Saturday 14 September 2002

Pic of the day: Meditating. Screenshot from Dark Age of Camelot (relax, I'm not writing about that today).

Me and meta

Sleepy day. I slept a full night's sleep, like six or seven hours, and then I slept again in the afternoon. I don't mind, this means I am wide awake as we approach midnight, as opposed to being half asleep when I type this. Of course, I cannot say whether this will be better or worse for the journal ...

Yes, the journal. I am once again breaking the fourth or fifth wall or commandment or something: In an online journal, Thou Shalt Not write about thy online journal. Oh wait, I broke that yesterday, didn't I? Anyway, I'm having some ideas. You know all the blue entries sloshing around? Games and stuff? I could make an index of them, sorted by game or something. Yeah, that would be cool for all the gamers. How about it?

And for all (both?) of those who come over just to see how I am doing, I could have a page that only mentioned the really important stuff. Wait, that would be a blank page, and thank the Light for that. The somewhat important stuff, then. Like the lightning frying my computer, stuff like that. "Month in a nutshell" or something. Crabshell, maybe. How about it?

Yeah, like I'm ever going to do any of that. Once I get ADSL (should be today, according to the mail from Telenor, but I sure didn't get any today) – once I get ADSL, I won't have to wait for slow stuff to load, and I can also play online games all day and all night. Then when am I going to update?

***

Speaking of mail, got a letter from Posten (the Norwegian state-owned snail mail company). They informed me that as of October 1, there will be a mail office in the Kiwi supermarket at Langenes, and I will henceforth get my packet and value mail there for picking up. This is considerably closer than Tangvall, where I get them now. (Not that this happens a lot, as I don't mail order much, but it does happen.) The funny thing is that a few years ago, they closed down the local post office – in the basement of that same building. Now it is back, but I assume it is outsourced to lower-paid shop workers. Anyway, back then there used to go bus fairly regularly along that road. Now, the bus usually takes the other road – through Tangvall, where I will no longer get my mail ... Nice timing, you folks! -_-

***

Back to the meta. Actually, in the case some of my readers are not online journallers, I ought to explain that “meta” is this writing about writing stuff. It's an expression used in various soft sciences, such as linguistics (meta-language is the language you use to talk about language – it describes not real objects but aspects of the language itself) and programming. Evidently some journallers write a lot of meta, and this is frowned upon by some of the more respected members of the community. At least there used to be a community, but I was thrown out of it. And not for writing meta, either. It was the mailing list software who threw me out.

I used to subscribe to the diary-l mailing list, a wonderful list for online journal writers like myself and with a great sense of community. Some of my all time favorite journal and diary writers were there. But shortly after 9/11 last year, I could no longer send mail there. I tried to de-subscribe and re-subscribe, but it would not let me re- subscribe. Mail to the list administrator was similarly blocked. This applied to all of my Norwegian mail accounts. I don't know if they did this to everyone who were not American. Probably. Norway is after all the most loyal fan who has not actually applied for US statehood. So, that was that. Fun while it lasted. I sometimes wonder what they're all up to ... I don't have the bookmarks anymore. I hope they have fun. I see Al and Gus have met again. Heh. Oh yes, in every community there are some who just can't sleep without insulting a rival, real or perceived.

And then there are some who just can't sleep without writing a journal entry each day. ^_^