Dance Dance Dance

So I got the result from my final exam back yesterday, and it was positive enough. A pass, nothing more, but it still means I only have to finish my thesis now, and I will officially be a Master of Science. I like that title - it reminds me of He-Man.


Also, despite my recent horrible experiences with all things electronic but perhaps because of my sour mood caused by my recent break-up among other things, I decided to spend all my remaining cash on a Canon EOS 400D. I had the previous model in the series, the 350D, some time back, but was forced to sell it as I was a bit shorter on cash than I liked. Anyway, I got a 50mm 1.8 lens of questionable build quality which takes great pictures, a decent flash, a 55-200mm zoom and some other stuff, so now I will spend my days trying to freeze the sky. As above.


I also bought this fabulous white shirt with black cuffs, collar and buttons. It is very, very nice, and I wonder why I have never made one like that. Yesterday, I read a bit more than half of Murakami's Dance Dance Dance, which was fantastic until about where I am now, but now it is not more than great. Still great, mind you, but I guess my expectations are far too high for the poor Mr. Murakami to be able to deliver all the time.

BioShit

For the first time in ages, since I mostly play Wii and simple web games, I was actually considering going to the store to shell out for a PC game, BioShock in this case, which looks absolutely fantabulous. I had my €45 ready and willing for the Swedish launch tomorrow - and then I learned that this (offline!) game requires online activation. Do these people understand nothing? The crackers will crack, the couriers will cour (?), the "Scene" will be lit with industrial light and magic with the result that everyone will be downloading it via BitTorrent within a week, anyway. The only thing that sort of practice does is put people off from buying BioShock. Pity. It seems to be great fun, and I liked the randian slant to the game. Some Half-Life game I got quite a while ago will stay my latest acquisition for some time to come, I guess.

In other news, I am nowadays utterly girlfriend-less, so I went to a bookstore and got Norwegian Wood, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle and Dance Dance Dance (I just picked them randomly from the books available). All by Haruki Murakami, whose writing I simply love. Equally randomly, I decided to start with Dance Dance Dance. Hitherto, it seems as great as I expected it to be.

I have recently been reading quite a lot of books, and this - combined with a very strange semi-hallucinatory awakening this morning within which I had the main theme of a story presented to me by myself to the tones of Last Train to Trancentral - led me to feel the uncontrollable urge to start sketching the rough outlines of a short story myself. I have no idea whether it will just end up in the trash like all my other attempts at writing, but this is the first time I have actually been able to develop the protagonist (or antagonist, as it were) to an extent with which I am satisfied.

She's in Parties

Apart from crying over all my electronic apparel going haywire for no good reason - the holy electronic udder having exploded in my face as I suckled its flame-retardant teats, as it were - I have been to parties. Some are good, and some are not.

Yesterday held one of the former in store. Sorry about the picture quality - another feature of the P1i phone of course. The party started innocently enough, but it might have been the ouzo and the gyoza I brought with me, like a harbinger of wailing doom, that made everyone rummage through the wardrobes to find all sorts of fancy dress. We also destroyed three bananas, did the Benny Hill dance several times and tried vacuuming everything we could reach, including a mouth.

Real Estate Ants

I have now had my (hopefully) last exam ever. Last, unless I someday decide I would like to become a doctor or I feel like studying for studying's sake. Anyway, the subject was real estate finance, and it makes me a wee bit uncomfortable. Studying (basic) chemistry or physics is ok, because it tells what matter will and will not do. Studying economics and statistics is worse to me, because it says what people in aggregate will and will not do. I prefer believing in free will and that the human mind cannot be so easily predicted, actions of human groups modelled like those of ants. Alas, that can be pretty hard.

Statistics in themselves have always been a bit counter-intuitive to me, despite the fact that I have studied the subject quite a lot. Something inside me says that rolling a dice six times should be equally likely to give an average of 1 as one of 3.5. On the other hand, something inside me has always wondered why left and right are inverted in a mirror, but not up and down.

Something inside me might be a little bit daft, or maybe those Machine Elf Gods that people who trip on DMT report seeing are having a little joke at my expense. You never know.

The High Priests of the Covenant of Arch-traitors

Alright, I have had the worst tech experiences ever recently. I thought I had seen it all over the years, but apparently not.

