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.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! STOP IT !!!! GIVE ME A BREAKE !!!! I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE !!! I’M GOING BANANASSSSSS !!!!!!! AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY!!!!!!!!!
I’ll tell you what’s PISSING ME OFF RIGHT NOW! – REALITY TV, or docu-soaps. I HATE THEM!! CAN’T FREAKING STAND THEM ANYMORE !
I began watching the first reality shows, back in -91 with MTV’s “Real Life – New York”, then LA, then S.F., after that it felt old. Then swedish TV started with their “Survivor” that was later exported. Then Villa Medusa here in sweden. So far OK. Then it all went to hell. You can’t turn on the TV here anymore without either seing some docu-soap or some trailer for it. Big Brother, Temptation Island, The Farm, Popstars, the Bar, Wannabe and all that crap, I CAN’T TAKE IT anymore! They are so totally crappy!! I mean – have we, as a society, gone so down the drain we actually have to expose fame-seeking people to artificially created environements and show it in prime-time? Seriously, if I hear one more confession from some corky Big Brother-girl, some horny guy from Temptation Island or read about how terrible it was doing the show in the paper… I don’t know what I’m gonna do!
Seriously, it’s gone so far that I actually feel physically ill and get an uncontrollable attack whenever I accidentally flip in the middle of either of these. Think it could be classified as torture by now, it’s even worse than flipping over in the middle of a Spears-video.
(still looking for the answer to “what tha hell is a female who’s not a girl, but not a woman”!)
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”.
Today I got an e-mail that made me smile. It was yet another “take those pictures off NP.Com or we’ll sue”-letter 🙂 We put up the latest scans from the “Entertainment Weekly” magazine and it took a whole day for their PR Manager, Jason Averett, to mail us asking us to take them down. The thing that made me smile was how incredibly nice and polite he was about it! I’ve gotten used to these types of letters, and if I was running a magazine and had a site like us publishing everything, I’d be mad too! But this guy was just nice. That was fun 🙂 So now I like E. Weekly even more than I use to. (I used to like them alot because they have great cover-pictures)
So, guess what I saw in the TV scedule the other day? You won’t believe this… PART II of the porno version of Trixx! Isn’t that just hilarious! 🙂 I didn’t bother seeing it, I just thought it was funny that they had a part II 🙂
Jocke wanted me to post this:
“Kanske borde skriva på ding sida att du BAd mig fiksa skärm och komma till dig. Det gjorde jag. Jag bad dig fiksa konto på hans ftp inte fiksa mutant x. Sen bad jag bara om hans email och den fick jag men då tjatade du om att du måste fiksa allt. Jag kan ju inte direkt gissa hans email eller ? Filmen 13 ghost var 1 månad 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.
Do you know what I think is way underestimated? Humor and comedy in the porno industry! I was flipping through channels yesterday and wound up on channel “Canal + Yellow” where they were showing the porno version of Matrix, called “Trixxx”. That’s humor right there, their titles! “Old McDonald Shags His Farm”, “Austin Prowler”, “Analyze These” and the best one – “Saving Ryan’s Privates”. Some of the… “actors” names are equaly hilarious, “Michael J. Cox!” 🙂 Then of course there’s the dialogue and story. And if you’re still not laughing, look at one in fast-forward and tell me it’s not funny!
(and don’t go all high and mighty on me saying you’ve never seen one!)
Anyway, off to my parent’s again for the easter weekend. Great food, great company and an F1 race. Have a great weekend everyone!
Ok, I know this site doesn’t look good in anything else than MS Internet Explorer! That’s because I was a bit too eager to get it up. I’m redoing the entire site using only tables instead of layers and frames. Then it’ll look cool in NS and Mozilla!
I’m also gonna update the “Eden Memorial” alot over the next few days. But I just got the new Star Wars game, Jedi Knight II, so I’ll be a bit busy with that for a while. Also, it’s easter time which means back to my parents for the looong weekend and the F1 race from Brasil. I’ll update again asap.
Payday again in sweden. You know what that means, right? It’s been exactly one month since my best friend died 🙁
On an egoistic note – I think this has ruined any joy I may ever have on any future payday…
On an optimistic note however – I got a real life example which proves I’m not a racists: I woke up this morning to the radio-chatter, and the news that Hale Berry had won an Oscar. “Good for her” I thought, “she’s done some really good performances over the years, so she’s worked for it”. Then 7 o´clock news started and one of the short headlines was “a historic win in best actress category at the Oscars”. “Why is Hale Berry winning historic?”… The youngest? No, Anna Paquin is the youngest one I’m aware of… no, it was historic because she was the first afro-american actress to get it. I didn’t even think about that! To me, that wasn’t even an issue! True, it sounds very much like the “South Park” episode when they had that huge debate over the flag that showed a bunch of white people hanging a black person. But all the kids saw was an bunch of people hanging someone. So once again, I’m reassured I’m not a racist, and I’ll let everyone else think what they want about me.
