hermiene.net

Almost a month, but not quite. I do have something to show for it this time, though: Check out the brand new Anime page. In other site-related news, I've linked to Concerned, a web comic about Half-Life², and Tile World, an emulator for the tile-based puzzle game Chip's Challenge which I used to play a lot when I was a child. Also new for the Links page is smaller images. I have slowly realized that not everyone runs 1600x1200 quite yet.

In meatspace news, I've been running dual monitors for some time now, and it's wonderful. If you do the same, I recommend you check out UltraMon which lets you customize your monitors to your liking.

I have read two books and one manga series since last time. Check Books if you're interested.

I've been hanging in two IRC channels for some time now. One is #swhack on irc.freenode.net which has its own web site, and the other is #bilge on irc.talkcrap.net. The former is composed of a conglomeration of nerds of all types, and the latter is composed of the same, only in fewer numbers and focusing more on game development. If you enjoy reading my site, then head over.

Speaking of my site, I'm well aware of my recent blogging trend. One explanation is that I'm under the firm conviction that almost everything and everyone in this world are almost infinitely more interesting than I am, and that accordingly I should speak little and listen much. Some of my friends think I should update more often. I'll certainly try, but the fact is that I don't have overly much to speak of all the time.

There are two games that you absolutely must play, and those are Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and F.E.A.R. PoP: T2T really saved the series for me. Now, I didn't particularly dislike the previous game (Warrior Within) like a lot of people did. I disliked the Prince's badass attitude and all the stupid backtracking that you had to do, but I welcomed the revamped fighting system after Sand's of Time's monotonous combat. The fighting system in T2T is more or less the same as in WW, but with an added stealth element: If enemies aren't aware of you, you can silently dispose of them by sneaking up to them and, in an animated sequence, hitting the attack button at just the right intervals. That's very nice and all, but it's too easy, even on the hardest difficulty. It would be awesome if, on the harder difficulties, there were multiple buttons to hit, corresponding, perhaps, to the different angles at which the Prince attacks the enemy in the animated sequence. Still, the game is incredibly fun, and if you like Persian ninjas, you should definitely play it.

The other game you must play, F.E.A.R, is just unashamedly badass. Some of the levels are pretty ho hum, but it's more than made up for by a sweet, sweet AI and the liberal use of expletives. ("Fucker's got an appetite", a phrase describing the cannibalistic nature of the game's antagonist Paxton Fettel, is my favorite line.)

I'm learning C++ from Steve Heller's C++: A Dialog because I can't call myself a geek and not know how to program. I do know PHP fairly well, so I already know some concepts (like variables, functions, and scope) while others currently elude me (I still have no idea what object-oriented programming really is).

The web comic project will unfortunately be put on ice until further notice. We have some sketches and meager attempts at inking and coloring (which I think are quite nice), but not nearly enough to start the comic. In apology for this, here's a sketch of my alter ego, Akil, that I think turned out fairly well:

I have read no fewer than three web comics (Comedity, GU Comics, and Hellbound) and two books (Use of Weapons and A Mathematician's Apology) since the last update, in addition to watching two anime series (Full Metal Panic! and Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu!). This means that I have been having a lot of fun, while at the same time having no original content to show for it. I also want to apologize on Even's and my own behalf for not having worked much on the comic. This is partly due to our scanner's malfunctioning, but mostly due to our reluctance to do anything about it. I should feel bad, and I sort of do.

I somewhat arbitrarily split my Books into four sections: Science fiction, non-fiction, manga, and other fiction. I realize that this is a very shallow categorization, but it's due to my not having read diverse enough genres. I also realize that the summaries are really short and look like blurbs. This is due to my not having read enough books. Both of these situations will rectify themselves with time.

I polished the Links page some more. There are new images and a new section, Physics.

Oh yeah. My personal site.

A lot of things have been happening since my last news post.

I have bought a ton of books, but have only read two of them: The Player of Games and Foundation's Edge. As for the ones I've bought, they're in the Books that I want to read section, indicated by their parenthesized status.

Go read Chugworth Academy. It's on the Links page together with a new image of Faye, the new Games section, and the new Art section.

Check out Bathsheba's Large Scale Model. That's a model of a 100 megaparsec cube of matter. A parsec is an astronomical unit, and it's approximately equal to 3.26 light years. A megaparsec, then, is 3 260 000 light years. To put this in perspective, our galaxy's diameter is roughly 100 000 light years, which is about 3% of a megaparsec. And this model is of a 100 megaparsec cube of matter! I've ordered it.

Fahrenheit is an excellent game, so much so that Even and I pulled an all-nighter to finish it. Speaking of Even: He and I are maybe — maybe — going to make a web comic. But don't hold your breath. If it becomes reality, Even will draw it and I will write it. I've read enough web comics to know what makes them good, I consider myself a competent writer, and Even's getting better and better at his drawing. I think we can pull it off.

I finally survived P8107, and here is the proof:

You wouldn't believe how much more easier it is to play StepMania when you've mastered the Art of Two Hands. Suddenly you're able to obliterate arrows almost twice as fast, but your brain also has twice the number of fingers to control.

As an avid gamer I feel it is my responsibility to write something witty and degrading about Jack Thompson, but I think everyone else has already done that more than sufficiently. So just let it go on record that the sooner everyone recognizes him as the lying, misleading, fear-spreading, unpleasant lunatic that he is, the better.

Yes, I should really do more site-related work. I'll be getting to that next, I promise.

Check out Alex Spurling's spiffy new site. There's not much content yet, but we all have to start somewhere. :-)

I made nice, alpha transparent PNG images of some of the characters from the web comics that I follow and a spiffy, new 1600x1200 image of my desktop for the Computer page.

