Look Ahead
This world is full of colours and lights.

One of those photos I've wanted to try for a while and finally did.

I've been doing some thinking lately.
My life needs a change. The way I live that is. A change within.
Get out more, explore more, seize the moments that flutter past.
What were those words so over-used by a popular media of mass production and consumption?
Though in words true to Horatius:

Carpe Diem
quam minimum credula postero.

Seize the day
putting as little trust as possible in tomorrow.

I can't say I've been living a life of plans so far, only seeing as far as my arms can reach, sometimes, though experimentally, while stretching, to see how far they reach. The difference though, is I have never put much thought into my actions, never thought more than two steps past the current, what can happen, what may happen, why, or whether I want it to happen. I live my life by vague rules, rules I've made as I've walked along this path. They serve no purpose than to allow me life.
Time to stop floating and start swimming.

I have news for this blog too. I used to think I'd only want to post when I have something to say. That is, something current, something thought through.
But
I'm going to be posting anything and everything. Who needs a purpose and reason to post to an abandoned, forsaken pointless blog. I'll write, post, vent, anything I have to vent. If I feel like venting.

I admit, I read this blog post first before posting this one:
Write to Done blog

If you haven't seen the movie then you should but here's the theme song played amazingly by Itzhak Perlman:
Grooveshark -> Schindler's List Theme

Labels: agenda, boundaries, flickr, goal, life, photo, purpose, rant, reflections, self-preservation, street photography

Go green
Nothing I take comes out the way I want these days so instead I do some mindless random swinging around of the camera in hopes of setting off some sparks in my head.

Been a while.
80 days, 15 hours, 39 minutes to be exact.

This will be short.
Just to follow up on some of this post. (bullet-points at the bottom)
http://www.thanksno.com/ [Just fun (and a heads up to all that's reading, clicking, writing and sending).]

As for the "unsettling heart". I'm much better now thank-you-very-much. Some things are being sorted, have been sorted, will be sorted, will be dealt with, and some are still unsettled but not as invisible. I'll make the next post more meaningful since I've now finally pulled the switch and put gears in motion. Hopefully they're greased and will keep turning.
Who knows, maybe I'll cover the remaining bullets.

Labels: first post, rant, test

London Classic Bus Hire
I took these photos a while back but have simply been far too busy to deal with them. Evidently I found some yesterday night and today afternoon so here they are.

Went rollerblading along the seaside that day for a couple hours. Real nice weather.
PS: Got to love rollerblading.

I think I like this one better large.

I have been a bit over-my-head busy lately and it's mostly my own fault.
Procrastination has never been and will never be a good friend of mine.
I need to start doing things at a more organised and dispersed pace.
Longing for trips to the seaside to feel the warmth on my skin, not just through my eyes, through a double layer of glass.


My list-system is slowly breaking down.
Let me explain; a little after the end of the Christmas vacation this year I decided to start listing things I need to get done, the decision came closely linked to my other organisation decision with an agenda.
It started out as a simple list of all the things I need to get done, ranging from reminding myself to eat the apple before it went bad, to assignments and things I need to get researched. Post-it was my friend and they adorn a strip of my wall. The story goes on; the list evolved, noticing it was disorganised and accepting that not all points were as important as others. So, I divided the list up in three: the "Very important and needs to get done soon" list, a "Get it done some time when you find the time" list, and "Do it some day.." (i.e. unrealistic to think I'll bother to do it anytime soon anyway).
Assignments with deadlines and things to research got the left most spot, apples and union work type things went in the middle, and lastly more future-oriented things in the last.

The list ran a good life, crossing off things more often on the important list, a little less often on the second, and practically never on the last. But as all things needing much effort with me, I stopped giving it the necessary effort required. Summing it up in one word: procrastination. Not only did I start pushing things to the last minute, I also stopped bothering to put up everything I needed to get done. The middle and right-most list have been unchanged for a while and the left-most (most important) list is only occasionally being altered and crossed.