The MacBook Pro I got for work suffered from a hinge which does not go back far enough. Since I am rather tall, this makes it impossible for me to use it comfortably on a table in front of me without using external mouse and keyboard. Another MacBook Pro owner told me that this is common, and the angle is different for different batches of hinges. When he made a fuzz about it, the retailer told him to wait a bit so that the hinge production stabilizes or some such bullshit. Furthermore, the screen is a wee bit flickery, and has some kind of a white spot which is not even a proper dead pixel. Oh, the enter key was all wobbly too. The store where I bought the computer was nice enough to replace the keyboard, so now I have one with a brand new wobbly enter key. Whoop-de-doo!

Having actually been around since the first Mac was released, even though I was just a wee kid at that time, I am appalled at this complete damn lack of quality control on Apple’s part. With the risk of sounding like an old geezer capable of predicting the weather by means of his swollen knee, the early PowerBooks worked for ages. I had one which was ten years old and ran just fine. My LC worked forever and so did my LC475. I have an SE and an SE/30 in the attic which both work perfectly well twenty years later. Now, both my MacBook Pro and MacBook have various issues. My mother's MacBook has had to have its hard drive replaced twice within its first year on this earth, presumably due to heat issues, as she never even moves it from the desk. Her Mac Mini also failed once or twice. So did her Airport Express, on a hot day when the temperature reached 30 degrees celsius.

Granted, computers have become cheaper and are now more of a perishable good than a durable one, but is it actually worth it for Apple and other producers to have so many faulty units? The shipping alone must cost a fortune, never mind the repairs.

Speaking of that, I saw the funniest ad in a while today. Some assinine picture trying to convey luxury and the catchphrase “Shopping turns up the heat.” This was no Al Goresque message, but it was situated outside fancy Sturegallerian where people certainly do not shop because they must, but because they can. Maybe they should have used some more appropriate wording due to the recent global warming and over-consumerism debate. I would have posted a picture if I could, which brings me to the next point.

My new phone works like an employee in a Soviet factory. That is, slowly if at all. The menus are a pain to navigate, feeling just like surfing the ‘net on a 14k4 modem. This is supposed to be a powerful unit, mind you, yet it performs much, much slower than any other phone I have ever owned. It should have synced with my equally infuriating but infinitely faster MacBook Pro, but Sony Ericsson decided that they will no longer offer the required software for download. Bravo. Just to add another little tidbit; the phone will not sync through a USB cable unless a driver is installed. There is no reason at all to give it this “feature”, so I wonder whether the Sony Ericsson engineers are just horrible, spiteful little goblins, such as those featured in the accounting department in the Dilbert comic.

Furtherdamnmore, I wanted to unlock my old phone to be able to sell it. This, the store clerk at 3 (the operator in question) told me with a straight face, would take SIX WEEKS. The procedure is such that I tell them “I want to unlock!” and they say “Sure, we’ll send you the unlocking code!” However, it takes them six weeks to do so. Do they need to assemble the high priests of the covenant of arch-traitors to summon the code? Do they let sloths carry the letter from Nepal, through perils unimaginable? Or are they just completely incompetent? I honestly have no idea. I get so very tired sometimes.

At least I got a nice tank top.

The Guy Who Drove Me Nuts

I would be writing something right now about the upcoming presidential election in the United States or my newfound love of the Holland Esquire brand. However, I have a meeting in nine hours and I want some sleep and a little bit of time with my books.

In other news, I got the new Sony Ericsson P1i. For some reason, I never buy anything else than Sony Ericsson phones. It is not that I perceive the brand as "trustworthy", "exclusive" or any such bull. I guess I am their dream customer. Needless to say, buying an advanced phone a mere week after its release is almost bound to end in disappointment. The software is so buggy it could ride dunes! Apart from that, the phone seems great. The next system upgrade will hopefully iron out some of the creases.

I was out partying with this crab. He had the sparkly wine, the cigarette and the chili peanut.

I also found this old mask I once made. It is made mostly out of snake skin, metal and very old computer parts. I was certainly more creative a decade ago.

Ah, the things people do. Especially considering that the car is quite expensive and it is parked in the most upscale area of Stockholm. The man with the mischievous grin is not related to the car - just a friend of mine.

This guy drove me nuts some days ago. He is some kind of night butterfly, and those tend to become pretty sleepy during daytime. Since he would have been crushed if I had opened my door, I had to get him to move somehow, but he simply refused. I had to carefully blow on him so that he finally crawled out of harm's way and fell asleep in a corner instead. I cannot for the life of me understand how these creatures survive.