Approximately 200 USD plus VAT. Sometimes more, sometimes less. If the customer doesn't haggle, the quote was too low. I'm based in Oslo, Norway.
837 karma · joined June 17, 2010
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Odda_frå_...
The town on the picture (Odda, Hordaland) was a major center of industry, thanks to the cheap power.
I have a wonderful globe from the same period myself, made in Berlin between April and September 1939.
* If I speak to other Norwegians, I will speak Norwegian. Always. I make a conscious effort to keep the language free of any [recent] loan words.
* If I speak to Swedes or Danes, I will speak Norwegian. If I see they're having trouble following, I will speak slower and tone down my dialect. I will not switch to Swedish or to English. I understand them – they better do the effort of understanding me. (That's the 500 years as a colony kicking in. :)
* If I speak to a non-Scandinavian foreigner who doesn't understand or speak Norwegian, I instantly switch to English.
* If I speak to ten Scandinavians and one non-Scandinavian, I will instantly switch to English.
* If I speak to someone who has been in Norway long enough to understand the language but not long enough to be comfortable speaking it, I will speak Norwegian. I don't mind if he speaks English, but I'll stick to Norwegian if he actually understands it.
* If I speak to someone who doesn't really speak much Norwegian but tries hard to, I'll answer in Norwegian first – but usually switch to English when I see they're struggling.
All of the above apply within my own country. Abroad, I will try to speak the local language if I can. If not, I will ask, in the local language, if they speak English and then switch. If I'm spoken to in English, I will respond in English.
And I do have to interact with people aboard. If you have a national economy or a cultural ecosystem consisting of fifty or hundred million people – like France, Germany or Japan – there's rarely a real _need_ to talk to anyone on the outside. There are enough newspapers, books, movies and records being produced in Japan to satisfy the domestic market – and the imported stuff can be translated and adapted without adding too much to the cost for each consumer.
For a country and language with less than five million people – not so much. We produced a total of 20 movies last year, and the climate on this frozen rock made sure our crops yielded only half of the food we actually need. If we didn't talk to anyone else, we'd be bored and starving.
Which regional great power dominates our trade and cultural input has varied over time. Norway was in the Hanseatic League's sphere of influence from the 1300s, and German language and culture had the greatest influence for almost a millennium. The harbour area of my home town of Bergen is still named “the German Wharf”. And my great grandmother told the German soldiers approaching her in April 1940 to fuck off in perfect German.
During and after the war, the Anglo-american economic and cultural influence quickly surpassed the German. The Cold War brought us even closer to the US, despite the American culture being rather … incompatible with the Norwegian.
The stories are similar for most of the other small European countries. But how the English language influences the native tongue varies wildly from one country to the next. The differences are especially noticeable between Norway and Denmark.
Some more historical background first:
Norway is a very young nation-state. From 1380 to 1814, Norway was part of Denmark. From 1814 to 1905, Norway was in a personal union under the Swedish king. As of the 19th century, we didn't have our own written language. We spoke Norwegian, but wrote Danish. As Norwegian nationalism grew during the 1800s, a charming gentleman called Ivar Aasen set out to create a Norwegian written language. He traveled around the country, taking note of how people actually spoke. Dialects vary wildly between different parts of the realm (I haven't seen this much internal variation in any other country), but he did distill what he heard down to a set of grammar and vocabulary.
The adoption of Ivar Aasen's nynorsk (literally: New Norwegian), too, varied a lot from region to region. It was generally recieved well on the countryside. In the cities, the Norwegian upper classes had developed an amalgam dialect combining the original local tongue and Danish. They were greatly opposed to this uncivilized new language, and brought much of the urban working classes onto their team. So for the past 150 years, we've been been fighting, sometimes almost literally, about how to write. Today we have two official written languages – bokmål (literally: book language) and nynorsk. There was a stranded effort in the mid-1900s to unify them, but they have influenced each other a lot. Bokmål isn't very much like Danish anymore, and standard nynorsk is quite watered down.
The result of these struggles is that how a Norwegian speaks and writes is a significant part of his identity. The dialect shows which region you come from and which social class you belong to (or aspire to belong to), and each one comes with pride. Not chauvinism or jingoism, but genuine pride. I live in Oslo, but if I come home to Bergen and show signs of being influenced by the Oslo dialect, I will be ridiculed by friends and family. For real. (c:
Now, back to my point. The Danish language today is heavily influenced by English. The frequency of loan words is staggering. A number of English words have found their way into the Norwegian language too, but an order of magnitude less. I believe this is due to our history. The Danes were never colonized by anyone, and haven't spent much time philosophizing about how they speak or write. We have, and it shows.
(Other interesting tangents: Why have the Norwegian dialects diverged so much? Why can Norwegians understand Swedish but Swedes have a hard time understanding Norwegian? Why has Norway stayed out of the European Union? Why is the English influence of the Norwegian language more noticeable in the capital than elsewhere?)
Now, however, I'm ready to do my own thing. Thanks to the experience I've gained, I think I'll succeed, too.
But be careful! If you serve user-uploaded, untrusted files from the same domain as everything else, that's a great way to make yourself vulnerable to XSS.
A button that allows me to create an anonymous test account with one click would be nice. If I like the service, I would like to turn my test account into a proper account, keeping my data. If I don't like it, and abandon my test account, you can delete it automagically after a month. Please do keep me logged in the whole month, though - I might change my mind and come back again.
Minutes? Well, yes.
In interviews, my tentative conclusion after two minutes is _usually_ the same as after 60 minutes. (I spend the following 58 minutes trying to disprove my hypothesis, of course.)
May I ask how you're organizing the practicalities of accomodation and food, and how much you're spending compared to at home?
You might want to slim that down a bit.
Test #1: Sign up. Did it work? Were all parameters set correctly? Test #2: Log in. Did it work? Are you logged in as the correct user? Test #3: Something that touches your most important business logic. Can the logged in user add an item to her shopping cart? Post in her blog?
Just a hundred tests like that gets you a long way, and doesn't take that long to write.
Allowing browsers on different platforms to adjust page widths, font sizes, whether or not load images and plugins in accordance with the user's preferences is fine, but that's an entirely different issue.