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.

Our elementary school teacher was a very devoted Christian. Every day was prayer and a little bit of reading from the bible. I can’t remember us singing that many tradition children’s songs, it was mostly children’s hyms. Every Christmas she would read to us about the birth of Jesus and cry of happiness. Every Easter should would read to us about the death of Jesus and cry of sadness. I think we were in the third grade when she did this for the first time, and for ten year old kids it was both scary and embarrassing. Of all the people in my elementary school class, only one later turned out to be a devoted Christian. I suspect it would have been more without all the scary (for us kids) emotions we now related to the Bible. Who would want to read from a book that made you cry?

Another thing that stopped us from judging people who are not Christians was probably science. At the same time they told us that God created Heaven and Earth and everything in six days, put Adam and Eve in the garden and told them not to eat anything from The Tree, we also learned about Darwin’s Theory Of Evolution. All this made everything very confusing, which one of these conflicting theories was the right one?

We knew that a lot of other things could be explained by science. Math, physics, biology, you name it. They were all right there in front of you, you could see how it worked on a day-to-day basis. The problem with the “God made this”-theory was that the only proof we had was our crying elementary school teacher and her book. To quote the late, great George Carlin: “They made questioners out of us” - I’m pretty sure science is the main reason why I didn’t turn into a Fanatic Christian.

Thank you, science.

*OK, that made me feel old.

The problem with over-hyped games is that they sometimes fail to live up to the hype that has been created. One obvious exception that is Grand Theft Auto IV, a game that was very anticipated and did great, even though it didn’t really bring anything new to the table. It’s basically like any of the other games in the series but with updated graphics. Spore has not received the rave reviews that EA had hoped for, perhaps because it’s not that good a game, perhaps because the hype surrounding the game was too high.

It’s time for me to find out first hand. Spore comes in two editions, a normal plastic hard case, one game DVD edition and an extraordinary Spore Galactic Edition. I’m a sucker for special edition, so that’s the edition I bought. There’s a lot of goodies in the over sized package:

• Spore Game DVD (PC/Mac compatible)
• “The Making of Spore” DVD. A behind the scenes documentary on the making of Spore.
• “How to Build a Better Being” DVD. A 50-minute evolution documentary by the National Geographic
• Channel featuring Will Wright and Spore.
• “The Art of Spore.” A 128 page hardback book featuring Spore artwork and stories from Maxis’ artists.
• Exclusive 100-page Galactic Handbook
• Exclusive Spore poster

Hours and hours of excellent entertainment! So far it looks like the general mood of the interweb is that the game is too shallow, that it doesn’t live up to the hype (there I said it again) and that the game just a series of mini games that by themselves is not really that entertaining.

Well, we’ll see. My biggest problem right now is to find space to install the game, my hard drive is full. Blast!

There’s always a risk associated with going to a live performance of any kind, at least if you’re seated in the first few rows. Go see a stand up comedian, and he’ll probably make fun of you at some point. Go see a magic show and the magician will chop you in two or teleport you out of the building. Go see a circus clown and you’ll get popcorn all over you. Thankfully the clown didn’t happen to me, since I was strategically positioned in the fourth row, just outside the danger zone.

Or so you might think, the clown with this circus defied all circus clown etiquette and suddenly picked people totally at random in the entire audience. Especially one lucky guy was very uncomfortable with being a chosen one, but he eventually decided to go with the flow. When you’re picked up by the clown you really don’t have a choice.

Why so serious? Let’s put a smile on that face…

I brought my camera with me, hoping to get a few good shots, but the lighting conditions and the constant movement made it rather hard. Circus performers can’t stay still for a second. What gives?

The plugin will only display years and days and will not take into account that 24 hours are one day. If you publish a page or a post at 23:59, it will be marked with “yesterday” at 00:00 even if it’s only a minute since you published. In some cases, the plugin will display a human readable text instead of the days count. Today is “today” and not “0 days ago”. Yesterday is, well, “yesterday”, while anything published seven days ago is posted “a week ago”. If an entry is more than a year old, the plugin will display the post date as “X year, Y days”.

If you want to use it yourself, simply follow these instructions:

1. Download here (v1.0).
2. Unzip the contents of the downloaded file to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory of your Wordpress installation.
3. Log in to your Wordpress dashboard and activate the wp_days_ago plugin that should now be visible in the list.
4. You can now insert <? wp_days_ago(); ?> anywhere in The Loop in your Wordpress theme.

The wp_days_ago plugin takes one parameter; the timezone offset between your Wordpress time zone settings and the server your Wordpress installation is running on. In my case I write everything in Central European Time, but the server is located in Sydney, Australia. That’s a -8 hour time zone offset from the server to my local time, and to get things right, I have to use -8 as the time zone offset parameter, like this: <? wp_days_ago(-8); ?>.

This plugin is also available through the Wordpress plugin directory.

But I digress, let’s get back on track. What is usability anyway? Google has a lot of suggestions, but in the context of web sites and the interweb I like this one:

The degree to which a software application or a website is easy to use with no specific training.

