“I spent a lot of time up there in a field, where we rigged up loudspeakers and all kinds of flashers and things – we were simulating audience noise to train these reindeer not to be afraid in a stadium of 40,000 people.”Work on the Olympic ceremonies meant he could “do some pet projects of my own, because I had the clout: weird experimental stuff in lighthouses, sealing off whole towns”. I came home to Norway: no job, no nothing.”Working in radio and TV drama, Hoegh met the man who had just been appointed artistic director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, and became principle director for the ceremonies.”I have fond memories of what it’s like to educate reindeer in the middle of winter,” says Hoegh He worked in Kautokeino, in the northernmost part of Norway. “I was actually going to Amsterdam, to work in the national theatre there, but they didn’t want to give me a work permit. They claimed there were too many unemployed directors in Holland.

In fact, Norwegian-born Thomas Hoegh, managing director of Arts Alliance, has changed jobs more often than you’ve had hot dinners. Hoegh, born in Oslo, served for two years on a “fast patrol boat, more explicitly called a missile attack craft”, where he did his national service “It’s a small coastal vessel designed to defend the fjords. You can’t really navigate big boats in there, so we have these small, very fast, very powerful boats with heavy firepower.”
After his naval stint, he did a bachelor’s degree in theatre direction at Northwestern University in Chicago, returning to Oslo in 1991. I salute them and will be first in the line to get my hands on the UK shipment.eva never .

It hasn’t exactly been the shortest distance between two points: from creating multimedia experiences for reindeer to founding one of the UK’s few Internet venture capital funds. So maybe you should resist the temptation to buy yourself a new PC for Christmas, and wait for the free PC January deals .Long live the subsidised PC, and three cheers for the guys who figure out how to bring us free hardware while pretending that they actually have a business model. Most of them are still pretty clueless about data mining on the Web, mainly because it is not something that is popular with technical staff here in the UK. That’s not not to mention all the ads for Gillette razors.Thus I really wouldn’t worry about a free PC supplier finding too much about you and invading your privacy. I was shown with great frequency banner ads for jobs in banking, despite the fact that my declared profession was journalist, not an aspiring financier. It is the same deal as with mobile phone handsets, and our wonderful networks deciding to subsidise them in order to get us to use Vodafone or Cellnet. I love being subsidised, and will probably set up at least one niece with the free PC deal just to see how well targeted their advertising is.On my Compaq free PC in the US, it was obvious that despite knowing all my details down to the level of the maiden name of my grandmother, Compaq still didn’t have a clue what products I might be interested in.

Even if you get annoying ad banners thrown at you and are forced to look at a promo of Sainsbury’s online one time too many, it still beats the pain of spending a fortune on a PC. The catch is that over three years you will spend enough money on upgrades, additional accessories like printers, e-commerce and advertising to comfortably reimburse the manufacturer.Should you consider those deals? The answer must be yes. The typical deal is likely to be based on your signing away your Internet life with your ISP provider, and paying around pounds 25 per month to the manufacturer, which includes Internet access and basic hardware. The disputes on the value of said hardware at the point of the customer’s “changing their mind” will become a subject of entertaining stories for years.Now there are rumours that a couple of leading PC manufacturers are looking at launching a free PC offer in UK early in January. The catch is that you will have to sign a three-year contract to get your free PC and connectivity, and if you change your mind, you will be kindly asked to pay back the full costs of the hardware. It is also talking about offering broadband connections, not just your pedestrian home modem speed.