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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Magnus Itland's LiveJournal:
| Monday, December 7th, 2009 | |
| 4:48 pm | Phone crash The Googlephone hung when I tried to turn it off today. Half an hour later it was still not off, and uncomfortably hot. So I took out the batteries and put them back in. That worked, but of course now it asks for the SIM PIN, and I don't go around remembering that. (This is after all the third time I need it, the first time being when it was new and the second when I upgraded to a new version of Android.) Without my mobile phone/ GPS / internet connection I am not going to the Mothhouse today. I hate living in the past. |
| Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 | |
| 1:06 pm | Finally at work 3 hours late, but the buses run on time again and I got to the city. There seems to have been a traffic accident combined with a prolonged rush hour. Current Mood:  sickCurrent Music: Michael Mackenzie - Optimal Learning |
| 9:58 am | First Snow I live in Norway. You would think that people here would be prepared for snow in December, or at least react rationally to it, having seen it hundreds of times before in their life. You would in other words believe people to not be stupid, or at least people with a driver's permit. No such luck. Each year on First Snow, the roads are blocked by cars on worn-down summer tyres, half in and half out of the road if lucky, wrecked and scattered in the middle of the road if unlucky. I am currently thawing out at home after waiting for the bus for 40 minutes. Not only did the bus not show up, but there was no bus passing in the other direction either. Since the buses that go to the city are the same that came from the city (ours is a closed circuit), that means there won't be any buses for a while either. That is actually what I expected, but out of common courtesy I had to show up. Usually the traffic unclogs somewhat over the course of the day, so I may make a new attempt in a while. |
| Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 | |
| 1:42 pm | Computer down My main computer, TERRA the quad-core, died tonight. Oh well, better it than me. When I turned it on this morning, it rebooted frequently, even before the bios stage. It is therefore almost certainly the power supply that is broken. After I turned it off at the back and later turned it back on, it does not even try to start, no matter how many times I press, or how hard, or how long. So yeah, it seems to have given up the ghost in the machine, as it were. It is two years and two weeks old. Wonder how long the warranty is on these things? Even if I can get it repaired, this habitually takes weeks or months here in Norway, at least in my experience. I eventually stopped sending my computers to repair and just bought new ones from competitors, but the truth is that have never had a machine that lasted for three years with all its parts unless it was from Hewlett-Packard or Goldstar. (And I have not seen Goldstar computers for decades. My very first PC, a 10MHz Goldstar AT, still works.) Dell lasted a year and a half, Fujitsu-Siemens keep ticking but without the CD-ROM and with a noisy fan (and I have had 3 of them over the years, they all were like that), North melted down repeatedly until the shop went out of business. I don't remember what happened to the Compaq (before HP bought them) but it had some minor problem. And now this. The machine is probably good enough for years more if I get a new power supply. What else could it be? The question is whether I manage to replace it. I am very much a software guy and if soldering irons are involved, I am so out. I believe it should be enough to unscrew the old metal box though, replace it with a new and press those little plastic things on the cables tightly together. Right? Or I could buy a HP and keep it until it is too slow, then reformat it with Linux and keep it until the Singularity comes. Or the Second Coming. Or the Grim Reaper. I don't know why Hewlett-Packard loves me, but they keep sending me good machines, if a tad pricey. Perhaps I should take a hint and just stick with them? Current Mood:  calmCurrent Music: Michael Mackenzie - Optimal Learning |
| Monday, November 30th, 2009 | |
| 12:14 am | Shooting a dead horse The whole "climate policy" debate thing is like a farce to me. NOW this is all the rage, when it is too late. Pretty soon we will all be carbon neutral, because there won't be enough affordable carbon left to burn. I'd say 2020, but perhaps it will be 2030. In any case, this debate should have been 30 years ago to have any meaning. My native Norway has promised to be carbon neutral by 2050. Now, leaving aside that the current crop of politicians will be retired by then, some even dead from old age, there is the small fact that it is after peak oil, peak gas and peak coal. Unless we cut down our forests and burn them faster than they can grow back, we'll not have much choice about being carbon neutral then. Why do people believe that tomorrow will be just like today, when we set the house on fire today? |
| Saturday, November 28th, 2009 | |
| 12:09 am | Whew Finished watching the Touch anime, all 101 episodes. What a long trek. It was pretty girly for a baseball anime, was it not? And incredibly old. People even have vinyl records in it, and no cell phones. It is strange to think that there already existed anime in such a time. |
| Friday, November 27th, 2009 | |
