I’m Losing It

Weird weekend that was! On thursday I had a date (went pretty good), on friday I decided to try out jogging now that my bike is broken then got busy Warcrafting and then the new computer game Hellgate hit the stores. On saturday I squezed myself into a pair of 34″ waist jeans… two things about that that just makes me think I’m going nuts – first of all jeans. I haven’t worn jeans since the 80’s basically. So why now? Well quite a few women have said “now that you’ve lost all that weight, when are we gonna see you in jeans?” so I had to do it only to shut them up. And they were 34″ waist!! Back in may I was wearing 42″ !! That’s 8 inches gone in 4 months! (not counting the last month since I haven’t lost anything in the past weeks)!!
Then we hit the sci-fi convention that was in town over the weekend, followed that up by catching “1408” (slightly disappointing movie) and finished the weekend with even more Warcrafting and jogging. Man that was a busy weekend. And this week I didn’t have much planned at all. Now I got go-carting on thursday, dinner with friends on friday, probably date-dinner on saturday and home to my parents for father’s day on sunday. And I’m not even trying to keep busy, I just am!

"Is there a doctor in the house!?"

Ok, that is a pretty bad comment but it’s such an obvious joke when you create a TV show about a doctor called House!?

My weekend was so slow (but not boring!) that I downloaded and watched the first season of “House M.D”. It’s pretty funny and at the same time worrying how much can go wrong with the human body! I mean if I wasn’t a hypocondriac before I saw the show I’m pretty sure I am now, can’t even sneeze without thinking about the preassure that it puts on my body!

And I’ve been doing alot of riding my exercise bike in the past months. So much that I think I broke it. And I have no idea where to hand in stuff like that for service. So I guess I’ll gain a few pounds again 🙁

Weekend Again!?

Wow, that week went by way too quickly. And nothing in particular happened. Not that I’m gonna bore you with anyway. As a matter of fact it’s been a really boring week. Usually that’s a symptom that you’ve got some kick ass weekend you’re looking forward to that the week just flies by, and that’s the weird thing, I was sure I’d made some plans for this weekend with someone but just can’t remember what it was?! Coming up empty which means it’s gonna be a slow weekend with Warcraft, catching up with Heroes and movies and hoping someone calls and say “hey, got a party brewing, come over” 🙂

Accidentally caught some live show with Avril Lavigne, you know that small pissed off 17 year old canadian that was big in 2001/2002? … she grew up really nicely. Not a big fan of her music unfortunately.

Live Earth

So did you watch the Live Earth thingy? I did. Kinda. I watched it, but not live. I left my place at 15 and just sat the recorder to record until 8 the morning after and I watched during sunday, so I could easily fast forward the boring parts. I’m so tired of rap music from MTV that I can’t stand it in these concerts. Anyway, overall I think it was a great show and they really got the message through. Personal favorites would be Wolfmother in Sydney, Linkin Park in japan, Metallica and Madonna (she may not e 20… or 30… and soon not even 40 anymore, but she can still rock like none other) in London, Joss Stone in Johannesburg, Katie Melua in Hamburg, Lenny in Rio and Alicia Keys in NY. I liked some of the small films but after seeing the same one 10 times it got boring.

The only complaint I have is actually the swedish broadcast. Especially the early broadcast when they had a guy that read everything off the internet and pretended to know music and his guests that couldn’t really decide what they were and what music they liked. The evening crew was much better though, especially Per “the long haired meteorologist”, he really got into the issues and sat some facts straight and had alot of interesting things to say. The night crew followed the morning crews tradition of reading stuff off the internet as they were broadcasting but not nearly as annoying. Next time I’m gonna demand to get the straight satellite feed so I don’t have to put up with that shit again cause I remember they screwed up the Live 8 thing too.

One question though… how much energy does it take to run 8 big concerts like this with complete “good enough for Metallica” speakers. Just out of curiosity?…

Going Geek

Talk more about the Live Earth concert tomorrow, right now I’m gonna go all geek on you. Two major things in the geek world at the moment that’s pissing me off alot at the moment.

First one is Piratebay again. Remember that site that hosts alot of torrent links with which you can download movies, music and all that stuff. Swedish police have tried shutting it down for years, and two years ago our attorney general, Tomas Bodström, pretty much ordered a raid after getting a call from Hollywood and swedish police confiscated all hardware, which shut down alot of unrelated sites who happened to be there in the same datacenter. It was the biggest abuse of power and should have blown up big. And it kinda did cause they lost the election a few months after. But now the guy who was the attorney general is in charge of an anti-child pornography organisation that reported piratebay for hosting child pornography which is gonna result in them getting blacklisted on swedish ISP’s so swedes won’t be able to visit the site. Total powerabuse again! And believe me, every time child pornography is found on that site 10.000 geeks report it right away and it’s removed fast as hell. ‘Cause just because we think it’s ok to download a movie that’s not worth the cost of going to the movies doesn’t mean we have more tolerance for that shit!

