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Yeah, it’s the last day of the year, so I guess it’s about time to sum it up. I wrote about 200 entries last year, not that much considering the fact that the year had a lot more than 200 days, but I like to pretend I do have a live outside of the internet. I’ve gone through the archives and it looks like 2004 was the year I (in no particular order)

• Started the 52 Albums or Burn-project, inspired by Jason Kottke‘s 52 magazines or bust-project. Unfortunately, I gave up after 3 albums. Let’s hope Jason had more luck with his magazine reading.
• Bought a lot of computer books I didn’t read.
• Started collecting South Park, The Simpsons and Futurama episodes.
• Discovered yet another favourite band; Chronic Future.
• Re-discovered Porcupine Tree.
• Got dumped by Stine.
• Dated some girls without much success.
• Had to take an IQ-test on a job interview, but didn’t get the job.
• Got kicked out of my apartment.
• Moved into a new apartment with five – but surprisingly sane – people.
• Got a lot of hits from people looking for Janet Jackson’s nipple.
• Listened to radio.wazee a lot.
• Started my own firm with Ola and Espen.
• Finally got myself an Xbox.
• Cried three times.
• Spent a lot of time in Trondheim.
• Moved the site to Segment Publishing because my other host sucked monkey balls.
• Worked a lot.
• Went to London three times. Or maybe it was more, I really can’t remember.
• Bought a new mobile phone.
• Strained my left ankle really, really bad.
• Got a lot of hits from people searching for “hot chicks” on Yahoo! image search.
• Starting playing RISK – the board game, that is.
• Bought a Canon EOS 300D.
• Ate a lot of pizza.
• Tried to subscribe to Wired, but didn’t succeed.
• Had my first real lap dance. But I wasn’t the one paying for it. It wasn’t exactly that much fun.
• Had sex just to have sex. That wasn’t exactly that much fun, either.
• Bought a new bike because my old one got messed up real bad. Also got a bicycle helmet that I actually use.
• Started jogging and exercising semi-regularly again.
• Made a few mix tapes for people who really didn’t like them. Kids today…
• Got a picture published in a magazine.
• Had a severe hard drive crash and lost all my data, more or less.
• Went less to the movies than I really wanted.
• Thought I was going to die.

All in all, I guess the year wasn’t that bad, I don’t live in Baghdad, for instance. Although I don’t feel I really achieved anything noteworthy. I’m looking forward to 2005 with the hope that it’ll be even better.

A happy new year to you, too!

Yesterday I almost bought a Creative Zen Touch from an online store – three times. Today I almost walked to the downtown Apple Store and bought an iPod – twice. But all five times, I had this nagging thought in the back of my head: “Do I really need a new MP3 player?”

The answer is no, I really don’t. I’ve got my Jens of Sweden MP-110, it can hold about three albums and plays for hour after hour, just what I need when I’m walking around downtown or I’m taking a jog. I wouldn’t jog with the Zen or the iPod anyway, they are too large for that. Having all my music on the player could be a good thing when I’m going on long trips, like I used to do when I was dating the ex-girlfriend, but now I’m not travelling that much anymore.

So I guess I’m probably not using that much money on a player yet. I will the day I get a lot of dough* between my hands. Or the day someone is able to convince me that having a player like the Zen or the iPod is a fucking great idea.

Anyone?

* I’m using cool words, please like me.

You’ve probably heard about the earthquake, the tsunami that followed and the death and destruction it left behind. So far, I don’t think I really knew anyone that got killed or injured, there is one very remote connection, but no one I really knew.

BBC‘s correspondent Rachel Harvey reports from Medan, Indonesia at 1045 GMT today:

There’s a whole area on the south west coast of Aceh, closest to the epicentre of the earthquake, where there’s been no contact at all. Officials are increasingly concerned about the situation there. It’s thought there were a million people living in that area.

No contact at all? A million people? Let’s redefine “bad news”, everyone…

…you’re in your home town when you see this…

I’ve just discovered a bug in Windows XP. So far I’ve been able to reproduce it on three Windows XP computers with SP2 installed. If you want to have some fun, you can try, too, but keep in mind that this will crash your computer – and it could be that it’ll also damage your hard drive because it starts to make some rather strange loading sounds – so be sure that you save all your work and make backups of all your important data before doing this.

DISCLAIMER: You do this at your own risk! I’m not prepared to meet you in court because you fucked up everything when trying the following:

1. Open Task Manager (right-click on the taskbar and select Task Manager from the pop-up menu, or press CTRL+ALT+DEL).
2. Once it’s open, hit F1 and ESC at exactly the same time. Actually, you might want to try to press F1 a nanosecond second before you press ESC.
3. If you manage to get Task Manager to load the Help screen when it’s closing, your hard drive will start to work intensely and Task Manager will take 100% of your CPU, bringing your computer to a very effective halt. It can be brought back to life by restarting the box, or, if you’re lucky, you might be able to open a new Task Manager and close the old one from there.

I discovered this because I spend most of the day hitting random key combinations on my keyboard.

And remember – you heard it first here at www.vegard.net.