Saturday 3 April 1999

Pic of the day: And the Heavens opened (ripples in reality).

I think pheromones may have a hand in it.
Yes, I'm still inquiring into the nature and causes of male horniness. I've noticed for years that when I'm away from strangers for a while, such as a week's vacation on the farm, my sex drive spins down in energy saving modus. In fact I already feel calmer now, after only 3 days of not wading in dozens of fertile females. Not that it's all that bad on normal days: It's not like I have to run for the restroom to jerk off before I lose it, or anything. Then again I'm 40 years old. People should be reaching for the Viagra at my age.

Man, 40 is a strange age to be. My brain says I'm walking into the reddening twilight of life (the picture above is pretty representative for the feeling) and then suddenly my body will say "Look, I bet you didn't think I could do this! Cool, huh?"

Got a phone call today from an old friend. She wanted me to look through some thirty pages about how midwives can encourage the natural birthing capabilities of modern women. (Here in Norway, women still give birth in the old painful way, instead of by caesarian.) I doubt I can add much to her presentation: She's fairly bright by human standards, and she's actually educated in these things as well as having years of practice as a hospital nurse. But I do appreciate the gesture.
Anyway, she wanted to fax me this stuff, and I don't have a fax at home. So I signed up with e-fax, who actually let you get faxes through the e-mail and view them or print them on your regular PC. You get your own personal fax number, mine being (781) 394-0711, and then people can fax to you at no extra cost above what it normally costs to fax to the USA. It's free for the receiver too.
The small print here being USA. Even with the heavily slashed prices of international calls lately, I reconsidered when she mentioned that she was sending 30 pages. So I found an old version of Winfax, a program that existed in shareware and pro versions. It lets you use your modem for sending and receiving fax. The shareware version came with my previous modem. I installed Winfax and it looked OK, until she started sending. The program then terminated the connection as soon as it started receiving the incoming transmission.

The solution? It turned out that she had written the whole thing in Microsoft Word, then printed it out. She was sending this from an office that had not only a fax machine, but also a PC with Internet access! So my best friend, who happened to be there, came up with the bright idea that they could send it by e-mail. And so they did.

I'm feeling less moody today, but I forgot to shop chocolate. And bottled water too. Even so, I was carrying quite a load of supplies up the steep hill towards the Chaos Node. Now that my wrist hurts after 2 days of playing, and ... well ..., stuffing my face is my remaining earthly pleasure. :)
That's two days of playing with the computer, folks. With the computer.