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Jeg elsker Norge!

As of today I have moved away from Norway where I have made my home for the past two years. It feels sad, as I do love Norway, the people, and will miss my life there. But I think it was time to move on. The company I worked for in Oslo has downsized dramatically recently, which involved chopping jobs, including my own.

My chosen career path (WordPress development) involves work which can be outsourced at any given moment, and even though I could probably have found another job in Oslo, there is always a concern that my employers would simply realise they could have the same work done elsewhere for cheaper and I’d end up having to find another job again. With that in mind, I took a job working for a growing company called 10up in the USA. They don’t care where I live, so instead of living in the most expensive place imaginable (Oslo), I have decided to have a crack at living in Berlin, Germany, where costs are significantly lower.

I know very little about Berlin, apart from the fact that I always have a terrific time when in Germany and I think my mindset fits in well with the German way of doing things. I’m hoping this will be a long term move, but I hoped that my move to Oslo was going to be long term (or even permanent) too, but that hasn’t worked out, so I’m not promising anything.

I had a very poorly laid plan for my arrival in Berlin. I have no work visa (the German embassy in Oslo told me to apply after I arrived), nowhere to live (I’m crashing at a hostel at the moment) and no backup plan for if it all falls to pieces and I don’t get the work visa I need. I always seem to land on me feet though, so either things will work themselves out or I’m going to have to haul my butt to some place else until I figure out plan B.

To all my friends in Norway, I will be back! Probably not to live, but definitely to visit. There are too many people I will miss for me not to come visit. In fact it looks likely that I will be back on the 25th and 26th January for WordCamp Norway 2014.

Here are some photos I took during my awesome time living in Oslo …

November 30, 2013
Anyone able to help with my VIP Quickstart problem?

If you don’t know what VIP Quickstart is then this post is not intended for you 🙂

Edit: I’ve been reading the Varying Vagrant Vagrants page, which says that version 4.2.16 of Virtualbox is incompatible with Vagrant. That is the exact version of Virtualbox which I’m using right now, so I’ll try downgrading and see how it goes.

Edit 2: Upgrading Virtualbox to 4.2.18 did not help with VIP Quickstart, but I tried VVV instead which seems to be working perfectly.

I’m having difficulties getting VIP Quickstart running on my main Ubuntu machine. I ended up doing a complete OS reinstall in the hope that my clear out whatever was intially causing me problems (I’d been planning to reformat at some time anyway).

I set everything back up and as per my normal procedure, I installed Nginx, MySQL and PHP to get my regular local server up and running. Then later, I attempted to install VIP Quickstart. I had the latest version of VirtualBox running, but it told me I needed an older version as the new one wasn’t compatible, so I downgraded to 1.2.x. That didn’t help, so I upgraded Vagrant to the very latest one (rather than the one provided by the Ubuntu software center).

I now get the following error message when I attempt to run ./bin/vip-init:

Timed out while waiting for the machine to boot. This means that Vagrant was unable to communicate with the guest machine within the configured ("config.vm.boot_timeout" value) time period. This can mean a number of things.
If you're using a custom box, make sure that networking is properly working and you're able to connect to the machine. It is a common problem that networking isn't setup properly in these boxes. Verify that authentication configurations are also setup properly, as well. If the box appears to be booting properly, you may want to increase the timeout ("config.vm.boot_timeout") value. Bringing machine 'default' up with 'virtualbox' provider... [default] VirtualBox VM is already running. [default] Running provisioner: shell... The private key to connect to the machine via SSH must be owned by the user running Vagrant. This is a strict requirement from SSH itself. Please fix the following key to be owned by the user running Vagrant:
/home/ryan/.vagrant.d/insecure_private_key

To try and help debug, I setup a blank Vagrant server without using VIP Quickstart and it seems to be working just fine. I can SSH into it and it is working as expected, whereas the VIP Quickstart installation won’t even boot the server.

I guessed that my regular local server may be causing problems, so I stopped Nginx, PHP and MySQL, but that didn’t seem to help either.

Today I tried to use my regular (non Vagrant) local server, and discovered that MySQL will no longer start. I’m assuming that is an unrelated issue, but am not certain (hopefully one of you will know more).
– this was fixed courtesy of the super helpful Amy Hendrix 🙂

Soooo … any ideas on where I should start debugging this?

My only thought right now is that I could reformat the whole drive from scratch again and hope that running a local server alongside Vagrant was causing some sort of glitch, but that is a royal pain in the neck and I’d rather fix whatever is wrong if possible.