Then it’s a consumerist site in the states that got reports that Geek Squad (a bunch of computer geeks fixing everyone’s computer Ghostbuster style) techies were copying stuff of the computers that they were fixing. So they rigged a computer with porno and sent it in with orders to fix something completely unrelated and recorded as the techie copied the stuff and “OMG! the invasion of privacy!! he even copied my holiday pictures!”. I’ve done my time trying to fix computers like that and believe me… it’s common. It’s so common that I didn’t even think people did not know that. Don’t they remember how Gary Glitter got caught? He had child pornography on his computer when it broke down, he handed it in and the geek fixing it saw it and reported it to the police. Copying porn, MP3’s, movies or software isn’t an invasion of privacy (ok, maybe if the porn features you) and I’m fairly sure all these places have a clause saying “we will search your harddrive”. And about the holiday pics? Do you really think geeks wants to see your holiday pics? Nope, it just ends with JPG and was just got copied because you wanted your computer back asap, when the geek sees it he’ll hardly save it. Ofc where I work now this doesn’t happen since we have a “do not save files on your harddrive, and everything on your harddrive belongs to the company!” policy.

Why do people think geek don’t have morals or integrity?!

Here We Go Again #2

When I was younger, so much younger than today, there was this huge concert at Wembley and simultaneously in Philly. It was called Live Aid and it was an initiative by Bob Geldoff to raise awareness of the starvin marvins (south park joke). Then it was Live 8 two years ago that was basically about how the northern heamosphere are ignoring the southern.

And tomorrow it’s time again! But this time to raise awareness of the growing environmental issues. You know all the talk about how we’re killing this planet. Or not? It’s gonna go on for some 20 hours in 7 cities in 7 continents and it’s gonna be big.

I dunno, maybe it’s my “I remember when I was young” attitude but it’s kinda hard to beat the original one. Because it was original.

24

I saw season 6 of “24” last week. I dunno what to make of that show, sometimes it’s getting a bit repetetive and this time it was even predictable. But I can’t help it, I just have to watch the next episode. And the next. And the next. And got a big movie weekend coming up with both Die Hard 4 and Transformers that I’m actually gonna watch “the way it was meant to” 🙂

Not Him Too

Today Påvel Ramel died. That makes me sad but in a weird way makes me smile. Because he was one of the really good guys. He was a true entertainer. He always laughed, always had fun and made some classic songs and even started an award foundation for people with elite language skills (an award I obviously won’t ever win). He was fun. He will be missed. I’ve never been able to order at a japanese restaurant without laughing because of him.

Good Or Bad TV?

As I was playing I was also flipping around the TV channels without paying attention. It ended up on channel 5 that was showing some terrible reality show called “My Fair Lady”. Now you know how I feel about reality shows right? The point of this one was that they had like 4 or 5 girls from the… shall we say “adult entertainment industry” that they were gonna convert to serious actresses by having them do Shakespeare plays. I wasn’t really paying attention until one of them having failed a rehearsal of “Romeo & Juliet” and thought that she should do it her way and shoved her Romeo down on a chair and gave him a lapdance while doing the dialogue. It was pretty funny and the guy didn’t know what to do. And I can’t make up my mind if it’s bad or good TV. I mean, most actresses can be quoting Juliet but doing it while giving a lap-dance, that’s respect 🙂

Oh what problems

The other day as I was flipping through channels I ended up on the “Actor’s Studio”. It’s one of those “let’s talk to famous people in movie bizz and see what they have to say” programs, but it’s actually usually quite good and some of them have things to say. And this time it was Michael J. Fox doing his best to try to sit there and talk about his career and Parkinsons. I particularly liked his attitude that “hey, everyone has their problems and issues, but they’ve learnt to deal with them and wouldn’t trade them for anyone elses” and how much a terrible thing like this was a “gift that kept on taking” in that it had helped him live life and appreciate everything.

And here I am with my biggest problems being a woman at work that don’t like me and owing the IRS $2000. Problem one is gonna solve itself since she’s decided to leave the company (which was what I tried talking to her about) and problem two is gonna be solved – somehow…

The Eleventh Again?

On monday it was september 11th again. I almost missed it had it not been for every media pointing it out. If you look at it objectively there’s no real reason why the entire world should feel so much about an event like that. But somehow we do. On CNN they had a brutal special feature – you could download 2 hour CNN coverage from 8:50 to 10:50 “as it happened”. That was scary!!