Michael Wilcox kindly notified me that my RSS feed wasn't working. It's fixed now.

You know what makes me sad? That supposedly intelligent and enlightened people of the 21th century lead lives so devoid of content that they need to believe in stupid things like astrology, clairvoyance, healing, reincarnation, and other abominations. As George Carlin puts it, "What are you, fucking stupid?" I don't mind that they believe it, really, but talking about those things as if they were true makes me really sad.

I pulled myself together and fixed a heap of stuff that was making IE puke, and my site looks half-decent in it now. I also removed the IE nagbox.

Check out Alex Spurling's Wikiknowledge, his repository of knowledge that he has gained from reading Wikipedia.

I killed Essay: Bases and Essay: Graphs & Functions. They were stale, the writing was completely off, and it didn't delve into the subjects deeply enough. Perhaps I'll remake them some day. I also linked to Games. Yes, I realize that there isn't much there now. That will change. At first I thought it would be a good idea to make the whole page first and then release it, but it obviously takes more time to complete than I thought it would.

I rearranged the navigation bar a little. I hope it makes more sense now.

I decided that 1280x960@60 Hz is abominable, so I bought a 22" flatscreen CRT monitor and I now run 1600x1200@85 Hz. Yum-sing!

Three new people and one new reference site are on the Links page: John Walker, Eric S. Raymond, Paul Graham, and HowStuffWorks.

Are you a neurotypical? Seek help today.

Every reader of science fiction should read SF Words and Prototype Worlds.

Yes, I'm working on a sudoku page. Yes, I'm working on a CSS page. Yes, I'm working a games page. But web comics, BloodRayne 2 and StepMania are too fun!

I'm back from Oslo, and, of course, all my organs are intact. Oslo is cool; it has an extensive metro system, two Outland stores that both are much larger than the one in Stavanger (and thus sporting more shelf space), and one Outlandish store called Avalon (which, as far as understand, is Outland's main and only competitor).

While walking in the city, a lunatic with flyers approached me and wanted me to oppose abortion. I told him he was crazy and continued on my merry way, of course.

I got to mess around with Mr Schrøder's Linux installation. It definitely seems to run faster than Windows. I promise to mess around with my own installation, eventually.

I've read two books since last time: Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov, and all the summaries of anthologies now has a listing of contents. I have now read 36 books in total, and 17 of those are Asimov's. If you do the arithmetic you'll find that 47% of the books I've read are by him. Perhaps I should, uh, read more by others.

Excerpt from Our Intelligent Tools:

"Eventually, if we learn how to make a computer sufficiently complex and sufficiently large, why should it not achieve a human intelligence?

Some people are sure to be disbelieving and say, "But how can a computer possibly produce a great symphony, a great work of art, a new scientific theory?"

The retort I am usually tempted to make to this question is, "Can you?""

This, of course, was incorporated into the motion picture I, Robot. Hee!

Let me take a moment to tell you how utterly stupid our workstation setups are at my work. First, the computers we use are slow. Second, we do all of our work through the Remote Desktop Protocol (or something very similar) on servers in Oslo. I believe these are very slow, or the connection is slow, or a combination thereof. In any case, it's a serious bottleneck. Third (and this is not really a technical flaw), the people who use this system (Lotus Notes) suck at it. Not only do people not use the database when making lists of people in, say, a certain group, they also embed images in PDF and DOC files, which in turn are embedded in so-called notes, stashed away in illogical places so that you are sure not to find what you want, when you want it. It is stupidity wrapped in evil inside incompetence.

If you haven't already, go check out (and play) NationStates. It's an online game where you create your own nation and rule it. It's not so much simulating as it is role-playing (for instance, there's no way to declare war on another nation, or initiate trade, or any such stuff except as role-playing via the forums), but it's still wickedly fun. The game is primarily made to promote Max Barry's new novel, Jennifer Government; the book is, of course, in my little list. Advertising can be effective, if it's targeted correctly. Go on, check out my nation, Mr Schrøder's nation, and Niels-Henrik's nation. I aim to be capitalist, Alex aims to be socialist, and Niels is... despotic. He may claim to be aiming for it, but my guess is that despotism just comes naturally to him.

I'm going to this country's capital city, Oslo, this weekend to meet up with Mr Schrøder. I hope he is the sweet misanthropic socialist geek that he claims to be, and not an eccentric 60-year-old lunatic whose interest in me revolves around my internal organs and the well-being thereof. Because if you are, I swear to Athe, I know Kung Fu!

Here's a thought: if we assume Sturgeon's Revelation to be essentially true, and that the amount of stupid people around the world is a direct result of it, things wouldn't be that bad, because the amount of smart people would increase proportionally as there will be more and more people on the planet. The problem now is just finding them. Speaking of which: I don't endorse overpopulation. In fact, I think we should slow down a little. This has been repeated by several intellectuals over the years (not that the general populace ever pays any attention), and so I'll repeat it: humans have an enormous advantage (well, several) over the other animals, in that we can plan what happens to our species. Whereas the other animals reproduce wildly until natural measures are taken (this usually involves starvation because of lack of food or being eaten by predators because, well, predators need food, too), we can plan ahead and make sure that this doesn't happen. If we continue this wild orgie, we'll start seeing resource wars, and although I've never experienced one (and I never will), I submit that it will be, shall we say, unpleasant. I don't want that. I like my species, and I would like to see it survive into space, and that can only be accomplished if we are sensible.

This is one of the reasons I refuse to procreate, by the way. Another, more immediately pragmatic reason is that children are noisy and require enormous attention, and that would seriously cut in on my fun time.

Unfortunately and unwillingly, I have started saying "1337" and "n00b" whenever I see something that rocks or sucks, respectively. I apologize to all who are affected, and I will shape up. I blame Pure Pwnage.

