OMG! The Server is Downz!!!!!11!

People have a very strange relationship to technology. They expect it to work twenty four seven, three sixty five. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It doesn’t. Sometimes technology goes tits up for no apparent reason. In some cases, it can be disastrous, like when a hospital’s life support equipment stops working. That’s bad, of course, because people on life support tend to die when this happens.

Sometimes when technology start to misbehave, you would, based on how people react, think that hundreds of people are about to die because of it. It’s like entire countries are about to get wiped off the map unless technology starts working properly again right this minute! But that’s rarely the case. It almost happened once, though, back in 1983, when Stanislav Petrov positively identifying a missile attack warning as a false alarm. Technology fucked up and the world was almost destroyed. A human saved the day.

Right now the poor people at CCP are struggling with a network issues and EVE Online is unresponsive and offline from time to time. Of course, all the morons are ganging up and screaming at the top of their lungs that CCP fix the problems or it will be hell to pay. Have a look at the forum thread about the issue if you dare. It’s interesting to observe what the interweb anonymity does to some people.

Yes, I can understand that it can be annoying that you can’t play the game right now, and I know that you paid for access. But shut the fuck up and go for a walk instead.

01 Delta 31.

Every year, one of the larger Norwegian TV stations rallies the masses to give money to a good cause. Many people volunteer to knock on people’s doors and collect money in small, sealed buckets. I’m not sure what they are called in English, but if you’ve ever seen one, you know what I’m talking about.

Today was that day of the year, but it turned out to be a really shitty day for one of the volunteers, a woman in her forties, when she was mugged by two masked men who threatened her with a knife and ran off with her bucket. The police was quickly notified about this and started sent units to the closest subway stations to look for people matching the very vague description the woman gave, a K9 unit was called in to track down the two men down from the scene of the crime.

When the woman decided to change the description of the weapons used during the robbery to a gun and a saber, two units from the armed task force were called in to assist the unarmed units. After about an hour of dicking around, the police, surprisingly enough, were able to catch the two guys. How do I know all this? I’ve once again found a site that streams police scanners live on the interweb. And there’s a lot of surprising and interesting things to hear. Continue reading "01 Delta 31."

Glow Job.

I’m still going to the gym at semi-regular intervals. Of course I’ve had no real progression in terms of getting in better shape, but at least I’m not in worse shape than when I started exercising there last year. I’m not sure if that spells “well-spent money”, though. Anyway. Since I stated going I’ve made a couple of more or less (probably mostly less) interesting observations:

I known that it’s important to breathe correctly when working out, in particular if you’re in the monkey room lifting scrap metal about. I can also understand that you are probably exhausted when you’re done working out since you were able to move a lot of heavy weights around in spite of gravity - and when you’re exhausted it feels really good to fill your lungs with air and then slowly let it all out again. But, please, for the love of all things holy, when you’ve been in the shower for ten minutes, it’s about time to stop. I’m in the shower booth next to you and it really sounds like you’re getting a blow job. I can only assume that you’re not, since we’re both in the men’s locker room and I didn’t see any women entering. Continue reading "Glow Job."

Quality TV.

A while back the gym I go to semi-regularly installed flat panel TVs so that their customers would forget how unbelievably boring it is to run on a treadmill. At the time they installed the TVs they turned off the hot water in the showers, now they have hot water again and I think that’s a good thing. Exactly why installing the TVs made it necessary to turn off the hot water, I don’t know.

I tend to do my cycling and running in front of a TV tuned to MTV. Oh, MTV, I long for the days when you were actually MTV and not the reality TV and Jamba (or Jamster for the American readers) advertising channel you’ve turned into today. For those of you too young to remember, the “M” in MTV actually stands for “Music”. Who would’ve thunk it? The channel used to air a lot of music videos, only interrupted by the odd MTV News show. Now it’s mostly reality TV, or probably in some cases, fake reality TV, with a few music videos every now and then just for the heck of it.

During my normal work out times, MTV is showing The X Effect and Dismissed. These two shows have made me lose a little of my faith in human kind. Continue reading "Quality TV."

I Should Have Been a Fanatic Christian.

Religion is a strange phenomenon. It can help people get their life back on track, completely mess up the life of others, it’s a great excuse to go to war and raise some taxes to support one or more imaginary friends - or foes if you don’t do as they say. Yesterday it struck me as strange that I had not turned into a fanatic Christian myself. Norway has an official Protestant State Church based on the Evangelical-Lutheran religion and there is no separation of state and church. This in itself would probably not mean that everyone will turn into fanatics, but it’s a good start since everyone’s raised in a Christian community.

When I was born back in the seventies*, most babies were baptised. This has since changed, and it’s not uncommon to just skip it. When I was a kid, my parents sent me to both Sunday School held by the local church, and something called the Tuesday Club at my local school. I can’t really remember that it had a very prominent Christian theme, but I suspect it did. In both elementary and lower secondary school, Christianity was the only religion they though us. This has also changed over the years, and it’s now optional - pupils, or rather their parents, can choose to have their kids take lessons that teach a little bit of every religion instead of the Christianity-only lessons of my childhood. Continue reading "I Should Have Been a Fanatic Christian."