Btw, this means that X-Men now have two Oscar award winning chicks 🙂
(of course, both Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen deserves one each, they’re both awesome actors!)
How do you like the new design? Pretty cool, huh? I’m still sorting out bugs for different resolutions and stuff like that, but everything looks perfect from my side so sorry, not a top priority.
And I have a new favorite musicvideo – Manson’s cover of “Tainted Love” 🙂 Great looking women, nice track and his style is so out of here, but he somehow manages to look cool anyway, how does he do it? Have you seen the MTV Diary featuring Manson? I might not like his style that much, or his music (except for this song ofcourse), but he’s got his style and he sticks with it and tells the people with the ties to shut up if they try to change it. Kinda total opposite of Spears that way 🙂
(I’m sorry, that Spears-bashing must be getting old now, but I just can’t help it, I mean listen to that crappy “not a girl, not yet a woman”, wtf does that mean? She’ll always be a girl, unless she has some operation… and a girl over 20 is a woman, right? So wtf does that song mean? Is she immature, like me? Then just say it – I’m incredibly childish and proud of it!… time for ice-cream!)
So, did anyone of you wonder why on earth I was actually thinking about not going to my best friend’s funeral?
When I was thinking about it, I asked myself “why should I?”. And the first answer I came up with is “because you’re just suppose to!”. And that’s so true, you’re just suppose to go, it’s what you do! If you don’t show up, people will think you’re a self-centered asshole. But is that reason enough? I really don’t want people to think I’m an asshole. But compare that to all the planning, work and emotional control it required to going… there’s gotta be something else! How about “so you can say a final goodbye”? NO! I’m not there yet. I’m still in a little bit of denial. And when I get there, shouldn’t I be able to say goodbye to him in my way, in the way I think is appropriate. So that’s not it.. How about “to support everyone else”? Fair enough, but that didn’t happen since every ounce of conscious thought went into trying not to burst out in tears myself, so I wasn’t able to support anyone else. Which, in retrospect, I really should have.
The only valid reason I came up with was “to show everyone what a good friend of his you were”. So good that I’ll go through all of this, so good that I could actually give a little eulogy. And no, I’m not applauding myself here, it’s just that I’m wondering what the real purpose is, why does everyone else go through this?
On a happier note, the new design is absolutely beautiful, some of my best work. Will be up this weekend.
I’ve finally got some motivation and inspiration (translate – “Kris found a good, nice and easily adaptable design that he’s gonna steal”) to start on a new design for the pretty low-key’d site. Also working on a little memorial for my friend. Hey, we all deal with this our way!
Just got my web-statistics report. I’ve had about 500 people checking in on this page daily since February 25th. Thanx everyone!
Here are some pictures from the most beautiful, but also the worst, funeral I’ve ever been too:
Pic # 1 : Picture with everything in it. (including my stereo 🙁 )
Pic # 2 : Picture with everything in it. (including Eva 🙂 )
Pic # 3 : Close up of two of the most frequent Eden attires – his hat and custom made jacket.
Pic # 4 : Close up of a “Galaxy-class” model. That was his alias on the web, Galaxy-class
Pic # 5 : Close up of the Spock action figure I mentioned in the eulogy.
Pic # 6 : Picture fromt the side.
Pic # 7 : Picture from the reversed side post-service.
Pic # 8 : I don’t know if this is something pilots do every day over this cemetary (the biggest one I’ve ever seen) or if it was specially ordered today, but it was a nice touch.
That was my eulogy to my best friend Eden. Or rather how it was written, approved and memorized. Unfortunately I tense up when speaking in front of a crowd. Add to that a very near outburst of tears and I’m bound to miss a few things here and there. But I’m pretty sure everyone agrees that it wasn’t what I said, it was the fact that I got up to say something.
My eulogy to Eden
I’d like to take a minute to explain to everyone a little about Star Trek and what it meant to Eden.
Star Trek, and Trekkies, are usually considered very techie, asocial and geeky. And although that description may fit Trekkies like myself, it didn’t fit Eden. Eden was more into the human and social part of Star Trek and the always present “message” of the show. During it’s 600+ episodes, Star Trek has dealt with basically every human and social problem there is – everything from politics, racism to sexuality. And they’ve not been preaching what is right and wrong, but instead let it up to the audience to decide for themselves. Before I met Eden, this part of Star Trek had gone unnoticed by me. But he constantly came up with weird Star Trek influenced questions like “what is life”, “define love”, “what qualifies as intelligence”… Edens gift to me, Star Trek-wise, was to force me to think along those lines, and not just watch the show but actually use my intellect.