Go play Sudoku. It's similar to Nonograms (in that it is grid-based and Japanese), and I might very well make a Sudoku page in addition to my Nonogram page.

"Audio, video, disco!"

I made a status column for the table of read books so that I can keep track of which books I've borrowed from friends, from libraries, and which books I own in hardcover or paperback, and the summarized books now have fragment identifiers. I bought Frank Herbert's Dune series from Outland (except Dune Messiah, which they didn't currently have), and they're in the books pipeline.

Check out the new Fun section! Expect more ultimately pointless, yet fun, stuff to appear here.

I have made a web interface for myself that enables me to painlessly add and modify news posts, add new abbreviations, and add new random quotes. Hey, I'm human, and humans will gladly spend hours of hard work in order to make their lives just a little bit easier and a little bit more convenient. I have also split the books section off the Random page and made it into a full-fledged page of its own. Incidentally, I have read Fantastic Voyage. Yes, there are no fragment identifiers on the headings, and yes, the summaries are short. I will work on that.

I discovered the proper name for the alternative to military service. It's not community service or civil service, but civilian service.

I have read through two web comics, no less, since the last update. They are Piled Higher and Deeper and Machall and both are hilarious.

I'm becoming more and more proficient with Dvorak, but switching between Qwerty and Dvorak is a hassle (I use Qwerty at work).

I have played probably insane amounts of StepMania. I now survive Heart of Asia and Rhythm and Balance with an A on both. I considered these impossible only a few months ago, and I now consider P8107 impossible. (How long before I can survive that?)

During the weekend, when I wasn't home and couldn't be informed, No-IP.com decided to revert the IP address to the one of the computer on which I temporarily hosted the notice stating that my site would be down during my move. Uh-huh. It's back to the real one now (evidently).

I re-watched The Fifth Element and re-realized how beautiful it is.

My web comic rampage continues, and the victim this time is Questionable Content. A link is as usual on the Links page.

I've finished Fantastic Voyage II.

Read the essay What You Can't Say by Paul Graham.

"The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know."

Mr. Schrøder is working on something which gets abbreviated to BS, and is not bullshit. The reason I'm writing about it here is that I'm looking forward to it and I want him to finish it.

You should play BloodRayne 2. This game is pure fun and the attitude of Rayne (the protagonist, a female dhampir) is badass. (Don't bother with BR1 unless you're curious; most of what they did wrong in BR1 is culled in BR2 and everything that made BR1 fun is even more fun in BR2.) If sucking blood from the neck of a punk, cutting off his head, and impaling him on a sharp object is wrong, then I don't want to be right. The level design is so awesome, and on par with that of, say, Max Payne 2. (In fact, I suspect that BR2 is heavily influenced by MP; there's the NPCs' banter, the slowmotion camera when you finish off an enemy in a cool way such as throwing him off a high vantage point, and a slowmotion view with similar post-processing effects as those in MP2.) The art is also fantastic, and the design of your opponents is simply beautiful. One of the things that makes this game so fun is the death traps into which you can thow your enemies. My favorites are a fan that you encounter very early in the game, and Tesla coils (the scream they produce when you throw them into a Tesla coil is simply classic).

When you finish the game, it unlocks, among other things, several new outfits for Rayne to wear, among which is a schoolgirl uniform complete with a short skirt (feminists would object), a penguin backpack, a dangling cellular phone, and katanas instead of the normal blades. This is truly dolls for geeks, and should give you an incentive to finish the game.

"How is living away from your parents," you say? Infinitely better, of course. I can't believe you even had to ask.

Friction burns like a hot fuel rod cannon.

I have moved! I now live in an apartment together with Niels-Henrik. So instead of being a disgruntled nerd living in his parents' basement, I'm now a disgruntled nerd living with a slightly less disgruntled nerd. This place is technically underground and beneath a fellow human being's dwelling-place, but I prefer the term "apartment" over "basement" (even though in reality, it is both). Because of this, my site has experienced a rather extended hiatus, and for this I am sorry. I expected that the apartment would have Internet connectivity relatively quickly after we moved in, but this was not so. Still, the hiatus was caused entirely by my own incompetence; I should have thought ahead. My site is now hosted by Mr. Schrøder, and I am extremely grateful for it.

I've read Forward the Foundation and The Alternate Asimovs. I have also made my very first book purchase, and the books I bought are Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, Inversions, Look to Windward, and Against a Dark Background, all by Iain M. Banks. Now I just need a book shelf upon which I can neatly position these newly acquired items. I bought them from a store called Outland, which sells all kinds of esoteric artifacts ranging from science fiction books (obviously) to manga comics to kung fu movies to board games. To my knowledge, this chain only operates in Norway. Do these kind of stores exist in other countries? I hope so.

Halo 2 is utterly fantastic. The only complaint I have is the Cortana makeover, but that's overshadowed by the sheer coolness of getting to play as a Covenant Elite.

Site-wise, the random quotes are sourced, I have a web comic pipeline that I will eventually churn through, I have a new favicon, and I've actually gotten around to working on that page I promised. Have patience. I'm getting there.

Thomas Sydorowski asked me to do a social commentary. I can't comment on much when it comes to "social stuff" (see, even my otherwise massive vocabulary fails me here), but I can comment on things that bug the crap out of me. Like commercials and some of the dumb slogans they have. An example is that of a TV station (I say "a TV station" because stating its name would deface my site) that we have here. Its slogan is, "What you'll be talking about tomorrow". As if a TV channel has the right to dictate what I'll be talking about the next day. Their shows are crap, too. (Not that I watch much TV in the first place.) Another example is the slogan of an electronics store: "Paying too much is stupid." Well, duh.

