Category Archives: slice of life

Quick note

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A human life moves like waves, sometimes it is higher and sometimes lower. Mine is a bit lower than recently now, although I am probably still very happy by human standards.

I don’t have the energy to finish my entries with such a quality as they deserve, though.  Second half of last week and Monday I went to work much earlier than usual. Between the long workdays and not getting enough sleep, I start getting infections here and there:  Eyes, gums, neck.  I still have not adjusted to eating small enough dinner to go to bed early without getting acid reflux.  I am getting closer though.

That’s it, basically. I have a number of entries that I feel could be improved on before posting.  Whether I actually do that or come up with something else if I get back to my normal energy level, remains to be seen.  There is hardly a day that I don’t find something new that should be said.  Perhaps it is a kind of hubris to want to say it well.  One day I will be gone, and I have no idea which day that is.  Before that I ought to say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.

But for now, I need sleep, so I can serve the world at work again.

Technobabble day!

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To the left, the repaired computer. To the right, the one I have used since December 2.  In the foreground, the broken power supply unit.

Today, dear reader, I want to babble about computers and software.  It will get geeky. You are not obliged to read if it makes your eyes go round and round.  The good news is that my best computer is back up and running and I can talk to it. The rest is optional.

So let us start with the high point of the day.  On December 2 this winter, my best computer, Terra the Quad-Core, crashed overnight. I decided then and there to not try to send it for repairs.  Not only does it hold private stuff, but there is also the point that it is really heavy.  I literally almost killed myself getting it home, except an old friend suddenly showed up like an angel and drove me and it most of the way.   The post office at Holum is at least three times as far away from home.  Besides, I am not sure if it was still under warranty after 2 years and 2 weeks. If not, it could easily become expensive.  Even if it was, the cost of freight would go a long way towards just buying a new power supply and replace it myself.

But I did not actually do that until just recently.  I was busy with moving, but mostly I had opened it and looked at the many wires crisscrossing and  connecting here and there.  Could I recreate that without an actual job training in computer repair?  I was not at all sure.

But then one day I got a mail from Multicom, the company that sold it to me. Although this is a machine with Windows (one of the last desktops with Windows XP, intentionally since Vista was much slower and had other problems while new) … As I said, although this was a Windows machine, my loyalty to Multicom is partly because they habitually sell computers without operating system, so you can install Linux on them for free.  This is rare here in Norway, which is a very Windows-dominated country.  People here have lots of money, so free software is not as popular as elsewhere.  I want to support companies that break with the Microsoft-Apple duopoly.  So I subscribe to their customer mail happily.  This time they had a 650 W power supply on sale.

“Even if it should turn out not to be the power supply” I said to myself, “I still have the Oblivion computer lacking nothing but a strong power supply to come alive with one of my 3 precious MS Office licenses and one of my 5 precious iTunes licenses, plus some data I had added since the last backup. So it would not be all in vain.”

It was the power supply.  I fetched it yesterday at the Joker convenience store, which happens to also be the post office, although they hide it well.  They even don’t have a sign with their name (Holum Nærkjøp) which the post office uses when sending the collect slip.  I actually spent some time looking for that other nonexistent shop.  But eventually I asked them and got my package.  In addition to the power supply, I had bought a fast 16 GB Transcend JetFlash 600 memory stick. This dual-channel stick is quite a bit faster than the industry standard, yet works plug & play in any USB 2.0 connector. Whee!

Actually, I took that first.  I had used a cheap, slower 2 GB USB memory key and converted it to a startup unit for Ubuntu Linux.  When I boot from that, it acts like the install CD, except it also has some extra storage to save settings and a few extra programs like the Opera web browser. Unfortunately, it does not have enough memory to install language files, because once I did, it decided on its own to unpack OpenOffice in pretty much every western language and perhaps some more.  I did this several times over the past week, each time crashing the key to the point where it had to be formatted anew.

This time I used the small key to install Linux on the big, fast key.  It worked quite fine, although of course it took some time.  I can now use this install of Linux on any computer that lets me boot off a USB key.  The one I had in mind however was the cheap little Acer Aspire One that I bought last year (at which point I broke a tooth).  This little thing comes with its own excessively user friendly version of Linux, but it is quite restricted compared to Ubuntu. Besides, I am used to Ubuntu. There has been rapid progress in Solid State Disks since then, but the Aspire One I got has actually noticeably less disk space than the USB key!

After installing and checking out, and downloading a couple favorite programs, I decided to upgrade the Transcend key to Ubuntu 10.04 (nickname “Lucid Lynx”) which is supposed to come out this April.  I was mildly surprised to see that it was still in Alpha 2, less than two months before release.  10.04 is a Long Term Support version, and these tend to have less focus on innovation and more on stability. I wonder how stable they can get it if they aren’t even ready for beta by now.  We’ll see, they usually make it somehow.

The upgrade was actually much slower than the initial install.  It told me it would take 8-9 hours.  I eventually left it on overnight, but it stopped with a question some 7 hours into the process, so it was still not finished this morning.  It did finish, however.

I was not pleased. They had for some reason decided to change the buttons at the top right of each window, the ones you use to minimize, maximize or close the window. These were moved to the top LEFT corner, and minimize and maximize were swapped around, while close was still the rightmost of the three, not the cornermost. They also had made them into small circles instead of squares, although this can be changed simply by switching to one of the other built-in themes, or download a new.  I spent probably a quarter of an hour before I found that I had to edit it with the gconf-editor. To the best of my knowledge that is not in the start menus, so I typed its name in a terminal window. Actually I first ran it as sudo, which meant the settings only applied to programs opened as superuser, not very useful.  Anyway I eventually got it right, opening ->apps ->metacity ->general ->button_layout and changing the line there to swap around minimize and maximize and move the colon to the front.  The colon symbolizes the divide between the left and right top corners, so any buttons placed before the colon appear on the left, anything after the colon appears to the right. Yes, if you are insane you can have buttons on both sides, but even Mac does not have that. I think.