Eden really loved Star Trek, from when he cried like crazy if he didn’t get a Spock action figure when he was a kid to just three
weeks ago when he was sitting in my couch talking about the latest Star Trek episode, he lived Star Trek. So when planning
this whole thing, it seemed fitting to do it as Star Trek inspired as possible. Because if I had to put a lifestyle or religion on him, it’d be Star Trek.
But there was one philosphy in Star Trek he couldn’t live by – non-involvement.
He loved to get involved, create a stir and to just take the opposite side of whatever you were talking about. He didn’t do it to offend or tick anyone off – he just wanted people to think and use their minds, not give the standard or political correct answers. He hated people who just said what they were suppose to, so he argued to make them think for themselves. Although I considred this a good trait, it was often mistaken as something negative. The people who didn’t knew him may have thought he was a bit arrogant, wise-guy, know-it-all nitpicker. He loved to point out other peoples wrongs and to brag how much he knew, so therefor it took a special kind of person to become friends with him. I’m sure all of his friends have some funny story how they became friends with Eden. Mine is that I was exactly like him – nitpicky and bragged how much I know. So I picked up the gauntlet to take his arguments and we spent hours trying to break eachother in “who knows most about the least important thing in the world”. That might have ended in a verbal war between us, but instead we teamed up to become the dynamic duo of useless information.
That’s how our friendship started. And when he got a job up here in Stockholm, but didn’t have any place to live, he crashed at my place for about 6 months. And during that period of trials and tribulations we got to know each other so well and I look back on those 6 months as some of the best of my life.
When he did get his own place and moved out we had inevitably become great friends. And if there was something he excelled at,
it was taking care of his friends. With him, you never had to call and ask for help – he’d call you and offer his help! He bent over
backwards to help his friends, sometimes at his own expense.
So there is no doubt in my mind that I’m a better and happier person today thanks to him, and it’s with a smile on my face that I think
about him and the time I got to spend with him, the incredible original that he was. And noone can ever forget him because he made an impression on everyone he met or talked to. Sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but he always made a lasting impression.
The most pleasing thought I’d heard during the past weeks when asking “what is he doing now” is ‘” he’s probably sitting up there in heaven [or whatever you believe in] sharing a cold one with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry “. That thought always brings a smile to my face.
And I’d like to close this with something I end all my mails with – a quote. This one from Star Trek II, said my Dr. McCoy:
“He’s not really dead. As long as we remember him.”
THANK YOU
Can you say a funeral was “perfect”? How about “beautiful”? Because that’s what it was! Everyone involved pulled everything off beatifuly, all practical problems were just solved, everything worked. The music, the atmosphere, the colors, hell – even the eulogy I managed to give was just beautiful. I’m sure Eden would have found something wrong with it, but as far as I know the only thing missing was just that – him. And then small touches, like people putting their communicators down instead of flowers, a small military salute… wow, and I was thinking of not attending…
I’d like to thank everyone who turned up! I was afraid not many would, but I was wrong. A special thanx to everyone in uniforms, I know Eden would’ve loved that. Credits go off to Ricki for keeping the entire thing together, Nic for musical recomendations, Eva for emotional support, Paramount for letting us use the copyrighted Starfleet logo, my father for letting me have the car and thereby solving so many practical problems..
It was really nice to feel the support everyone offered through this tragedy.
Well, let’s keep on Trekkin people!
Wanna hear a bad joke? “What is the one event you don’t want a front-row seat to?” – “A funeral”.
I’ve found that the best way to deal with this is humor. Anyway, somehow I wound up as the person responsible for giving a eulogy for my friends funeral. Is that heavy or what, and not in a good way!
Damn I hate funerals. I’ve been to four of them, and they have all pretty much sucked. I guess it’s because I’m just such a positive, optimistic happy guy that I just can’t take 50 or so people being that depressed and sad. And I have another one coming up next week. But as oppose to the other ones, this is someone who was really, really close to me. So I’ll be working all week trying to work up strength and courage to go there and get through it.
But on an optimistic note – guess who won… no, that’s not it… kicked ass?… no, not that either… DOMINATED the first Grand prix of the year? Ferrari baby, yeah! Over a second faster in training sessions, took pole with 0.4 seconds and even after one of them created some havoc and the other one slipping down to 4th by the first curve, they still came out on top with some 20 seconds to spare. And the best part of it – it was all done using last year’s cars!!
As promised, here is a page explaining how I’d want my funeral to be like, as well as some notes about “who gets what”.
Don’t think I’m suicidal or anything, it’s just that I don’t want anyone to have to go through what we’ve gone through in the last week. So to spare some practical problems, here are my wishes.
(yes, I know I should print and sign it to make it legally binding, but I’m trusting everyone will get along without contesting anything)
