HackCon & our time in Oslo

it was very wintry weather the whole time we were in Norway... snow and cold was the norm, but it was all very beautiful, not at all rough.
	Pyr0 & jackalope	we kept comparing our room keys in an attempt to decipher how close their bittings were. mouse's and my key seemed exactly the same... they just had a different profile.
this is the end result of my creating art at the pub as seen in the video below.
an awesome sticker on a door access intercom
	My Training & the Con
my training on the day before HackCon started
heh... the building where HackCon was held (the Høyres Hus) had a painting of someone who looked like Ed Harris on the wall.   ok, now it's officially silly what i manage to use to open master combination locks... during HackCon i started popping them using plastic cups!
At the University
at the University, where we are on phase one of changing the world for the better. ;-)
ok, this is easily one of the most fucking awesome things i've ever seen... by blasting traffic to specific ports on his firewall at very critically timed intervals, this guy's two friends managed to display images and text in his fucking network log graphs just because they felt like it. too cool.
waiting for the taxi bus to take us back from the university. snowball fun ensued. see the video below for one attempted arc shot... it was a near-miss.		a great group shot. heh, these are the people who may have secured democracy for the last free and independent country in europe
Our First Real Night of Relaxation
jackalope	our floor had a very confused elevator	shots of akvavit to start us off right ;-)
green laser for the win	another nice group shot... victor, guy, grey, render, and dragorn	jackalope & i
erin making the boys sulk about something, heh	jackalope and lost... can't take a bad photo of either one of those two beautiful kids.	pry0, dragorn, and i
i am the supplier of electrons the world-over. my equipment cases come with the ability to power basically a whole room ful of US tech from any single foreign plug. heh, it may violate fire code... but it keeps all the laptops happy	... and a projector...	... and an iPod for room music
one great thing about Norway is that you don't really ever need a cooler... just stick stuff outside of any window and it will remain ready to drink any time of the day or night.
random scenes... and walking down to the waterfront
jackalope got this adorable monkey somewhere. it is fucking awesome.		heh, seems like the hotel must have known who we were before we arrived. ;-)
i love pups. they are all very friendly and comfortable in the snow in Norway... just like their owners.		so we stuck our heads in a McDonald's and were greeted by women who spoke French and menus featuring very odd items... a "fiesta" burger with nacho chips inside? yeap.
more strange fast food offered there.	heh, this language is so georgeously obscure.	we had hoped to take a ferry boat across the harbor to the viking museum, but our plans were dashed.
we still walked to the end of the longest pier to feel a bit like being at the edge of the world.
	at least four of us all together noted that the gravel laid down on the steps of the Akershus looked like "cookies & cream" flavor ice cream.
a cool logo on a fire truck
walking around the grounds of the Akershus after visiting the Resistance Museum. be sure to check out Victor's special slide move down in the videos section.
a wicked long icicle that i grabbed... heh Erin stated that it looked like a magic wand.	would you believe that even in Norway, we can find cool people to whom we have odd connections? Erin is a member of an online forum where these local cuties post. they wound up accompanying us to a wicked Goth Rock club saturday night. what a world.

at the metal & rock club
can you spot the little Deviant tag smiling on the wall?	the ladies all love Victor
pyr0, ed, and LosT are rocking hard at the metal bar with the locals whom we met

more street scenes
the headquarters of a the Norwegian Labor Party	jackalope in front of a game store	a locksmith shop. sadly, they were all closed whenever we saw them this year, and i didn't get to buy any locks personally. Pyr0 picked one up for me, and some locals whom we befriended might send us some later on, too.

Windows errors in another language are funny.     :-)
There was recently published a very interesting work by Norwegian researcher Bera Ulstein Moseng, author Rolf Martin Angeltvedt, and photographer Lill-Ann Chepstow-Lusty that, according to reports, attemps to educate kids about gay love and gay relationships. I believe this was an exhibition at the Museum of Cultural History... i really wish we had gotten to see it, since it looks like it was supposed to have closed in January but seems to have been extended.

The Viking Museum

(heh, i actually turned this photo into a wallpaper for my home machine)
What can i say about all this? I had been dying to go to this museum since my first trip to Norway years ago... finally, now on my fifth trip, i made it there. That's a very good thing, too, because i heard a rumor that they were re-making this and possibly disturbing these old ships in the process. I hope that they don't... the whole thing is done so well, with these three amazing, huge boats and balconies with parapets that overlook the ships from above.
The ships lie in three of the museum's four vaulted rooms. Relics and other materials (beautifully restored in some instances) are in the fourth room. The woodwork is absolutely beautiful.
a huge, rolling cart... possibly used to convey bodies into their burial chamber		the holes that accomodate oars (hence the cut notch) can be used to determine how many oarsmen would fit in each boat. i believe the longest one held about 32 men or more, the smaller two boats held about two dozen seamen.
a decorative piece that could be held extended in front of a procession	tools used for tightening and managing ropes during seafaring	tools for riding horses and also assorted noisemaker "jigglers" whose purpose is not entirely known. (i loved how up front the researchers are about what details are not confirmed concerning the Vikings)
this sleigh was crushed into hundreds (or possibly thousands) of pieces by the rocks piled atop the burial site. look at all the amazing detailed work that went into making it whole again.

tools for Viking sewing	hardware for wrangling the Viking dogs

Our Last Dinner Together in Norway
heh, this graffiiti says something like "a penis can stand up on its own accord in the face of a vagina"	passing the "Gay Kids" display again	LosboY is slow to rise

reindeer with lingonberries and au gratin potatoes for my last meal. yummy!
what a wonderful group of friends!	many web sites block Scandanavian nations from seeing certain downloadable video content. this was one of the funnier messages.   ;-)

 

 Videos

making art while at the pub	demonstrating window latch compromise	snowball, heh
clearing the snow from the roof of an adjacent building. the falling avalanche was pretty wicked.	victor's great ice slide technique	another crew clearing winter weather loads from building roofs... these guys were breaking down huge icicles.

i tried to capture the picturesque beauty of the constant Norwegian snowfalls that we experienced by just filming out of my window at the street and adjacent building.	more snowballs... damn, i love my friends. they are the reason this was such a wonderful trip.

RAR archive of all the above photos