Tuesday 4 April 2000

Pic of the day: Virtual Magnus.
Seen any signs of suspicious mutant activity in your neighborhood? Perhaps someone at your workplace is mysteriously nearby whenever the copier breaks down? Are you feeling faint or the temperature increases suddenly when the new neighbor walks past? Don't hesitate, do your duty as a citizen and report it at the Mutant Watch web site!

You have probably seen me talk about the "normals" now and again, and wonder if I mean the same by it as you would. Well, I'll tell you who the normals are. (No, it's not quite the same as "muggles", though there are some similarities.) The normals are the people who assure that the Norwegian newspaper VG remains the no.1 tabloid here. For the last few days their main theme (as judged from the front page) has been the breasts of a young Norwegian pop star named Lene something. The breasts have recently increased in size, and studies have been conducted as to the reason. Famous people have been enlisted to comment; and wonder of wonders, they seem to have done so. (Or VG has made it all up, though I don't think they could afford the legal costs.) Today as I bought my milk, I noticed that they had an interview with the pop star in question, again judging from the front page.

Hello? If some publication spent days on end writing about my breasts, I'd make sure to not have anything to do with them for a few decades. Makes you wonder exactly how much of this was planned from day one, and who paid who to do what.

One thing is for certain, the normals have paid quite well to read about someone's breasts who they are not in a lifetime likely to have any close contact with. And all this happens in one of the most literate countries on the planet. (Iceland beats us soundly, though.) It's events like this that makes me waver in my indifference about not having shared my superior genes with a world that desperately needs them. It would be hard not to make an improvement to the gene pool, it seems.

Then again, I managed to run out of money a week before payday. Well, not quite. But I was at the optics shop and had my eyesight tested for the new glasses. My eyesight is surprisingly stable, it seems. But anyway, they were so happy to tell me that they would be able to have my new glasses ready for Friday, rather than a week later. I was quite a bit less excited, since I don't have the money before next Wednesday. I should be able to get food and chocolate, despite this month's rent hike. But not a big sudden thing like this. I'm not going to sell my shares for this. Better try to evade the shop for a few days.

Of course, this would not have been a problem if I had not bought the darned stereo, and the monitor. I can hardly believe it. Sometimes I feel almost like a normal.

Then again ... Yesterday I got a call from a friend who was trying to open a hotmail account. They had come to the main Hotmail page, and had figured out a username and a password which they wrote in the designated areas. But the machine just brushed them off and said that it was wrong. We pondered for a while, and then I asked if they had actually registered the new account. No, that was what they were trying to do. I explained where to click to enter into the register new account part of the site, where you read legalese and tell too much about yourself. And everybody was happy, until today when an e-mail did not arrive that someone thought they had sent. I got a phone call somewhere around 22:30 (10:30PM) and had to send them a test mail to check if the Hotmail account worked. I haven't heard anything yet (ca 23:45) so I expect it worked.

I guess the Internet is simply mysterious even to bright young people who don't live there. Sometimes it seems that I do. It is almost too bad that Raymond Kurzweil's ideas about uploading the mind is just science fiction (though he himself insists otherwise). While I really like to have a body, I guess being a netbot would not be all that bad either. It's not like most of you would notice any difference.

Also yesterday I visited the website of a local computer dealer, who also assemble their own computers. We bought one at work, it was quite cheap for that much computer. I used it a lot when my own was under repair. Anyway, I wanted to know if they sold printer toner cartridges. They had a really advanced homepage, written entirely in Flash, with only the bare bones of HTML to launch it. The text moved across the screen, growing as it went. Cute. The substance was close to nothing. OK, there were mentioned four different machines they sold. But not what other brands they sold, or printers, not to mention laser toner. And they were rather vague on other details too. Would it not have been better to use plain, simple HTML and list the things they could do for their customers? I assume that they put it up for the customers, not to get a job as web page designer.

This applies to a few online journals too. I can understand that it is fun to use the possibilities in the new medium. And just because my artistic streak does not lean that way, I accept that others are different. But occasionally I have this feeling that I'm not very welcome unless I'm there to hire an overqualified web designer. In those cases, I leave.

But I guess I too am gradually drifting with the current. Today I downloaded a program called HTML Pad that shows the HTML tags in other colors while I edit the text. I'm trying it out right now. So far I am not impressed, but then again it was free. I guess if I wrote a lot of code relative to text, it would be more useful at once.

But I learned to make web pages from a beginner's course in a magazine for teen girls and young women, aimed seemingly at the "eek, a computer" type of reader. And largely I have stayed that way. I added tables after a year or so when I saw how my pages looked on large monitors. But that's about it.

But at least there is content, dubious as it might be. Read till you puke, you are welcome to it. :)