Despite of this, the quitting has actually been a bit easier than I initially expected. Don’t get me wrong, I still crave it, a lot, but I don’t have any problems containing myself now that I have made up my mind. It’s also quite inspiring to think that just after these five days, I’ve saved about $50 dollars that I would otherwise have spent on that pointless habit. It sums up, for sure.

Another good thing is that I’ve been feeling a lot more energized. It could be that my appetite is increasing, but I feel really motivated to start working out properly again, and not just limit myself to the two to three days of week I spend on football (soccer). I just need to figure out exactly how I wish to spend all this newfound energy!

Other than that, I finally got me a new external harddrive today to use with Time Machine. It’s about time I started backing up again after I lost all my data when my Macbook’s internal drive died, and I directly after accidentally fried my backup drive as well. It sucks losing all your stuff, pictures in particular, and that’s why I’m being extra careful this time around.

And now, off to bed. Need some sleep.

Of course, dreams rarely come true without any action to set the wheels in motion, and right now I’m going through withdrawals to make one of my on resolutions a reality. Well to be honest, I would hardly call them withdrawals, rather just “wants”.

And to those of you wondering what the heck I’m on about, I’ll explain. I have this habit, a bad one. It’s a nikotine addiction, just like smoking, only instead of smoking the tobacco and nicotine, you put it up under your upper lip. It might sound weird, but it’s actually just as normal as smoking here in Scandinavia (at least Norway and Sweden). You can read all about it at Wikipedia.

While the health issues related to Snus are still being debated, the fact of the matter is that it’s an expensive, silly and pointless habit that I’ve had for far too long already, and I have decided to get rid of it. As of right now I haven’t had a snus (or any nicotine at all) in three days, or 72 hours:

It’s then that the anxieties associated with readjustment normally peak in intensity and begin to gradually decline. (WhyQuit)

I don’t think I’ve experienced any anxiety myself so far, but it’s good to know that the actual physical addiction is starting to decline from now on and out. Once I get through today, the fourth day, I have a feeling that that worst of the worst parts are over and done with.

Now, off to eat a healthy breakfast and then work. I’ll be sure to keep you up to date on my war.

I must have been pretty bored that night, waiting for Christmas eve and all. Well things haven’t changed that much in two years. This night / morning was spent watching Il Capo dei Capi (look it up if you like Mafia movies / series).

I also want to wish you all a politically correct holiday season, regardless of what you celebrate, or even if you don’t celebrate anything at all. Have fun!

It was this review of the Right Away, Great Captain! album The Eventually Home that apparantly made someone click the link at the bottom and purchase the album from Amazon, and that is pretty awesome in my book. The way I see it, it means I’ve already reached the goal of the blog, which is to let someone discover new, great music. The obvious next step seems to be to become influential enough to have the ability to kickstart an artists career.

Anyways, I’m couldn’t be more thrilled about the fact that the first referral the site actually made lead to a sale of Right Away, Great Captain!, because Andy Hull is one of my absolute favourites, and I think his work deserves all the attention it can get. The new Manchester Orchestra album is certainly among the top albums I can’t wait for in 2009!

If you’re wondering if this means that SSW is soon to be raking in big dollars, I can give you a firm no on that. This was actually one of the more expensive digital downloads, but it still only resulted in a whopping $.36 to be credited to my Amazon account. I wonder if that’s about as much as Andy Hull made from the sale as well?

Nevertheless, I don’t mind, because I don’t have any big plans to monetize SSW in the foreseeable future. At this point, it’s just fun managing a website again, and on a topic I really enjoy engaging myself in. As the new year comes around, and we get to see how much effort I’m able to actually put into it, we’ll know quickly enough whether or not it will amount to anything more than that at any point.

Just wanted to share that little piece of information with all of you. Now I should really try and get some sleep before I have to go to work in three hours. I accidentally woke up ca. 12 minutes after falling asleep an hour ago. Just three more days of work until the real Christmas break starts though, so I can take it!

