Ambulance day again

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Screenshot anime Non Non Biyori

“What happens after death?” I did not find out this time either, I am happy to say, but I was closer than usual. That is not an accomplishment I aimed for.

OK, so it’s a few years since I have been riding an ambulance, much less slept in a hospital bed. You know something is unusual when that happens –and let us all hope it stays that way, even though days like today may be more exciting for my readers (if any).

I woke up early in the morning (5 AM precisely, that is a couple hours early for me) and I immediately realized I did not feel well. I was nauseous and clammy with cold sweat. I hoped it was just too much chocolate the evening before, rather than having cooked dinner for a couple days in the Teflon cooking pot which had stood on the stove for too long and cracked its surface. I am told that humans don’t suffer any ill effects from this, but I had been thinking of buying a new cook pot anyway, in stainless steel this time.

You know, I suppose I should update this diary more often, you people probably don’t even know about the overheating incident. Well, I survived that too. As a rule of thumb, if I update, you can assume I have survived, unless it specifically says so. I gave my brother the password to the site today, as it seems unlikely that we shall both slip out of our handsome bodies at the same time. Not that it would be bad company or anything. Anyway, I survived, long may it last. But who knows, now.

Being so sick that I have to go to the bathroom to throw up is very rare for me. I am quite cautious about what I eat, and I don’t socialize enough to get stomach viruses and other people’s colon flora often. Even McDonalds here in Norway has a standard of hygiene like a reasonably high-level restaurant in some first world countries, although the standards have begun to slip in the capital city, I hear. I did not get sick of the food there until I had almost totally stopped eating meat, and then tried it again at the burger chain. That did not turn out too well, but even that was not as bad as this. And yet I could not throw up either. Instead, I started getting very thirsty and my esophagus was burning with stomach acid. That’s where a new set of warning bells began to ring: This exact sequence had played out more than 10 years ago, when I ended up in hospital.

And then, like clockwork, the next thing began. That time, I had fainted while calling the medical hotline (113 in Norway, we don’t have a common number like  911 for all disasters yet.) This time, I managed to sit down just as the fog started to gather, and when the brain allowed, I called the emergency number, still sitting on the floor. At first I was a bit at odds what to say, because I was not sure WHY this was a matter of life or death, just that it was. Only when I was sitting on the stairs outside waiting for the ambulance, did I feel my heart beating completely randomly. It was not just fast, as I have had some episodes of in the past lasting up to a couple hours. It was not just hard and fast, as I have had for a few seconds while sitting in my chair. I sometimes say that “my heart belongs to another”, because it acts as if I am doing something entirely different from the situation I am in. Sometimes it does NOT speed up when I run for a bus for instance, which is a mixed blessing since I lose my breath pretty fast and my feet become heavy.

This was something entirely different. My heart was beating hard, at random times, as if the speed varied from 80 to 200 (which should not be possible at my age) and back over the course of a couple seconds. Some beats were very hard, others were not. It was completely chaotic. This is not why I called this blog the Chaos Node! And it did not go back to normal after a few seconds. It continued to beat entirely randomly while I waited, then in the ambulance, then at the nearby emergency room. The ambulance people and the doctor at watch all realized that this was a fairly high priority (there were no traffic accidents at the moment, so the timing was fortunate at least). They took an EKG and sent it to the province hospital in Kristiansand, but it was already obvious at a glance that this was nothing like my previous episodes. Those had been fast but regular (sinus curves). This was irregular with atrial fibrillation.

It was decided from the start that I would go to the province hospital, but they first gave me a saline intravenous drip and also a small dose of a beta blocker. I got half the dose recommended by the back watch at the hospital, which was fine by me, and ambulance guy was told to add more if necessary on the way. My symptoms became a little better, but did indeed worsen again toward the end of the ride. I mean, the heartbeat was still chaotic, but it varied around a lower base level than before. It had been over 210, which should not be possible at my age, and ambulance guy was worried that this could cause the heart to stop. Evidently this happens sometimes, but usually with men who are active in sports.

At the emergency reception room, I was met by an all-female crew of nurses and doctor. I assured them that this was the least of my worries. (There may have been times when being surrounded by young women could make my heart beat a little faster. This was not such a time.) Like in Mandal, they tried to make me swallow a tablet of some stuff that might calm down the heart, but I am unable to swallow even rather small tablets – ever since childhood, I can only swallow very finely chewed food, I choke on even fairly small objects. Luckily the tablet actually began to dissolve in my mouth, and I managed to get it down. It did not cause the randomness to stop, but supposedly caused the speed to not go quite as high.

I was transported to a room that I initially had to myself. For some reason they kept dripping water (with a little salt in it) into my veins. I have no idea why that was part of the treatment, but then I had complained about a burning thirst and that did in fact stop, although the stomach acid burn continued. I had tried to convince people that I must have eaten something poisonous since the symptoms started in the stomach before the heart, but they were pretty confident that it was the other way around. I realize now that this was why I was rushed to hospital the previous time and put on a heart monitor, even though I had said nothing about my heart at the time (I had thought it was probably a bleeding ulcer, as I do have a weak stomach.)