As I'm writing I'm realising that all I'm doing is whining. That was a good system and it got things done more efficiently. I'm telling myself I'm too busy right now to resurrect the list yet here I am sitting on blogger. Now that I've confessed I better go restore the list and see whether it can be effective once again.
Maybe it'll pay off with a treat to the beach under the shining sun. I sure need one.

In other news;
Two or three posts ago I had different topics in mind than the ones I ended up with. Those topics ended up as a small .txt list and have been left on my desktop for a while. They were going to enter in this post but my mind had other things in mind.
I'll list them here, expect them to appear in the next post.
- glasses of perception
- foreign-language, public space, and noise
- the unsettling heart
- thanksno

Until then..

Labels: academia, agenda, boundaries, flickr, goal, life, photo, rant, reflections, time

Soar
Okay, this is extremely experimental. I am aware this isn't exactly an amazing photo but I had loads of fun trying to capture one of these. I've been and still am trying loads of different styles of photography and am having a ball in doing so.

I would greatly appreciate some constructive criticism. What do you like, what do you not, if it was you trying to capture/ post process something similar, how would you do it?

I've started doing something I promised myself I wouldn't here on my blog. I've made this blog a self-centred site. Well of course, I did expect to talk about myself and my life a little here and there. But seems like that is all I have done in the last couple of posts. Nothing I say can be applied to anyone else than myself. So I will try to step away from that again and make today's topic:

Sounds
More specifically; noise.
Everywhere we go there is this phenomena. Birds, trees, wind, sea, lakes, walking feet,,, cars, factories, horns, a vacuum cleaner, screams, machinery, explosions.
There are different sounds in this world. And in contemporary society it is mostly about the artificial ones. We can rarely go for a stroll and enjoy 'the sound of nature', the natural. The infinite time of development to come to its balance of sounds. The human conscious mind has its consequences, we create the unnatural and produce the artificial. We invent, we create, we fight to break free from the 'flow' of things.
For nature is not the inorganic body of homo sapiens. We decided against that centuries ago. Instead it has become our "tool" of sort and we reap what we sow.

Stop, don't move, just listen for a moment. Can you hear the silence? Neither can I. Is the blowing wind and the singing birds all you can hear? I didn't think so. Most of us have to travel for hours to experience this, because we have not only occupied land, not even just air and space, for we have occupied sound as well.
When was the last time all you could hear was yourself? Though this is a little far fetched for the wind and the trees create sound too, but if I had the chance to I for one would want to experience the sound of nothing but myself, but I am more than happy for just a moment of experiencing nature, the natural nature.

So here is my tip of the day if you who read are interested;
escape the town, escape all roads, all buildings, maybe all of humanity for perhaps just a few minutes, plan a few hours, it is up to you, and feel that you are part of nature and understand that nature is not a separate being. Listen to the balance that has been created through millions of years of development.

I am not a particular environmentalist neither am I a "tree hugger", I am just an individual who enjoys a little calm and peace.

EDIT: As a temporary measure for not having set up an "Older/Newer Posts" link yet I've set the main page to display 10 posts instead of 5. It'll mean a bit longer loading time but at least you'll be able to look a bit further back in time.

Labels: flickr, globalisation, minimalism, nature, noise, photo, rant, reflections, self-preservation, social awareness, sounds

Horizons
There were beautiful wisps of clouds in the sky that dissipated all light neatly across the sky today. I like how they create something like lines in the sky. They're also the reason to the sun's pretentious size.
I'm also trying the new polariser here.

View On White (not sure whether it fits well or not so I'm leaving the link here)

I've been lurking around the library and swimming through books so much lately that I haven't even found the time to pick up the camera for a couple weeks now. That was put to an end on Sunday.
I recently made the decision to (almost) always carry the camera with me whenever I head out and know I won't be professionally preoccupied. So on Sunday after dinner and some book scrounging I broke away from the crowd I whence started out with and went for a walk along the beach; camera in hand and finger on the button, photo ready. Not a bad idea I'd say. I spent most of the afternoon enjoying the lovely-slowly arriving summer.
Used up a full battery and put the second in... which turned out to be a stubborn one, refusing to work. I had it replaced today with a working one so all is good.

