stoff
Why have I been so quiet lately? Well, nothing really thought-provoking has happened. Well Bush had a hilarious press-conference last friday… as I said, nothing thought-provoking. Working away at work, re-programming NP.com. just going on with my life. Move on, nothing to see here.
This morning I woke up and saw one of the best interviews ever on CNN. One of the guys responsible for the bombing on Bali got his judgement and it wasn’t the death penalty which many would’ve thought. So CNN got a live interview with an aussy parent of one of the people who died and tried to get him to say “they should just kill him!”. But he quite simply stated that “I’m not a believer in the death penalty, it’s not a part of my philosophy and that’s the way I raised my children as well, so I’m content with this judgement”. And the poor interviewer did her best provoking him, even interrupted his sentences (no pun intended), no luck there. So much for death penalty being implemented to make the relatives feel better!
I don’t know why, but I’m a sucker for nostalgia. Always have! I use the words “good old days” way to often and like reminiscing about them. Like today! I accidentally met Chribba, the guy who tought me everything about being a corporate computer tech, today. And then I visited ITF’s office (ITF is a competing company made up mostly of old MinDator employees) and spent an hour there, which was really nice seeing these guys & girls again. And she’s as hot as ever…
I saw T3 yesterday. I was expecting it to be crap. Just another movie made to squeze some money out of the Terminator brand. But I was proven wrong! It was actually pretty damn good! Alot deeper than the other ones, not just a no-brainer action flic. Although they must’ve had way too much money during that street-carnage-scene! And the ending scene with Earth from orbit I thought was just beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t enjoy the thought of a scene like that, but it was really beautifully animated!
Gee, have I been busy! Movies, programming, computer game & Formula 1. And work ofcourse. That’s why it took me so long to upload the new pictures that can be found here. Enjoy!
Two more movie reviews : 1) “Office Space”. Don’t know what’s up with me and office-humor, but I just love it! And this movie’s point of “it’s only a job” and “what tha hell” is just so wonderful. And the gangsta-anti-fax-machine scene is one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen. I just wish someone could hypnotize me and take away that little blocking mechanism I have that stops me from just going into a place and ask a girl out like Peter does 🙂 And 2) “Daredevil”. I bought this movie for three reasons : a) Kevin Smith b) Jennifer Garner and c) “Bring Me To Life”. Well, Kevin is in for about 1 minute, you know what happens to Elektra, right? And the “Bring Me To Life” video wasn’t in DD 5.1! So I should be disappointed. But I’m not. Simply because of the two scenes with Jennifer Garner in the rain. And I’m not talking wet t-shirt alá “Spiderman” here (although that wasn’t bad either), I’m talking about the visual effect and the Matt Murdock POV. That was just beautiful! Worth the money just for those two scenes!
So this week is the annual national tolerance and respect week. Also known as gay pride week. For one week everyone in stockholm, from big coorporations to the little guy sitting in gridlock because the streets in downtown stockholm are closed, are suppose to show our respect and support to the gay community. What about the other 51 weeks of the year? As if I need an appointment in my calender to be respectful and support a bunch of people who wanna live the way they want! Some political correctivness is just too much. This, and casual Hawaiian T-shirt day (yes, I just saw “Office Space”, but more about that later).
The two travelling companions I had during my trip to South America had one thing in common – their need to shop! Shop shop shop! And I suck at shopping even when I know the store and even worse when I don’t even know the language. So I did my shopping from the hotel room by ordering stuff from the ‘Net. And now I finally got to see some of the DVD’s. And … well, I think I’ve seen so many movies that it is now almost impossible to sneak a twist by me. One of the movies was “Basic”, that military/murder/who did what movie. I heard the writer behind it had said he wanted to throw us, as in the people who pay attention and give away the ending 15 minutes too early, off balance. And there sure was alot of twists, so many in fact that he tilted himself and there are three major plot points still unresolved. And unfortunately I pay so much attention that the little broken eight ball outside Travoltas place totally gave it away, and that was less than 5 minutes into the movie! Then there was “Life of David Gale” with one of my favorite actors, Kevin Spacey. He said in an interview that it’s pretty unpredictable, and this is the guy who played a huge part in the movie with one of the biggest twists in movie history (“The Usual Suspects”), so that promised alot. But 60 minutes into that one I knew how it was gonna end, with one little exception – did he or didn’t he know. But I still recommend everyone to see “Life of David Gale”, quite simply because of the entire anti-death penalty story.
