Yeah, I know, this is an old story right, me and image galleries! I tried the new Imagevue but it just doesn’t work when you have thousands of images. And my NAS’ built-in system isn’t really that smooth so I’ve gone back to NextGEN image gallery for WordPress with the Justified Image Grid plugin. It just looks the best in my opinion.
So go here and go nuts.
I’ve tried alot of photo albums addon for WordPress but not really liking any of them. So I decided to use a feature in my NAS for this because it works pretty damn good. One feature that I’m working on is the ability to geotag photos so you can map out where we’ve been and the photos from that place (in the top right corner, simply choose “Map”). Unfortunately this means going through every picture and you know me and how retro I can be when I go down that path!
Anyway here is the address for it : http://photos.kristoffer.com/photo/
The login is “Gäst” and the password is the Swedish, short name of my employer.
I’ve updated the photogallery with photos for 2014 – which include Sam’s 4th birthday, Adrian’s christening, H’s trip to Barcelona and our trip to Rhodes. Awesomeness ensues!
(as usual, the password is the short Swedish name of my current employer, with a capital first letter)
I’ve finally upgraded my image gallery and imported it into WordPress with a cool addon. Took me about 3 days of work to get it sorted and adding comments and stuff but it’s been fun going down that memory lane again.
Here are some of my favorite galleries:
As usual the password what the company I work at is know as in Sweden.
I’ve finally gotten around to updating the image gallery with some new images of me, Helena and most of all Sam. Enjoy!
(and the password is the Swedish name of my current employer with a capital first letter)
My new life as a homeowner and father is progressing pretty well. My son is growing well over the curve and our house is still standing!
The biggest effect has actually been my abstinence when it comes to buying new toys! A year or two ago I wouldn’t have hesitated to buy a new toy like a new graphics card or camera. But for the past months I’ve given it a second, third or forth thought and decided that my money was better spent elsewhere.
Until now!
After spending easter weekend with Helena’s family I got inspired to buy a new real digital camera, not a small cheap one we already have. A real one this time. We’d already decided we needed one and was gonna wait until summer but after that weekend and realizing how many photos we’d miss out on of our boy growing we decided to buy one now on credit. A Canon EOS 450D with a normal 18-55 lens and a 55-300 zoom lens. With accessories and stuff it ended at about $1300 but totally worth it!
Or what do you think?
Ok maybe it wasn’t that long ago, just over 2 years ago, back in November 2007 one of my friends got married. And they had a professional photographer called Christel there (along with an “assistant”) that was running around all day taking photos. I saw a few of them on her website Estethia.com. I thought she did an awesome job of covering the wedding, took some really nice photos and also spent alot of time fixing them up in photoshop or whatever. But it wasn’t until recently that the bride sent over the photo of me from that wedding. And I gotta say… if you’re a photographer and can make me look this good, then you’re really good!!! Check out her website cause she does really good work! When I get married and if I can afford it I know who to call 🙂
And when I showed that to Helena she said “oh you looked so good back then. Pity I didn’t know you then”. What the hell is that suppose to mean!?!?! 🙂
Although it was a hectic few days to get everything ready for our very first Christmas dinner ever it was so worth it! We were about 13 people there over the day, 6 stayed the night so a bit of planning but it was so fun! Helena’s brother with his family and my sister with her kids and my brother, and Helena’s mother, grandmother, it was all fun and most people had a good time. It was a bit tough in the evening trying to make sure people of four generations had a nice time (what can you do when the kids wanna play Guitar Hero and the grandmother wanna watch the news!?).
Then on Christmas day we went home to my parents for a more British christmas with turkey and the crackers and even more fun was had by all.
All in all a very merry christmas! Thanks everybody!!
Some photos can be found here.
I’ve added some new pictures in my 2009 album here, although you should log in as “guest” to see them all.
Most importantly I have some pictures from the baptism me and Helena went to a week or so ago. It was for her brothers newborn, Emilia. As always it was a great day and I had a blast! And so did Helena once she got over the anxiety of “what does a godmother do!?”
Then there are some new pictures in our album for our new house. (you really should bookmark cause I’ve grow tired of mentioning every update to it)
Most problems I had last weekend seems to be solved now. Going out christmas shopping today with my sister. Better late than never.
Some news from work ; Our lawfirm used to be run by the partners of the firm, and even if they knew the law very well and made a ton of money they didn’t really know how to run a company of Vinge’s size. So about a year ago they hired a guy to run things. That guy is like the personification of alpha male, really cool guy. One of his way of running things is to make sure the administrative staff is happy. Not only the lawyers but the others too, the janitors and the IT department. One of his ways of doing that has been to make sure we’ve been included in for example the trip to the Czech republuc- And now he’s doing it again but giving the administrative staff a $1 400 (10 000 SEK christmas bonus!! How sweet is that! Unfortunately half of that is going to tax, but still…
Unfortunately it’s not all good. Another of his projects is making sure everybody is included on the new website with a staff directory, even the IT department. So we had to go get our pictures taken by this professional photographer that came by. He was really weird, ordered us to smile, slowly, in small stages from neutral to right out laugh. Unfortunately I suck at that, I either look neutral or laugh. But the result looked like this. Not too bad if I may say so!! And no, I don’t wear a suit at work, that was just a coincidence!!
Ok, so here’s the story of our Silverstone Weekend ’05!