After almost a week off after the end of the semester, I just started my work marathon yesterday. Will be working 8 hour shifts every day up until Christmas, mostly between 4PM and midnight. Can’t say I’m really looking forward to it, but it’ll give me a good financial start to the new year, and I can hopefully finally get some new clothes and stuff. Seen so many cool things, especially t-shirts and shoes, on the intarwebs recently, I can’t wait to actually do a little shopping.

Other than working, I’m hoping to get quite a bit a work over at Silent Sound Waves. Looking at the stats, I’m actually surprised by how well we’re doing in Google already. It accounts for most of our visitors right now, and we’re getting decent ranks for pretty much all of our reviews almost instantly. This is pretty great, and I think it speaks volumes about how great WordPress is for SEO purposes.

With this in mind, I want to give our reviews section some extra padding by hopefully writing up a new review per day for the next week. I don’t think there’s much purpose in reviewing old albums, so I’ll be focusing on 2008 albums, and in particular those who will most likely make it to our best-of-the-year list, which I hope to publish sometime between Christmas and the new year.

I’ve also decided to take one new person on the team, and I’ll be giving him a quick introduction when we both have the time, and hopefully he’ll start contributing after that. I’m excited to have him with us, and I think he’ll be able to write some great posts and articles that will be interesting for our readers, and hopefully draw in some new ones as well!

I’m also working on a monster of an article that I am certain will do really well in the various social sharing sites, but it’s not exactly top priority at the moment. Aiming to get it ready and published before the end of the year though.

Yesterday at work I think I heard through Day & Age at least three times, maybe four, because of a lack of alternatives. It’s actually better than my first impression suggested, and a few of the tracks are every bit as good as I had expected the album to be. Right now I’m loving Joy Ride and Neon Tiger, great songs! One interesting thing about the album though is the lyrics, which are much more cryptic and less acessible than those on Sam’s Town.

Oh and if you didn’t get it from the headline, Okkervil River is still near the top of my playlist. The Stand Ins is such a fantastic record, one of the best of the year for sure!

I have decided to retire as a football manager, for good. The games just aren’t doing it for me anymore, and everything is still as painfully predictable like it’s been for the past ten iterations or so of the game. And it takes way too much time, so I think I’m better of doing something slightly more productive, even though there’s still very little quite as accomplishing as winning the Champions League with a team built on players you’ve discovered as talents and groomed into world class stars by yourself!

Giving it up should give me more time to work with Silent Sound Waves over the holidays, which is necessary because right now it’s in the phase where it needs a lot of attention to sustain healthy growth. Right now I’m backing up everything in preparation of upgrading it to WordPress 2.7 (Beta 2 was just released, and it works like a charm here on my personal blog).

I just can’t believe how ugly and poorly layed out the backend of the 2.6 series actually is after getting used to the new one. Even though I originally opposed a new backend UI so soon after the release of the last one, I am now officially giving Matt Mullenweg my thumbs up for doing what was really necessary, and that was probably just what he needed to make him sleep well at night!

Off to watch new House and Heroes episodes, and then just enjoy the rest of my day before I have to go to work.

As you can see, I found a theme to base my new theme off of. What you are looking at right now however, is a completely unaltered version of the Blass theme. It’s extremely simple and to the point, and just what I was looking for. I will be modifying it quite a bit however, because I like my blog to have some sense of uniqueness in terms of look, even though it probably doesn’t matter all that much.

Among other things, I want to find a way to display my lifestream on the frontpage as well, but I need to find a plugin that actually works with WordPress 2.7 first. I should have the finished result ready in a couple of days, but don’t expect a drastic departure from what you are looking at right now.

Spent this weekend relaxing and not doing much, except for last night when I went out with a few of my friends, had a few beers (too much) and generally just had a good time. It was a nice celebration of the end of our semester! Yeah, the exams are finally over and done with again, for now.

