The Drywood picture

Last year we changed the color of our house. Originally it was painted red with yellow frames around windows etc. But last year we concluded that we were ready for a change.

Part of the story has been covered already, but there is more! Because the Norwegian representative for the Dutch Drywood paint arranged a photo competition. They asked their customers to submit pictures of their use of Drywood paint, and the winner would receive a stay at a spa resort for two.

I felt that we deserved to win so I submitted the picture on the right. It shows my wife standing on stacks of empty paint cans while pretending to paint. Compared with the other entries I saw I felt pretty confident, but in a show of strength I added a Limerick:

Byggfruen vil gjerne på spa
Hun sier til utførende da
Du får stable opp spann
Så jeg male litt kan
Slik at jeg æren kan ta

Google Translate fails at making a good translation. Norwegian words like "byggfruen" and "utførende" combined with rhyme is not trivial.

Of course we won, and she invited her sister along. This was during the schools' autumn break, so I won quality time with the kids.

Eldhuset

Ascensio  tend to come on a Thursday(!), and that makes it easy to take the Friday off for an extended weekend. So the excuse for a boys on tour was there for the taking. This time we aimed for the Håøya island in the Oslo fjord.     


Håøya is interesting in many respects:

• largest island in the Oslo fjord
• unique plant life
• White-tailed eagles nested there this year, for the first time in a very long time
• part of the Oscarsborg Fortress until modern times

So we hired a cabin from the local recreational council and took the boat from Oslo harbor in beautiful weather.

I was there on a school camp when I was a kid, and coming back brought back memories. As with other parts of the Norwegian countryside Håøya is also suffering from the absence of cows, goats and sheep. They used to keep the landscapes open, but now every nice view is disappearing in shrubbery and forest.

But at Håøya they are trying to do something about it. A goat farmer brought his herd to the island to manage the vegetation, and produce goat cheese. We were too early to enjoy the cheese, but maybe next year!

House of MOS Technology

Around Easter I started the process of changing the color of my house. We renovated and extended the house around the turn of the millenium. It used to be covered with Eternit, but we replaced that with wood paneling in red and details in yellow. But making sure the house looked OK when the coloring was an oil based wood stain proved challenging. As a consequence we decided to change to paint instead.

Well, the wife suggested that we use the same colors as we used on a new garage we built in 2012, but I was skeptic because I thought the result would be too dark. But when I noticed the NCS codes for the colors I changed my mind!
In the picture I have indicated how the new colors 6502 and 8502 are used. You can also see the original colors (after wire brushing and washing). I had to remove the rain gutter to get the scaffolding in place. That is why the edge of the roof does not look right.

So why did the codes of the colors mean so much to me? Well, when I was a kid in the seventies the microprocessor revolution was happening. I never had a Apple II but its processor, the 6502, was one of the technological wonders of that time, and I read everything I could find about such things. And the 8502 was based on the 6502 with special functionality for the Commodore 128.

Both of these processors were made by MOS Technology, and I fear that having these colors on my house will be as close as I will ever get to this technology.

Call me a nerd, but it is my House of MOS Technology.

Beha #10603

Back in 1988 I bought an apartment that contained stuff that the previous owner didn't care about. One of the items was this electric convector heater produced by the Norwegian company Beha.

Since I have a weakness for old stuff I brought the heater with me as I moved, although it always ended up stored away. I guess it didn't fit with my style or meet elementary WAF standard, and its electrical wiring wasn't up to modern standards either.

Earlier this year I started a long overdue clearing out of my basement. Stuff was thrown away or recycled, but what to do about this charming, pre-war piece of Norwegian industrial history?
Well, I offered it to three bodies that I thought could be interested in giving it a good home.

It turned out that the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History had a similar one already, the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology declined politely, while the company was very interested. I suspect that they lacked this part of their history in their collections.

So we agreed on shipment and off it went, the Beha #10603 to Beha's facilities in Porsgrunn. Hopefully its lion's paw-like feet and old fashioned appearance will not keep it from being put on display there. 

Øystein's Twine

My house is partially heated by circulating water in the floors, and this hot water is generated by a heat pump. This pump, the hot water tank and the rest of the distribution system is meant to require minimal attention. But when I found myself looking for a target for my Twine, I found that monitoring the heat pump allowed me to maximize my use of its sensors.

Embedded in the Twine there are sensors for temperature, vibration and the device's own orientation. To this I added a moisture sensor, so that I can monitor:

• the temperature of the water pump
• the vibration of the water pump
• any water released to control the pressure in the system

Before activating the Twine I had to rely on observing the heat pump to get its status. As I frequently have business in the basement this was no big problem, but I had to be at home. With the addition of the Twine I can now get the status over the Internet, whether I was elsewhere in the house or somewhere with Internet access.

Access to the Twine goes via the services of Supermechanical, so I depend on they staying in business for the setup to work.

By the way, the use of solutions like Twine is included in the concept of Welfare technology, applied to finding ways to reduce the burden of the elderly boom that is expected in the future.

Try this at home!

The Never ever do this at home TV series is a huge success in Norway. Supposedly they show you dangerous stuff you shouldn't do at home. Recently this included a relatively big trebuchet used for throwing food! We all learn that we shouldn't throw food in the garbage, so I guess the idea was to show how you should not throw food with style.

But if you haven't seen the show then curiosity may have helped you do stuff anyway. That is what happened back in 2007 when my kids and I build our own trebuchet. We had previously seen a full size version in action at the Middle Ages Centre in the south of Denmark. While we couldn't throw big stones in our neighborhood, water balloons and tennis balls are pretty harmless.

So we aimed at a smaller version. Using a bucket filled with stones for load, we were able to send our projectiles far away, to where we could not find them. Or if the release of the sling was out of tune, then we had one water balloon go vertical - we couldn't understand where it went before we suddenly realized that it was about to land in our midst. So all the kids in the street and I dispersed in different directions. Nobody got wet though!

Unfortunately the weapon was lost last year when our old garage was torn down, so I hope the kids come home with a school project where they need my help building a new one.

By the way, I see from the picture that I looked younger then!

Haukenestårnet in Rømskog

Haukenestårnet is an old fire lookout tower in the forest east of Oslo. After having been taken out of use it has been reborn as a cabin in the Norwegian Trekking Association's system of cabins. So three dads and five boys went on tour during Pentecost, from Saturday to Sunday.

Visiting such cabins during Pentecost has almost become a tradition. The boys' spare time is heavily influenced by digital media, and these trips are small attempts to show them the joys of nature.
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While previous trips (check the DNT label) may have been strenuous, this was much lighter since we could almost drive to the door. There is a forest road leaving just 5-10 minutes walk to get to the cabin. But we needed an expedition, so we walked through the woods to the nearby hotel. There we rented canoes that we used on lake Vortungen. We tried fishing as well, but without success. Instead we treated ourselves to ice cream back at the hotel before we returned to the tower for a wonderful summer evening and a very good sleep.

The picture shows the group (minus me) as we are about to get back to the cars. We didn't go directly home afterwards, but instead visited a small farm belonging to the ones with orange covers on their sleeping bags. There fishing was more successful!