Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Changes in lifestyle

In Denmark, I spent the evenings at work and the weekends in my apartment. The only sport I was doing was football, which is not suited to my two left feet and sometimes cycling the Brabrand-trail in the weekends. I never could find a good gaming group to hang out with in Denmark, although I did try to get one started.

In Norway I got back to my gaming group, we meet regularly each week, either on Mondays or Thursdays. This is great I get 6-8 friends over, we talk for 1/2-1 hour and then we play roleplaying games for 3-5 hours before we call it a night.

For sports I started with "innebandy" (running after a ball with a stick, like ice hockey without the ice), but that was not a sport for me. Then I started with dancing swing (Boogie-woogie and lindy-hop) and it is actually fun. I have tried to start as a beginner before, but it is actually fun, and this time I am actually getting better fast. I am starting to actually be able to coordinate my feet and hands and think of how to dance at the same time (thinking of 3 things at the same time is usually 2 more than a normal man can manage). But I still have things to work on as I am trying to complete a 8 beat move in 7 beats, which usually messes up things. An added befit is that there are more girls in the dance classes then there are boys.

For the weekends I have travelled to Oslo last weekend to visit an old friend, and I am going to Oslo again next weekend to attend a gaming event and to visit friends.

For all the good things in Denmark and all the fun I have had down there, I am a Norwegian at heart and I have 10 years of roots and acquiring friends in Trondheim. There is something said for living in one place long. If I could just merge these two places I would have the perfect place on the earth.

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Financial blogs I read

There are two ways of getting more money. One is getting paid more, by getting a raise, changing jobs or taking a second job. The other way is using less, or getting more for less money. The second option is usually the better, and you can get a better life using less money. For more on this I follow these two blogs daily: The simple dollar and Get rich slowly .

For an overview of the Danish housing markets we have the following 2 part article (on a Norwegian blog which is highly negative of world markets). I can also add my own observation, when I came to Denmark November 2006, there was a sellers marked, when I left I could count 6-8 for sale signs on my way home, and I only needed 10-15 min to cycle home (downhill).

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Thursday, September 13, 2007

Personal finance

I have been researching the question of personal finance (the kind of money we have and are gone at the end of the month) and global finance (the kind of money you can only dream about, and only big banks understand). Now I have accumulated enough knowledge/disinformation for at least 10 blog posts. Time will tell if I can ever do 10 blog posts without getting distracted and start talking about something else, but as I have bought Civilization 4 recently it does not leave me much time for bloging.

To start this off I have some financial information that is of global importance:
The dollar index (the dollar in respect to other important currencies) is now below 80.
For a short introduction to the significance of this: This index started at 100 in 1973, it has traded at between 120 and 80, but never below 80. Scroll a bit down in this article to see the index form 95-06.
Oil is now about to break the $80 per barrel barrier.
The mess in the American sub-prime mortgage is still not over.

Economists tell us that these things are not good for the global economy, but also remember that it is economists that got us in this mess in the first place. Now these guys control the flow of money, so if they tell us that things are going to get bad, then things are going to get bad.

Monday, September 10, 2007

Voting in Norway

Today there are local elections in Norway, it is local elections and I do not care which way the election goes.
1. The election results will only affect some aspects of my life here in Trondheim, and as I might be leaving this town in about one year the election has limited effect on me personally.
2. As I have lived one year in Denmark, the Norwegians have found me unfit to vote in the local elections.

Anyway to please my blog audience I have taken a test of which party I should have voted for:
The winner is Venstre (left) a central left party. A party that stands for decentralizing and freedom for individuals, a small party that I usually do not think of voting for. The runner up is an extrem left leaning party, followed by a more moderate left party. Then I jump over to the moderate right, and so on. At the bottom is the party at the far right which is against immigration. All in all a quite left leaning views.

The interesting part was that 10 years ago, I would probably have had FRP and H towards the top. I like FRP free-marked speaking, but as everyone (who knows me) knows, I have allways liked people from abroad.