I honestly don’t know exactly what to expect at this moment, but tomorrow’s the first day so I’m sure I’ll be getting a much clearer picture by then. All I can say right now after hearing their introduction, talking to our contact person and reading through their website is that I’m really excited about this opportunity I’ve been given!

More to come in the next few days once I get some spare time, including a bunch of pictures and some video from the concert and much, much more.

Sitting at the airport at the moment, and with half an hour to spare before I have go and start the process of getting through the security posts I finally found a power outlet. Sweet joy, this means my iPhone won’t be dead by the time I land in Los Angeles!

But wait, Los Angeles? I thought you were going to Houston, you might be thinking. And you are correct. But I’m making a pit-stop in LA first. Right before I ordered my plane tickets overseas I got an e-mail in my inbox about Manchester Orchestra going on a headline tour, and I knew right then and there that I had to organize my trip so that I would be able to catch one of their shows. They have been one of my absolute favourite musical acts since I discovered their debut album, Like a Virgin Losing a Child, shortly after it dropped, and the with the tour coinciding with my arrival in the States I knew I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

And as a result, I’m flying to LA today to catch their show at the Troubadour, before continuing to Houston where I will be doing my three month internship. I’m so excited about it I absolutely cannot wait, and earlier when I was on the plane listening to their latest album, Mean Everything To Nothing, I litterally got chills all over just from thinking about finally getting to see these guys live! Because of the time difference it’s already Wednesday morning here, but when I land in LA in about 17 hours it’ll only be noon over there. Hopefully there aren’t any significant delays, because I’ve practically timed this whole trip with minute precision!

Anyways, my time is almost up and I have to get moving to the gate. I’ll of course be keeping all of those who are interested updated on my journey through this here blog and Twitter. If I’m not too exhausted after the concert I’ll try to get write a short post with my impressions, but it’ll be pretty hectic so you might have to wait until the weekend.

Feel free to give me feedback on it. I opted for a barebone approach with the resume, leaving out a lot of filler info and experience to put more emphasis on what I consider to be the most important things.  Once I get a spare moment I’ll get the resume up here on the blog as well.

Norway has won more Winter Games medals than any other nation. Last week it became the first country to win 100 Olympic gold medals, and Tuesday it hit the 300-medal milestone (the U.S. is second on the all-time list with dozens fewer.)

What makes its performance hard to fathom, however, is that Norway has only 4.7 million people to choose from. It’s as if the American team finished third in Vancouver after limiting the athlete pool to people living in metropolitan Detroit.

I’ve always been a proud Norwegian, but it’s always nice to be recognized. Just stay out of the comments, people always feel the need to rain on others’ parades.

PS: Another gold medal collected today, and our curling team qualified for the final where they’ll face Canada. Let’s hope for a repeat of the 2002 final!

I will offer some insight on the service and what I think of it here at the blog once I’ve fiddled around with it for long enough to get a solid impression of what it’s like.

Like I’ve mentioned on several occasions here on the blog and many more times over at Twitter, I am leaving the safe and familiar (and cold) surroundings of Northern-Norway, where I’ve spent most of my life, to stay the United States and more specifically Houston, Texas to work and study for three months.

The entire trip is being arranged by Gründerskolen (The Norwegian Entrepreneurship Programme), and the main objective is to gain insight and experience about what it is like working in a start-up company, preferably in the technology sector.

In addition to partaking in a full-time internship at a company which has yet to be decided, I will also be following classes at the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which is apparantly one of the best entrepreneurial schools in the US.

An exciting prospect of the trip is that we get to exert a certain influence over which company we will be spending our internship with you, given that the company we prefer are interested in having us of course. I see this as a possibility for me to get involved with a web-based company, although I’ve yet to look around to see if there are any possible candidates. If you are familiar in Houston and know of a company that might be suitable, don’t hesitate to get in touch!

I’m ordering my plane tickets in the morning, but as of right now it looks like my first and last destination on the trip will be Los Angeles. A couple of days before the programme starts (March 15th) I am catching a concert, and afterwards I will be taking a vacation and do some “sightseeing” with a couple of the other participants of the programme.

For everyone interested in following my journey I plan on updating the blog to share my experiences, so feel free to bookmark or subscribe if you want to stay on top of what’s going on!

I simply asked myself: “Why bother?” — And when I couldn’t come up with a good answer, I just decided to go with this theme that I happened to like a lot for its clean look and emphasis on typography. The general idea anyways is that the blog will be about the content, and while I’m as busy with other things as I currently am I think a pre-made theme like this one does the job and even more.

