So that was another great weekend over and done with! Decent weather, great F1 race, new car to drive everywhere and just all over nice to visit my parents again. Do I need to say my mother’s cooking rocks? (I thought it went without saying, but she thought I’d atleast mention it so I did)
But about the F1 race this weekend (Spain), I’m a bit undecided if I like Ferrari’s dominance or not? I’m a Ferrari fan so ofcourse I love it when they win, but seriously, Schumi dominated it so much (same with Imola) that it just wasn’t as fun watching as it used to be. Hope the other teams can do something to make it a little more exciting.
“Woke up this morning, and I got myself a car”. I’m afraid I had to take another little step towards being an… adult. I bought a car. A very well used one that I’ll breake in a couple of years, but I really needed it for my work! Although I did take great pride in being able to get myself anywhere at any time using local transportation, it didn’t work in the long run. And I probably won’t be able to afford actually owning it. We’ll see…
Do you remember my collection of signed pics of beautiful women I got to regret having back in New Years? Well, my truly amazing american buddy Bill has given me another one to add to the collection. A signed pic of Linda Blair. Made out to “Kristoffer” – especially for me 🙂
Sometimes I really hate computers! Usually I shrug it off by saying “if computers didn’t screw up as much, I’d be unemployed”. But yesterday I was faced with some of the biggest messes I’ve ever gotten myself into. It involved two NT servers, one Netware 4 server, two virus softwares, four hugely infected computers and a very screwed up network. Took my 7 hours to sort out, but it’s the small things that just made me pissed (and by small I mean Microsoft). Fortunately it’s solved, but I’m still getting a headache even thinking about it!
A debate that’s been going on here in sweden (and in our company!) recently has been about the use of cellular phones. The debate has mostly been about corporate financed phones, and how they should be taxed since almost everyone uses it for private things as well. That’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is how annoying people can be when they are talking in their cell-phone. Not to the person they’re talking to, but to everyone else around! I use my cell-phone for “I’ll be there in 5 minutes”-calls. I rarely talk in it for more than 1 minute. But when people are sitting on the train, in a restaurant or something and they start talking in their cell phone and keep talking for 10-15 minutes, as if it was a regular phone call I get annoyed. And they also raise their VOICE WHEN THERE’S A BAD RECEPTION!, I hate that. And it’s impossible to try and filter them out, you inevitably wind up listening to the (usually idiodic) conversation.
So please people, save those conversations for when you’re in a more private environment, ’cause the rest of us don’t wanna hear your shoppinglists!!
Btw, if anyone tries calling me in the next few days, I’ll probably not answer. I got the Star Trek – Next Generation first season DVD box, 25 episodes to watch and an entire weekend to do it in. Now if I could just get a little pink poodle on a keychain, everything would be perfect.
I saw another movie the other day, “Resident Evil”. I’m not that big of a fan of the video games, so I wasn’t expecting much at all. And while watching it I realized something disturbing – I’ve seen so many movies I can’t watch one without thinking “where did they steal that from?”. This movie was a combo of “Cube”, “2001”, “Aliens” and “Night of the Living Dead”. The first three are great movies, but it was that “zombie”-thing I had a problem with. I still laugh when I see 30 zombies walking around trying to kill a main character. But other than that, a good way to waste 2 hours.
I just saw three movies this weekend based on historical events – “Braveheart”, “Apollo 13” and “U-571”. After all of those I realised what an incredible responsibility everyone who tries to do a historical drama has! Not only to do an entertaining movie, make some profit for the production company but also to enlighten the audience about an event they probably don’t know that much about.
And these three movies took their own routes to that. Story-wise “Braveheart” wins! Great drama, great battles, and a great ending. But it’s so full of historical errors it should have a disclaimer in the end that “some of this didn’t actually happen”. And that’s exactly what we got in the end of “U-571”, a disclaimer. But “Apollo 13” went all the way to try to be as truthful as possible. And in my opinion, “Apollo 13” was the best of them all, hands-down! Absolutely the best sound too 🙂
So think about that the next time you see a historical movie – they do take some libirties for dramatical purposes. So don’t sit there and think William Wallace actually nailed Isabelle, she was about 5 years old at the time…
I’m having one of those days you just wish you never got out of bed. First thing I saw in my mailbox this morning was a mail from the CEO calling for an emergency staff-meeting today. “Oh oh, I guess we’re talking cut-backs now, hopefully not staff-cutbacks!”. Then I get out to my assignment of the day and my boss calls me up and tells me to skip lunch and take a cab to the office because he needs to “talk to me”. What could be so important that I actually need to get there A.S.A.P? Does he wanna congratulate me for being such a good little worker-ant? Does he wanna mention that I’m # 7 on our “who brings in most money”-list? Or does he wanna tell me “here’s your severance pay, good luck with your life”?
I think I can take being unemployed, atleast for a month or two, but longer than that and I’ll have financial problems. But that’s not the worst part. Had he said on the phone “you’re out of a job”, that’d be one thing, I can start thinking “what now?”. But not knowing is the worst thing! Being in this kinda limbo-state, I hate that! Still, can’t blame him, firing somebody has to be one of the worst things for a boss so I guess I will appreciate that he did it person-to-person instead of over the phone. So for the next few hours, hold your breath for me when I find out what my future looks like….
