Freeday 30 June 2000

Pic of the day: Study catalog. I am having education fantasies again. Let us hope I don't burn off too much money before I recover.

The more things change

First some practical information. My homepage will be moved to a new server as of July 1st, through no wish of my own. The good news is that you will be automatically redirected for the first few months. The bad news is that the moving process itself could disturb access for a while. I will try to keep an eye on it, and if necessary post my entries to crosswinds.net where I have the Diary Farm. You may want to bookmark it so that you need not wonder whether I am alive or not if there is a long period of trouble with my main ISP. (Crosswinds are not the world's most stable either, but I hope they won't stop at the same time as the other.)

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OK. It is Freeeday! It is weeekend! What am I going to do with all that spare time? Will I go to a museum and absorb some culture? Will I go to the zoo and marvel at the mysteries of the animal world? Will I search out some old friends and be social? Will I go to a bar and look for matching lonely hearts? Or will I stay at home playing The Sims? Place your bets... :)

The great event of the day was finally shipping the old modem to Germany with priority mail. It probably cost more than the old modem itself was worth, but still quite a bit less than what it would have cost to buy a new. Intriguingly, I did not have to fill in any forms about the content of the package and stuff and stuff? When I sent the book, I had to write content and value, but the young boy at the post office insisted that this box would be treated as a letter and as such there was no need to specify anything except the address. I hope he is right. I know from experience that young boys can sometimes be more sure than their experience warrants... (Experience as in, that was me some time ago.)

I actually packed the modem yesterday, but of course I had forgotten the paper with SuperWoman's address. I remember the street adress, but not the postal number. (The European equivalent of zip code, I think. I hate it when I have to fill in zip code in some form on the Internet. Presumably a lot of people in America don't know that the world is round and that there are other countries on the other side. Too bad for their trade. Because we do have credit cards and Visa cards, but we don't have zip codes.)

While we are still going postal, it is now official: The state-owned Post system in Norway will slash thousands of jobs and close down hundreds of post offices. Why? Well, probably because they need the money for fatter salaries for the top leaders. Or I may just be having a bad day. Officially it's because of the new economy. People pay their bills over the Net these days. Packets can be picked up at the local grocery or municipal service offices. Exit the post office.

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In extremely local news, I've got the study catalog from NKI, the Norwegian Knowledge Institute, formerly known as Norwegian Correspondence Engineering college (or some such). They have certainly changed their profile. There are still some technical courses, but you're not likely to become an engineer that way any more. On the bright side, they have expanded into information technology pretty broadly, and added some basic university level courses.

To be honest, I don't have an inkling what the various university degrees are called in English. Or rather, I am not able to match them to the Norwegian ones. I am not even sure they overlap completely. There is one project in the catalog that's the equivalent of 1 year's study of psychology. And another in the history of ideas, of all things. All very feminine things, not the manly engineering studies that the school was famous for when I was young.

Yes, it's that way here in Norway at least: Women go to the universities and study humanistic stuff like psychology, sociology, literature ... stuff that is nice to know but that doesn't lead to any concrete, provable progress. The all too few engineers and IT workers are overwhelmingly men, as are a large number of the economists. But only half as many men attend universities as women.

By most standards we have a fairly egalitarian society here, also in the relations between the sexes. But equality it is not. Women seem to be more free to study whatever takes their fancy, without the pressure that they eventually need to buy a house for the education. Men have to be more practical and move in for the stuff that gives coins, and lots of coins. The old breadwinner role, just in more modern clothes. Of course there is a lot of overlap - for instance, my friend SuperWoman is hardly the only woman studying medicine these days, while it was once a typical male profession.

But anyway, since I'm not likely to need to feed a large family, I may actually study whatever I want and nobody need bother. Not that I am likely to take any more education. I'll probably just keep dreaming. I know that I rarely if ever finish anything I start, unless it can be done in a few minutes. Not exactly attention deficit disorder, but a lack of intellectual stamina perhaps. Time seems to flow differently for me. A week seems like a really long time, where lots of things may happen. Usually when I tried to take correspondence courses in the past, I lost interest while waiting for my answers to be evaluated. It may be different over the Internet. Perhaps. Yeah, right. :)

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." (French proverb, I think.)