That was that really, but seriously? You don’t kill holy cows, you milk them.  This placement has been industry standard for 30 years or so.  I am pretty sure it was in the top right corner on GEM, an operating system for home gaming machines back when the z80 processor was the way of the future and PacMan was state of the art video gaming.  I would not mind if they asked during setup where I wanted my buttons to be, or if it was an easy-to-find setting in the menus.  I might even have ignored it if it only showed up on new installations and did not mess with existing machines that were just being upgraded.  But this level of presumption is what you would expect from Microsoft or Apple, except they probably don’t have a gconf-editor.  But seriously, how many of you even knew this editor existed before today?

Harmony is restored though.  I can’t say I notice much other change. The OS supposedly starts faster now, but how often do you start your computer from zero when you have a stable operating system that does not reboot itself because you installed a new program or worse, because it installed a new program without asking you first?

Now, getting an entire computer back from the dead is something you really notice.

It was a bit unnerving to disconnect the old wires and cables and trying to remember which went where and finding them on the new power supply.  But amazingly it worked at the first try. And I only got two screws left over. ^_^ I also emptied the machine of a lot of dust…

I am quite joyful to have my best machine back. Not only does it have 4 processor cores instead of Trine’s 3, but each core is also faster. And it has Windows XP instead of the slower Vista.  (I could buy Windows 7 for the Vista machine, but I refuse to pay an extra Microsoft tax to reward them for making a botched operating system in the first place.)  It also happens to have the third and last MS Office license, not that I used it much, and the fourth iTunes. More importantly, it has DRAGON NATURALLYSPEAKING.

You have not forgotten Dragon NaturallySpeaking, have you? The speech recognition program that actually delivers. You may remember Microsoft being ridiculed when they tried to demonstrate the speech recognition in Vista and the computer wrote garbage all over the screen in front of everyone. I hear the speech recognition in Windows 7 is better, but at the moment Nuance has the only reliable speech recognition for personal computers. Yes it costs extra, but it actually works. It is on average as reliable as speaking to a college educated human. I say “on average” because they can both make mistakes, only the mistakes are different when the computer makes them. The computer is very good at listening, but very bad at understanding. It does not make typos unless you manually override it, but it may use words that sound similar and yet make no sense. Or, more commonly, make a different kind of sense.

The previous paragraph was dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking and me correcting a few hours. This paragraph is dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking but without error correction at all. As you can see, it is possible to dictate several sentences before it goes astray. Of course, I did not actually correct hours as in 60 minutes, but adults as I missed takes. Frequently when you press the “spell that” button, the current text we come up as an alternative. The problem is a spot in the mistakes in the 1st Pl.

Anyway, this is just what the doctor ordered. I mean that literally. When I visited my doctor about not being able to speak more than a few hundred words a day, he recommended that I try saying something every day. Perhaps, he reasoned, I may be able to train my voice back up without surgery, if (as was his theory) my vocal cords have simply fallen into disuse over the years. (I seriously doubt any one in my birth family will agree with his theory, or anyone who went to school with me. Then again, they do not know the Scriptures nor God’s power…)

OK, I better stop dictating.  I have speaking to do tomorrow at work, Light allowing.   And this should be enough technobabble for anyone I can think of that may read my journal. And then some.

Tie-cutting day

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Faithful in life, inseparable in death. *sniff* HP-IL units, ca 1980-2010.

I am not cutting my neckties into tiny pieces, though that might be fun to try if I ever get drunk enough, unlikely as that may be. I am talking about my ties to the past. That seems to be a lot more common in my life lately, and this morning it started again. I took my two last HP-IL units in a plastic bag and carried them with me to the city, there to deliver them at the electric shop.

In Norway (and other Protestant countries, I believe) shops that sell electric products are ordered by law to accept such products for recycling, regardless of whether they have ever sold that particular brand. This came in handy, because I doubt I can find any shop today that remembers to have sold peripherals using the Hewlett-Packard Interface Loop. I am pretty sure they were phased out around the mid 1980es when the personal computer completely changed the marketplace.

I have a long history with Hewlett-Packard. I bought one of the HP-41C programmable calculators when I was just barely grown up. A HP-41 had been used on board the Apollo spacecraft, I believe it was. It was around that time at least. My model was slightly later, but the same excellent quality (and somewhat steep price). These things were built to last for a lifetime. I don’t know whether mine does, as I eventually sold it. Instead I bought a HP-71B alphanumeric calculator. It had a child-sized qwerty keyboard built in, and a 1-line long alphanumeric display. It came with an extremely advanced version of BASIC built in, and you could buy various other modules. I bought a Forth & Assembler module, and had years of fun programming extremely efficient code that I ran on it. I made my own word processor in a hybrid of Forth and assembler, and it generally worked as fast as I could type. True, I ran ahead of it for a short while, but it caught up with me when I had to think, which I did even then.

A word processor is not very useful without storage and printer, and this is where the HP-IL comes in. I had bought a HP-IL module for the 71B, and it came with a small cable. The portable, rechargeable mini-tape drive also came with such a cable. I connected one cable from the HP71B to the tape drive, and the other back the other way. I could then save my writings to tape. (As well as the programs I wrote, of course.) When I wanted to print, I could connect the second cable from the tape station to the mini-printer instead, and its cable to the 71B again. As long as there was a closed loop, the units were all connected and could communicate. I later got a full-size inkjet printer and even a monochrome monitor. You could have up to 30 units, not that I ever had that many. After a while they invented a way to use indirect addressing, so you could have 30×30 units. I doubt this was in much use, for as mentioned, the winds of change came shortly after and ended this beautiful (if somewhat expensive) little world.