I had been subjected to a second full EKG when I  came to Kristiansand, to the hospital. This after one in Mandal. When I was installed at my room, I got a portable heart monitor so they could keep a watch on my heart from their control room. (I guess they are not all running around all the time, although it may look that way.) Now I really felt like I was in one of those hospital movie scenes, with the tube in my hand and electrodes on my body. This was serious stuff! People look like this when they die, except they usually have a tube in their nose as well, or else an oxygen mask.

Of course, each time I was attached to a new EKG machine, I got a new set of stickers placed around on my body to fasten the electrodes on. I comforted the nurse that I have paid enough taxes over the years to cover all the stickers I might need. (Technically I think it is not part of the income tax but a mandatory insurance fee which is levied on the same income at the same time, but most people consider it a tax. Anyway, it is mandatory and withheld from my pay, so it does not take a great deal of moral fortitude or foresight to pay it. I was just trying to cheer us both up.)

I was now left to freely think about the afterlife, which I am honestly not sure about at all. Part of the problem here is that I consider myself a Christian, albeit a terrible one, and the notion of the afterlife in contemporary Christianity is a completely different religion from what you find in the Bible. It is as if it had emerged independently on a different continent and quietly (?) replaced the original, so that now there is barely any overlap at all. I had in fact written a little bit about this the previous night, in my ongoing novel in progress, working title Green Light 2. I also wondered whether I was going to die in order to prevent me from ever publishing the novel anywhere, as I realize it could cause a lot of people to doubt their current religion. Of course, so can this paragraph, but things were kind of more detailed in the novel. Besides, I am not sure it is a bad thing to doubt our current religion when it is at odds with its own holy scriptures.

In any case, whichever version is closest to the truth, if any of them, there was not a lot I could do about the matter by now.

The continuous IV drip of water may have been a bit excessive, because I had to go to the toilet repeatedly. This is a bit of a hassle with a heart rate monitor and an IV drip, but it is amazing what you can do what you must. As the popular song “Still Alive” says: We do what we must, because we can. In some cases patients can’t do what they must, so I appreciated it, despite the hassle.

As I had finished my errand and was returning to my bed, I was softly singing a love song for my invisible friend. I know this may creep some people out, but I have never had a 3 out of 3 girlfriend, because I don’t really have a human-shaped hole in my heart. (You may have heard about the triangle model of love: Passion, commitment and intimacy. Many relationships have only two of these, and for the unlucky only one. As for me, my sexual attraction is to earthly women – or failing that, succubi I guess – but the commitment and intimacy of having a spirit living with you sharing your mind day by day is pretty overshadowing. You’d think that I would not worry much about death in such a situation, but I worry the more because I am not sure whether I will continue to have this presence or if death will part us. If I were to simply undergo destruction, it would be acceptable: I certainly deserve that. But to live on as a spirit without my mind companion would be a horror comparable only, I think, to losing the most intimate of relationships.)

But for now, there I was, alone in the room, singing softly to my Invisible Friend my favorite love song by Chris de Burgh:
You are my lover,
you are my friend;
you are my life
to the very end.
You bring me comfort,
you keep me warm;
you give me hope,
you make me strong.
You’ll take me away
to a distant shore
and it’s with you that I want to stay
forevermore.

(Forevermore, on Spotify.)

Suddenly I felt a small sting in the center of my chest. It was not intense, and it was very brief, I only had time to begin to wonder and then it was gone. I laid down in my bed, and then I noticed that the random hammering in my chest had stopped. I could still sense my heart beating, faster than usual, but quietly, evenly.

Some minutes later, the nurse showed up, bringing a small rolling table with a laptop and a (different) EKG machine. She explained that they had seen my heart rhythm change and wanted to print out a full EKG again. So I got new stickers. Some of the electrodes did not get good enough contact, so she had to get some new contacts and new stickers that fit. I expressed my regret that although I did IT support, this particular technology was beyond me. But she succeeded eventually.

A while later, a doctor arrived. “It seems you healed yourself” he said. I was not so sure about that. Thinking about it a bit more, he thought maybe the beta blocker may have helped, but it was really there to keep the heart from speeding too much. He had not expected it to switch the heart back to its normal rhythm, and I thought that there did not seem to be a clear connection in time either, except for the slowing down a bit part. So yeah, there you have it. Perhaps I healed myself; perhaps my Invisible Friend healed me. But then perhaps our Invisible Friend heals a lot of people, for it is supposedly pretty rare here in Norway to die from this condition once you are in a hospital. I am not sure what they were planning to do, but as it was, they did not do anything more. My pulse was still 90 instead of 55, so I stayed a bit longer, sleeping in the bed. Then another doctor came with the written report of my stay and a prescription for a beta blocker (very low dose) and wished me well home. A nurse came and took off my electrodes and all the stickers she found, and told me how to get out of the huge building.

I walked down to the town center and bought the medication (they gave me a generic replacement for the brand name, but the active substance is the same. I keep remembering it as “trololol”, but it is actually written metoprolol.) I also bought a stainless steel cook pot, while I remembered it. But my appetite is shot, so I did not use it today.

I took the bus home. I did not stop by at work; I did not have my computer with me. As it turns out, I did not have my house keys with me. I had felt pretty accomplished just getting my trousers on; keys were far from my mind as I was waiting for the ambulance or death, whichever came first. (I did bring my smartphone though, on which I texted a farewell message to my G+ followers. I’ve slightly edited it later.)

