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…
Another thing about me that I’m also pretty proud over is the fact that for the past 6 years or so I’ve been able to plan my economy so good that on the 25th (payday) of every month I’ve had between 0 to $10 in my bank account! No matter how much expenses, or incomes, I have that month, I’ve always ended up with basically nothing exactly when it’s time for the salary. Then I bought a car, and somehow I was actually able to equal that out as well. That is until this month… and this is why I hate our capitalistic society so much – I actually lost sleep trying to make my budget go together in my head! And if I get so out of wack thinking about it, what about people who have a family to support? Like all those single moms you read about!? It actually got so bad in my planning that I was thinking about not going to my friends 30th birthday this weekend because I couldn’t afford anything, and that felt awful! And who do I have to blame (except the company I work for who won’t give me a raise)? Noone but myself! With a little bit of planning last month I should’ve been able to balance it out this month, and with alot of planning I should by now have been able to put some money away for that rainy day! So I guess I’m no better than the people who I constantly harass for doing things they know are bad for them!
Fortunately I have great (supportive) parents, but that sucks having to ask them for a loan!
Oh yeah, and happy halloween to everyone in the states!
I happened to catch 60 minutes today. One of the stories was, appropriately, about something I’ve talked about on this page in the past week – TV shows. And not in a good way. The story was about how different TV networks in the states market themselves and their shows – some target the usual “age 18-49”-group, and some don’t. The actual point of the entire story almost got by me because I was so upset at hearing how 2 network execs, 2 researchers in the field as well as a PR firm exec sat and debated, without any emotion, about how shows are created to appeal certain demographics, and how “strong” these demographics where when it comes to sales and advertisement. Like “people at 55 may watch more TV than a 24 year old, but the 24 year old spends more money so we’re gonna go after him/her instead”. Am I being too naive in thinking that TV-making wasn’t as capitalistic as movie-making is? Listening to these people it actually seemed worse! One of them actually mentioned “Ed” as a show they created to target the more intelligent 30 something white viewer with a deep wallet. I was quite offended at hearing that, not that I fall into that category (although I hope to one day), but at how pathetic it sounds. I used to think of TV making as a form of art, but after seeing this, I’m having my doubts.
But that’s just one more point in my “evidence that human values are being replaced with $-signs”-list that is getting quite long now. Remember people – in Starfleet there is no such thing as currency!
(I wish I could say “Star Trek”, but after the Ferengis it’s all gone to hell)
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…
Do you watch “C.S.I” ? That US show about some forensic experts in Las Vegas. I’m still trying to learn how to like that show. I mean, it’s a pretty good show, good stories, good science, acceptable acting and, of course, Marg Helgenberger. But there is one thing that I don’t like about it. One thing so important and so bad about it… the dialogue. I really don’t like the dialogue! Half of it is written to make Grissom sound like Yoda (seriously, when someone says something he always fills in with something philosophic) and the rest is just a set up for some good one liner. I don’t like that, but they are getting better at it. And now they have a spin-off as well, “C.S.I Miami”. Gee wiz, I shouldn’t be surprised at the length some people go to to exploit a good idea as much as they can. But this did.
One of the hardest things to define about me is my taste in music! To give you an example of how diverse my taste is you can download my 2 favorite songs at the moment – 1) The theme from “Red Planet”, really good techno & ambient feeling there and 2) Norah Jones “Don’t Know why”, really nice and soft song. After listening to these two, try and put me into a genre…
Speaking of music, the other day I flipped over on VH1 and saw the video to Leann Rimes’ “Life Goes On”… I remember her in the video to “Coyote Ugly”, didn’t react that much, but DAMN is she beautiful in this video! Simply amazing… damn I love women…
But to switch topic and talk guy-music – also just saw the video to Jimmy Fallon’s “Idiot Boyfriend”… DUDE, I was laughing so hard I missed half of it and had to download it and laugh at it again! I absolutely LOVE his clothes, coreography and… well, you just gotta see it yourself!