And the day after, what does TV4 do? Show “Airplane” with the wonderful line “They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting themselves into!”… nice timing…

No More "Crikey"?

Came to work and hit the favorite icon for CNN and look at that, Steve Irwin killed in action. I think that’s a big loss to the world actually, you may dislike his way of presenting his shows but he certainly made alot of people (especially kids) watch nature shows with a bit of interest. Really sad to hear that and I wasn’t even a big fan…

Finally Over

Phew, finally the soccer championship is over. And what I’ll remember most about it is all the tied matches, and the fact that so many play-off matches where decided on penalties so it was kinda appropriate the last match was decided on penalties. Another thing I reacted on this time was how much the referees can screw up a game. I know it’s lame to blame a loss on a referee, but sometimes they were just downright fooled and duped and somtimes just made horrible calls.

More moral problems

As you may remember, a few years back in this blog I made a small reference to Tone Bekkestad, a norwegian chick doing the weather on TV4. In case you haven’t seen her, she’s hot but in a classy way. And the readers of Slitz, a very guyish magazine in sweden, agreed and voted her as # 42 on their top sexiest women in sweden. And she agreed to do a few photos for them. Now, they do very good photos, not that pornographic or explicit, they still leave alot to the imagination, just the way I like it. And TV4 fired her for it. All of a sudden she’s not “credible” to present the weather. Talk about pretentious since this is the woman who educated most of her collegues and actually has the credentials and title to do it 🙂

Can’t This Be Over Soon …

Even though I’m not trying to watch that many football games I still find myself semi-watching every one. You know, one eye on the computer playing WoW and the other one watching the game. And sweden scored one goal and all of a sudden the media are discussing how far we can go. But england will put them down to earth again.

Tired Of The Football

Damn I’m so tired of all the football shit that’s going on everywhere. I just don’t get what’s so big about it. And in sweden people are actually expecting our boys to go anywhere. Just setting themselves up for disappointment again. Sure, the european championships was good, but didn’t go that far. And now it’s world championship?! Can’t wait for it to be over!

Celtic Tigers

I saw Flatley’s new danceshow Celtic Tiger on DVD the other day. I loved “Lord of the Dance” and “Feet of Flames” but I had no idea what to expect out of this. Since it’s the same guy & crew I knew it was gonna be some of the same stuff….

At first I was wondering what tha hell this was and if there was a story anywhere but after a few number it really picked up speed and by the time it crossed the atlantic I was so digging it and it just got better. Some awesome numbers in there and the 2 favorites where the dance-mixing that made the producers of “Let’s Dance” feel like newbies, and the stepping to rock music number that felt very original. Overall a good investment and I’m sure my neighbors agreed cause it was loud…

Göra Persson Got Some Bonus Points!

I’m not a big fan of Göran Persson, our prime minister. He’s been the prime minister of sweden for 10 years now which is both admirable but also too long. Anyway, the other day he was a guest in one of the more unusual talk shows in sweden and as a part of their test how hip he was they showed him a clip from “Big Brother” and asked him to identify the show. He looked at it for a while and then said the most accurate description I’ve ever heard – “Is this a real TV show? People actually watch this?”. I thought that was hilarious. Got some bonus points in my book, but election is still a few months away.

Party, Party!

After all the stuff we’ve been doing last year with the entire IT structure at the lawfirm we thought we should have a little small party. And that party was held on friday. Started at 3 with some stuff we did just to motivate why noone was answering the helpdesk, then small dinner and afterwards a musical. Yes, you heard me, I actually went to a musical! It was the swedish version of “Beauty and the Beast” and I’ve read some great reviews about the Broadway version as well as the swedish version. But I’m not a musical fan but I thought I’d give it a try. Which I did. And I’m STILL not a musical fan! At the pause some of us agreed this wasn’t for us and since there were plenty of bars around and it was friday so we ended up there drinking free beers (sponsored by the two consulting firms, including my old employer, we’ve hired for some of these projects).

Fortunately for me we had a Star Trek day on saturday which is just what I needed – sitting back in a dark theater watching good Star Trek!

RIP Michael Piller!

Almost two weeks without an update. It’s a combination of being busy and not having anything positive to write. The past few weeks have been pretty depressing. And Michael Piller, one of the best TV writers there was, died. And tons of stuff to do at work, a job I still don’t know if I’ll have in 2 months time. But I don’t like being that depressive guy. Realist maybe, but not depressing. I prefer trying to cheer people up and I do a pretty good job of it. But I suck at cheering myself up!

But today I went back home to my parent’s place to celebrate father’s day and my sisters birthday. And that really put me in a better mood. Except when my mother starts babbling about me not delivering any grandkids but I’ve learnt to live with that.