Thursday 2 September 1999
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Pic of the day:
Psychology Today magazine.
Now with a tiny website and e-mail. A couple of quotes from this issue:
"Animals play at mounting. Humans play doctor." "... those still surviving
are those who played the most throughout their lives." And my favorite:
"The opposite of play is not work. It is depression."
Get the whole story, and many other stories too, in Psychology Today.
For some reason there are also lots of love potion and astrology ads.
I guess psychology is a science that attracts some interesting people.
Making sense: Sense.com is now offering free Internet access in Norway. They are the first to do so. Well, it is not exactly free: You still have to pay for your phone calls. In Norway, local calls are not free. In fact, there no longer exist local calls. The price is the same everywhere inside the country, a little over $1 per hour. In addition to this, Norwegians have had to pay a small monthly charge for Internet access, typically in the range of $12-$25 a month. This extra charge is what we can now avoid by switching to Sense.com. I'm not going to make the leap yet. My current ISP offers 10 MB of space for my homepage etc, whereas Sense only offers a 3 MB e-mail buffer. Since I already have an established homepage, which has been up for years, I am not likely to abandon it to save the equivalent of a weekly cheeseburger. I do however recommend any Norwegians who don't have their own homepage yet, to get themselves over to Sense.com and take a look. If you want to make a homepage later, you can do so for free at crosswinds.net, where I have my archives and now my Daggerfall site too. Not only is it free, but there are nifty tools for editing and uploading your pages with a browser. And no pop-ups. Oh, and unlimited space too. It's a Tooth Faerie & Santa Claus collaboration.
More likely than not, the sudden infusion of Sense into the
market will send the old oligopoly into a scramble. The few
who have traditionally carved up the marketplace will have
to react quickly, or customers will migrate in droves. Being
lazy, the customers will presumably use Sense's startup
page and portal site, and the ad agencies will start to place
their money there. So I predict that even without lifting a
finger, I will still reap some financial benefit from this.
All I need to do is stay alive and online, which I would dearly
like anyway.
Making cents: Today I went out to shop a goodly sized cup for my tea, soup etc. This of course was prompted by my investment in a gold-plated water-boiling jug yesterday. At the local branch of Christiania Glasmagasin I found a row of delicate china high cups that were reduced in price from kr 129 to kr 39 (which is ca $5). I also bought a cheap small spoon, with SPOON written in big letters. I appreciate that in a spoon.
The china seems so thin, so fragile, that I was just a little
worried the first time I filled it with boiling water. It
did not explode, however. And I reasoned that it will at least
not get thrown across the room in a hissy fit or PMS-induced
snit. There are upsides to being one rather than two,
I guess.
Trying to make sense: Of the fact that I'm constantly bungling my feeble attempts at human emotions. Was I born this way, or did I lose it during the harsh first eight years of school? Or did I truly sacrifice my mortal emotions during the years where I attempted to become a god? I still feel the tug sometimes, the desire to merge with the Greater Self.
I long to cross over. I read in some book by C.S. Lewis (I think it was called the Screwtape Letters or some such) that the human mind was incapable of stability and the closest it came was a wave function. Something like that. I am reminded of that occasionally. Some times one part will dominate, then another. At times the tug of the mortal flesh is particularly strong, other times the cravings of the immortal spirit. Yet, isn't this role as arbiter between dust and dream the essence of being human? |