Tuesday 13 April 1999
Pic of the day: The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
Or perhaps I'm just trying to show off as much as possible of my
new blue shirt, which I bought only for you. Isn't that sweet?
And anyway, the alternative would be to wash one of my dozens of
other $100+ shirts. Putting the stuff in the washing machine
really takes a lot of effort, you know. And then you have to
take it out too!
I don't even have time to play Tank Platoon, haven't done since around the time I last mentioned it. I experimented a little more with Daggerfall fanpics in the weekend, but had to spend time to start up the Diary Farm on Crosswinds.net. I'm sort of running the two in parallell right now, after the FTP access to Scandinavia OnLine came back. But I seriously consider to move all my web journal stuff over to Crosswinds if access times are not too bad. My experience is that there are sudden spikes in access time, while they are mostly decent. What I don't know is if those sudden slowdowns come from the Crosswinds server or from the route between Canada and Norway. If the latter, then Americans might get Crosswinds with less delay than SOL. I guess I will just have to run a Traceroute if I catch one of those delays again.
Got weekly statistics again. I suspect that the character that's been crawling through dozens and dozens of my pages is probably a bot. If I'm lucky, it could be HotBot or AltaVista's crawler. But given that its origin is said to be online.no, it's more probably either a local indexing bot (like Kvasir) or a spammer grubbing for e-mail adresses to spam. I guess I should put up random addresses like abuse@online.no or postmaster@online.no just to give those bots a sense of accomplishment...
Today, something useful actually became of the new Norwegian national airport at Gardermoen outside Oslo. Some people managed to lock in Madeleine Albright and her Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov and let them talk out about their differing opinions (and not-so-differing opinions) on Kosovo. Decent people that they turned out to be, both emerged alive. Now perhaps the nuclear ballistics won't start to fly until their respective computers malfunction on New Years Eve. *cheers*
For what it's worth, the fact that the UN security council isn't even close to an unanimous vote on the issues in Kosovo is a pretty good sign that things are not quite as obvious as they seem in our media. My best guess is that several nations feel that the massacres and ethnic cleansing there is really nothing worse than what they themselves do, and that licensing trigger-happy hi-tech nations to reduce Yugoslavia to rubble sets a bad precedent next time some overly eager CNN journalist happens to report from somewhere else where the same things go on. Because they do, and probably much worse. The Kosovar Albanians have Albania nearby with an Albanian language and Albanian culture. Where can the Tibetans go to find the same? Or the Kurds? The natives of South American rainforests?
Freedom is such a precious thing that we are willing to kill en masse for it. And yet, do we give others freedom where we ourselves rule? Should we even do it? Should we give freedom to sects who perform damnable blasphemous religious rites? Freedom to deviants who engage in disgusting sexual activities? Freedom to political opponents who preach against democracy itself? I would be surprised if all my readers, few as they are, came up with the same answer to these three questions. And I could whip up more for ten cent each.
For that matter, when was the last time I made someone feel more free after they met me than they felt before? I can't even remember.