Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ve been almost three weeks in Toronto on a short-term mission trip with the SCCC in Oslo youth group. Then one week in summer camp. Unfortunately, my phone broke, so I ended up not being able to take any photos after that… But I bought an iPad in Toronto, which works pretty well as a replacement for my Android phone, even though all the limitations are a little bit annoying (can’t easily transfer files to and from the iPad, but have to use the iTunes application to transfer stuff). Using it mostly to surf on internet (Facebook), chat and play games for now.

iPad and me.

I went back to using my old Nokia N95 as phone and camera, ordered a new battery for it since the current one barely lasts a full day even when I’m not using it for anything. But for internet stuff I’ll be using the iPad from now on I guess.

Anyways, Toronto and camp was pretty fun. Did I get closer to God though? I guess I can’t honestly say that I feel like anything has changed… pastor Enoch’s speeches at the camp were pretty interesting and funny though. I have notes! And I especially remember one line he said about prayer, that “God doesn’t answer our prayers because of our great faith, he answers them despite of our little faith” (roughly quoted from memory). I’ll just have to keep praying for me to change.

Pastor Enoch and me.

Other than that, I did feel like I managed to talk at least a little bit with people (both in Toronto and at camp). I also got to know a few more people, even though I hardly ever try anymore. I usually don’t even really feel like talking to people in my group at summer camp much… Now in the young adult’s camp there are more new people than back when I was still in youth or working as a group leader in youth camp. But I just don’t really feel any urge to talk to the new ones… Still I got to know John Asmussen a bit more, he was at last year’s camp too. And in Toronto I talked a bit more with Helen Su this year, last time she only came to one of the gatherings so we didn’t get a chance to talk with her more.

Some photos from Toronto:

Some photos from summer camp:

The drama team	Who is this girl? And why am I sneering at the camera?	OrangeEdward and the Ho brothers.

Anyways, I’m back at work now. Even though it’s pretty quiet nowadays because most people are on vacation, I still would like to have more vacation… Have promised to try and visit people too, I guess I’ll probably take some weekends and go to various cities in Sweden and maybe to Bergen. Will see. Have stuff to do in Oslo too, we’re supposed to paint a room at church. By next week. Ack.

Went on a five day cruise with my family in May, with Royal Caribbean‘s Vision of the Seas. Apparently there was a problem with diearrhea onboard the ship on it’s last few trips, and even on our trip there were 75 people or so who got sick, although we were lucky enough not to get sick or see anyone sick. The biggest difference for us was that we on the last few days of the trip weren’t allowed to get food from the buffet ourselves. Instead there were a bunch of staff stationed near the food to hand out the food we wanted.

The cruise went to Zeebrugge in Belgium and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. From Zeebrugge we took the train to Brugge (I think) where I took a few photos to make this panorama:

Also bought some cheap Belgian chocolate (factory-made instead of the more expensive hand-made ones). In the Netherlands we went to some Chinese supermarkets and visited our aunt. Other than that, I spent most of the time eating buffets, going to the shows and playing Dominion and other board games with my brothers. This time we only went swimming once, but I actually climbed the rock wall this time! Don’t have a photo of me climbing, but have some of Leon. Also had some Ben&Jerry’s ice cream (not free). The shows were almost exactly the same as last year, only the singers and dancers were switched out! It was still pretty entertaining to watch I guess. And one of the new guest artists was a juggler, Niels Duinker, that was pretty fun!

The last photo is of the “world parade” thing where they showed off all the countries that the staff came from. I tried using TiltShift Generator to make it look like a photo of miniatures, it looks kind of cool in the thumbnail, but not as good when zoomed in I think.

Last week we painted the outside walls on my parent’s house twice (two coats), such a bother… but finally finished! Also put up wallpaper in Vilhelm’s room. Luckily I didn’t have to join the painting, which Leon and Vilhelm did by themselves, since they don’t have school or work during daytime anyways…

On Saturday last week we had a cake baking day at my parents’ house, made some quite delicious cakes! Ate some of them and brought the others to the church the next day. Also watched the Eurovision song contest. The funniest part was actually the Spanish entry, where some random dude jumped up on the stage to join the dancing. And got escorted away by security. Well I guess Madcons song with the flash mob dancers was somewhat interesting too. The winner’s song (Germany’s song) was sung by a girl with a weird English accent. I’m not saying my accent is much better, but it was kind of strange listening to it. Oh well, congrats either way.

Ice cream cake woohoo!

Yesterday we had the annual church barbeque party. Ate some meat. Saw some swans. Had a nap under the sun.

