Interesting thing happened the other day as I was going home on the train. My cell phone rang and as usual I answer since I’m on call and have to answer. And as I’m explaining to this clueless lawyer how to install a new printer a guy comes up to me and asks me to hang up. Why? Becuase there’s a ban on cell phones on commuting trains now – apparently? I had no idea they did that, but I politely informed him that these things are in the same category as “give up your seat to an elderly so they don’t have to stand”, it’s more of a recommendation & courtesy than actually being illegal. He didn’t like that but couldn’t argue and left me alone. And the guy was sitting like 10 meters away from me so don’t know how me talking on the cell annoyed him…
But generally I agree – sitting next to someone who’s talking on the phone with their friend talking about stuff I have no interest what so ever about is damn annoying…
And now the mess grows, even as far as white house (or so they say in swedish media) as it seems they were preassuring the swedish government to have the Pirate Bay closed. Which I actually don’t see that much problem with, because the site was too anarchistic for my liking. But when they even take DNA samples of the people suspected of a crime of a digital nature, one has to wonder what tha hell this mess is about and how it could happen and if it was done legally or what? Fortunately our media isn’t letting this one like they did the one last year!
So finally our authorities, preassured by the lobbyist from the big multimedia megacorps, got enough of PirateBay and raided their server datacenter. It was a good idea I guess, I mean Pirate Bay has certainly made it easier for everyone to download movies with BitTorrent, but afaik they haven’t done anything really illegal. But this good idea is turning worse every hour because they didn’t only take the Pirate Bay’s servers, they took all the servers they could find, including tons of servers running “normal” sites, and worse of all, some politcal parties had their websites there too. And the police just took it all. And then we’re getting into one of the fundamental issues of a democratic society when they do that. Not to mention if they open them up and try to get at the information stored there!
And the even worse part of it is that they’ll probably not be able to prosecute them at all since hosting torrent-files that anyone can submit isn’t illegal, and that’s bad legal precedent to set.
Ok, here’s the new design. It’s FAR from complete. Still need to do a cool logo and fill the content and write alot of stuff but I thought the old one was too old now…
Don’t you just love technology? As I was sitting on the train to work the other day, bored out of my mind and out of battery for my MP3 player I picked up a newspaper and noticed something called Sudoku where the crosswords usually are. Tried to make sense of it by staring on the semi finished grid but couldn’t really get a grip on it. So Blackberry (small PDA) on, WAP over to the National Encyclopedia’s wireless service and look up what that hell it is. 3 minutes later I had it solved and one more new thing I learnt that day. And I’m kinda getting the impression I must’ve missed a craze by not knowing what tha hell it was in the first place.
But I love technology 🙂
Over the past three week’s I’ve migrated about 230 mailboxes from one mailsystem to another. And some small errors pops up here and there and I end up having to go through their mailboxes to find that one mail among thousands to see if it’s worth doing manually. And I’ve seen alot of fun stuff while doing it! Some fun legal things about company mergers that you wish you’d seen about a year ago but also some fun private stuff. I _accidentally_ saw a mail from a girls ex after they had just split up and man was he pissed! So even if it’s a really boring thing to do, those small things makes it worth it 🙂
And today I found out what people that don’t have a site like this do when travelling and want an online diary – Resedagboken.se. Didn’t know that place existed until a cyber-friend of mine went downunder to australia and started a diary there. I’m gonna go there someday too, I just suck at saving up for something like that.
This morning I saw something on the train that made me smile. A woman, a beautiful one at that, was talking on her cellphone. Nothing special about that. Thing was she was deaf and was using the third generation cell phones with the camera feature and “talking” with sign language. Made me smile cause it’s the first time I’ve seen that. And people say technology doesn’t make people’s lifes better…
And now the politicians in the US wanna go have a comittee and do a study on the real world effects of kids gaming too much thanks to all the recent “Grand Theft Auto” stuff. Even a grandmother who bought the 17+ game for her 14 year old grandson is suing them for false advertisement amongst other things! It really makes me sad to hear all this. If it’s not rock’n’roll, TV, movies, internet it’s games. It can’t possibly be the parents, or rather parent’s perception of things like this. I could go on and on about it, but I think this open letter to Hillary Clinton (who’s spearheading this) says it all much better than I could!
American double-standards are in full swing again! If you haven’t been following the story of Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas, here’s a recap : The game is a very violent game in which you kill people with guns or bats or whatever, steal cars and you’re a general bad guy. It’s sold like butter so far even though it had a “Mature (17+)” rating. Now a couple of programmers not related to the manufacturers at all released a little addon to the game that unlocks a part of the game that was previously hidden. It was in there but locked by the creators of the game. It was a little erotic mini game that takes place when the original game just shows the exterior of the house with moaning in the background. And when that got a bit of media attention all hell broke lose in america and thanks to political preassure they have to re-rate the game to Adults Only, and the creators of the game will complete take this part away to try to lower the rating.
Now here’s my thought : A game which goal is to kill people and do all kinds of illegal stuff is rated “mature”, but as soon as there’s a little change (by a third party) that involves sex, that’s when they start to protest and label it “adults only”? I would’ve thought it was the other way around! Can’t those americans get over their conservative “we don’t talk about sex even though everyone is doing it”-attitude? “Mature” is 17+, and isn’t that the perfect time to play these erotic mini-games rather than go around cyber-town waving double 9mm Barettas? I’m starting to think that the violent incidents like Columbine more had with sexual frustration than it had with the Matrix or Marilyn Manson! But ofcourse that’s me and I grew up playing Liesure Suit Larry that my parents didn’t really know it was 🙂
Over the past few days I’ve been corresponding with a person in the USA about some of the stuff I wrote in my essay-things a while back. “A while back” in this case is 2001. But since then I’ve done alot and seen alot and I realise that I was pretty naive and inexperienced when I wrote some of those a few years back. So to use the same cliché again – “if I knew then what I know now”. So I really should go through and update them. But I didn’t know people still read them!
Another thing that works awesome with my home cinema is the Eurovision Song Contest. Usually it was just pretty fun to watch, but now it’s quiet an experience seeing it in 100″ and the thumping sound. And “thumping” is pretty accurate since every damn number had thumping drums all the time. Still think Hungary should’ve won. One of the things I enjoyed was all the BOOOING all the friends-voting got, like Scandinavian countries voting for eachother no matter how sucky the songs are. That’s usually just an accepted behavior, but now they got alot of boooooos 🙂
Yesterday as I was walking along Kungsgatan I noticed a bunch of people putting up tents and stuff and forming a long line outside one of our biggest cinema’s, Rigoletto. To any normal average Joe this might’ve looked weird and stupid and made no sense what so ever. Not to me. To me it’s inspiring to see how this many people can be so dedicated to a movie saga that they’ll sleep on the streets just to be sure to get the tickets for the first showing of the new Star Wars movie. Other people may think it’s geeky and looooooser-style, but I respect it. If I didn’t have a job, if sweden was knocked out of the hockey championship and if I had a tent, I might have joined them. But nah, I’ll just wait ’til Monday when I can order the tickets online!
Finally! After years and years of debating illegal downloads of MP3 and stuff we FINALLY get Apple’s music store here in sweden! For a country as high up on the IT scale it took way too long! Just wish it was a little bit cheaper but it’ll do for downloading those old 80’s tracks that noone seems to be posting in those free (read “illegal”) places.
Isn’t the Internet great? When pondering over “what makes the internet great” one thing that tops my list is stuff like this. Right now we have a TV show here in sweden dedicated to clips like that that. Gotta love the internet for all the laughs it’s given me 🙂
Now I’m pissed off! Since I’ve started playing WoW I’ve been living in my little bubble almost oblivious to the real world. So I had no idea the new Moby album had come out in sweden but when I walked passed the CD store and saw it I just got all excited, bought it and almost ran to work to play it. And what happens? To make it more difficult for the MP3 coders out there to steal the tracks they’ve made it so copyprotected that I can’t play it on my computer! So here I am with a perfectly legal copy of a CD but still I have to download the MP3s from the internet so I can listen to it. This just pisses me! And it doesn’t help knowing that some of the $24 (!!) I paid for this CD goes to creating anti-copying software that results in this crap. Damnit! If it wasn’t a Moby-fan I’d ask for my money back!
This latest “wrath of the Earth”-disaster was quite something, wasn’t it? And after seeing some videos of it the spontaneous thought is that it wasn’t a huge wave alá “Deep Impact” that did it. But if there is one positive thing about this tragedy it is that the internet is for once regarded as something positive. The media that are so quick to mention that bombmakers had downloaded stuff from the internet or whatever are equally quick to point out the positives in a tragedy like this. From blogging to using it as a small messaging system just to say “I’m ok!”.
And one day we’ll learn not to build major cities so close to the water. Even if it’s from a practical standpoint a good idea, things like this as well as the doomsday prophecy of global warming should have some kinda of impact on where we chose to build cities. But the mistakes have already been made I guess, good luck trying to move them…
I love messing with other companies Helpdesk! I’ve got a couple of years of Helpdesk-service in my CV and I’m a pretty good techie if I may say so. So calling other Helpdesk can sometimes be fun because as a rule I know more about the problem than they do. So the only time I call them is when there’s a problem I can’t fix myself. Like this week when my internet connection started acting up and I had to call Bostream, my ISP, and talk to a Linda. Maybe I should’ve introduced me as the certified administrator that I am, but I thought that would either scare her or make her go “yeah, right, as if you know our stuff!”, but I didn’t. I started out pretending to be an average user but after a while she started giving me these really terrible advices (like disconnecting my firewall/router and allow my computer to go straight out onto the Net – unprotected!). Then I felt I had to kick it up a notch and tried telling her the problem was in their router located 3 km from me at this specific IP that was being bombarded with TCP packets. But she wouldn’t buy it and still told me to go home, try the things she told me and then call back. Being one that can’t say no to women I did exactly that and ofcourse it didn’t work. So I called back, talked to a Jacob and told him exactly what I told her – their router was being bombarded with TCP packets. He checked it up right away with a monitoring tool and “oh my god, look at that, i’ll send a techie to that router right away”. And they are still working on it though, but I thought the entire episode was pretty funny how she could sit there and insist on me trying things on my computer when I told her again and again that the problem was with their equipment. Although that’s not the worst helpdesk I’ve heard of, my friend called Telia Helpdesk and talked to this woman who claimed he was incompetent and didn’t know shit when he was saying he was running Windows 2003 because there was no such version as Windows 2003. In her troubleshooting papers that is.
This is just a test to see when my new webserver is online. I’ve been using Simplenet since I first started this joint, but I’m kinda tired by their lack of evolution so I’m moving the site to a new location. If you can read this, it means the new server is up and running. Hurray for me.
I’ve done it again – attended a LAN event. This time it was me and a friend that got a bunch of people togetherto just play games. Now I’ve been up for about 21 hours, playing computer games and just wasting another weekend. But it was fun, so not a complete waste. And by the way – 4 days. That’s how long it took for their hormones to get the best of them.