Monday 18 October 2004

Pic of the day: Clutter, clutter everywhere! That's one reason this place is called the Chaos Node.

Stupid stuff

I took the day off, and did indeed feel much better this evening. Of course, with my doctor appointment not until November, I'm likely to have to pay this one out of my own pockets. But life is a lot more than money, at least if you're not starving and stuff. I'll find some way around it and still pay my bills, I suspect, as long as I recover my health (at least to normal 45-year level).

***

There is one physical object I really miss now. You know what that is? A big container to dump trash in. I'd like to see one of those on my doorstep. I just seem to accumulate so much trash that I can't get rid of it the ordinary way. I share a trashcan with the neighbors upstairs, and it is generally full, which is amazing since I am only one person and they are only two, and elderly at that. What families with ten kids do, is beyond my imagination. Perhaps they re-use things until they simply vanish?

Also, our trashcans don't take broken washing machines and stuff like that, and there is special garbage that should not be put on ordinary landfills even if you could sneak it in.

Last weekend I brought a couple small broken electric items to the supermarket, as they have a small trash can specifically for such things. Sadly, it was full, with exactly the same objects that it had been full of a week before. That is to say, Kiwi Langenes don't bother with taking responsibility for the trash of stuff they sell (light bulbs and such, in this case). They also don't bother to refrigerate their perishables to the required temperature anymore. Last I checked, the shelves for meat products and such were slightly cooler than room temperature, but not as cool as outdoors. The freezers were about the right temperature for cooling milk and meat, using my fingers as thermometers. OK, that cannot possibly be right, or frozen food would spoil pretty fast. But it wasn't exactly painfully cold, that's for sure.

I suppose that for the future, if any, I will take the bus to Tangvall. The Kiwi shop there has had the coldest food I have found in or near the city of Kristiansand. Then again, almost all shops around here are way way way off the prescribed temperatures. The arm (or little finger) of government that keeps tabs on this keeps reprimanding the shops over and over, but a few weeks later everything is back to normal. This is another good reason why I rarely ever buy food based on meat, seafood or eggs. Cheese and bread generally don't care, nor does yogurt within reasonable limits.

For reasons unknown to mortal ken, Norwegians generally have only one requirement of their food: It must be cheap. Quality, taste, variation ... sure, if it doesn't cost anything extra. This is pretty ironic for people who live in one of the world's five richest nations. People who are perfectly willing to pay more and more and more and more for houses that are no better than they were back when the exact same houses cost half as much. But pay for properly refrigerated food? No way dude! It must be cheap. Cheap is the Way and the Truth; cheap is All.

***

Now to show that not only other people are stupid, let me tell you what I have spent quite some time doing lately: Uploading my archives to their new home, using command-line FTP, with commands such as mkd, cd, lcd and mput. At least I found a way to turn off the question for confirmation for each file, do you really want to upload this file even though you just told me to upload all of the files in the directory? But a few hundred files into the wrist-breaking process, I realized that I had, one of these last years, downloaded an FTP extension to Internet Explorer. I opened this program (which I normally don't use) and typed in the FTP address. Lo & behold! It asked for user-id and password, and then let me drag and drop my folders from my local harddisk to the website. Just like that. It's not the fastest cheetah on the savanna, but it runs unattended for minutes after a few seconds of dragging and dropping.

Of course, it won't help YOU any to point your explorer to my FTP address. Because I have this nifty password. But I have hundreds of gigabytes of free space now, so if you want me to put up some of your stuff I guess I could do that. But with prices like these, I guess most people will want their own.

Wish I could expand physical storage space as cheaply as that! ^^*