Thursday 17 May 2001

Pic of the day: Shades of green. It seems like almost every tree is in a different stage of awakening to summer. A fascinating sight, even more so in real life than in JPG.

Go with the programs

OK, it is late at night so this will be short. (Yeah, right.) All is reasonably well as far as I know.

I got the new computer online, as is good and proper. Was not able to connect for a while, then took a closer look and saw that it treated the new external modem with the settings of the old internal modem. (Actually the old modem was newer than the new one, but it is new to this machine, OK?) Got connection. Slow at first, but I assume that is because it has been May 17th.

For international readers: May 17th is Norway's national day, more exactly constitution day. Interestingly, we celebrate this far more than independence day, which is almost forgotten. Some folks place much mystical significance on this, that we are a people who revere the law above formal independence as a symbol of freedom. Others, well at least one other, think there is a more prosaic explanation. The independence movement during the last half of the 19th century encouraged the celebration of May 17th as a sign of national pride and a road to independence. (And it worked ... in the 1905 referendum, there were like a few hundred who voted for union and the rest for independence.) However, once this habit was ingrained, it was simply not possible to move it to another day. It had become yet another unthinking habit. Which depicts Norway as a country not of deep philosophers but of habit creatures. I think that is pretty realistic. (Then again, there is the occasional philosopher too.)

Anyway, I supposed that the connection trouble may be due to the national day. Technicians being drunk and people trying to download live footage, stuff like that. I still think the drunk technician hypothesis may have some value.

Not only did the computer call repeatedly (each try racking up the phone bill a little bit) but the connection blacked out for 10-15 minutes at a time. And we still pay per minute here, even though the price is more moderate now, less than a dollar per hour. Anyway, I intend to steal back the money they have stolen from me. I have a plan. We will not dumbly accept being stolen from. We are not sheep! Are we sheep? Are we? (Choir: "Naaaah!") --I love preaching to the choir.

***

There is quite a lot of downloading to do when a new computer first comes online. It did not even come with Opera installed - the world's fastest graphical browser. So first task was to get it, so as to maximize speed and convenience for the rest of the work.

Currently I'm downloading StarOffice 5.2, a free office suite vaguely compatible with Microsoft Office. I had a reduced version of it on the Toshiba, and it was kind of nice. I only used the text processing part, though, and probably will this time too. A shame to install so much and use so little, but that's how office suites are. I wish there was a Word compatible stand alone program freely available, but I have not the time to try out until I find one that is good enough. I don't use cuddly software that much. Most of my writing is finalized in PFE32, Programmer's File Editor 32 bits version 1.01 (the last version ever). A slight improvement over Notepad, it suits my needs well. Much of the actual text entry is done in EDIT for DOS. Nostalgia overload? Sorry about that. At least I don't use EDLIN. :)

I have on a very few occasions written entries in Word for Windows, and noticed that they tend to be more lighthearted and funny. I am not sure whether this would be a good thing or not ...

Oh, and the new computer does not seem to have MS Chat, and then there's the voice chat program, Iparty. I can always hope this voice chat fad dies a natural death in the Acid Reflux community, or I might have to shell out for a microphone too. Ack, I actually started to type "mircophone". With all due respect for mIRC, the program is hardly designed for voice chat.

***

Of all these programs, Opera is actually Made In Norway. The rest are not. So much for national independence. No man is an island, and only a few nations. Norway is not one of them, neither geographically nor culturally. In both aspects, we are wide open toward the west. Which may be just as well. But that is just my personal opinion.