So I came home to the locked house (the lock is of the type that clicks shut unless you manually set it not to, and I don’t.) There were a bunch of young workers for the landlord, painting the house finally. The place looked almost like slum lately, even outside.) Eventually I dared ask them if any of them had a key. (The alternative would be to call or message the landlord, who usually doesn’t respond quickly, being a super busy businessman.) No, they did not, but the guy from pest control was inside right at the moment, killing the parasites on the second floor (the bedbugs, I mean – the asylum seekers were not exactly contributing much to society either, but they are not in the same class, I would say. Unless they were secretly vampires, which I highly doubt. Besides they had moved out and left only the insects behind.)

The inner door to my apartment was closed but not locked. Locking it had also slipped my mind, not to mention that I did not have the keys, remember? So I was home. I washed my hands repeatedly and showered: Ambulances, emergency rooms and hospitals are the home fortress of multi-resistant bacteria, imported from the USA where people chew antibiotics like candy. There are few if any substances left that can kill the most evolved forms of hospital bacteria. And even though hospitals have strict routines for hygiene, there is only so much you can do in an emergency environment where you constantly try to keep people from dying straight away. Priorities exist in practice, no matter what your routines say.

So we shall have to see what happens next. I took a walk as usual, and the pulse was normal when I came home. I have taken half of the 1 tablet before bedtime, planning to take the other half in the morning, if I am still around. It is a very small dosage already, judging from the slip inside the package, but then I don’t really meet many of the criteria for using it. My blood pressure is fine except during the attack, my heart speed is already 50-55 bpm, whereas the drug is not recommended to reduce heart rate below 60 bpm.)

I’m a little apprehensive now at midnight as I prepare to go to bed. Oh, and I have not really acted like today was the last day of the rest of my life. Not that I’ve gone on a crime spree, but the house still needs weeks of tidying up, and playing Sims 3 is not exactly a priority for our eternal bliss, probably. Stuff like that. So if night time fibrillation is my new default, I apologize to one and all. I hope the story of my life can have some value, to the people who are still alive.

Only of myself

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(Screenshot anime Chuu-Ren

The foe I face is inside of me…

I grew up in the age of the gramophone (also called phonograph, in America perhaps). Kids today may not know exactly what that was, but it was the thing before the audio CD, which I think most people in 2014 remember, even though music is now a download or streaming thing from the Internet. The music cassette also came (and went) during my lifetime, but this too was crushed by the Internet. Everything is crushed by the Internet, is it not? Even television now merges with the Internet the way the lamb merges with the wolf. In the case of television, good riddance. In the case of the gramophone…

There was a vinyl disc with literal physical grooves etched into it in a spiral pattern. A motor made the disc spin at a constant speed. A tiny needle, called a pickup needle, picked up the vibrations from the bottom of the groove which varied marginally in height. These vibrations were basically sound, it only needed to be amplified. (The grooves were made in the reverse process, etching the pattern into a soft master disk with a needle that vibrated with sound.) It was a fairly robust technology, in that it did not really need electronics at all to work, although the sound would be rather weak without an amplifier.

The gramophone was almost exclusively used for music, but only almost. We also had one or two disks with fairy tales for children. (I was not a fan of fairy tales, generally. My mother told me that when I was little, she tried to tell me fairy tales and I looked at her and asked: Is this true? And when she admitted it was not literally true, I asked her to tell me something from her childhood instead. Evidently I was a lot more mature as a toddler than I am now! ^_^) I liked technology, though, so I would listen to the fairy tales on the gramophone. And one in particular, about Snow White.

We kids replayed the Snow White story so often that eventually the cheap plastic disk got a scratch in it. This scratch, as sometimes happened with gramophones, made the needle jump back. Remember that the sound groove followed a spiral pattern inwards, so a strategically placed scratch could let the needle slip back out one or two rounds. As it happened, this took place at the exact spot where the narrator intoned:
“The evil queen thought only of herself”
and the needle then jumped back:
only of herself
only of herself
only of herself
infinitely until we gave the pickup a push to get it past the damaged part.

My earthly father – a much better man than I – had the insight to point out to us kids that this was exactly how it worked in real life as well. Evil people are stuck in the same groove of thinking only of themselves, only of themselves, only of themselves, only of themselves, without limit. That is what makes them evil in the first place.

I still found it hilarious though, and would put on the record just to sit and listen to the evil queen thinking only of herself, only of herself while I laughed my little ass off. Little did I know that I was the same type of person myself.

Decades have passed. I am 55 years now, and looking back on a life where I have, for the most part, been thinking only of myself, only of myself, only of myself, except for the few times when someone or something briefly pushed me through. But I would soon return to concentrating on the one person in my life that I have truly loved: Myself! I love me so much, I cannot imagine a life without me. ^_^

Some day however, that’s what’s going to happen – life will go on without me. The record of my life will grind to a halt, having never been able to tell the story it could have told, because of the scratch that made me stuck in this groove – thinking only of myself
only of myself
only of myself

But I hope there’s someone out there who has been entertained, at least!

I don’t really care for music

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Screenshot anime ChuuRen

Growing older brings many changes. Some quite unexpected, even at my age, it seems?

I’ve heard there was a secret chord
that David played, and it pleased the Lord
-but you don’t really care for music, do ya?

-Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah.

