About

TL;DR

The Site

I started to maintain my first personal web site way back in 1997 - or maybe it was 1996. It is a long time ago. That site was converted into a site dedicated to the Korean lingerie/nude model1 Sung Hi Lee, who is 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 years old now. Time sure flies. The site made it to the top three on the list of most popular web sites hosted by Norway’s largest ISP, mostly thanks to search engine manipulation - and the occasional nudity. Shortly after it made it to the list, the site was was removed by the ISP’s administrators because of its content.

After finishing high school and a year of mandatory military service, I started college and was hungry for more internet success. I was heavily into strategy games at the time, and in 1999 I launched a site dedicated to the genre: The Strategy Shrine. It became quite popular with over three thousand unique visitors per day. That might not sound like much, but it’s not too bad for a pre-2000 site without a marketing budget, maintained in my spare time. After a while a Dutch guy, Marten Veldthuis, came aboard to help out. We ran on a free host for a couple of months, until the site was picked up by GameReactor, and moved to its own domain and server that GameReactor paid for. After about a year of hard work, I got tired of the project and called it quits in on April 24, 2000. The Strategy Shrine lived on for a little while before Marten retired as well.

Personal Sites

While I was running The Strategy Shrine, I also had a personal site, Central Park West. It was set up on a free host, and it was mostly a collection of files, photos, a half-written movie script and a ridiculous amount of Liberty Meadows strips. Somewhere along the way at college, Central Park West was put to sleep and reborn as SnuffCity.com, my first personal domain. The name is taken from a song by a band whose name I can’t remember. Most of the content from Central Park West was moved over to a brand new design, which was a considerable face lift compared to the old site. It also became a little more personal, with the birth of the “weblog” in the late 1990. SnuffCity.com landed my first job as a paid programmer. We were a group of students doing small jobs for minimum wage, but it was still a job.

When I left college to attend the university in 2001, SnuffCity.com was also closed down and replaced with another site; liquid8. I have no idea how I came up with this name, but it looks really cool with that 8 in it, don’t you think? No, perhaps not. After a while, I decided to tell the internet that I was here to stay, and bought this domain, www.vegard.net, a domain you have to tear from my cold, dead hands if you want it.

Design

The current design is a slightly modified version of the Hyde theme.

Previous designs

I’ve been maintaining this domain since 2002 and over the years, the site has been through a few designs. Unfortunately, I have not had the habit of saving screenshots of old designs whenever I’ve started using new ones. Still, here’s a few I managed to salvage from the Internet Archive.

In general, I’ve changed the design once every second year or so. Some designs are missing, mostly because the Internet Archive didn’t save the style sheet. My old backups are around here somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly where.

Technical details

Normal people: You can safely skip this. Nerds: Read on, brothers and sisters!

This site is powered by Hugo. I used WordPress for 12 years, but in early 2020, I decided to try something new. Everything is hosted on my own server, VBOX5, which is just a Raspberry Pi 4B stuffed in a small enclosure that gets very, very hot.

In May 2006 I replaced my old Dell Inspiron 4150 with an Apple MacBook Pro 17" to show my creative side to the world. That way I don’t have to run around nude to satisfy the exhibitionist in me. If you have an Apple laptop, too, you should regularly check you battery The MacBook has since been replaced, and these days I’m using a custom Windows 10 desktop PC Microsoft Surface Book running Windows 10 Dell XPS 12 and a custom built desktop PC, running Manjaro, at home.

The author

In The Beginning

The relatively short story goes something like this: I’m born in 1978 in Norway. That makes me 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 years old at the moment. For about 18 years I lived in a small town called Notodden, before I moved to Skjold where I had my year of mandatory military service. After that I lived in beautiful Grimstad, where I attended Agder College (now Agder University) and got my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.

From the fall of 2001 to the summer of 2003 I resided in a city in the North of Norway called Trondheim where I got a Master’s degree in Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, with a specialization in the field of Information Systems. Trondheim was a surprisingly nice city to live in at times. But expect some rapidly changing weather.

During the Winter of 2002, I spent three months in lovely Natal, Brazil, where I read philosophy and ethics.