I have not had the heart to throw away these until now. By rights they deserved to end in a museum, that is how I felt. But I realize that I am never going to make a museum. So, sad as it may be, it was their time.

***

The other tie to be cut today was to Nodeland, where I lived for exactly 4 years. Until one month ago, this was my home. Now I am never going to see it again.

You know, this gave me a flashback to the Prince of Egypt animated movie where Moses stands sadly among the falling chunks of ice and fire and sings:
This was my home
All this pain and devastation
How it tortures me inside
All the innocent who suffer
From your stubbornness and pride…

Hopefully it isn’t quite that bad. Apart from that carpet, I think the place should be OK with a little more washing, but I won’t be the one doing that. I’m just paying, and hopefully it will be a few years till next time. Plus, next time I will have less stuff. You hear me? LESS STUFF.

In Buddhism, “attachment” is the big bad wolf that will eat you so you never reach Nirvana. I am starting to see why. If it is this hard to say goodbye to small thing, how will it feel to say goodbye to your world, your body, your family and friends, the beating of your heart? But to the best of my knowledge, that is not on the menu for today. I sincerely hope not. I rather like the approach outlined in one of the older songs among Smith’s Friends: “You make me humble by the small things.”

Speaking of which!!

I overslept my bus stop today. That is a first. Ironically, it may be tied to the previous item, about the old home. Even there, I used to fall asleep on the bus home, but wake up just before we came to my stop. I think I overslept once or twice, but the bus did just go on a loop so I could jump off when it came back down from the hill. But after I moved, I would also fall asleep, but wake up after the number of minutes that had previously taken me home.

Not anymore. I woke up and had no idea how far we had come. I thought at first that we were still not there, but I did not quite recognize how far we were come. Then I saw a sign I remembered from when I moved, when we drove the other way (because the road was better). And I looked at the clock and realized that we had passed my stop. For a short time I considered continuing to Mandal, the nearest large town, and wait for the bus back. But that would be a couple hours wait. Instead, I hopped off at the next stop. Somewhat to my surprise, it still took me just over an hour to walk home, and I walked pretty briskly. Those buses sure drive fast out in the countryside!

Humble by small things, indeed. At least I have not had a donkey speak to me, yet. At least not in a literal sense. But if I need the advice of an ass to cut my old useless ties, so be it.

A day without blizzard

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The Batman does not shop here.  (The Mothman, on the other hand…)

When I say “A day without blizzard”, I am not referring to a certain computer game publisher, for I have not played any of their games in… a couple years?  Possibly a little more.  No, I am referring to the somewhat sensational fact that there was not icy wind and whirling snow today. It was overcast and a couple degrees above freezing. It actually tipped above freezing yesterday sometime.  I think this is the whole full day of so mild weather here since the Copenhagen climate summit. Certainly since I moved here, but that is barely a month ago. No, it has been icy cold much, much longer than that, since sometime in December at least.

Speaking of the moving, and it being a month ago, my old landlord called on Thursday and expressed very vague worries.  This is a trait of the family, or at least shared by his mother and grandmother, that they tend to be extremely polite to the point of just barely hinting at anything at all, but evidently he is worried about his house somehow.  That is not without reason, because his family got another house soundly trashed by an immigrant family before they rented out this. If he hasn’t been and looked at it, he cannot know what state it is in. On the other hand, I don’t see what keeps him from going there, seeing how I had emptied my part of it when last we met (when he came with the key to the basement door so we could get my washing machine out). Given that it was empty then, he is well aware that I don’t live there, I would think, so there is no reason to be uncertain about whether or not I should have paid rent for this month.  I did politely inform him that I am still paying the electricity.

To be honest, I thought this was a pretty good arrangement for all involved.  I have been kind of busy moving in here (and keeping the place from freezing over or getting lost in the snow) so I have only rough-washed the old place and not yet hired the cleaning company to complete the job. (Actually I e-mailed them a bit over a week ago, but I guess they don’t read mail, at least not at the mail address listed on their web site.)  It was my distinct impression that my landlord was not going to rent the place out again, but would clear the whole house out and sell it.  Now, clearing the basement and loft and the stuff they had standing in “my” part of the house is itself a labor of Hercules and will likely take them months.  So I rather felt I was doing them a favor by paying the utility bill for their house until such a time that I could get it sparkling clean.

In any case, the landlord seems eager to get the whole thing over with, for some reason. Perhaps he has reconsidered and wants to rent it out again?  Or perhaps that was the plan all along but he was too polite to say so?  I guess I can find out in a couple months if I really am that curious. As it is, however, I went over today and did some more washing of the bathroom and picked up some things that were left behind during the two days of moving. Light willing I may go there again on Monday late in the afternoon and try to get the vacuum cleaner with me home on the bus. It is not really too large for that, although it will look slightly humiliating to drag it around like that.

On Tuesday, I promised the landlord, I will leave work a bit early so we can look at the place together.  He really wanted to do that on March 1, but I have an important thing to do at work that day which won’t be finished early.