Because I took the weekend off, I haven’t had time to evaluate the potential new writers over at Silent Sound Waves, but I just briefly reviewed their writings, and it looks like we’ll get at least one new writer on our team. Hopefully I’m as lucky with this time around as I was when I found Matt, because he’s delivered high quality articles that have really helped with gaining attention for the site.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7 RC 1. Wanted to see what the new admin panel looked like before the stable release is out and I upgrade to it over at Silent Sound Waves. It looks good, but I just hope they won’t redesign it again as quickly as they have done after the previous makeover.

Right now I’m looking at the new theme situation. Should have something ready in not too long. Tonight’s dish off of the musical meny consists of Okkervil River, go listen to it.

As I consider myself a man who stays true to traditions, I of course went into this period severely underprepared and with far too few fellings of pressure and stress. Yet, with two of three exams out of the way, it seems like I’ll get through it with decent results to show for. The last one is on Friday, and after getting through almost half of the curriculum already I’m starting to get a feeling of being overprepared. That can’t be good, or?

After that exam I have a good week off from absolutely everything - No school, no work, nothing on my mind at all. I’ll be spending that week doing absolutely nothing except watching a lot of movies, maybe start following a new TV series (open for suggestions), listening to a lot of music and “working” on online stuff. I just got my “old” (around a year) non-functional TV replaced with a new one which actually works, and it’s great having a working one in my room again.

As for the online work mentioned, it’ll revolve mostly around Silent Sound Waves. Remember that music blog project I’ve been trying to get off the ground for what seems like forever? Well I finally got the ball rolling. I have one great writer on the team already, Matt Sanderlin (see his posts at SSW and his MySpace profile) and we’ve been publishing a few articles per week for the past.

Surprisingly, despite I haven’t had time to do much promotional work yet because of my exams, the site is actually being visited by around 50 - 100 people per day already, mostly thanks to search engines and StumbleUpon. I think that shows that we’re on to something with the concept, and it’s a good foundation to build on once I start doing some actual promotion and link-building. Right now I am talking to two other people about joining the team as well, and I hoping that at least one of them will pull through, as it will put us in a good position when it comes to publishing a new article every day.

The other thing I will be doing is redesigning this blog again. Looking at it, I can’t recall what I was thinking about when I did the current design because I absolutely loathe it. I want something cleaner, simpler and more “blog-like”. I am absolutely in love with the look of this blog, and I will be going for something similar to that. It should be ready for the two year anniversary of this blog (Christmas eve), or hopefully even sooner.

Now I’m off to watch the new episode of House, MD (what a terrific show), listen some more to my latest musical discovery, Bon Iver (not really new, I just discovered him for real recently), sleep a little and then continue with my exam preparations.

Truth be told however, there hasn’t really been much to talk about. Life has been taking its usual course with university and work in the front seats (my life has two front seats in addition to the driver seat), spiced with a little bit of fun and heartache in between. Uninteresting stuff for the most part, and certainly nothing anyone of you would want to read.

I have also been “preparing” for Silent Sound Waves by listening to music, a whole lot of music. I am also keeping up with the scene by spending quite a bit of time over at AbsolutePunk (my profile), and I think I am closing in on the place where I feel like I have enough to contribute with to actually justify a music blog.

One thing I have been contemplating though is whether or not I want to try and get someone to help me out with the blog. Posting as much as I’d like is going to be extremely time consuming, and finding one or two people to help me out with a post a week would make it a lot more feasible. Finding someone who is willing without any monetary compensation however will probably prove to be quite hard.

To close up, I feel like I need to make some more modifications to the blog. The current setup isn’t working very well, and activity is down a whole lot. I need to find a middleground between the current setup and the traditional blog frontpage, because it isn’t giving the posts enough attention. Plus I need to find a lifestream plugin which actually works, as the current one isn’t fetching my Pownce activity for some reason.

Will keep you up to date on all of this, and any other interesting thing that might, however unlikely, happen!