This year I turned 30. And when that’s happened to my sisters we’ve always done something special so we had to do something special this year too. And the one thing we all wanted to do was attend a Formula 1 Grand Prix. And since Amy lives in Scotland with her family and all it was decided that we were gonna attend the British Grand Prix at Silverstone. Amy’s husband Paul also loved F1 so he wanted to go and so did my brother Joakim. 5 people all in all. We ordered the tickets around Christmas, no problem. The problem was accomodations! Naturally all hotels and everything in a 10 mile radius was overbooked! Fortunately for us we found a family living in Blakesley that rented out a few rooms for this special occasion and they had 3 rooms available. My parents paid for that part and said “that’s all your birthday presents for this year all taken care of at once”. Sweet deal for all. And this year hasn’t really been the greatest for our family so we were all looking forward to getting away and just have fun for a whole weekend. And it was good!
It all started on thursday when Jocke and AC came over to my apartment to spend the night. It was the easiest solution since we had to go up early to get to the airport. Unfortunately we didn’t get much sleep since we watched a few movies, sat around and talked and just hung out. I got 3 hours of sleep, AC less than that and Jocke didn’t get any. But we got up early and headed to the airport. Smallest airport I’ve ever seen (not counting the one in “Wings”). After checking in we sat outside and a crew from the swedish TV showed up wanting to interview people about how the bombing on thursday has affected them. They interviewed AC but since we left the country we never got to see if they showed it or not. Two hours later we touched down at Luton and was greated by Amy and Paul. The weather was EXACTLY as I expected. Cold, grey and drizzling. We decided to skip the London part and just do the shopping up in Northampton instead so we got ready to go on a bus for over an hour up there. That is if the bus had arrived but after 30 minutes and no bus me and Paul decided it was time for taxi. £65 later and we were in Northampton. I did my shopping (which consisted of a new memory card for my camera) and then we sat down at the local pub for some beer and food. The ladies continued shopping and we continued consuming beer. After that we went over to Towcester and … had some more beer and food but by now we started feeling the sleep deprivation. So taxi out to Blakesley and me and Jocke went to bed right away while the others went to the pub.
After about 11 hours of sleep we were good as new and ready to head out to the track! The arrangement was that Christine, the wife of the family we were staying at, would give us a ride to and from the track for some compensation. Said and done, but we still had to walk for a mile or so to the actual track. We got there during the saturday practice session so we caught a few glimpses of the cars. Then we walked for another mile to the Hangar Straight grandstands and took our seats to see the qualifying. By now the Porsche race was on but that was just foreplay! The Blue Eagles had an airshow with some helicopters and then it was time for the real qualifying. And even though they’ve tried to make it more interesting and audience friendly it was still a very predictable event. After that we made our way back to Copse to just sit around with beer, burgers and watching the GP2 race. Then it was back to Blakesley and that’s when one of the few bad things happened – when she was coming to pick us up she hit a parking post that did a good job of scratching her car. Not a big thing but it’s still gonna set them back a little bit which we all felt bad about. Not that it was our fault or anything. Then we hit the local pub in Blakesley and then back to Towcester for some food and stuff. Unfortunately the pubs there were so busy they couldn’t fix the food part so we got a few take-out pizzas and sat down at the pub with the beers and just talked the night away. Then back to the pub in Blakesley for the closing-up party that lasted ’till 2 am!
Then on sunday it was time for the main event! We still had to walk all the way over there and made it just in time to see the drivers going around the track waving to the audience. Then time for Red Arrows to do their thing (which they do very well!) and now it really started to feel like a special event! Unfortunately for us the race turned out to be a pretty dull race, not many overtakings, crashes or anything and the Ferrari’s came 6th and 7th, but none of it matter because it was the thought that counted!
After the race we picked up our stuff in Blakesley and went back to Northampton where it turned out to be really difficult finding a pub open past 11. One that isn’t a gay bar that is (I’m not juding!). And the ones we did find didn’t even know what Jägermeister was. So we got bored at 11.30 and took a taxi back to Luton airport. The planes lifted off at about 7am so you can imagine how bored we were at 3am! And then without getting any sleep me and Jocke boarded the plane going back to sweden while AC followed Amy and Paul up to Aberdeen. Landed at about 10am and buss into Stockolm and train back to my apartment and that should have been it. But no, I’m still suffering from the second bad thing this weekend – the sun burns! Noone expected it to be THAT much sun and I’m right now in a not-so-pretty pink state. But that’ll pass but the memories of one of the greatest weekends of my life will remain with me forever!
Thanks everyone for making it such a great weekend! Thanks mom and dad for paying for the accomodations and taking care of Amy and Paul’s kids over the weekend! Thanks to Amy for even finding accomodations and Paul for making it down there (was touch and go there with the fog) and AC for being the crazy girl she is and Jocke for taking all the crap I give him and the family that rented us the rooms and all the bartenders (even the one in Towcester ’cause she couldn’t add)!
So now I’ve got to go back to work. Doesn’t matter, I could’ve taken 5 weeks vacation and it still wouldn’t have meassured up to this weekend.
Phew, that was one hectic weekend! Even though I wasn’t THAT involved with all the happenings during the SweCon it still felt like it! When we dropped off Tim Russ & Co. at the airport we just breathed a sigh of relief – it was finally over! And ofcourse I have some pictures thanks to my good buddy Ricki! Head over to My Pictures and scroll down to SweCon 2004″ I should be able to scan the signed pic with me and Tim Russ by tomorrow. Meanwhile, take a look at some new pictures I just added from my trip to Rome! And these pictures are taken by Ricki that was also “accidentally” in Rome at the time.
Wanna see an awesome picture? Check this one. You don’t see what’s so special? Take a close look at the sunglasses in the original. I emphasize original, cause it hasn’t been altered in any way what so ever yet. So, guess where I was at the time?!
