Freeday 29 June 2001

Pic of the day: Screenshot from the opening of the Cultures demo. It continues with an extremely high sugar content so far as I have seen. I like it! :)

Short shopping spree

Well, I ordered that keyboard for Cassie. Now I only need a modem for the Pocket PC, and I can avoid dragging the Toshiba with me. The Toshiba is kind of less practical now that the internal modem has gone the way of all flesh. We'll just have to see, though. The shopping lust is sated for now. You see, I also bought this most wonderful mouse...

Yes indeed, I went once again to the Shop of Angels. For two lunches in a row I went, like the fallen prophet Bileam who did not take a hint but waited until he got the answer he wanted. Except he wanted more gold, while I went to spend mine. So eventually on the second day a young man came over and told me what kind of mouse he used for his own mouse illness. (That's what we call it in Norwegian, mouse illness or mouse sickness. Nobody talks about carpal tunnell syndrome here, that I hear. Incidentally, I think mouse illness includes all repeated stress injuries from mouse and keyboard use.)

So I bought this cool Logitech mouse with a USB cable and a cool blue glowing logo and a thumb button for double clicking, and more. Very cool and with a good grip. But my stress injury comes mainly from typing anyway, and especially at the workplace.

***

Oh, and I downloaded the cultures demo. Actually the demo was not there, I found it on Gamezone. The game is cute! I have seen it described as a "rural Sims", but it is more like Settlers ("Serf City" in America). But each person has his own name, and the only way to get more workers is to have people marry and have their own place to live. And even then, people start as babies. This is kind of realistic (well, apart from the marrying part I guess) but it also means the game is heavy on strategy. I may buy it. :)

Incidentally, I got stuck early in the tutorial because it told me to click the gearwheels icon in the "action menu". There was a gearwheel icon on the menu bar to the left, and I clicked it and got up the tech tree. Buggy buggy bug! I thought. But eventually the idea struck me that perhaps the action menu was another menu. So I right clicked on the character. Lo and behold! The action menu! It would not have hurt to write that instead, the first time. "Right click Sven to get up his action menu, then choose the wheelgear icon..."

But I guess this just goes to show that when you live with something for a long time, you kind of expect everyone else to think like you do. Even before you explain it to them.

***

Oh, and I upgraded Opera to version 5.12. Somewhere along the way, it now handles certificates quite fine, so I have now deleted the old certificate from Internet Exploder. I won't delete the actual browser right now, but there is no longer any particular tast that comes to mind as absolutely requiring it. I may still use it for testing new layouts and such, though. But I'm quite happy to not actually need it.

And mind you, this is because I like Opera, not because I dislike MSIE. I like Microsoft. I am quite happy that the court stopped the forced splitting of the company. I think it says something that the stock exchange lifted noticeably on the news that MS was not forced to split, at least for quite a while. If you think MS is a monopoly, you are exaggerating. If you think MS is an evil monopoly, you are young. I could tell you stories of evil monopolies ...

But not tonight.