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.

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