Just another night

Took a stroll to the store earlier. Fall is in the air, a bit cool but quite pleasant anyway. I find it somewhat hard to get used to it being dark at eight in the evening, living far enough north that a few hours of dusk-dawn is what passes for night in the summer.

Got back home, turned on the TV and watched The Scorpion King. That’s not a good movie. A bit like a bloated episode of that Hercules series. You sort of know it’s bad when the dialogue is worse than the acting of the wrestler doing his first lead role…

On to the important world news: A team at the University of Munich, Germany (in this case I probably have to say: where else?), has developed a hi-tech barmat able to report to the bar when the glass needs a refill. Finally, technology in service of the the common man! And, as we all know, the common man really needs electronical aids to get more drunk.

CommentsTags: random, tech, thought, tv

September 30, 2005 at 10:15 pm · Filed under General

Wonderful morning

I woke up with this wonderful feeling, something much like having been deep-throated with a grater, as well as a suspicion that same utensil had been used to grate the generous chunk of cheese which appearantly had been melted and then poured down my throat. Phlegm so thick it bounced when I spat it out. Truly glorious, cold-season is really my favorite time of year… Nice weather for it, though. All grey and dull. It’s almost so that I wouldn’t mind a bit of snow to lighten it all up.

Well, not much more going on today, I’m on my way back to the book waiting by the bed.

CommentsTags: cold, random, thoughts

September 28, 2005 at 1:04 pm · Filed under General

Legends of Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

I thought I’d use some space in this blog to mention the books I read, new as well as old. I don’t have any real ambitions in literary criticism, but I still think it could be fun to share some thoughts, as well as keep a tally of what I’ve read and maybe enhance my reading experience by reflecting about the books.

Anyway, The Butlerian Jihad, by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson is set about ten thousand years before the events of Frank Herbert’s Dune, in a time when thinking machines are ruling over the Old Empire, including Earth. This period is the source of the technophobic aspects of the society in the original Dune novels. But humanity still clings to life, many as slaves under the machines, but some on free worlds such as Salusa Secundus. Here we find Serena Butler, the idealistic daughter of the planet’s viceroy, and Xavier Harkonnen, officer in the Salusan Armada – two people dedicated to standing up against the machines.

Read the rest of this entry »

CommentsTags: Books, Brian Herbert, Kevin J. Anderson, Legends of Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, review, sci-fi

September 27, 2005 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Books, Entertainment & Culture

Things you can’t do without?

This is one of my favorite pieces of software, it was only a short while since I discovered it, but it’s one of those interface additions that I got used to immediately:

FoxyTunes for Firefox is just one of those indespensable things you can’t do without once you’ve started using them. When looking for skins for a mediaplayer I’ve always wanted them to be compact and functional, but now I don’t think there’s any better way to save desktop space than having the controls right there on the browser.

Something you maybe can do without is Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca machines (I suggest to unblock the pop-up on the first page).

What Cloaca does is to artificially digest food and produce the closest possible analogue to human feces. I didn’t learn about this work of art until recently, and I’m not going to present any sort of thorough analysis of it here (analysises by people much better at such things than I am can be found in the essays section of the Cloaca site). I just wanted to mention it because I find the whole concept intriguing. I mean, what else can you think about a big, expensive machine whose only purpose is to produce shit? Maybe the only useful aspect of it is to be a an example of near-complete uselessness.

CommentsTags: Art, Cloaca, firefox, software

September 26, 2005 at 11:45 pm · Filed under Art, Computing & techiness, Entertainment & Culture

More about-stuff

It’s getting close to five in the morning and I’m having a little bout with insomnia, and that usually means that I’m planted in front of the screen. But there are worse things you can do than spending the night at the pc with a nice cup of coffee.

Since I can’t come up with any real content right now, I thought I’d write a bit about the site and its creation. Maybe someone finds it interesting. Overall, I enjoyed setting the site up. Firstly, I think WordPress seems like a great piece of software. It has all the functionality I can Imagine, and then some, and is really nice to manage. I havn’t had to consult the documentation much, but there seems to be a well-organized wealth of it.

The current theme is a quite modified version of Connections from www.vanillamist.com. Not that I liked it in its original form (going to add that when I get around to adding a theme choser), but I liked the layout so it was a good starting point for me. I’m not that literate when it comes to stuff like XHTML and CSS, so I focused on images and some stylesheet tweaking.

CSS is something I got determined to learn more about after working on this design, though. Last time I made a more advanced web layout the common method was to use tables, invisible gifs to make the tables behave, and occult rituals to ensure compatibility with more than one browser. That was a while ago, and good things have happened since.

CommentsTags: links, Site info, wordpress

September 26, 2005 at 3:22 am · Filed under Internet, Site info

Let there be blog

…and there was blog.

Well, that was a lame opening for a first post, wasn’t it? But it poses an interesting question; “why is there blog?” I realize that some people actually have an idea about it before they create the blog, while what I had was an unused domain on a host that I’ve mostly used for feeding Thunderbird’s junkmail filter. So, this weekend the rare combination of boredom (of which I have plenty) and initiative (usually elusive) made me decide to do something about that empty space. I guess I have to find some purposes for the site along the way.

I guess one of the first things on the agenda (after making the sidebar sections less empty) is some kind of art section. It’s mostly on a wannabe basis, but art is one of the things I enjoy dabbling with when inspiration hits. More about that later.

Other than that I guess it will the usual personal blog material: things I have thought about, books I have read, records I have listened to. We’ll see about that.

CommentsTags: Art, blog, Site info

September 26, 2005 at 1:55 am · Filed under General, Site info