Unfortunately my carrier, Netcom, has decided that they won’t allow this. In fact they only allow you to connect your laptop through the 3G network by using a modem with a separate subscription, or if you use a Windows Mobile phone. Go figure.

It’s not as if I would actually use this option a whole lot as I usually have wireless access, or just use my iPhone for what I need to do online. But on the odd occasion that I feel the need, it would be nice to have the option. Now I am definitely switching to a different carrier once my term with Netcom runs out, as other carriers are indeed willing to let us decide how we spend the traffic that we pay for. #Netcomfail indeed.

Get it from Amazon.

Vacation time is now over me and it feels… boring. Weather is abysmal in typical Northern-Norwegian fashion, and there really isn’t a whole lot to do. Right now I’m not quite sure what you do when you have vacation time, no work and it isn’t a weekend.

I suppose you could pretend like every day is weekend, but that’s not necessarily a good idea, I think.

This summer I’ll be fighting off my demons sporting some Brand New apparel.

A hoodie..

Back of the hoodie

And a subtle touch of excellence!

And a matching T-shirt!

Courtesy of the Brand New Merch Store. What are your favourite pieces of band merch? Looking to get some more from bands I like, but unfortunately a lot of bands don’t have a much that fit my taste.

Learning is fun!

Most of you, at least those who stop by my blog frequently or follow me on Twitter, will know that I am currently in the middle of preparing for my final exams for the semester. And those that know me a little better, know that I do 90% of my learning in the days and weeks before the exams, as opposed to the more structured students who have a more linear curve of learning throughout the semester.

As it turns out, these two final exams of the semester will be quite important for me because the average grade of my bachelor’s degree (business and leadership) rests on them, and ultimately that will decide my options of when and where to complete my education with two more years of studies to gain a master’s degree.

So I’ve been working pretty hard these past few days to prepare as best as I can, focusing mainly on my microeconomics exam. Those of you who have some experience with this branch of economy studies know that theoretically it’s not a terribly difficult field, but there is a lot to keep track of, especially if you’re trying to get it all under control in a short span of time.

Que my pseudo-weird out-of-body experience of sorts tonight as I was trying to fall asleep. I was so tired at around 11 PM that I went straight to bed, but to my dismay I was unable to really fall asleep, and my head was completely spinning with TC, TR, MC, LAC, LMC, free-competitors and monopolist supply, pareto-effecient allocations etc.

It was a surrealistic experience, because it felt as if I was, semi-consciously watching my head as it was trying to make sense and comprehend all of these things that I’ve been learning this last week. And then I awoke, and I just had to get up to try and get my mind off of it.

Has anyone ever had a similar experience? I feel quite intrigued by it actually, because it’s almost as if I got a glance into my own subconscious mind trying to process what I’ve learned. And at the very least it means I’m learning something, which is good considering that the exam is exactly one week.

And tomorrow I’ll get even more to process as I crack the qualitative and quantitative scientific methods books to prepare myself for that exam as well.

Image credit: scui3asteveo at Flickr

That was my old homepage back in the day, and I am pretty sure that it was started as early as in ‘99, but the WayBack Machine doesn’t have any records of it in its archives. (Thankfully) it’s written in Norwegian, so most of you won’t be able to decipher what it says, and even if you have a firm grasp of the language you might not be able to anyway, because it’s written in a pretty hefty dialect.

Also archived are the first renditions of Lars-Christian.com. I really haven’t changed much during the four years that have passed since 2005, have I? Seeing that also led me to rediscover a site I made (and sold) back then called TalkWebDev. I’m surprised at how well it’s preserved, even though there has been no activity there for almost two years. It certainly looks better than Bloggst, which I created (and sold) two years later. See the resemblance between those two sites? No reason to change a formula if it works!

Jumping from the past to current events, I just spent some time working on Silent Sound Waves (no plans about selling that). I wanted to integrate Facebook Connect as a way for users to identify themselves when commenting, but it didn’t really work at all (it broke the entire site by sending it into an eternal cycle of refreshing). I ended up setting up a Newsletter.

Sounds very 2001 (get it? It’s funny because of the context of this post!), I know, but I’ve been wanting to try out Aweber for a while, and it’s still one of the best ways of converting casual visitors into regulars. Now I just have to get people to subscribe!

Music recommendation: Plushgun. A guilty pleasure, love it! ” This is how we roll, we’re the rebels of senior year! “

Visitor numbers have shown a healthy growth since then, with average visitors per day growing somewhere between 50% to 80% during each of these months. Pageviews are up by almost the same, which might be a tad bit worrying as the number of pageviews per visitor is a bit low, but I’m attributing that mostly to social media visits, that tend to have a low conversion rate. I will touch on this later in the post.

As it stands right now, I’m estimating that we have a core audience of around 100 - 200 people that visit the blog every day, or at least when post updates. Our subscribed readers can probably be added to this number, but this is sadly as low as only 30 - 40 people. My suspicions that it would be a lot harder to convert readers into RSS subscribers for a less tech savvy audience were certainly warranted.

The rest of the visitors are readers that find a certain post or article from certain social media sites, and these do, like I mentioned, convert quite poorly in my experience. On several occasions over the past two months we’ve had over 1.000 unique visitors per day, but the return rates are pretty lousy on those that come from social media outlets like StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx and similar. Most of our return visits find us through search engines, other music blogs or music forums, which when you think about it makes sense.

Since we entered  2009 I have set a goal of posting at least 4 posts per week, and this has gone pretty well. As far as I can recollect, it’s only been one week we had less, and we had 3 that week, and the other weeks we’ve mostly been up to five.

In addition to me, there is one writer posting actively on the site, Matt, and he has done a great job and churned out some quality reviews and articles. Hopefully he will be able to keep at it, and at the same time I am looking actively for more writers. This is because I am hoping to lessen the posting (or at least the reviewing) load on myself, and be able to spend more time focusing on the promotional side of things. I have some great ideas, but most are pretty time consuming and I need to really sit down and spend a few hours to get any of them rolling. Will come back and share these ideas and the results in future posts, as soon as I actually get around to executing them.

The main priority right now is to get a more rigid posting schedule in place, and I am aiming at five posts per week, but I have realized that for this to happen I will need to have at least two posts contributed by other writers. I have one that will hopefully come through, and if I can recruit two others on top of him, I think we’ll have a good shot of that happening. To improve communication between us and make the co-ordination of the writers easier for myself I am currently setting up a staff forum. If I can get the writers to use it actively and participate it, I think it will be a great asset. As always, I’ll be evaluating the effects of this publicly here on my personal blog.

There are probably a thousand things I forgot to mention, but one thing that I will bring up before ending this already oversized post is a new column I just introduced. It’s called “In-the-News”, and you can see an example of it here. As we will never be able to keep up with some of the bigger blogs on news reporting, I am instead introducing a bi-weekly round-up of things that I found interesting. Still not a hundred percent convinced on this, and I haven’t really had any feedback on it, positive or negative, so far. My fear is that it falls a little outside of our “core-focus” as it is a tad bit tabloid (at least the first one), but I will give it a couple of weeks to see what the response is like, and whether or not the readers appreciate it. Feel free to let me know what you think!