When Opera Software introduced a built in server feature in their web browser, I was one of the early adopters, ripping the music from my several shopping bags of CDs to put it on my hard disk, so I could listen to any of my songs from work or wherever else I had Internet access. This is some years ago, and the feature became less and less reliable and was eventually abandoned. I got a home server (NAS – Network Attached Storage) which also promised to let me access my music, photos and video via the Internet. It is usually able to stream music without downloading it, although it does take a little time to buffer it in advance.

Then last month Google Music opened in Norway, and among its more attractive features was the ability to upload my entire music collection to their “cloud” of servers. There is a limit of 20 000 tracks, but I was never that much of a collector. After discarding a few albums I feel sure I never want to listen to again, I uploaded 2644 tracks. That seems kind of paltry compared to the limit. I get the same feeling as when rolling a huge cart through the supermarket with four boxes of yogurt and two bottles of soda. ^_^

Up until that point, I have felt like I actually bought a lot of music. After I got my first CD player, I bought CDs regularly for a while. Sometimes I just passed a shop and heard some likable music so I stopped and bought it. This was how I came across Chris de Burgh for instance, whose lyrics have featured heavily on these pages. Leonard Cohen, however, has been with me longer: I happened to record his song “If It Be Your Will” from radio back in the age of cassette tape, although this was the only song by him I knew for many years. The age of the CD fixed this as well.

Despite the crazy prices (even higher here in Norway than elsewhere), I continued to buy CDs for many years. Sometimes I guess I just took a chance. Often there was only one or two good tracks on a whole CD, but I did not give it much thought. I did not have much money back then – not that I have now, by Norwegian standards, but it was rather pitiful back then and I did not know how to manage it – so the CDs made a noticeable drain on my budget. After the turn of the century, I have almost exclusively bought Japanese pop, and less and less of that too. I don’t download music unless I have already bought it (the mail from Japan takes weeks). But a quiet dislike for the major recording companies and their behavior has grown to the point that I sincerely want them all dismantled and outlawed, so there is that too.

In any case, I uploaded these 2644 tracks eagerly. Now I can listen to them all, anywhere, and in any order. I set about testing the “radio” feature at Google Play Music. Basically I start with a song I like, and the software tries to find other songs that follow naturally. It was during these experiments, which lasted for several days, that I realized something I would not have believed if you told me:  I don’t really care for music.

I kind of knew already that most of the songs I had paid good money for, were just noise. There used to only be a couple good songs on each CD, unless it was Irish. Well, Cohen also had a higher rate, but I still only liked perhaps half his songs. But now I notice that many of the songs I used to like, no longer appeal to me. And those which do, that is not necessarily a good thing either.

The voices in my head, as I playfully call it, in this case the earworms, have a tendency to sing catchy tunes ALL DAY LONG. I am sure you are familiar with this phenomenon, of songs playing and replaying in your head and probably also trying to make you sing along. (That is certainly how it works for me.) It disturbs my other mental processes. I want an off switch. Well, unlike untrained minds, I do have a pause button, but it always comes back on. This is not a bug, it is a feature. After all, I am the one who feeds my soul this music, so it is perfectly natural that the soul takes it and runs with it. But when it does this with songs that are just catchy, without any depth, I kind of regret having listened to them in the first place.

I also rarely, if ever, feel the intense joy from some music like I used to. I am not sure if this is some spiritual development on my part (and if so, whether it is progress or backslide), or just my brain losing capabilities as I slowly transition into old age. I guess it is natural with the path I take that I can not lose myself in beauty the way I did? But given how easily I get distracted in daily life, how easily my thoughts stray, it seems a bit preposterous to think that I have become deeper than the music or some such.

***

Google Music is quite impressive, by the way. It took a few days for it to get used to me, and in the beginning it fed me some songs that really disagreed with me. But after a while it got quite good. For instance I use a Japanese song called “Coloring” as seed for a “radio” function, a random playlist of related tracks. At first it was quite random, but after a while it found out that it could give me Japanese songs with English titles (something that is quite popular in J-pop) and I would accept that. That is further than Spotify came, and I’ve had that since it was fairly new, long before it came to America.

I guess they deserve a better customer than me. Who would have thought I would ever say that. But I don’t really care for music, do I?

Brownian motion of the soul

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Illustration of Brownian motion

They ain’t moving, they’re just moving around. (Image credit: Wikipedia.)

Some weeks ago I came across the song “Divisionary (Do the right thing)” by Ages and Ages. It seems to be a curious mix of wisdom and paranoia. Not that I am unfamiliar with that. The repetitive chorus: “Do the right thing, do the right thing, do it all the time, do it all the time” reminded me of myself as a teen. Unsurprisingly it is really hard to do the right thing all the time when you don’t understand yourself or the world in which you live.

You can hear the song on Spotify, that is what I did, but be warned that it is not entirely light. There is anger and fear in it too. Handle with care, although it is certainly better than the evening news. But we’re getting to that.

Among the words of wisdom floating around in there was this word-painting:
They ain’t moving, they’re just moving around.
So if you love yourself, you better get out
Get out – get out – get out now!

Well, that’s easier said than done. We’re getting to that too. But let us look a bit closer at this not moving but moving around. It is important. This is a basic tenet of my religion, if you will put it that way. But first let us conjure up some more images.