He is a nice guy and I have only had good things to say about him, but honestly? If I could get a stranger to pay my utility bills on the coldest winter in decades, I should have been grateful, not suspicious. Just saying.  It is not like I’m skipping the bill or anything.  His grandmother knows where I live, after all.  (She has a daughter not far from here, and it is a very transparent little place. There are probably already all kinds of rumors about me. ^_*)

But today was a day without blizzard and very little sleet.  I came home with a bucked (which I had used in the old house) filled with canned food. Then I walked to the local grocer, pictured above.  Yes, it is really called “Joker”, but in Norwegian this means “wildcard”, not Batman’s arch-nemesis and the incarnation of postmodernism. It has a surprisingly broad selection for a rural shop, but relatively few of each thing.  I bought three of the four (or was that five?) packets of  really cheap noodles.  Well, really cheap by Norwegian standards, about half the price of others. They taste much the same to me, and each packet has five smaller packets in it, each of them just about the right size for a full meal for me.   One of these keeps me fed pretty much all evening, for pocket change.

On the other hand, there’s half an hour of brisk walk each way, so there goes some of the calories before I even get home to cook them.  Not having a car certainly pays off in the form of exercise. Of course, you could still walk even if you had a car, but the flesh is weak.  My flesh would definitely have been weaker, not to mention softer and more plentiful, if I had a car.

The fields were white, pretty much everything was except the road and some of the houses, when I walked home with my bag filled with food.  (I also bought some yogurt and juice so I had a full bag.) But I enjoyed the mild weather, amused to think that just above freezing actually feels mild to me now.  In fall, I would probably have been freezing.  But for now, a day without blizzard is a blessing.  I am sure it will be hot enough come summer.  May we all be there to whine about it. ^_^

From Jennicam to Happy Science

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“You never thought angels wore business suits,” says Edison in the anime “The Laws of Eternity”. Well, I am starting to see lots of angels around, even if some of them may be angels only for me.

Stephen Jay Gould is famous for his claim that if we could rewind evolution and run it again, we would end up with a completely different biosphere, and certainly not with anything resembling humans. I have to admit that my life looks a lot like that too. But strangely, both evolution and I somehow moved in the right direction, as if subtly influenced by some Great Attractor far beyond our sight. Today I will regale you with the tale of how I ended up with half a bookshelf full of Ryuho Okawa’s books. It is almost as unlikely as life itself!

I know exactly where my reality branched off from what should normally have happened. It was the day I bought, on a whim, an issue of the Norwegian magazine Komputer. It was a magazine for owners of home computers, and this was back when the World Wide Web was fairly new here in Norway. One of the fascinating sights on this new medium was Jennicam. Jenni was a young American woman – a student back when she started this – who lived her life on webcam. She had cameras in both the living room and the bedroom, taking one picture a minute throughout the day and night. People watched her spend her days in front of the computer, and nights sleeping.

I was one of the curious people who checked out her web site after reading about it in Komputer. Naturally I would be curious about what women actually do, strange and unfamiliar beings that they are. Unlike some of her viewers for sure, my curiosity was not primarily sexual, although I did collect a few nice, small (by today’s standard) pictures of her butt, usually in jeans. Pretty tame, I guess. My “buttpic of the month” was a homage to her for getting me started down the path to my own journal.

It was another girl of the same sort, Debra of Soyaratcam (New Zealand) who actually showed me how to do it. She was also living a pretty tame life on the web in the same style, but then her software broke down. For many days, she could not show the automatic pictures of her life. So she wrote a few lines and had a typical picture from the day on top. I pretty much adopted her format, down to the size of the picture, in my original JPG diary. (I think I even took that phrase from her. I searched the Web but found no one else who had it, so for months I thought I was the only one in the world after she went back to her webcam and eventually disappeared.)

After some months, I happened upon another like me. I found that they did not call their diaries diary but “journal”. Searching on this revealed a small community of several hundred people. This was before the age of the blog, so that was pretty much the world population of online diaries at the time. We were pioneers. But more pioneer than I was Al Schroeder, author of the journal Nova Notes. You will find numerous references to this in my early archives. We were strikingly similar in temperament and outlook, despite living on different continent, and despite him being married to a fellow geek and having three sons, two of which were autists. OK, that may be a similarity rather than a difference: It seems now that autism, or at least the main form of it, comes from geeks having children with each others. The same genes that make people smart and able to concentrate, in double dose causes them to become hypersensitive and apt to disappear into their own world.

I counted Schroeder as a friend for several years, and I guess I still do, but he eventually stopped writing his journal to concentrate on his online comics. Before he got that far, however, he had already established contact with other web comic artists, and started to review some of them. One of the first was Sinfest, which despite its name is not about a lot of sin but a kind of philosophical comic with stereotypical people and frequent appearances by God, angels and the Devil. There is a surprising dignity to it, for a humorous comic. I never saw any malice in it, even as it relentlessly revealed human folly in its many forms. If it had not been that good, Schroeder would not have recommended it, and neither would I have continued looking at other online comics.

But I did. I started reading lots of them for a while. Over time, it became common to have forums where readers could write about their impressions, and this often turned into general discussions about life, the universe and everything. Many of the comic creators were college students, and so were many of their readers. Intelligent, curious and often lonely, they were interesting people to get to know. I made many of my online friends this way. And especially from the Acid Reflux forum. Despite its name, it was not about the illness (which I also have to some degree) but a comic that seemed to attract particularly interesting readers. It also saw two of those readers marry each other, and then two more. But unfortunately the writer and the artists did not. So it came to an end, but not before putting me on the next path.

One of my friends there was very enthusiastic about something called “anime”. It turned out to be Japanese cartoon movies. Both these and comic books are even more popular in Japan than here, perhaps because their books are written in an extremely hard to read script, with a mix of sound signs and concept signs. In any case, this girl was in love with these cartoons. She also fell in love with one of the guys on the forum – not me, luckily for them both – and they are still married. But I had found a new interest. While I read very few online comics anymore (mostly those by Al Schroeder, actually), I watch anime fairly regularly.