Today we went to MegaZone with the alpha group, it was pretty fun. Although my team lost. I went from 7th rank overall in the first round to 4th overall in the second round though. W00t! Next time maybe I will even run around for more than 5 minutes before getting too tired in my knees. I tested taking some photos with RetroCamera, which turned out pretty cool. But the photos are just too low quality… so I guess I might uninstall it, maybe try FxCamera a bit instead.

Still haven’t beat Final Fantasy XIII. There just isn’t enough time to play, especially with all the painting last week. Maybe this week… I mainly want to beat it before Metroid: Other M comes out, but since it isn’t even announced for Europe yet, I guess I probably will have time. Super Mario Galaxy 2 is coming out soon, but I never got all the stars for the first one so I’m kind of hesitant about getting it. But seeing that it got a score of 98 on MetaCritic really makes me reconsider! Maybe I’ll buy it when I’m in Stockholm next weekend. Yesh, going to the Final Fantasy concert June 12th! Looking forward to it.

Been playing a lot of Aquaria lately!

It’s a beautiful 2D/sprite-based Metroid-like exploration game. You’re a mermaid with amnesia who can swim around and “cast spells” by singing, when you sing you pick out a sequence of 8 different notes. Although you don’t actually get many actual spells, most of the spells are for transformation into different forms, with different powers. The first form you get is the “Energy form”, which shoots homing energy beams. You get new forms as you go through the game, and the powers from each form allow you to go to places that you couldn’t access before. The graphics are, as I mentioned, sprite-based, but pretty detailed and vivid. Not everything you meet are enemies, there are lots of fish, crabs, dolphins, turtles and other creatures you might expect to find in the water.

I played the demo probably several years ago, but never got around to buy the full game before now because I had so many other games that I hadn’t finished playing yet. However, I bought this game as part of the Humble Indie Bundle, which lets you buy Aquaria and some other indie games for whatever price you wanted, and part of the money goes to charity. As of writing this there are still 7 hours left, so you can still buy it cheap!

Have gotten to the “missions” part/chapter in Final Fantasy XIII, finished the first 17 of the missions and also mission 36 or something. Now I can finally use the chocobos! It’s just way too much running around back and forth in this chapter, having a chocobo helps at least a little… They’ve made some funky chocobo music.

Also I’ve been trying to settle in at the new apartment. My parents brought me to IKEA where I bought a mini computer desk that could fit inside the “closet” in my bedroom. (It’s actually just part of the bedroom separated by some sliding doors.) So now I’ve got a computer workplace at least! Also bought a shelf/rack thing that would fit in the corner of the closet, so I didn’t have to try to balance all the boxes and bags on top of each other like I did before. I have also set up my stuff and posters in my room pretty nice now I think.

I got an old Toy Story wall lamp from a friend of the family, he had originally planned to throw it away since none of his teenage sons wanted it anymore. Hurr hurr. The reason it’s hanging on its side is because I’ve just used tack-it to stick it to the wall, and when I hanged it the correct way it would always fall off after a while. So now it’s partly hanging from its cord and partly from the tack-it, so it doesn’t fall down.

Had “dugnad” at church last Saturday, only Vilhelm, Tina and Stella showed up to help with the painting. Minh Thu and Lisa cleaned out the Youth group closet though. We still almost managed to finish painting everything. The bigger problem is that one of the paints was the wrong color… we ended up painting it anyway, but it’s pretty apparent that it’s wrong. Well I guess it might still look a bit better than when the wall looked partly burnt and discolored. (It was the part of the wall which was covered with heaters, but we changed to new, smaller heaters.)

Oh, I installed XBMC on the computer connected to the TV, it’s quite sweet! It scans through your video collection and downloads information about the movies and TV shows from internet, so that you can browse through them like browsing through a catalogue of movies, with cover art and movie descriptions. And for TV shows it will automatically download episode descriptions. So you can look through the description in case you forget which was the last episode you watched.

(Note: The screenshots were taken from the XBMC website, it’s not from my computer.)

You can also install plugins to do various things, there are a bunch of plugins for showing videos from popular websites, like Youtube, Gametrailers (this one didn’t work for me though, but some other gaming websites worked), National Geographic to mention a few. Also there’s a plugin for downloading subtitles. And I installed one for showing Bleach episodes directly without predownloading. Although I don’t really follow the anime since I read the manga.

Hum yeah, so that’s all for this post. Apparently a month since the previous one. Actually almost none of the friends that I’ve subscribed have kept up their blogging, I guess exams might be part of the reason. Good thing I don’t have any exams! Now is vacation time!