Why are people (including me) in such a hurry as soon as they get into a car? One of the first things you learn here in drivers ed. is that your greatest two foes are lack of time and sleep deprivation. I’ve been trying to start 5 minutes earlier when I go to work recently and I somehow arrive at work 10 minutes earlier… anyway, usually I’m queuing all the way into the central parts of Stockholm and in those queues you see som really fun behaviour, most of which are caused by everyones desire to go faster. The funniest example was last month : I come to a roundabout and was going to do a 270, i.e go off on the left exit. Problem was that it was jammed so I stopped halfway through to let the people coming from the other way through. Very nice, right? Well, the woman in the space wagon behind me didn’t think so! She backed up and drove around me and filled the gap in front of me, effectively stopping a pretty heavy roundabout (Gullmarsplan, if you happen to live in stockholm). What was the point of that? She gaines like 3 meters!? People should really take more time when they are out driving!
Right now everyone who’s even been in a car which I’m driving are saying “kris, you’re pretty good at driving fast too!”… true I am, when it’s all clear an no jams, yes I do. Like to feel the small g-forces my car can generate. But I’m not cursing or anything in traffic jams!
Let’s talk about Moby! I’ve been a Moby fan for a couple of years now. Hell, if I had a theme playing when I entered a building it’d be “Everloving”! First time I heard of him was when he did the techno cover of the Bond theme. The video for that was shot in Stockholm btw. And I love the Play album! What I also like about the dude, besides his music, is his personality. And his journal on his website that he updates, even when he’s out touring the world! And I love how he bashes the political establishment in the US of A! I bough his 18 album the day it was released (I did not even download anything before that!) and loved it too. Although it was much more… calmer, smoother, subtle than his previous work. Anyways, I’ve somehow never seen the dude live, not even when he was here for the MTV EMA’s in 2000, so I had to make due with the live part of the DVD. So when it was announced that he was gonna give a concert here in Stockholm I got excited, but that turned to disappointment as I didn’t find anyone that wanted to pay $33 do go with me. I just accepted the loss, but then Henke (the old friend from my school daze) asked me a couple of weeks ago and wondered if I wanted to go! I hadn’t even thought about asking him, because he’s more into… the techno part, high BPS and stuff like that than I am, and since this concert was gonna mostly be with the new 18 songs I didn’t think he’d be interested. But he was, and he got us ticket and yesterday was the M-day! The opening act was “Röyksopp”, that Norwegian duo who makes OK music but really freaky videos. They opened with a bang and never stopped. And I mean that, loud bang that never stopped. At first I digged it but after 30 minutes it got a bit old. So they went off, the stage was rearranged, and then the dude came running in like he was on fire! Seriously, every thing I’ve ever seen with this guy he’s always been calm and collected, even the live shows. But in those he’s just had a few square meteres do work with, here he had the entire stage and he was everywhere! He mostly played songs from the Play and 18 album, but he also played the Bond theme and something totally unexpected… HEY , HO… LET’S GO!… Didn’t see that coming! Add to that a hilarious DJ battle, a nice guitarr solo and ofcourse the usual Bush-bashing and it turned out to be a hell of a show!
In fact, I just have one little thing to compain about… they never played “Everloving” 🙁 I really missed that, but the tempo of the evening, which more suited Henke than it did me, kinda made hard to play it.
Twelve hours later and my right ears is still ringing! Trust me, use ear protectors when going to concerts like this! I though “nah, it’s not gonna be that loud, and I almost never go to concerts so my ears can take it”… yeah, right!
But to quote the great man himself – that was some noble shit!
May I make a suggestion to a social study in human behavior? Why are certain people fans of certain teams!? I’m not sure why I’m a supporter of Djurgården hockey, but I think it was that at that time I thought they were the best, and for the past 15 years I’ve been a supporter of theirs, although the past season was sucky (and the current seems to go even worse). And I’m a fan of Ferrari’s since -97, when they were just getting good and now they are undeniably the best, to my great delight. But how comes a person becomes a fan/supporter of a team? It’s not genetics, if it was my sister wouldn’t be a fan of Ferrari’s competitors McLaren! It doesn’t have with upbringing either, becuase why would my upbringing lead to me favoring an Italian team? And how comes certain people just can’t be converted, and when they’ve made up their minds, everything else is ‘wrong’. In the F1 community there is a debate right now as to what really went on during that last corner of the race in Indy, and a lot of people are just too serious about some stuff. Like a column written on a swedish motorsport website, Forza-Motorsport, a site I’ve come to respect and posted alot in their forums. But now they had a column that basically said “Michael Schumacher is an asshole”. How can he say that, it’s not like he knows him or anything, he just drives for the competition? I can understand Finns or Columbians being fans of “their drivers!”, but we swedes can’t really say that… This is a pretty interesting side of human behaviour for me…
How many charities do you support? That’s right, you! One of the few things that I’m proud over in this world is the fact that I support (financially and ideologically (yes, that’s a word!)) Amnesty International, Greenpeace, The Swedish Red Cross and Unicef. And I just signed up for a new Unicef program (“A Drop of Water”) and got a cool pin to put on my jacket for it.