And so I’m finally back here in lovely, warm & sunny Sweden! Man have I missed it! It took us about 23 hours from checking in at the airport to checking out at Arlanda. 15 of those was spent sitting in one little chair with severely limited space. I even tried sleeping pills, no luck there. But that just made coming home more enjoyable. So enjoyable I went right out to buy some new toys for my computers at home! And now I’m using wireless shit here, so I can actually sit in my bed and surf the web, checks mails and everything! Ofcourse I could do that before as well, with a long cable. The schedule over the weekend is very relaxed, only real “have to!” is doing my laundry. And I began it with sleeping 14 straight hours!
And then I checked my kristoffer.com mail account today for the first time in almost two weeks. It contained about 1350 messages! That’s about 100 messages per day! And maybe 10 of them was worth reading, the rest was just junk & spam mail. It doesn’t seem to matter how many proposals are on the table to stop spam mail and shit like it, it just keeps on coming 🙁 This has as another bad side-effect that when I go through my mail I spend about 2 seconds per mail to determine if it’s worth reading or not. And when I get 1350 messages hopefully you’ll understand why – 45 minutes to go through mail only to find the 10 I actually wanted to read!
Woke up today to the news that the USA military had killed Saddam’s two sons. And both the White House and 10 Downing Street were ecstatic. Without really knowing the exact nature of the operation I can only deduce this from what I hear on CNN and read about it on the net – but what gives the US the right to off people in foreign countries? They’ve probably been doing it for years, but this was kinda public and they’re even bragging about it? When they execute their own citizens in the name of justice they atleast give them a trial. But oh yeah, that’s right, the US don’t wanna go along with this international war tribunal until US soldiers are immune to being prosecuted for anything!
Over the past week, the media has once again shown its lack of good journalism when it comes to reporting about stuff on the web! A 31 year old ex. marine web-dated a person. It got serious, he told his family he was going to Britain to meet this 19 year old girl and off he went. They then travelled together to Germany through Paris, her stopping by a pay-phone to call her parents to say everything was ok. Oh, and the girl in this case was really 12 years young. And that’s as far as the facts takes us and speculation begins. CNN tried to keep an open mind about it, but when he was arrested they started the “predators on the internet” talks. And “Aftonbladet” in sweden didn’t even tell the facts but told the story so it sounded like a straight up kidnapping. And without knowing exactly what happened I can’t really defend the guy, but I gotta make some pointers here. Did he really know she was 12? I’m pretty sure young people today do what we did which was to lie about our age to seem more mature. And especially on the ‘Net, it’s really easy to get away with it too! I can very well imagine them two in a chat room with her saying she was 19 or something! And when they finally did meet IRL, he must’ve gotten the point she wasn’t that old, but so? What 12 year old hasn’t wanted to run away from home but doesn’t have a good alternative plan? This girl got one served up, what’s to suggest she didn’t leave on her own will? I can’t see any way that a person can be unwillingly dragged through three airports, with all the security they have today, without being able to call for help in any form. And is there a law out there against 12 year old people running away from home and travelling abroad?
But the dude was arrested right away in Germany, and he has a prior for sexual assault, so he might have done something wrong somewhere along the line, but I’m atleast giving him the benefit of a doubt and I’m really interested to see what he’s charged with, cause as far as I know, nothing he did was illegal. And for all the “what tha hell was he thinking!?” people out there, go see “Léon”, I’m pretty sure this guy had.
Remember that little link I posted a while back when they tried to change the name of French fries to Freedom fries in the states? Well, it looks like the French are returning fire as they try to ban the word “e-mail”! Seriously! What would the world be without politicians, huh? It would be a much more dull place to live in, that’s for sure!
