Understanding the Fjord1 time tables

Having worked in the middle of tourism in Sogn og Fjordane county (I managed a regional destination company for about a year) and receiving many couchsurfers coming by public transport, I often get to share the frustrating task of deciphering the time tables of Fjord1. I have thus found it useful to make an explanation of the codes used.

So if you ever are so fortunate to visit our beautiful fjords, glaciers and mountains, and would like to do so without your own means of transportation, you might find this explanation useful.

S: School days, which means: Monday to Friday from roughly the middle of August till the middle of June, except public holidays and school holidays. School holidays are hard to find out about and could vary from municipality to municipality. To find out about them, you could search for “skulerute” and the name of the municipality.

D: Daily
* / ** / *** / A / e: Look for explanations, will usually make limitations in time. Remember to combine all limitations.

1 = Monday, 2 = Tuesday, 3 = Wednesday, 4 = Thursday, 5 = Friday, 6 = Saturday, 7 = Sunday

H = Sunday and public holidays

X = Except

DX3 thus means every day except Wednesdays. Public holidays have their own time tables and are thus always excempt. Usually timetables for public holidays will be the same as for Sundays.

Oh, and there is an online service for the timetables. Try ruteinfo.net or rutebok.no.

If you understand the time tables you might not need help from guys like these.

Jog mapping – the productive way of working out

Perhaps inspired by french barefoot jogger and entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, and the fact that during six weeks of travelling I only got to work out twice (and swimming in the shallow pools of The Flamingo doesn’t work that well), I started jogging every day last week.

My somewhat untraditional (or rather traditional?) leather running shoes

Having to attend my two last lectures of STS in Trondheim, I was stranded in the remote town of Klæbu. With six days of reading inbetween lectures, there was plenty of time for jogging. Thus, to not feel too alone I brought my newly acquired Holux m-241 GPS logger with me for my jogging trips.

The utilitarian that I am, my biggest problem with working out has always been that it’s not immediately productive. You only produce muscles and good health, and seemingly for no tangible purpose (I know there are many, the reason why I work out anyway). There are many ways to solve this problem. You can work out by chopping wood, carry things, cycle to work, etc. In Klæbu I found another way: Jog to make maps!

This is jog mapping (or map jogging): While working out is your primary goal, your secondary goal is to improve Openstreetmap. To do this you have to jog where Openstreetmap has poor coverage or needs improving, and you need to bring a GPS logging device. Now your jogging will have a real useful, tangible  purpose, as it will help Openstreetmap improve!

At the same time you’ll really get to explore the area, and as you map it you’ll get familiar with all the paths and possible routes for your jogging. If you’re especially couragious and go jogging into peoples yards and gardens, you might also make som friends (and enemies). When you start running around houses and parking lots to log their location, you’ll eventually end up in the local newspaper too.

Luckily Openstreetmap wasn’t very well covered in Klæbu, so the Tuesday I arrived, the map looked something like this:

OpenStreetMap before jog mapping in Klæbu. (This screenshot has a different style than the following because it has been grabbed from Cloudmade.

And now, it looks like this:

OpenStreetMap after jog mapping for six days.

Oh, combining mapping with your daily life and social activities isn’t anything new, there’s always a mapping party!

Roadsharing, getting there

I have long been thinking that Facebook probably would be a good platform for car/ride sharing similar to Mitfahrerzentrale, GoLoco or the failed Norwegian Haiketorget, and since we discussed it at work today, I had a cursory look if someone have already implemented the idea, and lo and behold:

• Road2Share: 1148 monthly active users, looks like the real deal but still too few users.
• Zimride | Carpool: 6549 monthly active users, good review, has launched its own homepage, so not sure if all users are counted, could be more. Also have a partnership with zipcar at Standford.
• Peugot EcoSharing: 39 monthly active users, and seemingly unusable at the moment.

The two first look promising, but what I’d really like is for bewelcome.org to provide this and integrate with facebook, twitter, buzz and not least provide apps for iPhone and Android with location awareness. That last point is probably the killer feature here.

Communism is still alive!

Did you think the times of the hammer and sickle wee past? That communists has to become socialists or other halfbaked, pink, moralistic partis to gain power? That Cuba is the last dying outpost of a political philosophy that is good in theory, but brutal and bloody in practice?

Well, you are wrong!

These posters and other beautiful posters for the communist party decorated the streets of many a city in Moldova. Here from an evening in Soroca. Photo: Guttorm Flatabø.

The communist red color, the sickle, hammer, democracy, European union, beautiful girls, pop music and big growling, corrupt Russian speaking party bosses are all combinable, and have been in power the last eight years in what was Europe’s poorest country, Moldova (now beaten only by Kosovo).

From being av corrupt chaos democracy with a dominating russian mafia accused of kidnapping young girls for prostitution, Moldova has become a communist democracy with an economy well prepared for the world economic crisis. Moldova has been less exposed to the international financial system and haven’t loaned their country away.

On the 5th of April, parliamentary elections were held in Moldova, and the communists received even stronger support than at the last election in 2005, with four more members for parliament. They thus keep their majority, but the vote for president can be blocked by the opposition so that a re-election could be the end result. I visited the headquarters of the communist party in Chisinau in the middle of March to see if I could get some souvenirs from modern communism campaigning. I was received by a smiling and batiful Vera who found me a good bunch of posters, cds and stickers (photo coming)

Vera Balahnova ved sida av ein byste av Lenin utanfor det moldovske kommunistpartiet sitt hovudkvarter i Chisinau, hovudstaden. Vera tok vel imot meg og gav meg flotte suvenirar frå valkampen.

I only need one piece of each for myself, which means that there are really nice posters, cds and stickers for the ten first who send me an e-mail with the name of the President of Moldova the last eight years. Remember to include your own name and address and send the e-mail to  post@guttormflatabo.com

dittaeva; this is not eva

The first post is always the most difficult, isn’t it?

This is soon to be a small repository of texts written by Guttorm Flatabø. Stay tuned for multilingual, flickr-spiced sushi blogs every now and then!