Speaking of electrical things breaking. My laptop decided to take its last breath on Saturday (or was it Friday?). Oh the horror. Harddisk is fine so it didn't completely jump off the ledge. I've narrowed the problem down to motherboard or cpu. Hoping it's the cpu for that I can at least replace. The motherboard would be a lost case with all these customised motherboards for laptops and all.
Fingers crossed it's an easy fix. My wallet is not allowing me to afford a new laptop so soon. Been looking at those ultraportables though.

More flickr updates will be up soon. One thing I (probably should have earlier) discovered that is pretty silly for me not to have realised till now is that there is no rule saying that I have to finish post-processing and post all the photos from one collection right away and at the same time. This makes post-processing and shuffling through photos from a day much more enjoyable. I'll stop whenever I feel like it and post whatever I have and save it for later whenever. Enjoyability and convenience aside, it gives a larger chance and more time for flickr'ers to see all my new uploads.

Time to go back to my another day in another week of another month in yet another year.

(Note; I'm testing a different comment form that will pop up if you click the "leave a reply" link under this post. Blogger doesn't allow me to create a different comment form for the "comment" link to the right but I'll try to figure it out.)

EDIT: I've changed the comment form back to how it used to be. Normal link to the right of here does the trick again.
EDIT2: New upgrade to the comment form. It has now been implemented both under each post and under the comment bar to the right depending on which link you click, with user friendly-interface in the spotlight.

Labels: annoying points about blogger, bored, bugs, computer, flickr, life, photo, rant, reflections

The Last
moments of light before the darkness of reality forces itself back out.

Should be viewed large on black.

So I've been quite busy with books and the library and all that lately but when things start becoming too monotonous my brain starts becoming heterogeneous. What that means to the space that I call my personal is relocation and silly ideas. It has only been two days since I started my search for another world but so far I have glued (not strong) two small wooden blocks to my work desk so I can prop my laptop up against the wall easier. That isn't much of a change from how I've had it up till now other than now the prop is wood and not white-tack. Taking the laptop down is much easier now. And if you're wondering how I use the keyboard now then Synergy is the answer; one keyboard, one mouse, two komputers.
I've also reorganised everything to the right of my computers, I call it efficiency upgrade.. but that is just to make myself feel that I didn't waste half an hour of my life.
I used to have a laundry bag I was going to make but my fingers were too lazy at first and then too busy to finish that project. The materials are still lying in the bottom right of my wardrobe, right where they were a month ago too. I need that bag quite sorely. Some day, some time.
In five minutes I will start searching for the blogger code to add an "Older Posts" and "Newer Posts" link to my blog.




EDIT: here's a beautiful mspaint demonstration of how my computers are set up.







Speaking of websites, yesterday I put a drafted one together, one of those personal websites, based on the strange design I came up with three posts ago. It's not too bad and definitely need working on. I have a well of other ideas I want to realise into concept ideas some day. I'll try for something less, hmm, simple next time.
Go check it out: http://www.geocities.com/talleyway/index.html
Unfortunately I don't have a personal webspace and am too lazy to go searching for a good free service so I popped it into my existing geocities account. Click away the ad-sidebar when you're there.

Been checking out pixelpost lately. A great photoblogging application for databasing and showcasing photography. Fully customiseable. I'll be working with that a little in the near future.

Tom Clancy's End War is finally out for PC. Can't wait to try it out. Voice recognition warfare. *drool* I haven't bought a game in years but I think this will be next in line if the offline turns out to prove good prospects for online gaming.

As for my twitter-week experience. It started out alright, quite fun to share bits and pieces of my everyday life. But it only took one day to start feeling imposed upon by the intraweb. I found it increasingly harder and harder to keep up the updates as I wanted to share less and less information (apart from it being tedious to announce every bit of my day). It was a little relieving to be able to share some of my personal life even if there might not have been anyone on the receiving end. But Susan Greeenfield would beg to differ. I can see the angle she is coming from. The social community today has morphed to something very different from what it used to be only a decade ago. The constantly shifting economy of knowledge is a very different world as specialisation become the keyword of the century. Technology is growing and the world is shrinking.
Keep up, the times are changing.