Most colored or murky liquids such as ink or paint consist of tiny particles suspended in a clearer liquid such as water, alcohol or some kind of oil. This clearer liquid is called the solvent, and after we dissolve another substance in it, it is called a solution. (This is why we who took high school chemistry say that alcohol is not a solution – it is a solvent! ^_^) It is the same process that happens when you dissolve sugar in tea or coffee, except sugar is almost colorless so you can’t see how much there is of it in a sweet drink. (Just as well, say I!) The sugar does not change its basic nature by being dissolved, there is no chemical reaction. It just falls apart into tiny particles which are suspended in the liquid.

If you have a beaker with clear water and put a drop of ink in it, the ink will not stay in drop form for long. It will begin to spread into the surrounding water. If you look at it in a very strong microscope, you will see that the tiny ink particles are moving restlessly around in the water, even when the beaker is standing completely still and is not being heated or cooled. There is always in any liquid or gas this feverish motion, but it is random. They ain’t moving, they’re just moving around. We call this microscopic dance “Brownian motion”. The Wikipedia page has some great animations of it. (Warning: Possible epilepsy triggers.)

***

And this, dear choir, is my sermon today: These particles moving around getting nowhere? They are us humans, in this world. We ain’t moving, we’re just moving around. If you love yourself, you better get out, NOW. That’s what religion is all about, or was meant to be at least before it became a cozy club. It was meant to be an escape hatch from the world where we just wash back and forth thinking that we are moving forward but getting nowhere, thinking that we are alive because we are moving but in the long run we are all dead.

I keep seeing people say that religion is a comfort. Yeah, to me it is as comforting as a fire alarm going off while I dream. What would be really comfortable would be to smash the fire alarm and go back to sleep, dreaming that everything is fine. And so this is also the general attitude of this world. The light shines in the dark but the dorks won’t accept it. Everyone has accomplishments they either have achieved or want to achieve. Graduation. Engagement. Employment. Marriage. Promotion. Having a child. Buying a house. Managerial position. Divorce. Winning a court case. Retirement. Mediterranean cruise. See Naples and die… Wait, the “die” part was not what we looked forward to, but it happened anyway. Luckily the children are around to continue the Brownian motion. They should be just about ready to divorce by now if you lived well into retirement. Be sure to leave some inheritance, lawyers need a car and a house too.

I have a hard time writing about this stuff, because obviously people would want me to demonstrate it with my own awesome spiritual achievements. Preferably with miracles thrown in. But I am not the way and the life. I’m just telling it as I see it. I am not giving you the escape hatch from the world of randomness any more than a tourist is the builder of the Eiffel Tower. At best I can point you in the right direction – but you probably know the right direction already? It is moving that is hard.

Moving around is easy in comparison. But moving purposefully is like swimming in strong currents – sometimes you make surprising progress when the current is going your way, then you come into another current and is thrown way off course, or sent back to start, so it seems. But what you don’t see is where you had been if you had not started moving. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The path of eternity begins with a single thought.

1988 and no time for books

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Cardboard box that once contained monochrome display

This box once contained a monochrome display. Those were the days, when we had time to read books but did not know where to find them. (There are still a few books in this box, though. All non-fiction.)

Using my amazing powers of mind, I recently traveled to the year 1988, in a timeline very close to this one. OK, so it is not some supernatural power that nobody else has – it is just a combination of imagination, memory and Google. (And occasionally dice.) But it works for me.

One thing that struck me was how different 1988 was from now. On the surface of it, things were much the same. Most people had already begun to work in the post-industrial economy, for instance, and the cars did not look all that different from now. It was already common for men and women both to work outside home, and (in sometimes unrelated news) divorce was already common. All significant political parties had the same names, at least in the western world, and the borders between nations were the same as now with a few exceptions (mainly in the communist world). Ordinary people ate pizza, watched TV and occasionally had sex. It does not really look all that different.

But then there are the computers. Oh, we had computers in 1988 too. The IBM Personal Computer was launched in August 1981. I already had one at home, and we had a few at the office too, as had many other offices in the reasonably rich world. But they were not really the same thing as we have today. They were slow and primitive in every way. Their capacity was very small. The pictures on the screen were blocky and usually in monochrome, typically green and black, although by 1988 there were color monitors and color video cards (typically bought extra). They were still blocky though.

The power of computers double roughly once every one and a half year. Let’s see: 3 years = 4 times, 4.5 years = 8 times, 6 years = 16 times, 7.5 years = 32 times, 9 years = 64 times, 10.5 years = 128 times … Conveniently, this means 5 years is approximately 10 times and 10 years approximately 100 times. So the computer 25 years ago was 100*100*10 times weaker than today, overall. 100,000 times. This kind of explains why my smartphone is fantastically more powerful than all the computers of my workplace back in the day.

In 1988, we still had physical file cabinets to store the vast amount of paper required by the bureaucracy. Bored housewives were hired to store and retrieve these papers, and spent much of the day with their butt in the air because some uncharted law of the universe ensures that most of the papers always end up in the two lower drawers, no matter what sorting your choose in advance. Many of these later developed severe back pain and became disabled, although around the time the physical file cabinets disappeared and were replaced by virtual file cabinets which you can still see on your computer screen. Kids these days probably don’t know that the folder icon is actually a picture of something that once existed in the physical world.