Japanese culture certainly is fascinating. It is different but still kind of understandable. It is also very varied. Here in Scandinavia at least, Japanese manga (comics) and anime (cartoon movies) are mostly famous for sexually explicit content. The line between pornography and art goes quite a bit further to the sexy side in Japan, it seems. It is perfectly normal for non-religious anime to have random sightings of girls’ panties, for instance. In all fairness, Japanese school uniform skirts really are that short, so in school buildings with stairs it may well happen much the same way in real life. I am not sure why they do this. Then again, it is a foreign country.

I don’t watch anime for that purpose. (That would be crossing the river for water, seeing how I live in Scandinavia, but I also try to live with some degree of self-control when it comes to such things, despite being single.) My favorite are humorous slice of life movies. Luckily there are many of those too.

I was expecting something like that when a fellow anime fan shared a copy of the anime The Laws of Eternity last year. It seemed to be an interesting adventure by a bunch of friends who more or less by accident end up in the spirit world. Well, it is that, but mainly it is a way to visualize the teachings of the religious organization Happy Science (Kofuku no Kagaku, literally “Science of Happiness”). This particular movie was about the spirit world, which can be seen as both the afterlife and our state of mind while we are alive. The attitudes of the various heavens or hells are actually found in people alive in this world, and I could recognize them easily.

This was how I bumped into Happy Science, and I was surprised by the effect of the movie. I watched it repeatedly, sometimes twice in the same day, something I almost never do. I felt that watching it made it easier to live the way I wanted to in my daily life. I have tried to buy this and other movies from the organization, but this seems to be hard to do for an individual. They probably have their reasons for that, though I don’t know what.

Google Books lets you read a few scattered pages of a book online if the publisher allows this. That is the case with the English translations of the Happy Science books. By reading those few pages, I realized that these books were even more inspiring than the movie. They were more practical and down to earth, an everyday wisdom that added to the understanding I had gained through my own Christianity. Seeing the same things from a different perspective gave me a sense of depth that I had lacked before, or at least had less of.

I am still not sure what to say about this, or what will happen with my life from here on out. But this came into my life just when I was finally ready to understand it. If not for idly buying that magazine that day, it is quite unlikely that I would have bumped into them in my lifetime.

There are many such “coincidences” in my life. But then again there are many such coincidences in the world. Suspiciously many, don’t you think?

Digging in and out

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Itadakimasu! “Let’s dig in!” I have seen the Japanese word translated that way occasionally, and it can certainly look like it, as it is said immediately before one starts eating. But actually this is a religious custom and the phrase means “I will receive”, “I humbly receive”, “I gratefully receive” depending on whom you ask. Now, having this attitude toward snow…

As I told you yesterday, I came halfway at best in my attempt to dig myself out of the house and establish connection with the nearest cleared road. On the bright side, I did get my heat pump excavated, and the general vicinity of the house, and started getting into the biggest snow drift before I gave up. I also got to experience the feeling of being exhausted without being winded, something that I hear is perfectly normal for humans.

I guess the reason why I have rarely if ever felt it before is that my family tends to burn a higher proportion of fat rather than carbs. It is not just us, it is very common on the west coast of Norway. This kind of people can eat lots of fat but it melts away again as they go about their daily life. It is probably an adaptation to a climate that is great for rising livestock but bad for grains. People would have less starch in their diet and more fat, so the genes of the survivors reflect this. Heart infarct is generally uncommon in the province where I grew up, and extremely rare in my family on my mother’s side. I know less about my father’s family, but it seems it actually could happen if you lived long enough. In any case, the point is, your blood sugar does not run out if you are not burning it, or very little of it.

It may be just old age, or perhaps my years on a low-fat diet has caused the body to switch to an alternate mode. (Although I currently have enough body fat, though it took me a year to replenish it after I was forced to shift to low-fat by some mysterious illness.) In any case, today I consciously worked slowly, to make sure I did not get winded, just breathing deeper than usual. This keeps the body in fat-burning mode, as fat is a more plentiful but slower energy source.

(By the way, if you are looking to get rid of a few pounds, the “fat burning” slow exercise is overrated. Yes, you are burning mostly fat, but because of the slowness you are not burning MUCH of anything. You will have to keep it up for a long time, and most people have too much to do to actually keep exercising for a long time. For the average modern person, who exercises for health, it is better to work out harder (if your health allows, of course). If however you have a fixed amount of work to do (like, say, shoveling a ton or two of snow) then doing it slowly will indeed burn off fat. And if you live on a low-fat diet for unrelated reasons, then it will take its sweet time coming back on.)

Don’t worry, I still have fat enough to survive for weeks at the very least! Just a little bit less of it than yesterday. As an added bonus, I kept radiating heat for a while after I came in. So yes, I gratefully receive! Although I am sure I can get fed up if it just keeps coming and coming. Even if it snowed candy, I would be fed up after some days, I am sure!

PS: I do have food too. Today I had leftover rice / pasta / tomato / maize stew from yesterday. Pretty good, although it was a bit too spicy for my tastes yesterday. It felt less intense today, quite enjoyable.

Trapped in the snow

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You know it is winter when you try to open the door and come face to face with a snowdrift almost as tall as yourself.

OK, so perhaps I am not trapped in the classic movie scene style, in the howling blizzard and with a cute heroine. Wait, that is classic anime style. Anyway, not quite like that. Not even in the sense of not being able to get out the door, although I had to squeeze out sideways. I may even be able to leave the property, if my life depends on it, but not with dignity. The snow drifts are close to my own height, and the path I shoveled is utterly erased except near the house, where the walls keep the wind at bay.