Into The Rat Race

In June 2003, I moved to Norway’s capital Oslo where I started working for Norway’s largest media company, the NRK. I left the NRK a year later to work for Rubberduck Media Lab, a company I co-founded with two other NRK employees. The company is now known as Aspiro TV NORIGIN MEDIA.

In July 2005 Rubberduck Media Lab was acquired by The Mobile Media Company. Then, in May 2006, after three failed attempts by The Mobile Media company to actually pay for our company, we decided that having them as a majority owner was not the way for us to go and Rubberduck Media Lab once again became an independent and prospering company. In late September 2006, the company was once again acquired, this time by Aspiro.

I left Rubberduck Media Lab on December 31, 2008. I had three months off where I did nothing in particular, then I went back to Rubberduck Media Lab as a part time consultant. In August 2009, I found myself back at the NRK, developing their web publishing application. After another year at the NRK, one thing led to another and in September 2010 I got a job as a senior consultant, and eventually manager, at Bekk Consulting AS.

Growing Up

After two unsuccessful long-term relationships, both of which lasted for about three years, I found the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with in 2009. In late 2013 we moved to Nesodden, where she grew up. It’s only about 20 minutes by boat from Oslo, though, so my days of clubbing until the sun rises were not over yet2.

In 2014, our first kid was born and our lives were turned totally upside down. In 2016, The Girlfriend and yours truly got married in a unbelievably romantic wedding ceremony in the Oslo Courthouse, an event we celebrated with family and friends the following Saturday. Then, in 2017, our second kid was born, and our lives were turned totally upside down again.

In February, 2021, 12 years after we met, The Wife told me that she wanted a divorce. In early March, I moved out of our house, and into a rented apartment. In May 2022, I finally managed to get my own place, where I now reside, and I try my best to be a proper part-time dad.

To be able to better juggle the balls of life after the divorce, I wanted to spend as little time as possible commuting. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it obvious that going to a physical office when you work in the tech industry is a massive waste of time. So in December 2021, I left Bekk, and joined Experis and their AnyShore department, and now I’m working (almost) exclusively from home. It’s not for everyone, but it’s exactly what me and the kids need where we’re at right now.

This page used to feature a rather long part about me as a person, but an early Saturday in October 2003, I decided to remove it. The site is now packed with stuff written by yours truly, and you’ll probably learn a lot more about me by browsing some of the entries you find there than you would’ve learned by reading whatever I’d written explicitly about me here. You’ll also noticed that I’ve changed a bit from when I first opened this site. At least I realized that.

I plan to die happy.

Political affiliation

The Green Party is one of the global ecologist and environmentalist political parties and movements. As a member of the pan-European European Green Party, the Norwegian Greens subscribe to social progressivism and social justice. The main focus of the party is environmental protection and ecological sustainability.

The party seeks to introduce a tax on wasteful consumption, and to reorganize the food industry. The Greens have also pledged support for a reform in the agrarian industry, increasing the production of organic crops and strengthening the eco-friendly agricultural sector.

The Green party seeks to reduce the Norwegian petroleum extraction in order to counteract serious climate change. The proposal is to stop extraction by 2033.

I’m a regular donor to Extinction Rebellion. XR is a global environmental movement with the stated aim of using nonviolent civil disobedience to compel government action to avoid tipping points in the climate system, biodiversity loss, and the risk of social and ecological collapse.

You can also donate to XR.

I’m not the one you’re looking for

If you are looking for the Vegard Skjefstad who is well-known for his involvement in organizing The Gathering, please don’t contact me. The reason is simple: I’m not him. The person you want is Vegard Skoglund Skjefstad, also known as Vegard Hvem Skjefstad.

Thank you and good luck.

Contact

Although it might look like I’m everywhere, I’m not. I just create accounts on every site I come across to make sure I’ve reserved my user name if the service becomes popular. If you really want to in touch with me, an e-mail to vegard at this site’s domain is probably your best bet.

Active-ish

I don’t spend much time on social media (or the internet in general) these days, but feel free to browse around.

Alumni

  1. I was in my late teens. At least that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. ↩︎

  2. That’s a lie, those days ended long before we moved to Nesodden. ↩︎

Caution

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