Friday 12 May 2000

Pic of the day: That's me in the corner. (Consider this a hint.)

So how was my day? I woke up at normal time but my hyperactive digestion kept me home from work. Not an ideal day to call in sick, either. I had just eaten the last yoghurt the night before. I rarely run out of yoghurt completely, but today I have. I'm almost out of milk too, and hasn't seen a chocolate all day. Poor me. In short, not the day I would have chosen to stay home, if I could choose freely.

Also it was a beautiful day. Sunshine, warm. I forayed outdoors briefly in the afternoon, though not far. I'm sure lots of people are trying out their new summer clothes these days.

And! It is PAYDAY! Yes, on the 12th day of the month the money pours in. And out, as in my case. I had lined up an impressive stack of bills for the Netbank to execute as soon as the salary arrived. There was the utility (electricity) bill, the phone connection bill, the phone use bill, the Internet phone bill, the Internet account bill, the credit card bill and the other credit card bill. And the rent. All in all ca NOK 8500, whereas the salary (after tax) was around NOK 12300. (Divide by 8 to get the figures in Euro, by 9 for US$.)

Heh. There's still enough left for food, and even chocolate. So I'm not exactly despairing. But any new hardware, clothes etc will have to go from one of the credit cards. Last month, I paid the new glasses (spectacles) straight from my bank account, which may or may not have been a good idea. I did survive.

The bills don't arrive every month, or at least not all of them. They do vary - but this month seems to have most of them. At least I don't have a house, or a car, or a boat ... basically I don't have any expensive capital goods unless you count the computers. :) So I am not overly worried about the interest rates that are crawling upward. The disastrous wage settlement (way too high) and the upcoming disastrous state budget revision (which will also collapse into a wild spending spree) are guaranteed to send the interest rates climbing. Blessed are the single and those who have no children, when those days come. [1]

I need no gift of prophecy to foretell that the revision of the State Budget will dissolve. Already the various political parties have loudly reviled virtually any cuts, while being very careful not to go into too much detail about where they would cut, if they had the power. It's a safe bet that there will be agreement on any and all expansion, such as more money to hospitals, and no agreement on where to get the money. A wild spending spree, as I said.

If you want to wager with me about this, e-mail me. I could need some extra money.

Politicians may be better informed than the average tabloid reader. But they are still on average significantly less intelligent than you or I. And the skills required to be a politician are not the skills required to run a country. This is the sad fact of life, and there is no way out of it except changing from parliamentarism to democracy. This will not be easy. Like the kings of old demanded the right to represent the whole people, so the politicians today claim the same right. "The state is me" as that stupid French king said. Well, actually he said something like "L'etat, c'es moi" but you get the point. This is exactly how the mini-kings of our elected assemblies think today. They honestly think that they are acting on behalf of the people. But if we survive long enough, the flood will come. And they will be swept away. But it is not yet.

I've started to look into CSS - cascading style sheets - out of idle curiosity. I can't really see what it should be good for. It seems to just make web pages bigger and more difficult, without giving any real benefit. I mean, the idea is that we folks who make the web pages, we supply one style sheet. And then if people want to view the web page in a different way, they just use another style sheet. Yeah, like anyone would bother. I can already change almost anything in a normal HTML document in Opera, but how often do I do that? Well, in the extremely rare case that someone writes white on black (or worse, white on picture) AND actually is worth reading. It's not a heavy workload on my mouse wrist, exactly.

Still, I guess I should look into it just to be sure. It seems that some of my online friends are earning heaps and heaps of money by writing unnecessarily complex web pages. So there must be some demand for it. Probably some normals with too much money who are easily impressed. They did support alchemists too, at that time.

If you have any idea how any of my web pages might benefit from added complexity, feel free to mail me. Actually, feel free to do that anyway. But if you don't, I've still got the Sims to keep me company. They keep breeding in my irregular Sim Diary.

[1] OK, that was a bit over the top. Children are always a gift from Heaven, even when they sometimes seem to be exactly the opposite. After all, without children there would be no future as we know it. Still, the cloud of not having them is entirely wrapped in silver linings sometimes.