UPDATE: Ok, you can exhale now. It seems I get to keep my job, for the time being anyway. We’ll see how it goes during the next 6 months, if things don’t look better then, who knows. What saved my ass was a clause that said our employment would be transfered, not discontinued and renewed when we merged the two companies last year. So my employment date of “April -96” saved me, so I get to work here for a while longer.
I guess I managed to get the flu or something because all weekend I’ve felt like shit and spent most of it tucked down in my sofa watching old movies with my new DVD player. And I’m pretty grateful for it, because there’s been a while since I’ve had a weekend without any plans what so ever. And we all need those, right?
Anyway, one of the movies I saw again for the 15th time was “The Matrix”. There’s one thing that always bothered my about that movie – the window cleaners. The plot-reason for them being there is to motivate the existence of a scaffold outside. But why did they go to so much trouble showing the cleaners, and most of all, in the 5.1 digital mix they could very well be heard in the rear channel. I never quite got what was so important about them. Until this time around when I realised it was the directors, the Wachowski-brothers. Live and learn…
I also saw a movie that may very well make my top 5 of “best movies ever” – Groundhog Day. You know the one with Bill Murray who wakes up to the same day over and over. I still think that movie is hilarious and has some magic in it I just can’t put into words. It’s a totally weird premise, and there’s no real answer given, but it’s still a great movie. And whatever did happen to Bill Murray, he was a huge star in the 80’s, but what happened to him later? The most recent movie I’ve seen with him was “Charlie’s Angels”.
Jocke wanted me to post this:
“Kanske borde skriva pÃ¥ ding sida att du BAd mig fiksa skärm och komma till dig. Det gjorde jag. Jag bad dig fiksa konto pÃ¥ hans ftp inte fiksa mutant x. Sen bad jag bara om hans email och den fick jag men dÃ¥ tjatade du om att du mÃ¥ste fiksa allt. Jag kan ju inte direkt gissa hans email eller ? Filmen 13 ghost var 1 mÃ¥nad innan jag fick mitt adsl som jag bad dig tanka den filmen.”
Should I translate it for you? No. Two reasons : 1) His spelling is so fucked up I wouldn’t know how. And b) Why should I translate his defence? Another thing to add to the “lists of stuff he’s asking me to do”.
Seems I’ve lost another friend, but not in the dramatic way I lost Eden. My “brother” Jocke (I grew up without a brother, so he’s “the brother I never had”) mistook creative criticism for something else. The story is that for the past months I’ve peaked him about how lazy he is. Not lazy in a “don’t even wanna get out of bed”-way like me, but lazy as in “why bother learning new stuff when I can get someone else to do it”. Latest example would be Warcraft III. I got a cracked, ripped and beaten up hacker version that took some work to get working. He got the same stuff I had but he couldn’t be bothered setting it up himself, so he asked me to fix it for him. On a short term basis that principal works, getting someone else who’s already done it to do it for you is quicker and less painful. But what do you get out of it? You’re not any wiser or anything. So I’ve tried peaking him about the principal of Do It Yourself. If there’s one thing I got going for me professional-wise it’s my creativity and resourcefulness – if I hit a brick wall I do everything I can, time permitting, to solve it myself. During all the times I’ve had to solve problems I’ve learnt something new, maybe not relevant to that specific problem, but I always learn something. So I think it’s a really good thing to try and fix and solve problems yourself. But sometimes I do take a shortcut and ask someone if I’m not in the mood for surfing the web for problems I don’t really want to have. So after trying to tell him this he basically told me to fuck off. Should I have been a bit more tolerant when he asked me again to download new Mutant-X episodes for him, while looking for 13 Ghosts DVD-RIP for him and in the meantime playing Warcraft III (which I don’t even like) with him after I had driven over 80 km just to give him a ride beause he couldn’t be bothered to take the bus. Maybe…. (incidentally – this happened less than 5 days after I got his own ADSL internet connection working)
Anyway, bought myself a new DVD player yesterday, a Pioneer DVD-545. So now I can squeeze 4.7 GB (80 hours!) of MP3 onto a DVD-RW and let it rip. But somehow it didn’t make me feel the least bit better under the circumstances.
Again – I didn’t update yesterday because I didn’t want an update to be confused with April fools. Let’s face it – sometimes my life can come off as a bad joke! Btw, what is a good April fools joke? Is it a joke that’s hilarious, funny but totally obvious that it’s an April fools (like TFN’s conversion from Star Wars to N’Sync!), or is it something that’s very nicely disguised and could actually be real (like that time 4 years ago when the internet went down on April 1st and someone started a chain letter explaining that the US government had pulled the plug)? Or is it something in between, like NataliePortman.com’s faked interview that wasn’t totally out there but too funny to actually have happened? I think it’s one very well disguised, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t laughing at TFN’s N’Sync site 🙂
I did an update last week about my communicator. But it was lost when I uploaded the new pages. I’ll post it again tomorrow.