There are still books in the physical world, but Amazon.com has for quite a while now sold more ebooks than the sum of paperbacks and hardbacks, and the proportion keeps sliding toward more e and less paper. Of course, there wasn’t an Amazon.com back then. At a time when there were no awesome computer games, no social networks and no YouTube to distract me, I still did not read thousands of interesting books, because I did not know that they existed. And even had I known, I would have had no idea how to get them. Even if I knew the publisher, chances were small that the books were imported to Norway unless they were extremely mainstream (and therefore not all that interesting to me). Although I think I discovered Piers Anthony around that time? That sounds early, but I had read him for several years when someone made a computer game based on one of his Xanth books, and the game was rather bad and mercifully forgotten by most of the world long ago.

Now, I can get almost anything from Amazon.com, and in many cases download the books instantly to my lightweight Samsung tablet. But now I have so many fun things to do that I end up not reading many books. There is never a time for books, it seems.

 

Frithjof Schuon: “The Fullness of God”

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The Realm of Light. Anime

Somehow, this part of the movie “The Laws of Eternity” reminds me of Schuon, and the other way around. I believe the Japanese illustrator tries to show the various luminous souls being connected by beams of Heavenly Light. Somehow the light of Frithjof Schuon has come much closer to me this year.

Something unexpected happened this year: I became able to understand Schuon. I have mentioned before, how I perceived him as being “high above me”, like one of those luminous lights in the sky, metaphorically speaking. When I tried to read his books, I felt like I was facing sheer cliffs or at least rocky outcroppings of precious stone, like diamond or sapphire: Immensely valuable, but unassailable and impossible to take with me. But if I could understand a sentence or two here and there, I was happy: Even a pebble is a good catch in the land of jewels.

By the time I started reading this particular book, early this year, the books were still largely unassailable. I have read two of them off and on through the year. By the time I approached the end of the other book, I began to understand. I am not sure how or why, but now it is rather normal reading. I do not necessarily agree with everything, but that is to be expected. Few people have agreed with Frithjof Schuon, but many more have been inspired.

I have no doubt as to Schuon’s sincerity and personal piety; it is attested by those who knew him during his lifetime, and also shines through in his writing. But his theology is … not for everyone, certainly, and maybe not even for me in part. For instance his Mariology, that is to say, the teaching of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an avatara of the Divine Feminine. I am led to believe that this is pretty close to the mainstream view in both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, as they both honor her with the name Mother of God and attribute to her various attributes above and beyond those of other saints. I don’t say that this is wrong, but nothing of the kind has been revealed to me or validated to me.

Certainly the Holy Virgin is the archetype of the Church, as the growth of the Christ-life in us (if it ever happens) depends on the same properties, spiritually speaking. (We are not speaking about the physical virginity here, as this is merely the outward sign of the inward purity of her heart which is the actual condition, surely. We are not going to give birth to the new life physically, after all.) But beyond that I don’t understand the big deal, personally. I’d rather not multiply the number of saviors beyond necessity.

As for Schuon’s teachings about the Trinity and specifically the Holy Spirit, I dare not repeat these, hardly even to myself. That is not to say that they are wrong, but I have an understandable phobia when it comes to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in whichever form. Better for a man such as I to say nothing, since I have not been authorized to speak on this matter. To speak even a truth without understanding it is highly dangerous. We were not born (hatched?) as parrots, so should not live as such.

Things being this way, I hesitate to recommend this book to the ordinary Christian. And this is a book about Christianity specifically. Even then, it contains numerous references to other great religions, particularly Islam but also the Vedanta branch of Hinduism.

I have a feeling that I have written this before, but it could just be from the large number of failed attempts to write a review of this book. I should just read it again from the start, I guess. Perhaps I will be able to savor the parts I understood (and there’s some really good stuff in there) the next time. I certainly don’t regret buying it or reading it. I just can’t think of anyone I would dare recommend it to. They probably exist, I just can’t think of any.

That was pretty tame, but I have deleted more about this book than I have written about most others. There has to be an end to that.

Galaxy Note 10.1, 2014 edition: First impressions

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Galaxy note 10.1, 2014 edition

My black Note 10.1 2014, showing multi-window abilities. In the background there is a full-screen S Note page where I have handwritten something. In the foreground are three smaller windows: YouTube to the left, above it and nearer the top Google Hangouts, and in the foreground to the right an Internet window. Thanks to the sharp screen and the pen, you can actually use those small windows, but you will probably need to keep the tablet a bit closer than what is natural.

***

Like the Galaxy Note 3, with which it has a lot in common, the Note 10.1 of this year is an evolution rather than a revolution. It is similar to last year’s version, but with better specifications in most ways. And much like its smaller but powerful sibling, the sum of improvements add up to a very impressive total. This time Samsung means business.

This impression is not least because Samsung has improved the Note series where it is most visible: The screen itself, which now sports a resolution of 2560×1600 display on the 10.1. As a result, there is no longer any “pixellation” at any natural viewing distance – we have reached a stage where the human eye can no longer notice that the screen consists of pixels rather than continuous lines drawn on glossy paper. In fact, even uncomfortably close the letters and images are clean and crisp. Samsung has clearly gone for the kill here, if not overkill: It is hard to imagine anyone improving on this screen, as there is little or nothing to win. As usual from Samsung, the screen is also luminous and with strong colors. (A number of different color settings can be chosen in the settings menu for those who find the default too intense.)