When will Norwegians learn that their language does not have the possessive apostrophe except for words ending in s, x, or z? I blame the fact that English is slowly taking over Norwegian. I don't mind that at all, of course, but if you're going to use the language, please do it properly.

I have switched to Dvorak, and my typing speed improves slowly but steadily. Incidentally, I really want an OLED keyboard.

I finally watched Angelic Layer. I think it's extremely cute. I also finished Real Life, and as usual, a link is on the Links page.

I have mastered the Way of the Yellow Arrow.

Karan Sjet has the cutest voice ever. Hers even beats Cortana's.

I want Phanum Yeerum to play the protagonist in Prince of Persia the movie.

At work the other day I saw a black person, and, not knowing who he is or anything about him, I queried one of my co-workers, Bjarne, about him using the adjective "black" to describe him, whereupon he corrected it to "African". I found that a little puzzling, but today I discovered that he thinks it's a racist remark. He told me I should rather use terms like "dark-skinned" or "African" because of the negative connotations that the word "black" apparently carries. Now, "dark-skinned" might be okay, but unfortunately it is a euphemism synonymous with "black" in addition to being a disyllable ("black", by contrast, is a monosyllable). Calling him "African" when I don't know his place of origin is just ignorant. I might have been evil and called him a "nigger", and while there is nothing wrong with the word in itself, I am sensible enough to avoid it. Or, if I wanted to be painstakingly correct, I could call him a negroid. But then I'd have to refer to myself as a caucasian, and it's much simpler to refer to myself as a white person.

Of course, I might have circumvented the whole issue by referring to him by some other characteristic, but as I know nothing about him except that his body contains more eumelanin than mine, I found it very convenient to call him "black". Bjarne told me that the speaker of a word doesn't define the word's connotations and while that is undoubtedly true, it's unfair that the negative connotations of a word imposed by someone else should interfere with my perfectly legitimate use of that word. It's as ridiculous to take offense at the word "black" as it is to take offense at, say, "female" or "Asian" or "football player". (Assuming, of course, that one or more of these hold true for the person in question. I certainly would take offense if someone referred to me as a female Asian football player, and not because they called me female and Asian.)

I finished Gold by Asimov, a collection of short stories plus two non-fiction parts (the non-fiction parts, which span a little less than one third of the book, deal with concepts in science fiction and on writing science fiction, both of which I found enlightening). I immensely enjoyed Hallucination, The Instability, and Alexander the God.

I'm reading Asimov like there is no tomorrow, and I have to say, his non-fiction is better than his fiction. Not much better, just better. He has the incredible ability of explaining things in such a way that any intelligent person is able to understand, and I happen to love that kind of writing. A silly thought, maybe, but I feel that my opinions on science fiction shouldn't carry much weight, since I haven't read science fiction from other authors than Asimov (if you don't consider Nightfall, which was co-written with Robert Silverberg). In particular, I still haven't read anything by Iain M. Banks, Vernor Vinge, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, and Jules Verne. But I guess having picked up the names, at least, is a start. Urge... to... read... rising!

I want to cull my two essays on Bases and Graphs & Functions, but I'll leave them be until the rate of new pages created is equal to or greater than the rate of old pages culled. We'll see.

I discovered a ghastly error whereby requesting a file that is also a directory (such as html_tut) resulted in the directory being served instead of the file. I added DirectorySlash Off to the configuration file, which fixes the error but makes my URLs slightly more draconian; you now need to explicitly add the trailing slash if you want to reach a directory.

I have only worked very little on that page I promised. I'm sorry; I will get working on that Very Soon Now, I promise.

Uncyclopedia is extremely funny, and since it's a wiki, its humor becomes an amalgamation of all the esoteric and idiosyncratic tidbits of humor of anyone who cares to edit an article. For instance, check out its entry on 1., its entry on the Pope, and its entry on Isaac Asimov.

Web comics are addictive. I finished Applegeeks and linked to it on the Links page. I'm now reading through Real Life, which currently has 1480 strips (compared to Applegeeks' 204).

Finished Nightfall. I think it's an excellent, captivating novel. It's based on a short story which I have yet to read (Asimov fans apparently think the short story is better than the novel).

My seasonal allergic rhinitis is kicking in again, and I'm hating every second of it. Whoever said one should spend time outside when the sun is shining is a lying bastard.

What is it that makes female AIs so appealing? Ping, Eve, Cortana. I love you all.

Sarah Kerrigan is arguably the most detestable video game character ever. Well, that's what you get when you label yourself as the Queen Bitch of the Universe.

I started work at Amnesty on June 20, not July 4. I didn't miss it, though; a letter from Siviltjenesteadministrasjonen (the administration that handles what I loosely term community service) casually mentioned, among other things, that work started on June 20. I assumed it was erroneous, as my employer and I had agreed on July 4 and since the letter didn't state that this was a change, but I showed up anyway, expecting a short visit and two more weeks of vacation. Alas, work did start June 20, and I have been working for three days now. I like it there; it's laid back and my co-workers are OK people, despite one of them being religious. But you know I don't care about that as long as he's not a zealot. I have already pointed out four spelling errors to my boss, and I wasn't yelled at! In fact, he seemed to appreciate it. I wonder why, back in school, my classmates didn't appreciate it when I corrected my teacher.

I have finally churned through MegaTokyo, and a link is on the Links page.

Reading Asimov's Second Foundation I came across one Commander Cenn, which I consistently allowed myself to read as Commander Keen. See? This is how I amuse myself. No, really; my humor can be truly simple at times.

It strikes me how very few people in Asimov's works are irrational. Sure, they may be evil, negligent, hateful, or frustrated, but they're always rational. The only irrational people, as far as I see, are the ones who are against, say, robots (like Mrs. Weston in Robbie), and then mockingly so.