I started with the stairs in front of the door, and gradually cleared a small space so I could go in and out freely. I shoveled a path through the nearest snow drift to the small stretch of open road. I made a road in to the side of the house and excavated the heat pump, which was almost hidden in snow. And then I faced the open field, where snowdrifts stretched like dunes of the desert. I came less than half the way to the nearest cleared road, however, before I was exhausted and found it safest to go inside.

I had already eaten before I went out to work on the snow, but I took a few glasses of Pepsi and water. (Don’t you think ordinary cola is too strong without watering it a bit? I use about 40% water, I’d estimate. So three or four glasses would be more like two glasses of pure cola. There will be a test on this topic.) I relaxed in front of the computer, and even napped a couple minutes. I felt fine when I went back out. Already some snow had accumulated during the couple hours or more, so I cleared that away first, then resumed the Herculean labor of extending the road.

I had been out less than half an hour and cleared only a few feet of the huge snow drift, when I noticed that something was not working as expected. I was not breathing hard, but my heart was still laboring way too much. Now, there was no pain or anything like that, but it was out of proportion. Usually with that kind of heartbeat I should be winded. I was also weakening rapidly. Yes, this is what normals experience when they run out of blood sugar, I think. I have heard them tell about it, but it came as a bit of a surprise to me. I usually get tired in my muscles before I get that far. I don’t get to the point where I am lightheaded and weak etc. Or did not until now. I suppose that must be what happened, but who knows.

In any case, it was obvious that my body was not able to process energy at the speed needed to keep working, even though I got enough oxygen. So I went back inside again. But seriously, two glasses of Pepsi is not enough for half an hour of shoveling? I am disappointed. I mean people are like “Oh Noes Its All Sugar OMG Help!!1”

If it is as I believe, then there is at least a silver lining: Until my glycogen reserves are rebuilt, I am going to transmute sucrose into that instead of fat. Of course, making fat even from sucrose is not very efficient in humans, but still. The liver is awesome (except as food, blech!). While I am relaxing, it is working full tilt, doing advanced organic chemistry for the whole body. I expect that when the morning comes, my muscles and the liver itself will be fully loaded with enough glycogen for another 24 hours of software support and playing The Sims 3. Of course, it is anybody’s guess how much snow shoveling that translates into.

I hate looking like a heathen to my new neighbors, but I think I shall have to work on the Sunday. (It is not actually a holy day, you know, or rather not more than most days. But I don’t expect the local farmers to know that.) But that is for another day, and we don’t have that until we receive it, if ever.

Oh no, not again…

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The cold has returned, but not with the same deep freezer temperatures we had earlier in winter. It is more around -7C  (around 20F).  But along with the wind, it has once again become hard to keep the house warm.  We had a couple “mild” days with only -1 or so, and little wind.  It was quite easy to keep the whole house warm then.  Now, not so much.

Oh, and the water in the bathroom faucet is gone again.  I would have thought that using it a couple times a day would be enough, but evidently not.  It was fine when I came home from work, now it is dry again.  And will remain so until the temperature again returns to around the melting point.  Let us hope that is not too long.  At least I managed to set the kitchen faucet dripping before it could freeze up too. I can always wash my hands there.  There is no dripping option for the shower, it is very much on/off, so I guess that one is a goner too.

Luckily spring usually starts sometime in March here, not necessarily to the point where the snow disappears, but it would be a rare year that the temperature is not above zero for a couple days at least in March.  Then again this has been a rare winter so far, both here in Norway and elsewhere.

This morning I shoveled a path through the snow drifts, just in time to get to the bus.  When I returned from work, the path was gone.  “I knew the path was narrow, but it is gone now” as depressed Christians say.   Yes, there seems to be depressed Christians.  I won’t make any guesses as to why. I am sure others have strong opinions on that, especially those who have either never been depressed or never been Christian.  Anyway, it takes a bit more than a snow gale to depress me these days.  I had to wade through snow to my knees, if not more, but I did remove the drift that was building in front of the main door.  There are actually 3 outer doors in the house, so it should be a rare wind that managed to pack drifts around them all.  Tomorrow, Light willing, I will shovel a new path through the trackless snow.  Think of it as negative calories!

But before that, sleep. Although I may need to put on some more clothes first… ^_^

EDIT to add:

Oh, something good happened today that I should share!  I have a label on my mailbox that says “No unaddressed mail”, because I don’t want to risk losing letters in between the dozens of fliers, advert-paid newspapers etc.  But today I got an unaddressed sheet.  I did not mind at all though, because it was from the Agricultural Office of the region and was marked “Distributed unadressed to farmers and small farm holders in the region.”  It is the first time in many years that I have been mistaken for a farmer, and I really enjoyed it.  I admit it certainly looks that way, seen from the main road. ^_^

Negative calories

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Since it was dark before I was finished shoveling, I’ll just re-use an old picture of the unbroken snow where there was supposed to be a road.

“Think of it as negative calories” said the voice in my head, or perhaps it was me. Anyway, it snowed when I got up in the morning, and it kept snowing practically to the end of the workday.  So when I came home, I had some work to do with my aluminum spade.  And I did it.  I re-opened the path from the house to the neighbor’s road (the plow has never returned after the one time it saved us from death by washing machine) and I made the path twice as wide while I was at it.  Of course, if we get one windy night, it may all be lost, because it crosses a wide open field where the north wind has all the time it wants to build up speed and pick up snow to put in my path.  But for now, I am content.  Think of it as negative calories.