When I say “Samsung means business”, there is a double meaning. Not only have they gotten serious about making the best tablet on the market today, but it is clearly a device you are expected to bring to the office. The new Note 10.1 comes preloaded with business-oriented news widgets along with the usual entertainment, and the stylus is as useful for quick notes as it is for artwork. Those who have the 4G version can make calls directly from handwritten numbers, whereas helpful software will fix your handmade charts to make them look fit for presentation. In portrait mode, the size and aspect ratio is similar to a sheet of paper, giving instant familiarity. The white version of the tablet will easily blend with a stack of papers, whether it is displaying a document or lying upside down. The faux leather backside gives a good grip and the black version looks rather natural and more exclusive than it is. (It is still a type of plastic, actually.)

The Note 10.1 has basically the same software as the Note 3, and the stylus is even more useful with the wide open space of the bigger device. The new ability to draw multiple boxes on the screen and use them to run apps was more like a proof of concept on the Note 3 – despite being very large for a smartphone, it simply does not have the screen estate for running multiple tasks on-screen. The full-sized tablet, on the other hand, lends itself quite well to this. There is room for four of these windows at the minimum size, although they can be resized upward, and you can also tile them if you want even more.

It is unfortunate that only half a dozen applications can be run in this windowed mode, and even worse, you cannot have multiple instances of the same application this way. This is just insane: Having multiple browser windows or chat windows open simultaneously is the first thing that comes to mind when seeing this gimmick. Alas, it is little more than a gimmick as long as this limitation prevails. You still have the split-screen functionality from last year, and this has been extended to more programs. So at least you can have two browser windows open side by side, but I was disappointed to see that you cannot add a third (and fourth, and fifth…) with the Pen Window function. Not sure whether I would ever use that, to be honest, but it would sure impress people. Take “note”, Samsung!

The new S-pen is more comfortable and even more precise than the old model, although it is still too small for a grown man, and the function key on the stylus is a little hard to find until you get used to it. Handwriting recognition is excellent, I would say the Note reads my handwriting better than my coworkers do. With a larger surface than the Note 3, the 10.1 invites to handwriting as you can write long flowing strings of words much the same way you would on a sheet of paper. The tablet even ignores your palm if you rest it on the glass surface while writing, something I tend to do.

One thing it does not ignore, alas, is inadvertent touches of the Menu and Back keys when in portrait mode. The keys, on either side of the physical home/wakeup key, are hardwired and stay in the same place even when you turn the device and the picture changes automatically. I find myself reaching for the back key at the bottom of the device in portrait mode, which is what I am used to from the Note 3, but it is not there. Conversely, if I hold the tablet in portrait mode, it is all too easy to hit these keys with my fingers when I simply want to hold the tablet with both hands. Despite being a marvel of lightweight engineering, you don’t really want to hold something this big by just one hand in the long run. And the keys are treacherously close to where one would naturally hold. I am sure this becomes second nature pretty quickly, and I suppose it is the price for having a physical home/wake key, but perhaps some smart engineer comes up with a better solution before the next turning of the wheel.

Battery time is impressive for a device as thin and light as this. Strangely, the device recharges via the usual micro USB rather than an extended USB 3 port as the Note 3 had. I don’t really miss the USB 3 myself, although it supposedly gives higher speed on transfers against a PC or other USB devices. The micro USB is industry standard now and I am OK with that. It also means I can mix and match chargers without having to bring extra cables. Some earlier Samsung tablets used a wider separate charger port, eerily similar to what Apple used. I am not sorry to see that go. The default charger comes with an output of 5.3 volt, 2.0 ampere. In contrast, most PC USB ports deliver 0.5 ampere, which will not go far toward charging any of the Samsung tablets, I’m afraid.

The new Galaxy Note 10.1 is the best a man can get (at least until the 12.2 comes next spring) and it is priced accordingly. Samsung has never really been into the whole “pricing aggressively to get market share”. They seem to do well enough, but I can’t help wondering how the world would have looked today if Samsung had priced their initial Galaxy Tab lower than the first iPad, which came out the same year. (Samsung actually was available first in several countries, including my native Norway.) But with the current generation of tablets, I find myself wondering instead how much more the Note 10.1 would have cost if it came with an Apple logo.

Even so, the 2014 edition of Galaxy Note 10.1 is a pricey beast. If you don’t have an office job or don’t particularly miss handwriting, drawing or multi-window multitasking, or compatibility with the Galaxy Gear “smartwatch”, there is money to save in opting for something cheaper. But if you love living in the future and want to enter your next meeting with a lightweight tablet more powerful than a fairly new PC, the new Note 10.1 is there for you.

Lost NaNoWriMo

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“It is the test’s fault for being too hard.” That is a normal human reaction, but let us be honest. It was my own fault and I could have avoided it if I had taken the project more seriously. Luckily it is not my living at stake, much less my life.

I failed to write 50 000 words on my novel in November, which is the challenge of the National Novel Writing Month (which is, by the way, international). Actually I lacked less than 3500 words, which I sometimes write in a day. Perhaps I did underestimate the Big (Secret) Event at work, which happened to fall on the last weekend of the month. But I had plenty of time to write before that.