I removed the IE nagbox from all pages save for the Index page and slightly shortened it. There's really no need to remind you that you're using a horribly broken browser on every page.

I've finished my 12 years of obligatory schooling, and I am happy to report that my curiosity and sanity have survived, despite several of my teachers' best efforts to the contrary. A few of them, notably Ivar Lein-Mathisen and Trond Borgen, however, did their best not to kill them, and they succeeded brilliantly. Let's not talk about my grades; they're mediocre, at best. Next up is working for Amnesty International, Rogaland division, and the date of my starting there coincides with that of USA's Independence Day, July 4. I'm still looking forward to starting.

I love Wikipedia and its concept and I have been reading articles on it for a few months now, so I decided the only fair thing to do was to make my own user page and start contributing more than correcting spelling and grammatical errors.

I reinstalled Windows XP, and my system is now more elegant and clean than it has ever been. Perhaps it will be even cleaner when/if I get around to installing Linux on it. I celebrated by playing and finishing XP Plus Pack's Labyrinth and its bonus pack. This game looks absolutely gorgeous in 1280x960 with Quincunx anti-aliasing. I tried Winamp 5.09 for the second time. (The first time I reverted to Winamp 2.91, for reasons I can't remember.) I especially like the global hotkeys, which I now use fanatically.

Try playing StepMania with both hands, one hand for each player. It's fun.

Is it weird that my last five news posts (and this one) have all been posted on odd days on a two-day interval? It's totally coincidental and it's not a conspiracy. I swear.

Even started up a new site again. As usual, I wish him good luck with it.

I finished Foundation and Empire.

In imitation of Mr. Schrøder's "English words that I think are cool", I present you with my own list.

Oh yeah. At a recent LAN party, my ethernet card fell out of its PCI port while my computer was running, fell down on my Audigy card, and short-circuted it. Blast. I have no idea where that screw went, but I am positive that it held the ethernet card firm, at one point. Oh well. Such is gravity.

The Nerdiness Manifesto is an extremely funny read, and its first addendum more so.

I wonder if maybe the typical jocks-get-pretty-cheerleaders-and-pick-on-nerds phenomenon is specific to the United States. For instance, Norway isn't big on sports in school (we have annual tournaments, but they're not serious and we don't have cheerleaders in the organized fashion that American high schools seem to have them), so we don't have many typical jocks. Speaking for myself, I was never stuffed into a locker or locked in toilets or any such thing. During my first six years of school, I was bullied a lot and a few times I ran away from campus, crying. That wasn't particularly pleasant, but that type of bullying stopped after those six years, and grew much more subtle during the next three years of schooling; one of the things I damn myself for even now is that I was so weak as to not openly admit my nerddom in fear of being bullied, and the reason I was afraid, I firmly believe, is because I was friends with Niels-Henrik, who at the time was very skinny, wore patched-up spectacles whose glasses could withstand a 20-ton thermonuclear explosion, and did "weird things" such as being reclusive during breaks from classes and play Wolfenstein 3D on the computer in his classroom. This caused him to be severely bullied, and I still can't forgive myself for not standing up for him. Niels-Henrik and I are still friends (and very good ones, at that), so I don't think he holds any grudges.

What slightly bothers me (but not to such an extend as to actually affect me or anything) is that now that I'm unafraid of positively proclaiming my nerdiness, very few people bully me about it. That's a Good Thing, of course, so I guess what really bothers me is that I didn't have this attitude then, when I really needed it.

Oh well. Site-wise, I have acknowledged Even's transcendental artistic skills on the Colophon page.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory's cooperative mode is awesome. I am not a homosexual, but there's something really aesthetic and elegant about two fit male superagents dressed in black leather climbing on each other, covertly making their way into all sorts of secret hideouts. What's so cool about this mode is that you really do depend on your partner. If he lets you down, neither of you can complete the mission. Hmm... You know what would be cool? A female protagonist for Splinter Cell 4. That should make for some interesting interrogations with the hostaged mercenaries.

Finished The best science fiction of Isaac Asimov (yes, my summaries are short, but only because I want you to read the books I summarize and not waste your time reading the summaries).

The subject of my social life (or lack thereof) has been on my mind recently, and because of two interesting conversations about it, there's now a new section on the About Me page.

My ability to delve into the unknown and bring swift, radical changes to my site knows no boundary. Behold, a header image! Of course I didn't make, seeing as my artistic skills go as far as cutting away unwanted parts of the image and making it alpha-transparent. Oh, and I know how to save the images. No, Even made it, and I'm very happy with it. Thanks a bunch, Even!

So yeah, my site has experienced a small hiatus, and for that I am sorry; I have been too lazy/busy (interpret that as you want) to rectify the situation, until now.

I have read two books since the last update: Fremtiden by Eirik Newth and The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

And when you thought it wasn't possible, my news system is getting even more nifty and user friendly! I decided to arbitrarily allow the characters /, ., and - (solidus, full stop, and hyphen, respectively) to delimit the year, month, and day in the Archive. For instance, 2005-05.03 is as valid as 2005.05/03. Not that anyone would want to use such ugly combination, but the possibility is there. Also, people might legitimately want 2005-05-03, and I'm not going to stop them.

I made one update and one change to the site:

• All pages are now reachable via foo instead of foo.php (that is, the extension is optional).
• Dates are now formatted for easy human readability; "May 21, 2005" reads better than "2005-05-21", doesn't it?

I love PHP and I love the merits of a modularized backend and dynamic content generation. It really makes life that much easier. Granted, my site's backend probably isn't the cleanest one in the world (although I constantly work on making it better whenever I see something is not optimal), but it works, and it works well. For instance, all I had to do to get the dates changed from the easily machine-parsable ISO 8601 format to the human-friendly format was to change $arg['date'] into date('F j, Y', strtotime($arg['date'])). (Dates are still internally stored in ISO 8601.) If I hadn't used a database, I would have to change 221 news posts manually.

