My hometown
I grew up in Fredrikstad,
a small town in the south-eastern parts of Norway . Even though Fredrikstad is small compared to the
size of the cities here in the US, it is actually the 6th largest
city in Norway with approximately 70.000 citizens. If you ever
come to Norway, you should visit Fredrikstad
and its Old Town - it is a city you definitely will fall in love
with....In fact, Fredrikstad's Old Town was selected the best
tourist site of the year in Norway by the readers of Dagbladet.
Child
I
grew up on Prestelandet, just outside the Old Town, with my mom, Aud
Unni, my elder brother, Steinar, and my
younger sister, Hege. My dad, Gunnar,
and my mom got divorced when I was four and he is now married to Inger-Lise
and they have given me a half-sister, Jeanette.
I
was a quiet little boy and I did not do much wrong (at least not
much that my parents know of :-). I lived in the same building as
my best buddies, André and Jon
(later we teamed up with René and Richard),
and we had a great time growing up together. Unfortunately we
lost contact when I went to high school and they started working.
Teenager
During
my years in high school I had two part time jobs at the same
time, one being a salesman selling electronic equipment, the
other one was in Fredrikstad's first local TV station, TV-Fredrikstad,
where I worked as a graphic artist (designing logos, creating
graphics for the commercials and creating Ray Traced
animations/vignettes), database designer, programmer and
occasionally being responsible for the sound when we did
recordings. After I graduated from high school, I took a year off
from school to decide what direction I wanted my career to head.
I continued to work for both companies during my year off from
school.
Discovering computers
Even though I had always wanted to be an architect, the
job situation in Norway at that time was not good at all for
architects, so I decided to pursue another interest I had: computers.I
have been interested in computers all my life, but I was actually
as old as 17 before I bought my first computer, a Commodore 64.
That little computer changed my life. I mean, it was just amazing
how you could use POKE and PEEK to do little (and not always
legal) tricks and not to mention making small programs that
actually could guess the number you were thinking of. It
sounds stupid now, but at that time this was state of the art!
Within three weeks after I had bought the computer I was already
working on my first adventure game. In BASIC, of course!.
Unfortunately I needed too many variables to keep track of all
the items in the game and I soon ran out of memory... It didn't
matter much though, because two months later I was introduced to
another computer, a computer that could display incredible
graphics and even animate them at 25fps: the Amiga computer from
Commodore. I immediately sold my 'old' computer and bought an
Amiga500. I soon started to program on this computer too, in fact
I started working on the same game I had abandoned on the C64.
This time I used a graphical language called Director.
Unfortunately, as the game grew larger and larger, I discovered
that the compiler did not support source codes larger than 65Kb,
so again the game was put on ice until the company released an
update of the compiler- which took them over a year and by that
time I had lost my interest in programming games and I had
started programming useful utilities instead. I later upgraded to
an A3000 with 100Mb harddisk and incredibly 6Mb of RAM that could
display a 760*580 sized desktop! ;-) I have released several
programs, both shareware and public domain, during the many years I had
an Amiga. And even though I switched to PC during my years in
college, the Amiga computer will always be special to me...
Military
After the year off from school I was enrolled in the
military. However, because TV-Fredrikstad still needed my
services, I was allowed to serve my country in Fredrikstad's Old
Town while still working part time for TV-Fredrikstad. The Old
Town has a military base that once used to defend Norway against
the vicious Swedes and the military base now serves as a base for
military training before they send off rookies to the cold north.
I served my country as a corporal for a year doing all kinds of
administrative work and managing their database on rookies.
College
After the military service, I found out that it was time
to continue my search for knowledge and wisdom :). I had heard
many good things about Molde College
(i.e. it was said to be the best educational center in computer
science in northern Europe). I applied and was accepted. I
realized that computers was my business at once! Never before had
it been this fun to do assignments and attend classes. But the
heavy workload and the high requirements were more than everybody
could handle and during the first year the number of students in
my class dropped from 75 to 35!
During my last year at Molde College I did a thesis on teleprompter systems. The goal was to design and implement a teleprompter system that was intuitive and easy to use (no need for teleprompter operators) and yet be available at a low price (most teleprompting systems today are too expensive for small TV stations). The project resulted in a 500 page report and a software called AmigaCue and an additional 150 page user manual. The product was supposed to be released as a commercial product, but unfortunately Commodore went into the 11th chapter that year and no one would take the risk of releasing the product on a computer that was not going to be manufactured anymore.
The years in Molde was fun. I got a lot of new friends and two
of them came to Pittsburgh with me.
Living in Pittsburgh
I
arrived in Pittsburgh in January 1996 and I must admit that I
wasn't that impressed with the city and its environment
at first. I had quite frankly been expecting something a little
bit warmer. Instead it was dead freezing
here! . After experiencing 25 cold winters in Norway, I was ready
for a change. However, I was later told that that winter was the
coldest in 20 years and that this was not how the winters in
Pittsburgh usually are.
Later I have become very fond of the city and especially our American friends; they're the best!
I share a house with two other Norwegians, Ole-André Ranvik and Roald Hovind, a house we call the Fort Norsk because it looks like a fortress (Norsk means Norwegian in Norwegian) and because it sounds like Fort Nox. The other two Norwegian students that came to Pittsburgh at the same time, Ståle Nerbø and John Christian Lønningdal, live a couple of houses up the street. They share the house with Rolf Knutsen (who came to Pittsburgh this semester).
Last fall, 4 more Norwegian students arrived. They are Tor Oskar Ova Johnsen, Ivar Handeland, Hilde Anita Hopen (all in the CS program) and Cato Søgnen (IS). The last two went to the same college as I. Tor, Ivar and Hilde share a house in Squirrel Hill and Cato lives by himself in Oakland.
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