Currently rediscovered playlist: Feist - Let It Die

Labels: agenda, annoying points about blogger, bored, bugs, computer, flickr, globalisation, goal, life, personal website, photo, rant, reflections, social awareness, time, Twitter, website

Thorns
that hold us back.

This really should be viewed large on black.

Well then, yesterday was the last day of my twittexperiment (Click here for details).
I'll give a very short and brief summary of my experience of that soon enough. But the general experience was one of giving up my privacy as the private became far too public and becoming far more conscious of my daily routines.

Sometimes the only boundary is reality.
Break free, do what you want, and realise that you still cannot grab the edge.

Labels: boundaries, flickr, goal, life, photo, purpose, rant, reflections, time, Twitter

We construct
It's nice to know that the road is under construction, but I find it a little early to tell the drivers when it's 500 meters away.
Perhaps a little closer. But who am I to talk.
Let the speeding cars do that.

The photo is from the same day as the post on the 15th of February.
Just didn't find time to upload it till now.

So, today I think I'm getting the haircut I've been planning to get for a while now. I'm far too lazy for this sort of stuff.
Still waiting for the day they invent a pause button for hair growth.
Heading out a few minutes after hitting the "post entry" button. I might be a bit late for the opening hours though, I'll see. If today fails I'll have the rest of my life to get the cut anyway.

A good habit I've started developing recently that I think everyone who needs it should get, an agenda. And not just to keep it on the shelf (like I did for two, three months before finally picking it up), but to actually note down events and things that you need-to-do, should-do, should-think-over, plan-to-do, etc.etc.
Up until now I've trusted my memory to keep track of all of this. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure you all have amazing memories, neither did I forget appointments and such. But by writing them down everything suddenly becomes much, much clearer. Easier manageable and I am able to become much more time efficient.
Not only can I easily plan things for my "free hours", but I have become a little more conscious over how I spend my days, that way I can spend them on something a little more productive than staring at the computer screen for hours on end.

Society is constantly demanding higher and higher levels of efficiency, we try to save time every single step we take, whether it will be spent staring at a tv screen or actually effectively used doesn't matter anymore. Many have never heard of 'stopping to smell the flowers' anymore even and society is erasing that phrase evermore. So why not conform a little and try to become a little more efficient ourselves.
Though while knowing society's growing efficiency demand, we are able to become aware; awareness is important for change. Therefore, with the agenda that you surely now will go and get (*hint*hint*), start "effectively" planning calm nights of rest, notice when you are busy and when you can sit back with a book or go for a walk to take in all that you didn't have time to when running to your bus or while working frivolously at a project.
We used to just have time to slow down and sit down for an extra breath, now we need to plan it. Follow the waves of change.
Pick up a new hobby if you want, for now you have the time to..

And yet again, here's My Twitter and why you should check it.

Labels: agenda, flickr, globalisation, goal, life, photo, purpose, rant, reflections, social awareness, time, Twitter

I have been left speechless. Amazing photoblog. Extremely inspirational. Fantastic photography.

Go visit now:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/12/the_year_2008_in_photographs_p.html


In other news: My Twitter

Labels: life, photo, rant, reflections, Twitter

Alright. All that hype about Twitter and such and such. I figured I should jump on the train as well and follow the rest of the world wide web and be a nice little sheep.
What is there to say. Twitter...twitter,twitter,twitter. A little device that has taken "Facebook Status'" to the next level. Take Facebook, cut out all the photo albums, the wall, the applications, the events, etc.etc. and only leave the status field and friends list and you'll have Twitter.
You see, some people don't think letting complete aliens know how your day was is enough. Twitter allows you to let the world know you're going to the bathroom, having your dinner, picking your nose, buying groceries, and all the rest of your sad little senseless life.

It is therefore I will indulge myself with this fun little interactive website and see if I can pull off a full week of constant 'twittering' (I believe that word has now been coined by the twitters, yes; "Twitters" *shudder*).
So, starting today, Saturday 14th February 2009 till Saturday 21st February 2009 I will be actively twittering whatever useless information of my day to day life I can muster.. if I make it.
Let us call it a social experiment to get a slight grasp of what the personal tweeters go through.