I am slowly beginning to realize the shortcomings of self-hosting. Due to my recent liberal LAN partying, my site has experienced more downtime than it ever deserved. There are two solutions: Either I can get proper hosting (I have considered B-one and Micfo), or I can get a hold of a second box that stays permanently in my house. The former isn't possible at the moment, but the latter may be possible. We'll see. In any case, LAN parties are more important than uptimes. (Yes, that is a sleazy joke intended to cover up my own incompetence.)

The 17th of May is the National Day of the geographical unit called Norway into which I was randomly born and currently reside. On this day, Norwegians dress up in their national custume, bunads, march in line in big parades, wave their flags, eat ice cream, and barbecue with friends and families. I didn't participate in any of these activities, except the last one. (And even then, all I did was play frisbee with the ten-year-olds present. I didn't even dress up.) Seeing as quite a few people harassed me about this (and by "harass" I mean "ask me about it, listen to my answer, and then give out an audible sigh"), I'll try to get people to understand why. First of all, I am chronically lazy; my reluctance to participate in any given activity is inversely proportional to how fun and meaningful the activity is. I do not consider marching in line to silly, repetitive band music while waving a tricolor flag fun, nor do I find it particularly meaningful. Not only am I not listening to my own music (which is bad enough), but marching (heck, even casually walking) in line stinks of militarism.

No, no, no. I'm not ashamed of my country, as you might think. But I'm not proud of it either. Norway is a mediocre, mostly secularized Western European nation, and therefore a mediocre habitat for me. But it isn't worth the strains that are the 17th of May. Besides, I don't really identify with most Norwegians in the first place (with a few notable exceptions, of course), and would like to be classified by what I do and what I say rather than by the boundaries of the country I live in. You see, in my personal utopic little world, there are no nations, only areas and districts (or whatever you want to call them).

A slightly related issue is that of Norway's national anthem, "Ja, vi elsker dette landet". I'll be damned if I'm going to listen to (let alone sing) a song that mentions feudalistic warfare and tells me to "thank [my] great God" (that's the Christian god, in case you forgot) without a very good reason.

Cars are the spawn of Mephistopheles. Or, at the very least, the moronic bipedals that operate these machines are. Why do nine out of ten of these five-seater transportation devices contain only one individual, and why can I walk faster than they can move in the morning and in the afternoon? It's pathetic. I will take my driver's licence, but Korenchkin and Delacroix be willing, I will not allow my clean hands to touch the vile steering wheel of a car if I can help it. Public transportation, a Segway (when I eventually get one), a bicycle, and even my own feet are enough for me, thank you.

The Archive is now more user friendly than ever, and so are the permalinks. Doesn't archive/2005/03/10 look infinitely more nifty than archive.php?news_item_date=2005-03-10? A natural progression from this was of course to make, say, archive/2005/03 list all news posts from March, 2005. And guess what, it does! Go ahead, try! It works the same for years and any combination of years and months, provided there are entries for the requested year/month.

I am working on a massive page, whose topic shall remain secret (no, it's not a CSS tutorial, although that is coming, sooner or later). Suffice to say that this new page will detail one of my all-time favorite hobbies. I have already started it, but I have a long way to go. Mentioning it will perhaps imprint the illusion of a deadline in my mind. Not that I need worry about such a thing on a purely personal site (insert large grin here).

My site now features an RSS 2.0 feed for my news. I don't see why I need it, but Mr. Schrøder wants it, and when Mr. Schrøder wants something, he gets it (what with my being so benign and all).

Adding RSS to my site is probably the last bloggy thing I'll do. For instance, I'm pretty sure I'll never add comments to my news posts, mostly because most of my news posts are general updates and statements of facts rather than debatable stuff.

You know you've been Skypeing too much when you read people's writings in their own voice.

I have added very short summaries of the books I've read and a list of books I want to read.

I also finished reading Angels and Demons. Beside the facts that it was Tim Berners-Lee who invented the WWW and not Tim Berners Lee (the hyphen is elusive), that antimatter can't be used as a bomb (nor as an energy source, which the book also states it can be utilized for), and that CERN still hasn't built the LHC (it's scheduled to be operational in 2007), the book was fairly enjoyable. There's a lot of gore in the book, though, and I wonder if Dan Brown could have told the story equally well without all the graphic detail.

Avoid Coupling season 4 at all costs; the characters (in particular Jane) have completely warped, there's now way too much drama, and Jeff's sorry excuse for a replacement, Oliver, is way too bland and predictable to be funny. Seeing as Jeff is my favorite character, his disappearance really annoyed me. Now where am I going to have characters accidentally say "I have a wooden leg" and "I didn't mean you have a jar full of ears in your apartment" to women? That said, you should still watch the first three seasons.

Incredibly, I have done some semi-crazy stuff to get some russ knots. A russ knot is something you get for doing something semi-crazy, crazy, or ultra-crazy. Doing semi-crazy stuff gives you one knot, doing crazy stuff gives you two knots, and doing ultra-crazy stuff gives you three knots. The things you have to do to get these knots vary from place to place, but here are some examples of semi-crazy stuff we can do in Stavanger:

• Stay awake for 24 hours.
• Insist on using a taken seat on the bus (the victim has to be a stranger to you).
• Bite a freshman on the shins.
• Speak another dialect or another language for a whole day.
• Walk blindfolded for a day.

Examples of crazy stuff:

• Stay awake for 48 hours.
• Read a pornographic magazine on the bus or another public place with great conviction.
• Run naked around campus.
• Strip in front of a camera at a gas station (all clothes come off).
• Crawl for a day.

