Monday 26 December 2005

Pic of the day: The excavation proceeds apace. Parts of the table are now visible for the first time in this millennium. (Actually probably the first time in ca 15 years.)

Would you mind?

I'm kinda busy here. Moving, moving! You may press the point that I have been doing that for a month or more, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm doing it even more now. I'm sorting through my earthly belongings trying to find out what to keep and what to let go. It is hard work, mostly for the soul, although carrying stuff for 20 minutes in the arctic cold doesn't exactly help either.

To top it off, my computer is breaking down. More exactly the fan is going down. Not in flames, yet, but it is not for lack of trying. The rubber band that's pulling the fan blades around is beginning to slip, from the sound of it, so they don't run at full speed and sometimes halt briefly. I can't keep it running through the night or while I am at work, for fear that it will catch fire or at least enough smoke to set off the fire alarm. But there's no reason to let it run either, because the reason for that was the Internet. And that is gone starting tonight.

Telenor disconnects the phone line, and thereby my ADSL (although that service is provided by a competitor, but Telenor has a de facto monopoly on copper cable). I asked them some time ago to switch the line from this apartment to the next tomorrow. But they can't do that until January 10th. What they didn't tell me was that they do mysteriously have time to switch it off on the 27th, or rather the night to the 27th. They just don't have time to switch it on in the new place until mid January. Notice that the switching all takes place in the central, electronically. It is the same central, since it's only 20 minutes walk apart, and I'll even keep the same number. Whether they are stupid or evil is something God will have to decide on Judgment day, but for the eternal benefit of both me and them he better not ask my opinion. "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who trespass against us." Most likely they don't know what they do. They certainly don't seem to know what they do normally when I have any dealing with them.

While the computer still lasts, I have also undertaken to copy back in the dozens of burned CDs from before the age of DVD, then re-burn them to DVD. Whether I will ever use them again in any case is not known, but at least DVDs take substantially less space than the corresponding stack of CDs. (8 CDs just barely fit on 1 DVD.) Of course, three years from now (if we are still around) I may tell you that I have burned them to HDVD or whatever will be the standard at the time. Or perhaps I have them all on free Net storage with Google (or whoever bough up Google before that time). God alone knows the future. But I'll happily volunteer to be there. Hopefully the stress won't kill me ...