No, no I don't have anything better to do.

Now come read my week as I live it. https://twitter.com/TallyWeek
*add me if you're already Twittering, if you're not, follow me anyway.

More info on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/, if you're interested.

Labels: bored, globalisation, life, rant, self-presentation, social awareness, Twitter

Street Performing


Alright, here goes. A photo with an actual Person in the middle.

Also, my thursdays are a pain. Annoying timetabling.
More on that next post. Off to next class.

PS: I only recently realised my blog has no "Older/Newer Post" link. I'll get that done when I've figured what the bracket|tag|endbracket script is.

Labels: annoyances, photo, rant, street photography

London Eye


I know this is a rather boring photo. Ground-up-shot-of-monument photo. But I figured I just wanted to do an update now so picked this.
(PS; For some reason Flickr's auto blog function isn't working, curious)

So, tried street photography more or less for the first time this weekend. I rarely ever/never take photos with people as the subject so I figured I should try it.. a lot of rather boring and horrible photos. Not a single one I liked at least. I'll pick one of the people-containing photos for my next blog update.

On the non-photographic side:
Semester two has started again. My timetable for this semester is a complete joke. I have a four day weekend; Sunday - Tuesday, every week. It's rather idiotic. But my solution so far is to move my work hours at the health centre to Tuesday and spending more time in the library. Hopefully that will keep me off lazing around doing nothing.
Also, get myself a part-time job with hours in the weekend through to Tuesday. (perhaps)

I've discovered a nifty little network belonging to my uni. An entrepreneurship network, holding workshops every Wednesday, today was on Social Enterprises, very interesting workshop, very educating. I think I might keep going to their weekly sessions.
Next week: Marketing in the Facebook Generation.

Something less societal and more personal; I've found a growing interest for jazz. I've gone from only liking two artists to discovering dozens of new artists and liking the larger portion of them. I seem to have weekly trips to this small vintage cd shop down at The Lanes with a large array of cds most for only £2-4 each. Great place. All I have to say.

I will then end this post, but not before:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
[W.B. Yeats]

Labels: annoyances, bugs, flickr, jazz, life, London Eye, photo, rant, street photography, Yeats

I'm bored. So very bored. So I present to you, my pastime for today.
I'll be from now and the next few hours stenciling this 55x40cm onto the backside of a pizza box.
I'm counting 11 parts/layers. Should keep me entertained for a while.

Labels: bored, globalisation, rant, stencil

Hoist Me Up
Part of an old boat crane lying along the beach rusting away.

Time is but the illusion of events passing by.

This is mostly just a photopost. Spent most of my Friday (after my last exam of the semester *insert big smile*) somewhere along the seaside with my camera.
Very windy. Very refreshing. Very relaxing.

I think I have a cold now.
Been sniffing away since yesterday. Only mildly though. This cup of nice and warm tea should do the trick.

Labels: cold, photo, rant

okay, this is something that I absolutely have to put into everyone's (at least whoever reads this') attention.
At the very time of writing this 1 GBP = 9.547 NOK. (Follow the rate here)
That is almost a full 10% decrease from a bit under a week ago. Times are crazy and Britain's falling ever deeper into the recession.
If there ever was a time to be glad to be a Norwegian citizen in the UK then now is it. Norway is less affected by the financial crisis than the UK and that is all there is to say about it. But every world economy is taking a heavy blow. Let us hope the world escapes recession in a year or two years.

Og dette trodde jeg hadde vært åpenbart lenge.

[Note; links open in a new window/tab]

Labels: finance, rant, UK recession

I used to know my 10 before counting to nine.
What happened? When did I stop counting?

Labels: annoyances, life, purpose, rant, reflections

Bring Me Light
The Lanes, Brighton, UK.
Showers of rain has been haunting this town for some days now. And I seem to see those reflective jackets more and more as well as the rain.

The rain is getting annoying. Someone needs to do something about it.
Proper constant rain is fine with me. That's just refreshing. But these short 10 minute intervals of showers are just annoying. The skies need to make up their mind.