Examples of ultra-crazy stuff:

• Stay awake for 72 hours.
• Masturbate for five minutes during class, with great conviction.
• Donate blood.
• Bathe naked with a russ of opposite sex for ten minutes.
• Run naked around a police station some time between 24:00 and 06:00.
• Walk naked through a busy city street.

I've earned five knots, and to get them I had to eat six Kinder Eggs and assemble the toys contained within in ten minutes, crawl into a store, bark at the dog food for five minutes, and crawl out again, scold a statue for five minutes, stand still in a store window for five minutes, and take fifty trips up and down an escalator. Useless, but pretty fun.

I finally told The Girl my feelings for her. Oh, it was no easy task; I was nervous as hell. I had constructed a long-winded speech in my head beforehand, but what she received was a severly shortened version of it and some giggling on my part. I told her that when I first met her and got to know her, I was very in love with her, and that now I'm not really sure what I am. She told me that she actually had a notion of it (I expected her to have a notion of it; I have been flirting). I told her that I really like her as a friend. I didn't really ask her if she'd like to go steady as such, but her response was that she also really likes me as a friend and she'd like it to stay that way (she added, for now). With that out the way, we got up from the table at the library where we were sitting. I fumbled something bad with the two bags I were carrying. (One of which contained Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code, incidentally. See Michael, I do get around to reading the books you recommend.) She noticed the fumbling. Well, she must have. Then, silly as I am, I giggled some more. I then managed to calm myself down some, and while we were walking toward the exit, I told her how I'm really comfortable around her, and that I like spending time with her. She said the feeling is mutual.

I'm very satisfied with the outcome of all this; I've gotten a better understanding of what being in love is and what not to do when in love. For instance, making an image of her in my head and then imagining her to be something much more than she really is was a big mistake. As an example, I imagined she would be really computer savvy, while the truth is that she's not competent with computers at all. Not that that's necessarily bad, of course, but the simple fact remains: I was wrong (and on more than one point, but I won't get into those), and being wrong doesn't feel good.

Two things are for sure: One, I now have an extremely good female friend, something I've never really had before and something I'm really happy for, and two, I have wasted way too much time worrying about what she thinks about me. Seriously, it feels like someone dropped an Arclite Siege Tank on me and that it has just now lifted off my shoulders.

On impulse, I joined Niels-Henrik for a beginner's tango session spanning three mondays, two hours of training each monday. While I'm sure tango can be fun for some, let me assure you that dancing is not for me. Well, tango isn't, anyway.

In site-related news, my footer erroneously contained "Hosted by dataportalen.com". That's removed now. Also, Mr. Guthrie made me aware of the fact that my CSS signature erroneously said www-dataportalen-com-pho. That's also fixed; it's now havard-no-ip-info, of course.

I have now started hosting my pages completely by myself. I left an .htaccess file at the old address (dataportalen.com/pho/) which will happily redirect people here until dataportalen is closed for good. I want to thank Alf Otto for hosting my pages all this time.

Ever since I started hosting my pages on my own machine, I have been pretty lazy about mentioning small updates and fixes here and there in my news posts. You see, back when I had to upload files to my host's server in order to view the results, I used to append a 2 to my files (like foo2.php) and work with that until I was happy with the result. Then I'd delete the 2 version and upload the real version. This means that when I did an update, changes had been accumulating over time and the change was rather big. Nowadays when I add and fix stuff, it's visible immediately after saving the file, so I feel that because the updates have already been there for some time, it's kind of old news and doesn't deserve to be mentioned. Oh, I'm wrong, of course, but feelings aren't always rational. So, in recognition of and in apology for this, allow me to present some StarCraft quotes. Also, a few new books have appeared in my book list. Yes, that table is created manually, and yes, that should really be pulled from a database and assembled properly afterward.

My job at Amnesty International, Rogaland division is now official! I was in for an interview about one and a half month ago, and while Atle Espedal (my boss) said the job was more or less mine except in writing, I didn't want to mention anything in case nothing came of it. I will start on July 4 and will work there for 14 months. I look forward to starting.

I've been watching a lot of Coupling together with Even lately. Coupling is so funny! My favorite character is Jeff, but Jane comes pretty close at times. I've also started watching anime, and the first series I'm churning through is called Angelic Layer. It's pretty cool, though I think I need to watch more anime to really get the gist of it. Some of the stuff those crazy characters do is just plain weird.

I got around to watching I, Robot. It's something special watching the stuff you've previously imagined in your head come to life on the screen. For instance, Alfred Lanning was more or less the same as I imagined him, though I imagined him to be chubby, not skinny. I also imagined Susan Calvin to be a little older than she is. The CGI in the movie is superbly done, Sonny is an awesome robot, and I really like the design of the NS-5s. Overall it's a very good movie, but there was one thing I didn't quite like. Unfortunately I can't tell you what it is, because that will basically spoil the movie for you. Suffice to say that something interpreted something in something's own way, and as a result, some other things started doing this-and-that. The problem isn't that the other things started doing so-and-so, but rather that something was behind it and not the other thing, which is usually the case in Asimov's novels when the other things start doing stuff. Also, the movie lacks a surprising and breath-taking ending, which Asimov's novels tend to have. Hmmm... I hope they make a movie based on Elijah Baley and Daneel Olivaw in the future.

Let's see... Doing a Google search for "Håvard" places my (now obsolete) dataportalen site at place number five. My self-hosted site (that is, the one that you're viewing now), is at place number thirteen. Not too shabby! Doing a Google search for "Håvard Skjæveland" places my dataportalen site at the top and my self-hosted site on place number four! That's pretty nifty.

