Saturnday 23 January 1999
The real problem with not being married (or some such) isn't the lack of affection or, hmm, physical proximity. It's that there's no one to blame when the dust grows thick. A few of my female friends have raised the suspicion that I may have signed a permanent peace treaty with the dust bunnies. I hope this will convince you that the war goes on! And at the same time, a chance to show off my nice grey super fleece jogging suit (well, at least the nether part). And finally, occasionally showing one's rear should keep up the number of visitors to the site. It sure seems to work elsewhere.
Luckily, while most of the Chaos Node is stacked with stuff, most of the floor space is still free, at least in the living room. What I need isn't a larger apartment, generally. It's a library, the size of your average small town library. Where I can put my hundreds (if not thousands) of books and magazines. I wished the future had come a bit sooner, so I could have most of these in electronic form. A Zip disk (from Iomega) takes a lot less space than a stack of books or magazines. Not to mention that you would probably not want to save the entire content of magazines, ads and all. During the last months I've finally weaned from the paper format of The Economist, one of my favorite weeklies. Despite the name, it's not mainly about accounting and such, but gives the larger picture of politics, technology and cultural shifts. In addition to the weekly news of mergers and upheavals on the world's stock markets.
Speaking of which, I firmly believe that the irrational exuberance of the American stock market is finally going to get its teeth knocked out, any day now, and we'll finally have the world recession that we've made for ourselves and which I've predicted for a while. Let us pray for the health of Alan Greenspan (head of the US Federal Reserve). In a time when the "bulls" and "bears" of the stock markets have been generally exchanged for yapping chihuahuas, at least this guy has tried to keep things on the road as long as possible.
This seems a good place to mention that I bought home a small load of macaroni for my Y2K cache. They only need to be cooked for 5 minutes, which may come in handy if one needs to save fuel. Though I suspect that in January 2000, if we are still alive by then, it will be cold enough up here that I will want the primus on for a longer time. Then again, it's pretty mild and green outside now. I would have tagged the greenhouse effect, had I not seen recent reports of the terrible snow winter in the USA.