Exams and assignments coming up next week.. and I still haven't gotten rid of my insomniac. This is bad. It's 5.41am right now and I've been up since a bit before 5am. My body is starting to feel the stress of this irregular sleep pattern. Time to go back to bed again; to lie awake for another hour or two.
No lectures today, so that's good.

PS: Whoever invented exams-after-Christmas-holiday is a(n) [insert obscene word of choice].

Labels: annoyances, insomnia, photo, rant

My Restless Mess
This is my bed-corner.
Someone get it in order..
I've been having sleep problems lately and haven't made my bed for days.

Maybe I should. I recently did a proper cleaning of my room.. well, more or less, tidying up still looks messy when it comes to my spaces.
If it is true that a person's home is a reflection of the owner, then my life, my..me, is a very messy entity. I try to find order in the little bits; alphabetically organised books on the shelf, nicely folded and stored socks and clothes, lined up tubes of paint, a corner for every mess, but I strive to find balance.

I've been thinking, recently more so; What happens to people who never find a purpose to their life, never any goal, never any preference, those who just 'exist'? Is there a future in that? What is there, in a future?
Those days with no care in this world, where all I had to do was live up to my parents' expectations, my future was decided and I knew which roads to take, I miss those uncomplicated days at times.
People change, this planet changes, the universe changes; the only thing within our power is to savour the moments that we are granted. We all live different lives, but we all share the same time. Time: this arbitrary idea of something flowing.. a human creation.

Lately I've been getting a bit irritated at this aimlessness so I've decided, maybe. I'll start taking note of what I really want to do. Where I'm headed and which turns to take. I don't even know whether I enjoy what I am studying right now, despite finding it an interesting subject.
One step at a time, one rock at a time, some day, I'll travel those several miles up that mountain.

Labels: goal, life, photo, purpose, rant, reflections

it must be said.
The most annoying passerby greeting that you can ever come across.
"Hey-how-are-you."
I'm not even going to put a question mark behind that because it's not even adressed as a question, it's not even said as a sentence. It's all one long word of a greeting.
No pauses in their steps, all you get is a quick smile and heyhowareyou, you manage to put across a 'hey' and if you're lucky, a quick smile back again, unless they already are five metres past you.
What's the point in even saying it if you're not going to stop and wait for an answer. At least do one of those two..

My suggestion? Take the word out of the English vernacular altogether. "Hi" should suffice if you're not asking a question anyway.

Labels: annoyances, heyhowareyou, rant

through the door.

And that is a figure of speech just in case you didn't know. And it stands for; I just got back 'home' again a bit over an hour ago, dropped off some groceries (mostly liquids), had myself a bowl of cereal (I seem to be quite fond of that though I suspect a major factor to that is the convenience of it all), got myself a glass of nice and fresh cold water from a bottle I've left in the fridge (ice cold > tap cold), put the empty bowl next to the sink in the kitchen, clicked a bit around the net, and ended up here at Blogger.

I think I'll stick with 'just in through the door.' The shortest distance between two points is a straight line..right?

It's only 15:00 and I'm already feeling tired. I've managed to be what I consider to be quite productive so far. Went jogging today morning, had a proper and relaxing breakfast before heading out to town after: PS/2 extension cord for my keyboard, materials for a laundry bag(yup, still don't have one), a book, and liquid consumables.

Now,
I am tired and ready for a guilt-free nap that I will try to avoid taking.

So, anyone else out there excited about what is going to happen in exactly 6 days?

f(t) = t - 6 ; and counting.


On another note. One thing I've been wondering a little for a while now. Why aren't those four seaters (you know, those with two and two seats facing each other with extra large footspace) on buses the first seats that get taken when they're perfectly void of human presence. I know I head for those whenever they're empty.. one seat for my bag, one for me, one's footspace for me to stretch mine over. They already have dedicated seats for the elderly, and here at least, they have own seats along the wall further up front with an abundance of space for potential bags and/or luggage, so it's not like those are valid reasons.
Suggestions?

Ps: I can't believe this blog is turning into just another rant-sphere.

Labels: buses, president, rant