The theme you are looking at is more or less exactly as it came from the good George Wiscombe. I only made a few minor alterations to the sidebar and the comments. Once I come around to it I’ll also be incorporating the tags once more, but for now I’m completely exhausted from modifying the categories. There were about twenty categories or so, all of which overlapped at least one other category, so I’m pretty happy about narrowing it down to five broader categories. It certainly looks much cleaner, and let’s be honest, it’s not as if anyone actually go beyond the posts on the first page of any blog, which means that in the case of categories the less the merrier goes.

I hope you enjoy this new look and plan on staying around to hear everything about my upcoming adventure which will take place in the United States. In the coming days I will post the first entry in my “travelin’ journal” which will go into detail of the where, when and whats of the trip.

Watch this space for more information!

And hopefully some fellow music fans out there can join in with their own picks and remind me of some of the great albums I’m surely forgetting, or even missed out own completely!

These are the albums currently nominated for my list, alphabetically arranged by artist thanks to using my iTunes library as a starting point:

• Against Me! – New Wave (2008)
• Andrew Bird – Noble Beast (2008)
• Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006)
• Athlete – Tourist (2005)
• Audioslave – Audioslave (2002)
• Augustana – Can’t Love, Can’t Hurt (2008)
• Band of Horses – Cease to Begin (2007)
• Beirut – Gulag Orketar (2006)
• Blitzen Trapper – Furr (2008)
• Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (2007)
• Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Lie Down in the Light (2008)
• Brand New – Deja Entendu (2003)
• Brand New – The Devil And God Are Raging Inside Me (2006)
• Bright Eyes – Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)
• Coldplay – Parachutes (2000)
• Coldplay – A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002)
• Conor Oberst – Conor Oberst (2008)
• Damien Rice – O (2003)
• Death Cab for Cutie – Transatlanticism (2003)
• Death Cab for Cutie – Plans (2005)
• Discplines – Smoking Kills (2008)
• Elliott Smith – Figure 8 (2000)
• Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (2008)
• Franz Ferdinand – Franz Ferdinand (2004)
• The Gaslight Anthem – The ‘59 Sound (2008)
• Grizzly Bear – Yellow House (2006)
• The Hives – Veni Vidi Vicious (2000)
• House of Heroes – The End Is Not The End (2008)
• The Hush Sound – Like Vines (2006)
• I’m From Barcelona – Let Me Introduce My Friends (2006)
• Jack’s Mannequin – Everything In Transit (2005)
• Jason Molina – Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go (2006)
• John Mayer – Continuum (2006)
• Johnossi – Johnossi (2005)
• Jose Gonzales – Veneer (2005)
• Joshua Radin – We Were Here (2006)
• Keane – Hopes and Fears (2004)
• Kent – Vapen och Ammuition (2002)
• Kevin Devine – Brother’s Blood (2009)
• The Killers – Sam’s Town (2006)
• Kings of Convenience – Quiet Is the New Loud (2001)
• Kings of Leon – Because of the Times (2007)
• The Kooks – Inside In/Inside Out (2006)
• Manchester Orchestra – I’m Like A Virgin Losing a Child (2006)
• Manchester Orchestra – Mean Everything To Nothing (2009)
• Mando Diao – Ode to Ochrasy (2006)
• Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s – The Dust of Retreat (2006)
• Mew – Frengers (2003)
• MGMT – Oracular Spectacular (2008)
• Modest Mouse – Good News for People Who Love Bad News (2004)
• Modest Mouse – The Moon & Antarctica (2000)
• Muse – Black Holes and Revelations (2006)
• My Chemical Romance – The Blakc Parade (2006)
• The National – Boxer (2007)
• Okkervil River – Black Sheep Boy (2005)
• Pedro The Lion – Control (2002)
• The Postal Service – Give Up (2003)
• Razorlight – Up All Night (2004)
• Right Away, Great Captain! – The Bitter End (2006)
• Rise Against – Appeal To Reason (2008)
• She & Him – Volume One (2008)
• The Shins – Wincing The Night Away (2007)
• Something Corporate – Leaving Through The Window (2002)
• Stickboy – Pointing at Clouds (2008)
• Thrice – Beggars (2009)
• Tom McRae – Just Like Blood (2003)
• Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend (2008)
• The Weakerthans – Reconstruction Site (2003)
• Weezer – Green Album (2001)
• Wilco – Yankee Foxtrot Hotel (2002)

There we have it. 70 nominees so far, all which will be cut down to a top 32 or something like that. But I know that I have forgotten at least 70 other great albums from great artists that for some reason isn’t represented in my iTunes library at the moment, and that is why I need all of the three or perhaps four persons that will be reading this to compliment my nominations with their own. Use the comments, and if you have compiled a list of your own feel free to share a link to it!