Short and sweet. My web site designs have always been plain and minimalistic and I like to think that it’s because of the little I know of usability that makes me embrace KISS. No, not the band, rather Keep It Simple, Stupid. Another possible reason is that I know nothing of web design whatsoever. Lately I’ve been working on somewhat subtle changes to the way links are displayed on this site. For instance, I’ve never before cared about make visited links stand out, or rather fade away. But when you think about it, they are not that important anymore because you’ve already visited whatever site they link to. If there’s a lot of links on a page, it would be interesting to be able to visually remove the links that you’ve already visited. So now, visited links will be greyed out and there will also be a little “check”-sign appended to the link if you’ve got a browser with good CSS support. Come on, click a link and give it a try. But please come back soon, because there’s more to read below.

Some internet users, in particular so-called “power users” tend to be a little paranoid about their surfing. Because of that, it’s very interesting for some people if a link will take them to a new site, or if the link is to another page on the same site. To visually show that a link points to a new site, there’s now a tiny icon appended to each external link. Unfortunately, you’ll not see it in old browsers and I was not able to tag every link in the archive easily so only links in new entries will be marked. Also, I should probably get a better icon, but it’ll do for now.

Now, with the brilliant work of the Russian iPhone Dev Team, the process of updating the firmware is a breeze, simply just click around a little in a graphical tool and the phone is updated, jailbroken and unlocked once again. Thanks to the unlock I can use the phone with any operator and the jailbrake makes it possible to install unsigned applications that are not available through Apple’s own App Store (which iPhone application sucks monkey balls, by the way).

The most popular installer on the first generation iPhone firmware was Installer. Perhaps not the most imaginative name, but you knew what it was doing. On the second generation, however, Installer has been surpassed by Cydia as the number one choice of application for managing applications not officially signed by Apple. The beta version of Installer is just a shadow of it former first generation self.

Everything that is distributed by the official Apple App Store is checked and validated by Apple, this probably to make sure that the applications are not stuffed with code to steal passwords, personal notes and whatnot. I’ve always blindly downloaded and installed all kinds of applications from Installer and Cydia, and only recently the thought of malicious code struck me.

Am I getting old and paranoid? Maybe being a bit paranoid is healthy.

The greatest photo you’ll see today. Unfortunately not by me, this beauty was captured by Sam Javanrouh. Also available on Flickr. Protected by a Creative Commons license.

Still it’s important to prepare for the new, digital world and find a replacement for my old Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, the new digital system will be closed, meaning that it will not possible to buy a digital tuner and a conditional access card reader and just continue to use the Media Center; I have to use the provided set top box. I can probably live with that, considering I don’t really watch much TV anyway these days and two of the channels I watch the most won’t be available on the new setup, at least not initially. I’ve got most of my music on the Media Center box, tough, and I’d like to be able to play music in the living room. But I don’t want to keep the Media Center just to play music, it’s a huge box and because it’s running Vista the startup time is too long when all I want to do is to jump around to a couple of tunes.

So yesterday I started looking for a home jukebox of sorts. As mentioned, startup time is important. It must be possible to control it with a remote control, a TV connection with a nice GUI would be nice and maybe even a small web server so I can control the system from anywhere in the world. It’s nice to know that I can play Rage Against in my living room when I’m in China or some god forsaken part of the world. I’ve already got VBOX, a small Debian server running behind the TV 24/7. It’s got a sound card installed and it should, at least in theory, be possible to control everything with a remote control, connect it to the TV and install playback software with a web interface. The problem with all this is that it’ll most likely result in a lot of dicking around because it’s working and the days when I could play around with things for days to get it to work are over it seems. From what I read, there’s also a challenge with the M4A format and all the music I’ve bought through iTunes are in that format.

So the next option then is a pre-built system and there are a lot of good options available, like the wireless sound systems from Logitech and Sonos. Probably great stuff, but very, very expensive and I really don’t need the wireless features as I can easily hear the living room speaker anywhere in the apartment. These systems also have problems with the Fair Play DRM on some of my iTunes music. I could of course just download MP3 versions of the songs and use them on the jukebox, but the hassle, the hassle…

Then, after an hour of so of browsing and reading, I finally realized how I could solve all this:

By connecting my iPod to the living room amplifier, I’ve got a fully functioning home jukebox right there. Retail price for the cable? $4.99. I even think I’ve got one laying around somewhere already. If I really hog wild and use an additional $49 on an Apple Universal Dock, I’ll get a remote I can use as well.

Problem solved.

To be honest, it’s wearing me out a bit, and I wish I could handle it better mentally.  I should be able to relax, the monitoring system will inform me the second something is wrong with a myriad of text messages, e-mails and whatnot, so there is no need to be this proactive.

Ah, there you go, had to check the monitoring system again. And nothing was wrong this time either. So I had to check it again. Which I did now. Nothing amiss. Still nothing.

As you might have noticed, I used the last day of my vacation to re-design the site once again. The last design, which I downloaded from some Wordpress theme site, lasted for about 9 days before I got dead tired of it. The new design I almost created myself, you can probably see that from the extreme simplicity. I lack the creative skills to create a proper Web 2.0 design, so I’m probably stuck with pre-Web 1.0 for ever. Not that it matters really. So far I feel the design is good enough. There is, however, room for improvement, like on the navigation side.

Anyway.

Here’s another pic from the thunderstorm that hit Oslo a few weeks back. Not as dramatic as the previous one, but still. Enjoy.