked my way back home. Two idiot youthful hoodlum types were walking a bulldog on the løype. Personal message to the perps: don't walk on my snow you ugly morons!!
Went about 40km in all. A fresh new blister on my left foot. Otherwise no worries. The camelback is a good thing as long as you remember to keep the drinking tube tucked away (otherwise it freezes). Blue extra wax kept me from slipping too much. Maybe wasn't ideal on the loose soft stuff on the lake before Kikutstua but good enough. I wasn't stopping to change it.
Stryken - Kikutstua would have been perfect with a few fewer skimates and without the ski jump road crossing. The route I took from Kikastua to Skar basically sucked. The map indicates another route directly from Kikutstua over the Bjørnsjøen that may be a lot better. It stays pretty resolutely over water and the pictures look good.