As I mentioned, I lost a bit of weight during the move.  My daily calorie intake is not calibrated for packing and moving tons of stuff (probably literally, given that we drove that big car at least four times).  And probably not yet for shoveling a lengthy path through the snow, either. Although that could possibly become a habit if the winter just goes on.  Not that I am that keen to lose weight.  Rather I joke with my American friends:  “Depose Obama! Give us our global warming back!”  (Although I actually know quite well that climate and weather act on very different time scales, climate being a glacial process in the literal sense of the word.  I wonder how many eco-people know that though. We have literally seen nothing yet – it was warmer during the Viking age.)

Anyway, I guess I lost some calories shoveling, but at least I did not lose my lunch. Although the thought did visit me, as I have been not-quite-queasy all afternoon and evening.  I don’t think this is related to the pain in my lower right side, right inside the hip bone.  Shoveling snow and feeling that pain each time I straightened up, I vividly remembered feeling the exact same pain when I was widening the exact same path the week before I moved in.  So, around 3 weeks ago.  It wasn’t there all the time though, it came back this morning or during the night.  Not typical of appendicitis to appear randomly like that, I think.  Besides, with appendicitis you get sick first and the pain moves from all over to settle in the side.  Well, there are exceptions. There are also people who get hit by meteors.  I hope I fall in neither of these categories. In fact, I hope not to fall at all for a long while.  At least not by the wayside.  Falling in temptation – well, I don’t hope for that either really.  It has been known to happen though, somewhat depending on how harmless the temptation seems.

Today, for instance, I bought a pastry (Danish-style) for a late lunch, even though such things are absolutely soaked in fat, and you know I get violently sick from eating more than a little fat. That is why I can lose weight so easily and spend so long putting it back on, although it does return eventually.  Well, I did not fall all the way to the bottom of this temptation, I only ate half of it.  My vague feeling of being over-fed is just as likely to come from the Pepsi I had for brunch, or even the sweetened fruit yogurt.  I have been feeding myself a lot of sugar lately, and I feel that way too.

In happier news (if we can get happier than negative calories), it has been mild the last couple days – only a couple degrees below freezing.  I guess it says something about this winter that this really feels mild.  I don’t go outside in my shirt exactly, but I can easily keep the house warm in this weather. That is a wonderful feeling, after having had to sit with a thermo jacket in the home office, and being roasted on one side and frozen on the other in the living room where I have kept the wood stove burning.  It still burns, but now the whole room is pleasantly warm. And not just the room.  The fan in the heat pump is blowing through the home office (but I sit to the side of the jet stream) and through the small outer hallway into the living room.  The living room is open to the kitchen, and I have the door open from the kitchen to the inner hallway, and from there to the bathroom and from there to the washing room. The inner hallway also contains the stairs to the upper floor, so the warm air rises up there on its own. That way, the whole house is covered with just the heat pump and the wood stove.  Well, and a small radiator in the bed room, though I would not have needed it if I liked to sleep cold like most people do.

I still have some calories to burn on unpacking, as things are standing in bags and boxes all over the place still.  The truth is that many of them stood in bags and boxes before too, except many of the bags and boxes were inside the deep cupboards I had there but don’t have here.  I intend to take the content from some of them and simply get rid of it without ever finding a place for it.  If I live long enough, which I sincerely hope. Keep watching this space to see if I’m still around!

Doctor visit and Google

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Being alone is scary for neurotypical humans.  Obviously their vocal cords never fall into disuse with that attitude.  Not so us porcupines.

Yes, doctor visit and Google are connected, even if just a little.  It all started like this:

For years, I have not talked much. Well, hardly at all outside work, and not much at work. After all, I work with computers. I also help people with their computer problems, but for years I mostly did so for the dozens of people in the same house.  Looking back, I did not know how good a time I had!  Not that it is all that bad now.  But back then, there was little reason to say more than a few words when someone had problems. I would go to their office and see for myself.  If they talked to me, they could see that I was listening, so there was no need for me to talk except for essential questions and the occasional reassurance.

The years passed, and my voice fell into disuse. There may be other reasons why my throat now gets sore after five minutes, but it is hard to know.  After all, it is not easy to track the development of a voice problem if you don’t speak!  I was happy with it that way. “Where there are many words, there is no lack of sin” as the Bible says, and indeed the constant talking of people seem to me a hallmark of their superficiality. (I was a massive talker myself when I was a child, and at least a ways into my teens. Possibly longer.)

Lately my work has changed so that user support is now mostly on the phone. This is very nearly the worst kind of talking for me, as I have to speak fairly loudly and clearly.  (Talking in a noisy place is even worse though.) I have been allowed to do mostly non-talking work after I explained the situation to my boss.  But the work at which I am competent is slowly being phased out, and despite numerous requests I have not been formally taught anything new.  For obvious reasons, I cannot just ask my innumerable contacts inside [Himitsu Corp.] since I don’t have any, not speaking to people.

So in the end, after talking (painfully) with an old friend about the matter, I called the rural clinic where my “fixed physician” works (that is a literal translation of the Norwegian word “fastlege”, although the concept itself is hard to believe for the American reader.  Basically you are assigned a doctor from those who have a deal with the State, but you can apply for another if you feel the need to.)  I got an appointment for today at 11AM.

This morning I got a mail from Google, since I had added a mail alert to my appointment.  (I am horrible with appointments, especially doctor and dentist.) This ability to add mail and on-screen alerts is nifty enough, but what impressed me was the extra service:  The name of the rural clinic, which I had added in the location field even though I knew where it was, was now blue and underlined. Yes, it was a link to a local map.  It is not like I needed that, but I was impressed that Google had located the address on its own, without me needing to ask.  Since the name was unique (probably in the world, given that it contains a special Scandinavian letter) it was probably easy for Google to find, but it was still nice of them to do it without being asked.

