So many emotions in this song. And what an amazing performance:

Ola Nordal was so nice to translate the Norwegian lyrics into English. Many thanks for that

One of my colleagues bought a new car and I had the honour to test drive it for a couple of km. First of all it is not a bad car he bought. Especially for older people
But after the test drive I prefer my Paseo. He might not be one of the luxuriest cars there is but who needs that crap anyway. The Paseo has 90PS (89hp) and 130Nm and weighs 995kg (2183lbs). The engine has almost no flywheel which results in an amazing acceleration. On a dry track and a cool day the acceleration is about 9s 0-100km/h (0-62mph) although certain websites state longer accelerations. The only alteration I made are an K&N air filter and 0-30W motor oil. The latter he likes a lot
Because of it’s light weight the Paseo is pretty fast in corners although he is not lowered very much (my Paseo has it’s original configuration).
The Paseo is clearly a 2-seater. The back seats are more of an quick access luggage room. The front seats don’t provide much grip especially in fast, sharp turns. But fortunately one sits so deep that you can clamp yourself between the door and the transmission hump
But what’s really amazing besides the quick acceleration is the low fuel consumption. Usually the car consumes less than 6,5l/100km (36.2mpg). I tried to reach a minimum consumption over one gas tank (5,7l/100km = 41.3mpg) and a maximum consumption (8,2l/100km = 28.7mpg). I read that some people made it to 10l/100km (23.5mpg) but I wonder how they made it. I am not a slow driver but I shift up as soon as possible.
Until now the car left me alone only once and this was my own fault. I ignored the low battery sign and one morning the battery was completely dead… after 10 years and 90.000km (55,900miles)!!! But besides that the car is doing his job very well!
Well, the conclusion is: if I had to buy another car for that kind of money, I would buy it again

4 days of vacation is far from being enough but anyway it’s better than nothing. The way there and the way back took me about 10h each. Which is strenuous because of the enormous traffic.
On Friday we went to Chamonix in France because my mother wanted to buy postcards with the Mont Blanc. But this village is awful. Tourists everywhere. They are rude and loud and run into you if you don’t step aside. We had pretty good weather and the Mont Blanc was visible in full. It’s always amazing how big this mountain is. I wish I wasn’t so unfit
The next stop my mother had in mind was Aosta in Italy. Compared to Chamonix Aosta is very silent. But it’s Italy and that means: crazy car drivers everywhere. Nevertheless we found a very nice ristorante/pizzeria called Caesar there. The pizza was just excellent… hmmmm. We then went back to Switzerland via the Pass Grand St. Bernard.

Last week I went for four days to Switzerland to visit my family who had a three week holiday there. Because I wanted to not use the autobahn, I decided to buy a navigation system which had to lead me through Switzerland. At first I wanted to buy a Navigon but they are quite expensive and so I took a Falk M6. I wanted to have one where I could put in geographic coordinates and with most of the maps in Europe.
The operation of the navi is pretty easy. All steps are simple and logical. At least for me it is The route is calculated very fast and if you miss a turn the navi has calculated a detour instantly. The announcements are easily understandable and spoken enough in advance.
But there is not only light. The navi crashed two times and only a hard reset (switching a slider on the back of the navi) would do the trick. Of course the route had to be set up again after the reset but that’s not that hard
Especially in areas with lots of streets the navi gets confused and in serpentines it sometimes thinks you are on the back. And like all navis it has it’s suicidal tendencies. Announcing to turn left or right on mountain passes or suggest to turn around at the center of a bridge. Not always are the suggestion useful. And the driver has to think carefully when guided.
Nevertheless it is a good navigation system. It is fast, the touch display is very good and the three dimensional view gives a good idea of the route to come.

I was playing the tour de france browser game this year because I thought it might be fun letting your own riders climbs those mountains, race those time trials, get the points.
The idea of the game is to develop certain skills for your riders and distribute the researched points to your drivers. In addition you have to set up the team and individual tactics and distribute the massage sessions to the riders to regenerate them.
You can buy motivation points (to increase the daily morale of the riders), massage sessions, bike equipment and a research planner. But I thought I try it without spending money.
The start was pretty bad. I lost minutes on the first stages and thought the game for my team was done. But with persistence, a good tactic and the right researches one can manage to get the team better and better during the tour. And so I concentrated on mountain, fighter, stamina, recovery and time trial skills. And I concentrated the researched points to my mountain riders and the tour favorite Step by step my team increased it’s performance and the deficit decreased and decreased. In the alps my best riders were fighting the actual leaders and they managed to lead the team ranking
But the most important step was the individual time trial at the third from last stage. My riders got the positions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10
After that my tour favorite had 3s advantage and at the last mountain stage up to mt. ventoux my favorite got the stage victory and cemented the 1st position in the total ranking. In addition one of my U25 riders won the according ranking.
Means: I won all the time rankings (total, young riders and team ranking) without spending any money

This is the village Sogndal in the Sogn district in Google Maps.

Größere Kartenansicht

As a fan of Windir I am very curious what are the other members doing after the death of Terja Bakken.
I discovered several bands which band members are living in the Sogndal. Some of them have nothing in common with Windir except the location.
Vreid I already mentioned. But there is more.
Mistur is one of those not-Windir-related bands. They are doing kind of melodic black metal as it’s best. They will release their first full album at August, 29th 2009. I can hardly wait… until then MySpace has to do it’s best
In Cor Scorpii two former Windir members are doing a great journey around melodic black metal. The influence of classic music is very well adopted to their music. They released their first full album in March 2008.
Sigtyr is a one-man-project. His music is very mystic and of course it’s metal So far he released (together with guest members) 3 demos. I can hardly wait for a full album

And one non-metal related project comes from this valley. Highslide JS it’s product is called. The idea of Thorstein Hønsi was to develop a tool where you can view large images to a thumbnail without popping up a pop-up or by reloading the page. Highslide JS works in almost every browser (only the paleozoic browsers are not fully supported) and there are a lot of descriptions how to implement it in several web-related softwares. I love it and implemented it in several websites I constructed.