| 8:04 pm | Food! I think I may accidentally have made the best meal in my life today. And I ate it all alone. Oh well. I guess it has to happen to us all sooner or later. Current Mood: full |
| Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 | |
| 4:44 pm | Ubuntu improves again Earlier this fall I moved the ADSL modem and router out in the hallway for various good reasons. The downside to this was that my old laptop with Ubuntu fell off the home network. I had to attach it to my mobile phone to go online. The problem is that the OS did not recognize either of my USB devices for the wireless network. I have 3 different models from 3 different manufacturers: Jensen, D-Link and SparkLAN. Unfortunately the drivers were all for Windows. There are supposedly ways to get around that, but they are extremely technical and more disturbingly, each website that has a solution has a different solution. Anyway, I had used cabled connection but that was no longer an option. The easiest seemed to be one that required me to download the source code for the driver and compile it myself. I could probably have done that if it was necessary to impress a woman, but I am past the age of compiling for fun. So, I let it gather dust for a while. Today I had a compelling reason to try to hook the machine onto the local network again. Since I have in the meantime upgraded Ubuntu to a new version (9.10) using the mobile phone, I decided to let it have another go at my oldest USB wireless receiver, the SparkLAN. I plugged it in, and a few seconds later it told me there were wireless networks present. I selected my home network (the neighbors seem to have one too) and gave the encryption key, and moments later I was connected. Just like that. That's a lot easier than it was in Windows when I first got it, although I am not sure, it may be just as easy in Windows 7. I don't have that. Anyway, I believe it is now as simple and easy as physically possible. Good work, free software folks! (While writing this, I suddenly lost connection to the Internet, for all of my computers. After half an hour of trying various remedies, I found that the dial tone of my landline is gone too. Looking out the window I then saw a guy near the top of a nearby phone pole. Whether he is the problem or the solution, I don't know, but I'll not be able to send this until he is finished at best.) |
| 6:32 am | There is still some evil inside me So I was reading the NaNoWriMo forums, and someone was asking if there was free (creative writing) software for the Mac, and I was thinking "If you don't have more money than you need, why do you have a Mac in the first place?" |
| Monday, November 23rd, 2009 | |
| 5:13 pm | Coming soon to a charging station near you The Era of the Electric Vehicle Started Now (Discovery News) Electric cars have been around for a while, and for the last couple years they have been competitive with diesel cars for the uses most people actually use their car for. They are certainly a contender for the number two cars for the American or Norwegian family. (Not all nations have two or more cars per family, of course, so that market is smaller.) But this is the first time we are seeing massive implementation on the corporate level. This is not an experiment. If the recession really ends (as opposed to the technical ends achieved by unsustainable government stimuli) and oil prices go back to their pre-crash level, the gas-powered car may be headed toward extinction. But that is a big if. Peak oil may be delayed for years if we get a double-dip recession followed by a Japan-style zero-growth decade. Even so, the price of electricity compared to fossil fuels is bound to improve as alternative energy technologies mature and gain scale. It is only a matter of time. Take good care of your gas-powered car, it may be your last. |
| 3:27 am | Leg cramp I think this is the first time I have woken up to a leg cramp in winter. They have always been in the summer before, to the point where my doctor thought dehydration was a trigger. Now it is November, I've been drinking plenty, and I exercised (with proper warmup) the day before. I also always get plenty potassium because milk is part of my daily diet. Perhaps it really is random. Oh well. I am still off from work because Norwegian law mandates that we must have a month of vacation and naturally I picked NaNoWriMo as mine. The stiffness usually only lasts for one day if I take NSAIDs as soon as I can get up afterwards. |
| Saturday, November 21st, 2009 | |
| 10:44 am | |
| Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | |
| 5:16 am | I feel your pain, but... ...how do you manage to drop your trousers when you're stuck halfway through a tiny window? (Reuters Oddly Enough) Because I've been in such a window, although that was my own, and I am pretty sure I did not have any body parts on that side of the window prehensile enough to take off my pajamas bottoms, much less a pair of trousers. Current Mood: sympathetic |
| 1:10 am | In Google we trust - well, at least a bit I've enabled Google Latitude on my HeroPhone. I don't have any latitude friends - I actually have only one LJ-friend in Kristiansand, and none in Mandal where I will hopefully be moving one of these weeks. But I like the idea of having a log of my movements on some offshore server, to pull out if I need an alibi. Or just to know where I've been without having to write a Facebook entry about it. It must be thrice awesome for those of you who have close friends in the fleshworld. |
| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 | |
| 11:54 pm | Dreaming of the afterlife I slept for about 8 hours, which is very long for me. As usual in those cases, at the end I had a very long and very strange dream. This time I got to see the parts of Hell and Heaven where new arrivals first came. Well, they were not really Hell and Heaven, just temporary lodgings I think, for those going that way. After much confusion that I don't remember clearly, I ended up on the good side. There were not many angels around, I was shown to my room by another recent arrival, and did the same for a woman who came a bit later. The rooms were along a corridor that just grew on itself while no one was looking, so that there were always free rooms at the end of the corridor when someone new came. The woman whom I helped spoke only Norwegian so I had to find a place where there were already other Norwegians. Luckily I had noticed a cluster of them when I passed. Each of us got a spacious room and there were common rooms where people gathered, and also you could go outdoors. It was all rather ordinary. What made one of the places hellish and the other heavenly was the people who got sent to one or the other. You could tell you were heaven-side because people were going out of the way to help each other. |
| Monday, November 16th, 2009 | |
| 10:43 pm | Unintentional metaphor With the dollar sinking again, gold prices have been going through the roof. I just saw Forbes write an article about the "Gold Bull Market". It took me some lines to realize that they were not alluding to the biblical story of the golden calf. |
| Sunday, November 15th, 2009 | |
| 5:24 am | Memories of Acid Reflux  Hi guys Paragon City sure has a lot of work for a battle-porcupine, and the city is teeming with nice humanoid cuties. But every so often I miss the old gang and the times we roamed the world of Irving fighting creatures almost as fantastic and improbable as ourselves. Wish you were here, or I were there or something. Thanks for all the fish! Hugs... oops! *bandaid* Itland the wereporcupine. Current Mood:  nostalgicCurrent Music: Pikku-Orava - Pokka |
| Friday, November 13th, 2009 | |
| 8:51 am | When you're dying you'll trust Big Pharma. Medicines to Deter Some Cancers Are Not Taken (NY Times) This long, long, long article documents two related topics. 1) There are drugs that are proven by big, elaborate studies to dramatically reduce the risk of certain cancers. People don't effing care. 2) The usual stuff that is believed to prevent cancer does not work, or causes more cancer. People still believe in it. It is a dismal picture indeed. This article confirms that a lot of correlations turns out not to be causations. Eating fruit or losing weight won't prevent cancer, at least if you do it the last 20 years or so before the cancer breaks out. Eating various supplements that are supposed to prevent cancer will give you more cancer. But most importantly, people don't care until they actually are diagnosed with cancer. Then most of them decide to give medicine a try anyway. So pharmaceutical companies have taken the hint. They have stopped developing drugs that prevent cancer, and are investing in treatments instead. That's where the money is. Current Mood: still alive |
| Thursday, November 12th, 2009 | |
| 9:12 am | Some people need to sleep more From the NaNoWriMo forums. Q: Why are the squirrels sinister? A:The squirrels think the characters are nuts. They intend to seize them and bury them in the leaves for future storage. |
| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | |
| 8:09 pm | Politics is a noxious soup. Have some! I think the US government would have become more popular in the short run if it made the economy (and mainly employment) its only priority until it was, like, fixed. Not that they would not have to make various decisions about other things that come up - things always come up. But not pushing anything else, not starting to talk about anything else unless someone asks, things like that. Because this was, as far as I could hear from a distance, what they were elected for. I have a pretty good memory and I don't think the independents who voted Obama did so because he promised tax-funded abortions or some such. It was the economy, stupid. And most people don't perceive the economy as fixed just because some stocks go up. When they get a new job, they will say it is fixed. Then you can start reaping the political capital from it. Then you can start pushing your agenda. There is of course the small question of whether the Democrats CAN fix the economy. Opinions on this will obviously vary. I'd say that the whole stimulus thing would be a defensible answer to a normal recession. But if the problem is that the American model is Just Plain Wrong (that is, if you can't outsource production but keep consumption at home), then the large stimulus package will actually make things worse faster. But we shall have to wait and see about that. In the case that this fails, in the case that the counter-bubble burst just in time for the next election, people will say: "These jackasses promised to fix the economy, but once in power they broke their promises and spent four year driving through their commie agenda", and Palin will return in glory while Riflejugend patrol the neighborhoods. OK, probably not, but it could get mildly unplesant to be openly Democratic for a while in some districts. |