Freeday 17 September 1999
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Pic of the day: Just me. I noticed that I hadn't posted a decent
portrait of myself for a while. I must admit that I do look healthy
and reasonably happy... The large tuft of "wild hair" on my forehead is my style the last couple weeks (since just before the Oslo trip). It may be growing a bit too large and dominating now. But I sort of liked it. Oh, I'm glad the work week is finally over. I mean, I've been jumping around day after day, helping my coworkers getting started with their new machines. Today I didn't get a lunch break at all, though I managed to eat a piece of cake that I bought on my way to work. At least it is sort of meaningful work. If you manage to forget for a while that the entire workplace may be little better than nothing, possibly worse. But apart from that. The people who work there are nice enough, so I'm happy to help.
Incidentally, I discovered today that while we're on an Intranet rather
than the Internet, we still have external e-mail. So I can send
mail from my work account and also receive mail to it. I find this kind
of funny. We don't have floppies, presumably because we might use
them to either contaminate the system or export information out of it.
We work with some pretty sensitive client data at times. But e-mail
is OK, obviously. :)
In years gone by, I used to read books. I would borrow them from the town library, if I found them there. Cheap books in English I would buy at the kiosk, as these were rarely ever to be found in the library and anyway they were cheap. I still have a lot of those. After I got bookshelves, I stopped throwing them away after I read them. I have a lot of them. Most of them are from some years ago. I don't read much books anymore. A fantasy book once a month perhaps? I think you have seen most of them here. It is like an event now, that I actually read a book. I still read magazines. I don't buy quite as many regularly as I did. For instance, I bought The Economist this week, but usually I just browse their stripped-down online version and perhaps their e-mail newsletter. I also usually buy the monthly Norwegian science magazine "Illustrert Vitenskap". And I used to buy the competing magazine, but it seems to have folded. Its web site has been down for a while too. I guess I should delete my link to them. On the brighter side, good old Scientific American is still going strong. Always a nice read on my bus. Then again, my laptop is really a bit too big to use comfortably on the bus - if it were not, that would probably spell the end of my buying these magazines as well as the British New Scientist. In years gone by, I used to write my own fiction. Lots of it. I never published any of it, I wrote it mainly for my own amusement. And for my need to get a grip on the stuff that was welling up inside me, I guess. I had an old typewriter, and wrote and wrote. I got a tiny computer with a few kilobytes of RAM and a small printer, and programmed my own text editor and wrote and wrote. I got a full-featured PC with various shareware text processing programs, and continued writing. Then I started to play games. Lots of games. And then I found my favorite role playing and strategy games. I wrote less and less. Now, I rarely buy new games. I still play my favorites off and on. But often as not, I don't even do that, just read and write about them in e-mail and on UseNet. There is a pattern here, I guess. I am reading and writing more than ever. On the Internet. Gradually, it eats away at the edges. Now, I don't have much of a social life anyway, but even the nerd life is slowly devoured by the Internet. And I feel fine. For instance, I just today got a couple e-mails from an online friend I've never met in the flesh and never will. Still, it was a nice touch. I always appreciate a friendly mail. And I usually reply, if it looks like you would want a reply (and perhaps anyway). But I guess I could take the time to read a book now and then. While they still exist. |