I know I’m really patting myself on the back here, but my point is – what do you do? I wanna make you feel bad if you’re not supporting one single charity, so bad that you’ll have to start after reading this. And I wanna make the ones that do give something feel a little better. And I also wanna make a point to everyone who says I’m too obsessed buying stuff for myself (most recently a new $1500 TV) and thinks that I’m too tight!
I would be blood donor too if the hospital that’s close enough to walk to would allow me to give blood there…
This may come off as a bit cold or just asshole-like, but am I the only one who’s tired of all dedications / memorials and stuff that’s gone on over the past year? It seems that when someone, especially if they are famous, dies it has to be made into something huge and special. Two great recent examples of that is Aaliyah and Lisa ‘Lefteye’ Lopez. Both made decent music and they may both have been good people, but with all stuff that’s been done in the media (like the recent MTV VMA dedication to Lopez) you’d think they were up for some saint-status or something.
And then ofcourse there is all the 9/11 (which by the way, we swedes would write 11/9). Naturually it was a terrible event and a huge loss of life, completely over the top and I in no way condone what happened. But why was I asked to hold a minute of silence last wednesday? Anton, a friend at work, got really upset, borderlining mad over this entire thing. At first I thought he was overreacting, but at the end of the day, with all the hype in non-american media, you’d think it was the biggest disaster that ever happened and that the world “owes” america (especially their government) something?! Wtf is all that about? Ofcourse I feel sorry for what happened and to the people who lost a loved one, but it has in absolutely no way affected me or my life, so why should I feel anything about that entire thing? Let’s reverse it – can any one american say why we swedes should hold a silent moment or two next saturday (Sept. 28th)? I’m pretty sure not a single one of them can, because why are they suppose to know that is the date when Estonia sank! Which, if you’ll excuse the cold Vulcan part of me, was atleast 10 times worse, percentage-wise, for sweden than 9/11 was for US of A. “But Estonia was not an act of terrorism against civilian targets” you may say. True, but the Estonia disaster was a random event that killed about a thousand people, which I consider a far worse human disaster than some misguided terrorist who’s been fooled into thinking that USA is the devil. But from their perspective, just how wrong are they? I’m not gonna try and justify what they did, but lets face it, USA has a huge tendancy to play cop in the world. And as long as they have the UN support, that’s fine with me. But I can atleast understand why the islam world are getting upset when the US government is demanding that Yasir Araft be replaced by someone more US friendly!
I, myself, am pretty US friendly when it comes to the people, it’s just their government I object to.
“Dude, if you’re so against it why do you have a memorial for Eden!”. That’s different. That was a personal tragedy for me that I dealt with in this way. I have never ever asked anyone to feel sorry for me or a minute of silence for him. Not even when the 6 month mark came and went did I tell anyone! And it’s not like I’m doing a huge thing about it either, it’s there, read it of you want to. Or not.
So I’m on call this week. Again. For the third consecutive week! I work as a computer consultant, and one of our most important customer is this big lawfirm that I’ve been working at on and off for the past year. And as a part of us taking over their network, we have an on-call service for them. And I’m it again. There are three major points to being on call – 1) Be close enough so you can get there within the time specified in the contract 2) Make 100% certain you can answer the cell phone when they call. This includes staying up till midnight (can’t go to sleep and hope you wake up when it rings!) and also making sure there is a clear reception where you are and 3) be 100% sober. Now, any of these three things I can do, no prob. But combine them all, for an extended amount of time, and what kind of life do you get? No going out for beers with the pals, no going home to my parents, no going to the movies and you can forget about dating. And this is the third week in a row!
