Payday 9 June 2000

Pic of the day: More Norwegian wood!

Formatting friend

Today was a premature payday. We usually get our pay on the 12th of each month, and this month is our "no tax withheld" pay in celebration of the summer holiday. Needless to say for a Nordic country, the summer holiday holds a special place in many people's heart! Now since the 12th is on second day Pentecost, we got it before the weekend. Second day Pentecost (and Christmas, and Easter) is a holy day in the nominally christian nation of Norway. Since this means a day off work for most, there are few complaints even from the atheists or muslims. :)

Suddenly rich, I bought a CD. I was walking through Markens, the main street of Christiansand, and stopped as I heard a beautiful rendering of "Sound of Silence". A street musician from Andes was playing a pan flute in the main street, and boy could he play! So I bought the CD. It cost only kr 100 (ca $11) which is fairly cheap for a CD here. Then again, they probably don't pay tax. :)

Speaking of which, the EU have in their wisdom decreed that companies outside the EU have to charge Value Added Tax on Internet sales into the EU. Heh. As one reporter noticed, this was obviously meant for the Americans but it's easy enough to sell software from Burkina Faso, and would the EU even know? It seemed to be pure rhetoric.

I have to pay 22% VAT here in Norway if I download a commercial program via the Internet. I also have to contact the corresponding arm of government to report that I have bought the software, fill in a form and pay a fee for the processing of said form. Oh my how inviting! Trust me, I plan to give this the consideration that it deserves.

***

"Die Gedanken sind frei" says a famous German song. And free is also some stuff on napster.com, a website which I saw for the first time today. And the reason why I saw it was that my old friend Dan invited me over to help repartition his hard disk and reinstall software. This took quite a while, all the time till midnight in fact, as I had suspected. I did get to see his newborn son, though. The little one did indeed look noticeably like his father. Not that anyone had expected anything else.

Dan is the guy who married last summer, a member of the seriously pious congregation popularly known as Smith's Friends. Despite this he did invite an old friend such as I was, even though I am not attending their meetings and workshops anymore. Anyway, Dan was also the guy who protested against being mentioned on the same page as a wet dream about a woman in skirts. I leave the obvious conclusions to the reader. :)
(Oops, mentioned it again, didn't I?)

That's a nice thing about being a computer guru, people remember their old friendship with you. Luckily for this guy, I genuinely like him and his entire family. Great folks all around. His father was a good friend through many years, one of my best friends ever, until his tragic death by cancer while his youngest children were still in school. They have coped well enough, though. And it is still my pleasure to help his children. Oh, and they are cool people in their own right. Dan even tried to pay me. Heh. I don't forget friendship that fast.

***

Dan is not stupid, for a human. He has picked up a lot, working with computers and having one at home. But when it came to running FDISK and deleting partitions, his courage wavered. As is good and proper: This is the truly fast and efficient way to make your computer useless and send your valuable data to the great data dump in the sky. Luckily there was a slave disk, so we dragged stuff over there first. Then we installed windows again. There were two pieces of hardware that were not recognized by Windows when installed: The Voodoo card and the ISDN. Yes, pietists are allowed to have Voodoo cards. It was the ISDN card that took a hour or two to get up and running. In the end, we had to resort to the user's guide. Oh, the shame!

Unlike yours humbly, Dan has ISDN. This digital phone connection is very popular here in Norway. This was fairly noticable when downloading, which was a bit faster than I am used to. We tested it by downloading first something from Napster, and then the web browser Opera. You should have seen the guy's face when we later downloaded from Napster again, using Opera. The speed was nearly doubled, and his eyes fairly stood out and he was mumbling incoherently. Opera is definitely a good choice if your phone line is faster than your Internet Explorer. Actually it's a good choice usually, but it does cost money. Which IE does not, at least until Judge Dredd, or Jackson or whatever it was, has done his work.

Mind you, I like Microsoft. I remember the time before their "monopoly", when you couldn't use a floppy from one machine on another. And they don't have a monopoly. Ask anyone with a Mac. It is entirely possible to have better software than what Microsoft makes, if you are willing to pay the price. And that's why I don't use IE and Outlook at home, even though I have them at work. I have programs which I had to pay for, but which are simply better for my work habits. As a Norwegian, I use to go online, fetch stuff, and go offline: We pay the same price for Internet use, local calls and long-distance national calls. Under such circumstances, slow software is suddenly not free anymore.