The truth is that the characters did not really engage me, and probably would engage any other readers even less. The premise of the story was great, I think. I may reboot it if I live long enough. But for some reason, most of the characters did not click with me or each other. The most interesting was the weird cousin, who was not even meant to be in the story, I just roped her in because nothing would happen with the existing characters. Pretty much every major character was lacking basic social skills, and unfortunately they did not have other engaging traits to make up for it. I had some plot, but moving forward along it was like constipation.

Instead of writing about an augmented reality game combining the best elements of Ingress and Magic: The Gathering, I spent much of the month playing the actual Ingress, and had rather more fun. Although I think the game would have been better if it had been like the game in my novel, it was still more engaging than my novel.

Better luck another time, if there is another time.

Exit from Camelot

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My rather defensive paladin in Darkness Falls (an underground realm in Dark Age of Camelot), battling imaginary demonic creatures. Well, at least I was on the right side.

Well, it was kind of fun playing the old game again for a couple weeks. But it was almost a single-player game on the co-op server where I used to play. There were some scattered player on the combined server where all the other old servers had been merged. But over the years they have continued to develop a more and more unique culture and language, so that the public messages were a mixture of names and abbreviations that made no sense to me. I wonder if this would have happened to City of Heroes if it lived for another decade? There was some of it after 8 years, but not so much that you could not get into it pretty quickly, and there were always new people who would ask for advice, and people would answer them politely and quickly.

I guess going back to the ex after the death of your loved one just isn’t very likely to work. Not that I would know except for computer games.

I may still play it as a single-player game occasionally, perhaps. Although this is made unnecessary difficult because the game refuses to acknowledge my mapping of a network drive to store the game files, even though it should normally be transparent to programs outside the operating system. Probably some part of the Electronic Arts paranoia, the same thing that makes The Sims games so hard to run on Linux.

Return to Camelot

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Screenshot Dark Age of Camelot: Prydwen Keep

Tinlad, the new overly defensive paladin, at the gates of Prydwen Keep.

It was September 1, 2006. I was writing in my hand-coded on-line journal about leaving my favorite game for several years, Dark Age of Camelot. A new, superior game had taken its place in my heart: City of Heroes. And I wrote: ” I know that unless the game gets an interface as easy and intuitive as City of Heroes, I am not going to return. Probably not even then. Well, unless CoH is closed down for some reason. Perhaps not even then.”

Both of these things came to pass. It is now almost a year since City of Heroes closed down. It is not coming back. A “spiritual successor” is slated for release in 2015. Perhaps I will still be here, and still be interested. But to me it is an ocean of time. And a while ago, I learned that somehow Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC) had survived. It was scaled back. Development is slow when it happens at all. The population is low. The subscription fee is still there, in an age of plentiful free massive online games. The servers have been consolidated, there are now 2 of them from what I can see: Gaheris, the no-playerkilling server, and one common server for all the rest.

And so, I have returned. I am not sure for how long: I paid only for 1 month, and I may not stay that long. But I did stop by.

As promised in that entry in 2006, Itlandsen the overly defensive paladin is going to remain retired, although I may visit him for reference perhaps. I have started a brand new paladin, so that I could go through the tutorial quests from the start. It has been some years, after all, and the game has also evolved for a while after I left. So let’s welcome Tinlad, the overly defensive newbie highlander paladin!  (Yes, I have just shifted a couple letters in my last name, but it was unexpectedly descriptive, since paladins spend their days in plate armor.)

The startup zone for highlanders was moved to somewhere that did not even exist when I was there. The tutorial quests were easy and the leveling quite rapid – I got to level 10 and was ready to leave the startup zone in an afternoon. In the olden days, it took days to get someone to level 10, at least alone. And I spent plenty of time getting familiar with the controls again (and changing some of them – the system is now more flexible and it is easy to set up your own keyboard shortcuts and mouse controls, or choose from popular setups.)

Some memories of the early 2000s did come back, though, once I got back to a zone I was familiar with. And when I saw the entrance to Prydwen Keep, I felt a wave of nostalgia. This was where many of my first characters spent their “childhood”, the levels up to 10. I have no count of how many hours I have spent chasing ghosts and spriggans and bandits in the area between Prydwen and Cotswold. It was also on the ramp up to Prydwen Keep that I parked my favorite character when my trial period was over and I was unable to subscribe to the game, a problem which was later fixed.

My online friends from back then are no doubt long gone. I only saw one other playable character during my stay online, but there are probably others since Gaheris is still running. But the game is playable solo, especially during the first part, as long as you don’t go into the borderlands that are designed for large-scale realm war. I wasn’t into that even back then, and I certainly am not now. Knowing that there is a real person playing the character I am killing is a super turnoff for me. Your turnoffs may vary. ^_^

The extreme longevity of DAoC also shows what a big mistake NCSoft made when they closed down City of Heroes. If they had kept the game subscription-based, slowed development to maintenance and consolidated the least populated servers, they could have had a steady income from people who just never got fed up with the game and subscribed year after year. All for the cost of electricity and fiber connection for the servers. CoH had a system for users to create new content, so it could probably have continued to grow for another decade or two or three, until the end of PC gaming as we know it.

Whether DAoC will last that long, is more uncertain. And whether I will be there, even much more uncertain. But I was there today. It was … alright, I guess. ^_^ But I’m impressed that they kept my characters waiting since 2006 for me to return. Perhaps we all have something to learn from that!