November 27, 2013
Bandy

I made my first attempt at playing Bandy. For those of you who aren’t aware of what Bandy is, it is a sport which is similar to regular hockey, but is played with 11 players on each side on a huge soccer field sized ice rink with very low boards. The stick is much shorter than a regular hockey stick and you use a small rubber/cork ball instead of a puck. We were only playing in a very small area, more like pond hockey for bandy, but it was very fun. I haven’t quite figured out how you are meant to take the ball off the other person yet as I kept trying to poke check people, but failing as the darned stick was too short!

The photo below is of my lovely new friend Tessa, a Kiwi I met here in Oslo who joined me at Frognerstadion for skating and our unexpected try at Bandy.

November 26, 2013
Bullet holes in Berlin

I saw a terrible reminder of the history of Berlin whilst walking down the street. Bullet holes left on building walls from World War 2 could be clearly seen.

November 25, 2013
Cute pigs

November 25, 2013
Berliner Weisse

My friendly tour guide in Berlin kindly suggested to us all that we never try the local brew, called a “Berliner Weisse”. He claimed it was supposedly a horrific abomination of beer and should never be consumed by anyone.

To me, that felt much like telling me not to press a big red button. I must press the big red button! In this case, the big red button was a rather horendously bright red coloured beverage. It was spiked with a pungent raspberry taste. I actually like raspberry, but my tour guide was definitely correct. Beer and raspberry do not mix 😛

November 22, 2013
Visiting Vikas in Tübingen

I met up with my old chemistry colleague Vikas in Tübingen, Germany. We met at the University of Otago many years ago and it was nice to catch up once again. We had some genuine German food from the region and had a beautiful view of houses beside the Neckar river. Tübingen is a beautiful university city with beautiful old historic buildings; I highly recommend visiting if you are in the area.

November 17, 2013
München

I visited München (aka Munich) in the heart of Bavaria. I made a new friend called Jen at the hostel I was staying at. With the help of Jen’s amazing timing, we saw the famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel, a strange feature on the München town hall which chimes and re-enacts two stories from the 16th century to amuse passers by.

I tried the famous Oktoberfestbier. It tastes somewhat like other beer except it was served in a mug.

November 9, 2013
What to do with a naked man

What is the most appropriate response to the following scenario …

You wake up to hear crashing and bashing in your apartment. You figure one of your flatmates is just drunk and ignore it. The bashing goes on for a while. You keep ignoring it. Then someone walks straight into your room (no knocking, just walks in), you realise you don’t know who it is, so you say “Hello? Who the fuck is that?”, to which the response from a mans voice says “Ahhh, I’m trying to get into that room” and they point towards your male flatmates bedroom. You then say “Get the fuck out of my room” to which they say “heyyy, chilll, I can’t get into the room can I can get in through (gestures towards your wall)”. At this point you realise the man is only wearing a pair of underpants. And you go on to say (more aggressively) “GET THE FUCK OUT NOWWWW!!”, at which point they disgruntedly leave your room. You then try to go back to sleep. But then you hear them talking to someone in another part of the house, and definitely not in the bedroom they were trying to get into, so you get up just in case he’s up to mischief and check on what’s happening.

You then find the mostly naked man standing in your female flatmates room talking to her. So you ask her if she knows him and she says “No. I have no idea who he is.”. So you demand he leaves, which he seems to object to, but you be more insistent, then he leaves the room. You then tell him to get out of the hallway to clear him out of her way, then ask him what he is doing and why is there, to which he says he is trying to get into the same room he pointed to before. You ask him why, and he says his friend is staying there. Then you ask him “which friend?”, but the name he says isn’t familiar. So you ask him why he is in the apartment and he says he knows one of the girls who lives there, so you ask him why he’s trying to get into a particular room, to which he says he knows the girl that lives in there (but it is of course a males room that he is pointing to). You then ask him exactly who it is that he knows in this apartment and he says he can’t remember the name of the person.

No one else appears to be home.

At this point, what is the most appropriate course of action?

(I actually had to deal with this scenario earlier this morning)

November 9, 2013
Vigilantism

If people had the right to seek vengeance for things they saw as an injustice, society would become a very scary place. You may feel you are justified in seeking vengeance upon others, but I’m sure others feel justified in seeking vengeance for things you would not agree with. I recommend not setting an example for those whose moral compass does not align with your own. At least the justice system is “trying” to get it right.

November 9, 2013