Hi! I'm the concierge *.

My name is Børre Ludvigsen which is also spelt "Borre" and "Barre" depending on what's most convenient. Finger me at work and at home.

I'm an associate professor teaching third year students at Østfold Regional College. While my course is popularly called "multimedia", it's more closely related to a field under development titled "information architecture". IA is the process of designing, planning and producing information environments, where both digital processing and the character of informational content are considered equally important in forming interfaces and environments where information moves and resides.

As I find the time, I might add a short biography, some articles that might be of interest and various bits and pieces I find interesting and would like to share with visitors to our virtual home.

Here are a few of the things I enjoy doing.

Al-Mashriq - The Levant cultural multimedia servers

A repository of cultural material pertaining to Lebanon in particular and the Levant in general.

An exploratory archaeological excavation of Christopher Bocklum's clay pipe factory at Larkollen.

A short history and drawings of the various pipe types made at the factory between 1769 and 1981.

Panoramas

In the spring of 1996, I had fun doing 360-degree panoramas from video tape taken at the same time asphotographs for QTVR panoramas.

Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation

From early 1995, I've had the good fortune of being allowed to work with NRK in exploring and developing their potential presence on the Internet.

Petroglyphs

These are a few scanned measured drawings of some petroglyphs I found during the late 70's and early 80's in Onsøy just across the river to the west of the island we live on. "Tradition" would have it that there were no rock carvings to be found to the west of the river Glomma. Perserverence prevailed!

Ivar Bruu

I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Ivar Bruu a short time before he died in the late 70's. He was an artist with an interest in almost anything to do with art history, architecture and archaeology. These drawings and pictures of Østfold houses he made over 50 years ago are part of the extensive archive of his work at Fredrikstad Museum.

Films

Various film experiments made during the early days of this server. There are surely very many better products around now, but these could server the purpose of helping you test your browsers ability to show films or show you around the house.

Sounds

Test your sound applications with our dog and some ATC sound.

Video conferencing

Want to talk to us in real-time? you can also control the camera yourself. You need to have CU-SeeMe running though.

APT Imagery.

Automatic Picture Transmission images from US NOAA (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency) and Russian Meteor weather satellites is not difficult to receive. Although I still haven't gotten round to mounting a tuned and amplified antenna, the images I occasionaly pull down with fairly simple equipment here at home are quite clear and compare favourably with the ones the weather man on TV serves up. During winter, the IR (infrared) images are the easiest to view, as the amount of sunlight that reaches us this far north is not enough to illuminate whole images of our area.

Here's a sample (51Kb) from NOAA 11's IR channel during an early morning pass on January 17, 1991. You'll notice that land is lighter than water. That's because the warmer temperatures are dark and the colder white. Although there is some noise, this is a fairly clear picture of Scandinavia and where we live from 800 km up.

And this image (36Kb) is sample from NOAA 11's IR channel on the "noon" pass of February 5, 1994. It shows clearly ice settling into the Baltic, cloud cover over southern Scandinavia and clear skies over the central part of our country.

2 NOAA 11 visible channel passes from August 1, 1994 . This is a combination picture, about 406K of great summer weather.

Images available on the net:

The most recent Meteosat image of Europe and North Africa is available from Nottingham University, UK through the webserver of the Institute for Meteorology at the Free University, Berlin. This image comes from the geostationary Meoteosat weather satellite 35 000 km above the equator. (101 Kb jpeg)

NOAA imagery for Europe is also available on daily basis from the Institute for Meteorology at the Free University of Berlin. (62 Kb jpeg)

Junk around us
A 1993 report from NASA on hardware in orbit. This is a list of 22856 objects that have been launched into space, 5330 of which were debris at the time. (564K of text)

Antenna for APT reception
A gif image of a quadrifilar helix antenna contributed by Kevin G. Shea N9JKP <mashea@students.wisc.edu>.

* con cierge \ko�n-'syerzh\ n,  pl con cierges \-'syerzh(-ez)\ 
[F, modif. of L conservus fellow slave, fr. com- + servus slave] (1647)
1: a resident in an apartment building esp. in France who serves as 
     doorkeeper, landlord's representative, and janitor
2: a usu. multilingual hotel staff member esp. in Europe who handles 
    luggage and mail, makes reservations, and arranges tours for the guests 

(Websters Ninth Collegiate, First Digital Edition)

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