I, for one, welcome our new robotic underlings.

The doctor visit went well enough.  The doctor jumped to the same conclusion that I had at first, that the symptom was probably caused by inactivity.  It is not something a doctor comes into contact with every year, I bet, since all humans except monks are chatting like their lives depend on it. Which it well may:  Dolphins in isolation die in a matter of hours or a few days at most, while humans take longer but usually go more or less mad after a fairly short time in solitary confinement. It is in fact classified as cruel and unusual, if I remember correctly.  I am no big fan of confinement myself, but given food I would probably be happy to spend a few weeks alone in my house. So I am not exactly normal. (Thank the Light…)

Speaking of which, at some point the doctor suddenly asked if I felt fear when talking on the phone (or “angst”, which in Europe means something more like panic than the trite teenager navelgazing the word refers to in America). I was a bit taken aback by this, although I do live in the nerve pill belt of Norway.  No, I certainly am not afraid of my fellow humans, I assured him.  I don’t like to talk to them, or I would have done so on my free time as well, but I don’t fear them.  (Now, traveling by car, that I fear. You are locked in a small metal box hurtling away at tremendous speed, surrounded by other such boxes also at extreme speed, controlled by humans of on average not very high IQ, not very stable emotions, but grossly inflated self-confidence.  What is not to fear?  That I am even still alive is a miracle of Biblical proportions, is how I see it. Telephones though?  No.  Not until they start trashing about at lethal speed.)

There is no pill for the affliction, as expected.  (I have peeked around online after all.) Again, this makes sense if it really comes from prolonged silence, since this is so rare. The doctor promised to refer me to a specialist, who will send me a letter with the appointment in good time.  It will take at least a few weeks, thought the doctor. Having lived with this for years, I am OK with that.  There may be laryngoscopy though, if worse comes to worse. This may not necessarily prove fatal, but I notice that in lawyer-happy countries you have to sign a form that says it is your own fault if you die from it. We don’t have that here in Norway, as you can’t sue doctors anyway. They are partially employed by the  State and even if they accidentally kill someone, they only get a stern “Uff da!”.  If they just keep killing and killing people, they may eventually be asked to stop practicing, but this is exceedingly rare.  Of course, it is exceedingly rare that people die from this stuff anyway, but I just want to point out that Norway is not America.  Mostly we are thankful for that, of course.

But until further notice, if I don’t keel over from unrelated reasons, I should make sure to talk some every day, and keep water handy for drinking between bouts of talking.  This sound advice set me back a few dollars, the State probably pays another goodly sum for the doctor’s time.  I think the fact that we have to pay anything at all is mostly to discourage people from showing up with random insignificant stuff.  Of course, we do that anyway, we just don’t know it is insignificant until at some point during the visit.

Now, back to Google.

There is something new out, called Google Buzz.  It is a kind of stab at the social media scene, FaceBook and MySpace and the gang.  Twitter too, I guess, but Buzz actually has some integration with Twitter.  Basically it is a microblogging software, meant to write short quick messages.  It shows up next to the inbox in Gmail, and if you have Gmail you becomes a member automatically.  It will add contacts that you have a lot of conversation with, or so it says.  It did not add anyone for me, but this may be because the one person who mails me does not use Gmail…

In addition to posting things on your Buzz homepage (like the “wall” in a certain competitor) it also harvests Twitter, as already mentioned.  Unfortunately it is one way only, probably because Twitter has a much smaller maximum post length. But even short posts are not relayed.  Another source is Google chat status messages. (Like, “Out for lunch”, “Meeting with boss”, “Busy making love” – not necessarily in that sequence and not necessarily right after each other.) Then it harvests pictures from Picasa Web and Flickr, videos from YouTube and blog posts from Blogger / Blogspot.  So much for microblogging.  It is clearly pretty open for Google-owned stuff, while few outsiders get in. No LiveJournal, no WordPress, and noticeably no FaceBook in either direction. Rivalry from first buzz!

So I have had this a couple days now, since it came out.  I turned off the option to show who was following me and who I was following. I don’t have a problem with telling who I read, or would read if they posted anything, but it is not my right to publish choices that other people have made.  They may have reasons to not want to appear online more than strictly necessary, for all I know.  Since you either have to publish both or none, none it is.

So I worked a bit on my Google profile (which is mostly hidden for those of you who are not my contacts) and there it was again.  I had typed in my address, and Google showed it in the map. OK, so it is two houses wrong, but it is really close.  Again, I did nothing to instigate this.  It just integrated Google Maps on its own.

This is boding well, I think.  Computers should not just answer our questions, they should also have the answers to the questions we didn’t know we could ask.

This is not the only invention that makes life easier for computer users. For instance Windows Vista introduced Superfetch, which keeps track of what programs you use and load them while you don’t use the machine.  This would have been an awesome idea if people used computers with lots of memory at the time Vista was released, but most only do that now that Microsoft has switched to the more memory-frugal Windows 7. Still, it was a good idea, in principle, especially if you don’t have users like me who gets deeply suspicious when the computer starts running the hard disk in my absence.  Is it perhaps a virus, is what I think then.  But eventually I drew the conclusion that it was Vista that was the virus.  Still, it works well enough now that I have a 64 bits processor and 4GB RAM.

In the future, if any, I hope to see computer programs that take advantage of extra information they have, to make life easier for the users.  I also hope to be able to talk, but even more I hope not to need to.