From Kalymnos #2

A few more days have gone by and I’m still living the “hard” life at Kalymnos. We (as in Louis which I’m here with and myself) have been climbing today and we’ll go out again tomorrow. When tomorrow is at an end we have been here for a week and have climbed 5 days. We have done some very nice routes as well! I’ll include a tick list when I get home from this place for those who might be interested in that.

We have been bathing and swimming every day as well. It’s about 21 degress in the ocean here so it’s quite nice. It’s very refreshing to take a quick dip after climbing all day long. We are going out to eat today since we forgot to take anything out of the freezer yesterday.

You’ll hear from me later!

From Kalymnos

So, we’ve been here for a couple of days now. We arrived around 1800 on Sunday and didn’t do much that evening. The room we are staying in is not really that good. The “kitchen” is a small portable gadget with one plate to cook on and a fridge that barely works. Not too great if you want to make rice, sauce and some meat. We have been talking about looking for some other place to stay if there are better options regarding the kitchen around here. Since we’re staying here for over a month it would be nice to have a decent place to make some food.

Today we are having a resting day after a long climbing day yesterday. We went to the capitol of the island earlier today and picked up some food since there is no butcher shop around here. We also spent some hours sleeping in the sun on the beach after a short swim. It’s a hard life we are living here…

We are going to climb tomorrow and Thursday and we’ll rest on Friday again. I’ll write some more later and post some pictures as well. There won’t be too many pictures until some more of our friends arrive here. When it’s only the two of us climbing there is no opportunity to snap some photos as well.

Anyhoo, hope everyone back home is having as great a time as myself. Later everyone!

Firefox + Spotify in Wine

I run Ubuntu on all my workstations. I also run Spotify in Wine and use Firefox 3.0 as browser of choice. Until now I haven’t been able to click on the spotify:* links in Firefox and have it open them in Spotify. The following small changes made this possible:

Start Firefix and enter about:config in the address bar. Click past the warning that comes up, right click somewhere in the list of settings and click on new -> boolean. Create the following setting:

network.protocol-handler.expose.spotify

and set it to false.

Right click again to add another setting:

network.protocol-handler.external.spotify

Set this to true.

Now, lets create a small shell script that Firefox can use to start Spotify. I chose to place it in the Spotify installation folder:

vim ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Spotify/spotify.sh

Enter the following:

#!/bin/bash
wine "$HOME/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Spotify/spotify.exe" /uri "$1"

Then make the file executable with the following command:

chmod +x ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Spotify/spotify.sh

Now, click on a spotify link (like this one for instance) and select the newly created shell script to see the magic happen!

Soon off to Kalymnos

In about 4 days I will arrive at Kalymnos, Greece for a month of sport climbing together with a friend, and I’ll stay there until the 15th of October.

Our plan is to go climbing every other day. I wanted to bring my bike so I could get some mileage done on the non-climbing days but there was no room for it on the plane from Athens to Kalymnos (which is a smaller Propeller aircraft). I’ll probably try to do some swimming and hiking instead. I also have some plans to read some books while there. I’ll bring World Without End by Ken Follett and some other smaller books.

I’ll bring my camera and some lenses as well and I’ll hopefully be able to snap some nice climbing pictures (pictures from last year is available in this set over at flickr.com). The last couple of weeks some other guys will join us there so it’ll be easier to fix myself high up in some route and take some pictures of the other guys.

When I’m really bored (can’t really see how that will happen) I’ll probably get some coding done as well. :)

I’ll keep you all updated!

Finished Birkebeinerrittet last Saturday

Last Saturday I raced in Birkebeinerrittet which is a mountain bike race in Norway over the mountains from Rena to Lillehammer. The race is about 94,6km and it’s the worlds biggest mountain bike race with ~16.000 contestants. My group started at 13:20 so I left Fredrikstad around 07:15 together with Linda so I’d have plenty of time. I arrived early and managed to get a good 45 minute warm up by cycling around Rena before the race started. During my warm up it started to rain and I got some messages from a couple of friends of mine that the track was extremely muddy and slippery. I raced in Grenserittet earlier this year and thought that it couldn’t be much worse than that… boy was I wrong. Take a look at some pictures from the event and you’ll understand.

The trip over the mountains did not exactly go as planned though. After 3,16km’s my cycle computer stopped working. It has been this way once before and that was at the Grenserittet race. I’m guessing this computer doesn’t want me to enter these races. Now, this was only a small beginning. When I stood on the top of the so called raisin hill (Rosinbakken) at the ~55km mark I had managed to break my glasses (which was a major bummer in these conditions), puncture twice and split my chain 3 times. Since I only had one extra tube in my backpack I actually had to patch the tube the second time around which was not too easy when everything is covered in mud. I got quite cold during this ordeal as well so it wasn’t to pleasant to get back on the seat. Since my chain (and the rest of the bike for that matter) was covered in mud it’s easier to break it if you don’t have the correct oil and bit of luck. The last time I sat mending my chain some other guy broke his chain as well so we sat down and shared a laugh and a bun with raisins (which was fitting since we were sitting at the top of the raisin hill).

After all this I lost all motivation and did not ride very fast and efficient to the finish line. I finished the race in 5 hours and 54 minutes which was way more than my intentions. Hopefully the weather will be better next year and that I’ll have a bit more luck with my bike. Mats finished the race in 5.24 wihch was a big improvement from last year.

I’ve uploaded some photos of my bike after the race to flickr: