Sorry about not updating, I’ve been totally immersed in the game of Bf1942 over the past weeks, finally finding a game I can start playing on a little bit more serious level. I haven’t been playing anything on this level since the good old Starcraft and Unreal Tournament days. The amusing thing about the gaming community is how incredibly (I can never spell that right!) isolated we seem to be. If a member of SK walked around here in Stockholm 99.5 % of the people won’t know or care about it, the other 0.5% would either go down on their knees and pray or throw a HE at him (which is politically correct since they just dismissed their ladies). Which is kinda sad considering how HUGE sweden is in the gaming world. We’re the best gaming country in europe, and world champions in some games. I think someone should mention that when discussing if it’s a good idea to subsidize “broadband to the people” or the home-PC projects since both of those two are mainly responsible for putting us up there in the top.
Now I’m getting really annoyed by spam! You know, those annoying e-mails trying to sell everything from Viagra to the Hilton sex tape. But I’m not annoyed because of the nuisance factor of getting 200 spam mails every day, I’ve got a pretty good filter so that’s no problem. No, I’m annoyed because I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone, any sane person, can ever fall for any of these e-mails! I mean, seriously, if you get a letter from some [email protected] with the topic “Instant Prescript%ion Dru[gs to your Door!” and the e-mail is a picture of a guy in a white coat and a pricelist for stuff like viagra and whatnot, why would ANYONE click it or buy anything!? I don’t get it. Obviously there are people out there who fall for it, otherwise these spammers wouldn’t keep on sending spam. So who are the people that think they can increase their penis size by buying a patch from an anonymous website?! Would you buy anything from a site like this!? Yeah, you could make these kinds of things illegal, try to develop software for it or whatever, but the real problem are stupid idiotic people who fall for these letters! I just don’t understand it… and not understanding them makes me annoyed.
Am I the only one who doesn’t get the point of having a camera in your telephone? What’s the point? I’d get it if it was a good 4 mega pixel camera that would replace a normal one, but it’s not! They are all sucky, bad quality and way too easy to scratch! I’m a gadget freak but it just doesn’t make any sense to combine a phone and camera?
This has to be the best music-related story I’ve heard all year! Who said computer freaks lack a sense of humor!? I thought those suits and marketing execs would have learned not to go around asking for trouble with hackers?! I wonder if they are now considering the actual costs of fixing that website compared to the not so measurable cost of MP3 spreading. Was it worth it?
I’m one of those people who can take, and actually appreciate, being proven wrong. I don’t know if it’s because of my “I have to constantly learn/discover new things”-drive or what. Most recently it was UIP who proved me wrong! UIP is a movie distribution company here in Sweden. They distribute movies for Paramount amongst other. And Paramount make the Star Trek movies. So we have to be friends with UIP. And last weekend we got a preview screening of the new Star Trek movie, “Nemesis”. That was a pretty nice surprise, but what wasn’t such a nice surprise was the bad quality of the translation in the subtitles. It was pretty obvious that guy wasn’t a trekker. So we complained about it, but so what – what’s done is done, right?… wrong! They invited 3 of us to come to their office and go through the movie and correct everything we felt was wrong and to suggest what should be there instead. I never thought they’d do something like this, I was under the impression that that kind of thing didn’t happen… “re-subtitle a movie just because the die hard fans don’t like it”… but it did. Now of course they have to live up to the challenge and actually change it before the real premiere.
Another nice surprise I got, this one also in the realm of flexibility, was when I was putting together a server for one of our customers. I’ve been tinkering inside computers for about 13 years now, and there are some facts you just have to accept – changing/adding CPU’s is a mess, changing/adding power supplies is a mess and putting in hard drives is easier said than done. The computer manufacturers have put in a lot of work to make it easier for us, but I’ve never been impressed by it. Until yesterday when I was putting this HP/Compaq 380 server together. I was suppose to add a secondary CPU, add a redudant power supply, insert 3 extra fans and put in 5 hard drives. Guess how long that took?… less than 15 minutes. And everything worked right off the bat. So I guess I owe a big thank you to some engineers at HP/Compaq for thinking a couple of extra steps – nice!
My sister, who is content staying here on Earth, was questioning why I got so depressed over this Columbia thing. She means that if I got that depressed over 7 people dying in this accident, I should be suicidal when children are dying all over the world for one reason or another. Why don’t I get depressed over that? The austronauts atleast knew the risk of doing what they were doing and had accepted them. The innocent children dying a little all over the world didn’t. And I can’t argue against that. But somehow this just felt worse. I felt really bad. Just think about it – now “we” only have three shuttles to take care of the rest of the IIS building, and if there’s any chance of building a vessel to go to Mars it’ll have to be built in orbit, and with just three shuttles that’ll take a while.
So with the risk of sounding a bit cold-hearted – it’s more the setback to the exploration of space that I was being depressed about, not so much the 7 astronauts.
“If we die we want people to accept it. We’re in a risky business,and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program.The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”– Gus Grissom, killed in an accidental fire in Apollo 1, January 1967
Puh, that was a busy week! Except all the work at work, and being on-call and actually called in, I’ve been totally busy writing a new revolutionary section on NataliePortman.com.. revolutionary for us anyway 🙂
Which reminds me of that funny joke most of you didn’t get (“select * from users where clue>0”), this is the end result of what I’ve been doing:
“SELECT ARTICLE_ID, DATE_FORMAT(DATE, ‘%M %D, %Y’) as FDATUM, PUBLICATION, COUNTRY, LANGUAGE, AUTHOR, TITLE, ROUND(RATING_POINTS/RATING_VOTES, 1) as RATING, RATING_VOTES, SYNOPSIS FROM articles WHERE $wherelan $wheremedia $wheretype $orderby1 $orderby2 LIMIT $limitvalue, $limit”
Yeah, it may look easy but it took a week!
Anyway, onto something much nicer – last minute Christmas-shopping! I realised on Thursday that I still haven’t bought the presents for the grown-up part of our family so I had to find some time to do that. And since I’m working on Monday I planned it for Saturday. I expected half of stockholm to do the same, but thanks to the fact that I got in early I missed most of the crowds. And there was this one things that I thought was pretty funny.. an elderly man and his wife going around the hippest CD store with the list of things for their teenage grand-daughter and trying to pronounce “INXS” to the clerk.. something funny yet sweet about that whole scenario 🙂
Every once in a great while my brain does something right and I come up with a funny idea that even I can be proud over. And today was one of those occasions – ImOnlyKidding.com. Believe it or not, but that domain wasn’t take. But it is now, so in a couple of days typing “imonlykidding” will land you on this site. It’ll take a couple of days for the DNS entry to replicate to the DNS roots due to the distributed architecture of the IP protocol. Don’t you just love computer lingo!? 🙂
Just how geeky am I? One example – I laughed my ass of today at the following joke:
> SELECT * FROM USERS WHERE CLUE >0
> 0 rows selected
Don’t worry, if you didn’t get it, you’re normal.
One thing about LAN parties everyone should know is what a beating your body takes! The food is terrible – pizza, cola, chips and snacks. And you suffer from sleep deprivation. Then your mind is focused 95% of the time when your playing some LAN game. And then ofcourse all the carrying around with your computer equipment. But believe you me – it was so great to get home and slip down in my bed and sleep for a good 10 hours, then it was up and go to work again 🙁
But I had a helluva time!
This weekend I’m gonna do something I haven’t done in a long time – attend a LAN party. Here’s a short description – a bunch of gamers pack their computers and head off to one building, hook everything up and just play games against/with each other for a few days, and there’s usually a tournament. Now I know what you’re thinking – “oh my good how anti-social, pathetic and geeky”. You’re wrong! It’s not anti-social – there’s plenty of human interaction, and you can actually go around blowing up your best friend or anyone else you want to and laugh it off. You get to meet the people you’ve been playing against/with, swap war-stories. Pathetic? What’s pathetic about a bunch of people getting together at one place to train and tune their skills? It’s the same as a friendly game of soccer! Geeky? Just because it’s with computers, isn’t it? Do you know how much a computer, with monitor, weighs!? Carrying all that around builds muscles, and we’re not geeky anymore!… ok, that was a longshot, but I really don’t like how people think “dude, that’s pathetic” when I describe what I’m gonna spend my weekend doing. Or perhaps this is just more of my late teenage rebellion against my mother always saying “why don’t you go outside and play”? (I never said my parents were perfect!)
Some people have asked me how I can be this open and expose myself and the weird thoughts that are going through what little excuse I have for a brain. I don’t think I’ve got a good answer for that yet. But this morning, as I was slouch-surfing around the web I ended up on a webpage that made this place look like the Vatican – AsiaCarrera.com! Yes, that tri-lingual piano-playing, HTML-typing woman with a registered IQ of 156 that have done some adult movies. I wasn’t sure what I was gonna find on her very own site, but I wasn’t expecting to end up laughing my shoes off as I read the F.A.Q! If you’re not afraid of a little porno-talk and love humor then please, head over there and take a look!
It was also a bit self-enlightning when it comes to prejudice and being judgemental…
How about Ed? Totally the opposite of CSI! Not the least bit exciting, no action, no suspense. Just a good hearted show about good character, with alot of humor and something that CSI lacks – extraordinary well written, funny and great delivered dialogue!
Do I spend too much time in front of the TV? Probably, but considering I payed $1500 for it, you bet!
On another note – I’m attending a course this week , Advanced Novell Administration. One thing never siezes to amaze me and that is how totally different Microsoft and Novell are in the way they do things, but the weird thing is that their server operating systems (Windows 2000 and Netware 5.1) appear to be doing the EXACT same things! Almost all services and stuff you get in Windows 2000 you also get in Netware 5.1. Netware is just ten times more difficult than Windows 2000!
But I shouldn’t really be complaining since this just gives me extra work…
I did something this weekend that I don’t think I’ve ever done before. I never logged onto my computer at home! Seriously, from about 11 on friday night until I got to work at 8 am this morning I never logged onto my computer, not to check my mail, not to check my icq, not to read the latest Natalie-news! It’s not the first time I’ve been without computers (that week in Kenya was a real trial!), but it’s the first time I’ve been home, with a computer available, without going online or anything. And it felt good. Real good as a matter of fact. So relaxing just kicking back and doing other stuff than programming or webdesigning or graphics management or gaming or something. Does this make me sound pathetic? Don’t know, you’ll have to be the judge of that.
The other day some person called me trying to sell a subscription to a newspaper, DN. As usual when this happens I just reply “nah, I read everything on the web, it’s all there”, and they just take that excuse and that’s the end of that conversation. But there’s one thing that is NOT published on the web – obituaries. I wonder if there’s a law prohibiting it or why, but they don’t publish them on the web at all. It would make things a little easier having them on the web so you could just send the link to everyone instead of telling them to buy the paper… (yeah, I know, there are bigger problems to dwell on than this)
Now what have I been doing so much that I haven’t been able to stop? Programming PHP! Again! And once I get started programming I won’t stop until it’s all done. And now I think it is. I’m really annoyed at myself for not being able to go to bed without keep thinking of this project and coming up with new ideas and trying to solve old problems. I’m a really weird and nutty guy.
There was also another reason I wasn’t updating, but I’ll come off as sad and pathetic if I tell you…
You must be thinking “you are one lazy dude, only updating twice during a 8 day vacation!”. Not true! I don’t think I’ve ever had so much to do during a vacation as I did last week! The time just flew past me like Marilyn Manson from a Britney Spears concert! And every little minute of free time I could find went into studying for my Novell 5.1 Administration certification exam I had this morning. So I hardly feel relaxed and re-energized after this vacation. But I only have myself to blame I guess.
And speaking of Britney Spears – I heard she “loves rock’n’roll”. Then why is she in the pop-genre? The difference is huge, and I don’t think she’d cut it in rock’n’roll. Although that song may be one of her best ones. Too bad it’s a cover.
Oh yeah, I passed that test by the way. So what does that mean? It means that I have a paper that says “this guy passed a test so he should kinda know Novell Netware 5.1”. I don’t know any more, or less, about Novell than I did two weeks ago though.
Let’s talk about an ever increasing problem in our society – DVD IMPORTS! The production and distribution studios like DVDs. The format gives them one more chance to make money on old movies and another format to distribute new movies. They also like that they now have some place to store all those documentaries that are made during production of a movie. A DVD disc today costs around $20, so that’s more than twice what it costs to see a movie in the cinema. So you’d think that they would like everyone to buy DVD’s everywhere?… yea, you’d think!
To prevent a movie from being available on DVD before it’s available in the cinema (which sometimes is the case here in sweden, I bought “Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back” 3 months before the swedish premiere!), they have decided to region code DVD’s. When I started buying DVD’s there weren’t that many places to buy from. DVDExpress was one of the first Internet ordering places, but the shipment cost was pretty high. Then I found a DVD supplier here in sweden selling imported region ones (i.e american) at a pretty cheap price so I stuck to that place for two years. Then the distribution studios in sweden decided to get “tough on imports” and started suing places that sold imported DVD’s. So I had to switch. That’s when I found Play247, an internet business selling region ones over the internet, free of shipping and delivery within a week. Not ideal, but great. Until last week when all of a sudden, the swedish customs wanted $20 extra, PER DISC! Just $5 of that went to the actual customs, the rest was just tax, shipment and all other kinds of stuff you can only charge people in sweden for since we never say no.
So what now? I’m gonna try with this Canadian place called DVD Box office, that place sounds good although they can sometimes take up to 2 weeks to deliver them. But if I can just get rid of this customs-charge I’d be pretty happy.
They could all solve this problem with region coding easily – have premieres at the same time worldwide, like Star Wars Episode II! It doesn’t make sense for a movie to get here 6 months after the states, it’s just rediculous! Anyway’s, I’ve started playing around with PHP so I might convert this entire thing into a database or something…
Cars. They are a very stupid invention! The only good thing about cars, as I see it, is that they give alot of people alot of work! Come on, think about it; think about the raw materials required to build one. Think of the actual construction and all waste it produces. Then the fuel, oil-rigs aren’t environment friendly either, and then the gases produced by the motors and all that that does to the greenhouse effect. Then think about all people & other living things killed or injured by cars every year. Don’t forget all the space and wonderful nature we’d have if it wasn’t for all the roads (the construction of roads isn’t environment friendly either!). And then when it has outlived its usefulness, it’s dumped to just corrode away. So why are we using cars so much? Same with smoking – people know it’s bad for them, they know their lungs are taking damage, they know their stinking up the place, themselves and their clothes. Still they do it.
People really are stupid