Category Archives: Non flying

In Sydney

In Sydney, jetlagged and a little hungover from the Moyes christmas party yesterday. Nice to be back here again, even if the weather is not very nice at the moment with rain and wind. Georgia and me will be tourists for the next weeks, before the comps start.

Alternative to Adobe PDF reader

In my job as an network consultant I spend a lot of time reading technical documents from the internet, and a lot of those docs are published as PDF files. PDF in itself is a nice way to make sure your formatting stays the way you want it to when publishing a text, it widely used, and there’s lots of software that can export files as PDF.

To read a PDF file most people use the Adobe Reader software. This used to be a nice small download that did just one thing – display and print of PDF files. The reader have become bloatware with more and more useless junk added for every version released.

Right now Adobe reader is at version 7 something, a whopping 27MB download, it comes with a useless Yahoo Toolbar, and a crappy photo management application. It forces you to install a useless download module, and installs itself to always run in Windows, consuming resources on your PC. It takes longer to start up than Microsoft Word! It also crashes on one in ten files, locking up the web browser and forcing frustrating restarts when you least need them.

Acrobat reader sucks bigtime – and I’ve finally gotten rid of it!

The alternative is Foxit Reader, a free, small, no-bullshit, and robust PDF reader. It starts up in no time, and have never crashed on me once in the 8 weeks I’ve been using it.

 

Florida, Bassano, marriage.

Olav Opsanger and Olav Lien Olsen have been flying the Florida Ridge and Flytec championships in Florida this easter. Olav Opsanger did well at Quest with 13. place, up from 18. place last year. It was a total of 70 flex wings in the comp. Oleg won, Brett second and Jon Jr. third.

Olav Lien Olsen came 45, improving from 59. place last year. The weather did not seem to cooperate in Florida this year, ref. the Oz Report, with high winds and overdevelopment cancelling many days.

In Bassano they had 2 days flying, Nils Åge was the only Norwegian and came in 10. place of total 40 pilots. Robert Reisinger won in front of Frisi and Hans Kiefinger.

Frya Cup is the first competition in Norway, and it starts this weekend. Hope we get a good start of the season with perfect weather.
And a little off topic news – I got married to Georgia 16/4. I traveled with family and friends to Brasilia this easter, thus no flying news. It was a fantastic event with around 150 guests from Brasil and Norway.

Gamez

mono_6_t.jpgI got a link to some cool free games at BinaryZoo, very fun and addictive. I liked Mono the most, it’s like Asteroids on acid and speed. Reminds me of old school arcade machines (1 or 2 Kr. per play) and some of the Amiga classics. Quick and no-brainer games for instant fun in the wintertime.

If you have a modern computer and some spare time, X3 – Reunion is my current favourite. I spent many hours playing the prequels X – BTF and X2 – The threat when they came out years ago, and so far the hours have gone quickly while playing X3.

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X3 is a realtime space game, where you play a pilot building an empire by trading, fighting, exploring and building in a huge universe. If you have played the games Elite or Freelancer you get the idea. X3 was buggy and crashed frequently at first, but download the version 1.3 patch and everything works fine. You do need a good 3D card and lots of memory for the game to run.