Naturally there is an upside – money.
But does that compensate giving up the freedom of just going to a movie if you feel like it, or to drive down to my parents for a nice dinner or something?… There must be some part of me that thinks so, otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it. Again and again.
Guess it all goes back to the old saying – “time is money”. I just wish you could reverse it and buy more time 🙂
Ask me how long it took for me to drive home the other day! Long enough to hear 26 tracks of Moby’s “Play”-album. “But that album only has 18 tracks!”. You’re right, it does, which means that I listened to it almost 1 1/2 times. I don’t know how much time that actually is, should be around 90 minutes. That’s right, I prefer measuring time in what I actually do, or what I would do if I wasn’t stuck in traffic. Because time really is, much like money, something artificial that we humans have created. The only three naturally occuring cycles are days (Earth’s rotation), 4 weeks (the moon’s orbit around the Earth) and years (the Earth’s orbit around the sun), the rest is just made up of a bunch of people. Don’t know exactly where I’m going with this, I guess I just want people to stop and smell the flowers a bit more often like I do. And I still don’t have a wrist watch 🙂
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.
I just got a new favorite TV show. “24“. The show that finished its first season in the states and got like 10 Emmy nominations. Well worth it! It’s about a anti-terrorist unit trying to stop the assassination of a presidential candidate. So far, nothing major. But the series wins in it’s originality! First original thing is that it takes place in real time. So one show, with commercial brakes, is one hour, so the entire season only covers one day. I didn’t think it’d keep up the pace, but I’m in the eleventh hour right now (get it?) and it’s still exciting. Also really well written and pretty good filmed. Have only spotted two major screw-ups, but that’s because they don’t settle for one camera angle, they always seem to have two cameras rolling. ATLEAST. And with a little hi-tech phoning some interesting scenes can be produced, like one in episode 10 when the lead character is being chased and has his cell phone on and four different people are listening in on what’s happening, and they are all cut in into one frame, pretty interestingly done. More original programming like this please! And credit to the Internet for supplying me with these episodes. (since alot of people are always trying to relate violence and/or sex-crimes to the internet somehow, I just want to offer a different opinion about it!)
August 25th, you know what that means? 6 months since I suddenly lost my best friend. My spontaneous reaction was “is that all?”, it feels like ages ago since I last spoke to him. Since we shared some jokes, watched movies together, just sat down at a bar testing new beers and stuff. But at the same time it feels like it was just yesterday that this entire thing happened. I remember those weeks as if it was yesterday…
So how have life proceeded since then? Pretty well I think. Although I did suddenly realise that alot of my life has been converted to routines and procedures. Like I’m just going through day by day waiting for something to happen. And I don’t like that. So I’ll see what I can do to change it. And I still find myself thinking “I gotta tell Eden about this” when I stumble on something new I know he would’ve liked. Guess that’ll have to wait until we meet again in Sto Vo Kor.
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)
When asked “what kinda music do you like?” I’ve always answered it with something like “I’m not into any special genre. I like the tracks, individual songs!”. What I mean by that is that I’ll listen to almost any kinda of music, as long as the song itself is good. Sometimes a musician/group that I like makes a bad song that I really dislike (like Meatloaf for example!). Then there are some musicians/groups that I dislike that does a song I actually like (like Britney Spears).
There are a few that have made my list of people who can’t do a song I will like. Eminem just made that list. All pop-groups put together by all these star-search TV-shows are also there.
Then there are very few that are on the list of people who can do nothing wrong. Who’s work I like no matter if it’s good, bad or crappy lyrics. Today I saw a documentary featuring one of those very few people – Jewel. I remember when I first saw her, it was on some MTV show. It was just her, her guitar and a piano and she was performing “Foolish Games”. I just fell in the love with her voice and the overall feel of the song. Went out and bought the CD right away and never looked back. And I’m still kicking myself for not getting tickets to see her when she was here in Stockholm. Another person on this list is Moby.
So now you know.
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…
I had a perfectly good reason for not updating this place, but I guess I have to now – yet another couple made in heaven, Sandor & Josefin, got a son two days ago. Huge congrats and all good fortune blah blah to them!