Why can’t spanish be spanish everywhere? Why do they have to have different versions of it? I’m not sure the use of “dialect” is appropriate, cause it’s not a matter of dialects, even words are different. I still haven’t seen any place selling bocadillos, but plenty of sandwich-places! And then double “L” is pronounced differently as well. It’s annoying as hell when you’re trying to learn a language.
Have you ever seen “She Spies”? It’s one of those rediculous TV shows that doesn’t do much seriously what so ever, and if it wasn’t for Ms. Henstridge I wouldn’t watch it all. But it’s got some good moments like “Hey, this isn’t a movie!” – “No it’s not, if it was we’d have bigger sets”. Anyway, we’ve done some tourist stuff today. But there’s not much of that to do when you come here totally off-season
And yesterday we were invited to dinner at one of the guys working here which turned out … great! Really great actually. Two of the women from the office joined us for nice little get-together in his loft (and color me jealous, that was an amazing loft!). And then things went a bit wrong when the attention was tuned to my interests and it kinda slipped out (one of these days I’m gonna have to learn how to lie to women!) that I had this place with a diary so I better watch what I write in the future. But it’s below me to change what I wrote in the past – “know what I mean, nudge nudge!?”.
Work-wise everything has gone according to plan. Some small hickups but nothing I can’t handle.
Another thing that’s great about south america – they have lots of good TV stations here. Sony Entertainment with all sit-com’s, Fox, Warner channel, AXN and so on. Yesterday I was flipping over and happened to see an american show called “The Dead Zone” (yes, based on Stephen King’s work). Pretty damn good and lots of Star Trek references too. But what do you expect when Michael Piller is involved. Although I’ve only seen one episode, it showed alot of promise. Just the way the end scene of the episode (“Precipitate”) I caught was filmed like, slow-mo, silent, just amazing!!
One of the small little pleasures when I’m out travelling – tuning in to CNN to hear the latest news delivered by Daljit Dhaliwal! She’s like Tone Beckestad on TV4 in sweden – they can give you the worst news or weather report and you still sit there smiling.
I had a pretty good feeling about this trip even before we left Stockholm. Don’t know why, I just did. And now that I’m here, now that I’ve met the people here… I’m having an even better feeling about it! The staff here is great. Not only “great” as in “hey, how ya’ doin’?”- great but as in “I can relate”-great, which there hasn’t been much of during the other trips. And the hotel is great too, but no internet so I’m not sure when this is coming online.
One thing that isn’t great is the weather! It’s between 8-15 degrees down here now. That’s not what you’d expect going south of the equator!
Puh, that was a long flight! 2+12+3 hours! Don’t recommend it! And ofcourse people pissed me off. This time it wasn’t the passengers but the airline crew trying to help. After doing this for a while I think I’ve gotten the hang of it. And at Arlanda they try to force you to use the self-service thing, even though you’ve already tried it once. And then at Frankfurt they wanna make sure you’re going to the right gate all the time. Then at the plane they wanna make sure you know where you’re sitting and everything. And so on, annoying as hell.
One of the things that have been keeping me busy is cathing up with what’s been happening in the Moby-world. As you may remember, I missed his concert in Budapest with one day, so to compensate I’ve downloaded his show at the Glastonbury festival. And once again he reminded me of why I like the guy so much – he, as an american citizen, apologized for “having such a f*cking idiot as our president”. And I liked that on so many levels! Not only because I totally agree with him, but that he won’t give into the normal “our president is almost like god and he’s infallible” bullshit that seems to be going on over there. I’ve heard alot of people not being totally happy with him, but I’ve never heard any american ever use that strong language about the President. And I’m not speaking about the person of “Bush” anymore, I’m speaking about the institution. Just look at any american movies involving the President and he’s bound to be shown off as a larger than life person (Armageddon, Deep Impact, ID4, The Rock and so on). But if you prick him, does he not bleed? And now I could actually be arrested for a felony – threatening the President of the US of A!
Scary, isn’t it!?