Saturday 26 February 2000

Pic of the day: Drepende uskyld (Killing innocence), yet another "Kingdom of Light" book by the irrepressible Margit Sandemo. I've already read it. Like the others, it is full of romance, magic, romance, aliens, romance, spirits, romance, a little bit of sex, and romance. This one is set in the year 2080. The guy wears shades because he is part alien, and it shows in his eyes. The girl is the reincarnation of a witch from 1500 years ago. Wonder why the church doesn't particularly like these books? Oh, and the son of Lucifer finally falls in love. Sort of.

In other bookish news, I printed out Beasts of Tarzan so I could read it on the bus. I would not normally do this kind of thing, and I felt like I was running amuck with a chainsaw in a sacred grove or something, killing innocent trees left and right. Even though I printed it in 8 point Times. I wish I could read my portable computer on the bus, but there simply isn't room. It's hard enough to find a good place for one's legs. Even so, I felt like a card-carrying hypocrite for printing out a book to read it exactly once, after my rants about the death of paper in favor of electronic media.

Normally I would not even use the bus today, on a Saturday. The reason I did so was that we had got a new PC at work yesterday. I downloaded and installed loads of software updates. After a couple hours I went home, reading Tarzan all the way. Those two Russians are some real creeps, though of course like all good crooks these they're too evil for their own good. Either that, or closet sado-masochists.

Back to the brave new world of paperless media. After I wrote yesterdays entry, I got Entrypoint to personalize. Yay! It had only been too busy to let me log in, I guess. (I still had to use Internet Exploder because the Javascript was too proprietary for Opera to parse. This happens quite a bit. I wonder if Opera will cave in and include a personalization choice to let it fake IE, or if they will go down fighting.) I'm mostly interested in international news, as well as tech and health and such non-US-specific stuff. No big surprise there. And there it was:

Internet improves lives. A survey of Internet users showed that most of them felt that going online had improved their lives. "While 72 percent of current users said the Internet bettered their lives, 26 percent said it made no difference. Only two percent said their lives become worse."

Now remember that these people were Internet users. And it is reasonable to suspect that some of them were online because they wanted to. I take it that the two percent who felt that their lives had become worse, and still were using the Internet, did so because it was their job? And despite the recent economic boom, they were unable to get a job that did not involve the misery and suffering of surfing the Net. One may be allowed to wonder about what they spent their workday doing before the introduction of the Internet. Whatever it was, it must have been wonderful. :)

Perhaps they relaxed with a good book? If so, they probably didn't buy it from Amazon.com. (Then again, neither do I.)