I am now a russ, apparently. I will wear my russ clothing and hand out my russ cards, but damn it, I refuse to participate in silly activities such as throwing rotten eggs at other russ (and potentially hitting innocents), kidnapping, and getting senselessly drunk. In fact, I will not get drunk at all, as I'm a teetotaler. You will also be glad to know that I do not intend to be a nuisance to students younger than me; I was soaked in water in my first year by russ, and that was not very pleasant. In case you're curious, here's my russ card:

Unfortunately, dataportalen will be sold on April 15 and not June 1. Be sure to start using the other URL.

I had a pretty cool thought the other day. Close your eyes. Then, imagine that somewhere out there might be the perfect girl for you. And then imagine that the perfect girl for you really exists and that she is also closing her eyes and thinking that somewhere out there is the perfect boy for her, namely you. Call me mushy, but I think that's a pretty neat thought. (If you're anything but a heterosexual male (say, a homosexual female), modify genders accordingly.)

Is this silly, you think? Maybe it is, but God damn it, this is my site and, by extension, my silliness. :-)

Interesting fact: The fourteen first pages of Asimov's Foundation's Edge were written in 1973, while the rest of the book was written in 1981.

It appears that some people believe I am asocial and that I should socialize more. They are wrong, and on both points. I am social and I do not need to socialize more, and here is why.

At school, I have two people in my class whom I know better than the others, one of whom I also occasionally see after school (admittedly not too often, but I'm working on that). Outside my class, I have about six very cool people whom I usually hang around with in the school library (mostly girls, interestingly). We talk, we play games (not very often), and we read books. Outside of school, I have a bunch of interesting friends whom I chat with on IRC quite a lot. Some would argue that chatting via IRC isn't really socializing, but they're forgetting that there are actual people at the other end. I don't occasionally go outside to visit people, but that does happen. I'd estimate that it happens about once every two weeks or so.

All of this makes for quite enough socializing for me; I'm not going to socialize more because some people think it will do me good, and help me get more "perspective". I have an incredible amount of perspective already, I'm constantly working on acquiring more, and you don't necessarily need to socialize more to get that.

That, more or less, is my social situation right now, and I'm pretty satisfied with it. I have few friends, but they're good friends.

Enough ranting. MoonJihad linked to me, and the only polite thing to do is link back. Some of the stuff he writes is hilarious, such as The Cat That Came Out Of Nowhere and Doom 3 Review. In addition, I must echo his recommendation on some very good stepfiles. There are 202 songs in this collection, most of which are excellent, some of which are mediocre, and a diminishing few of which are somewhat poorly synchronized. But the bulk is good. From bemanistyle.com, here are some others I recommend:

• Ayumi Hamasaki - Evolution
• Ayumi Hamasaki - Immature (Koglin & Heath remix)
• BT - Dreaming (Lucid Mix)
• Beautiful Day - Natal Angel
• Dutch Force - Deadline
• Fatboy Slim - The Rockafeller Skank
• Fatboy Slim - Wonderful Night
• Sarina Paris - Dreaming of You
• Sarina Paris - Look at Us (Daddy DJ remix)
• Sarina Paris - You
• t.A.T.u - Robot

First, some IRC fun:

bloodymike

I think you'll love the symbology and the puzzles in [The Da Vinci Code].

bloodymike

And if it's condemned by the Vatican, you /know/ it's good.

Havard

Ooooh!

bloodymike

:-)

Havard

That's, like, the quality stamp right there: "Banned by the Vatican -- It's Gotta Be Good"

bloodymike

Well, they'll only ban it if it's true or scandalous, or both. It's win-win.

Havard

^_^

Second, Asimov was a hell of a writer. Sadly, I didn't finish as many books as I'd like to due to various distractions not under my direct control. The ones I did complete, however, are Robots and Empire, Prelude to Foundation, and Foundation. I won't spoil anything, but if you're planning on reading the series, you're in for a big treat at the end of Prelude to Foundation. I almost didn't believe it.

Third, distractions not under my direct control suck.

Fourth, and most importantly: Play StepMania. StepMania is an emulator for Dance Dance Revolution, a highly addictive game where the point is to hit arrows (either with your feet, as on the arcade machine, or with your fingers on the keyboard) as they pass a designated point on the screen. The more accurately you hit, the more points you get. Now, when you download StepMania, you won't have any songs; you'll have to download the songs for yourself and place them in the Songs folder where you installed the emulator (instructions on how to do this is included in the logically-named file Instructions.txt which resides in the Songs folder). A good place to get songs is Bemanistyle. You'll have to register, but I think you'll manage. The cool thing about StepMania is that it's fast and extremely configurable. Be sure to tweak all the settings you can! You probably won't understand what all the settings do the first time you fiddle around, but you'll understand when you've actually played the game some. Oh, and it uses PNG and XML. WIN!

There's now a books section on the Random page. I'm not entirely satisfied with the organization of it yet, but it'll do.

I will be away for about a week, at an incredibly dull place (read: Rural, computerless place). That won't be too bad though, because it will give me time to churn through even more of Asimov's work, making the trip less boring. Incidentally, while reading The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, and The Robots of Dawn, I noted that while the books feature a lot of conversation between robots and humans, I really missed conversations between robots. I was incredibly pleased to see that Robots and Empire contains a lot of that.

As for The Girl stuff, "bleargh". After a lengthy discussion about my conflicting feelings for her with my psychiatrist, we decided that the problem basically boils down to what can be poetically described as my heart saying "yes" and my brain saying "no". (Wait. Did he say psychiatrist? He did, but he didn't really mean it.) Let me make it perfectly clear, though, that there's nothing wrong with The Girl, but I believe we're just too different to ever be a good couple. We are, however, very good friends, and that's what I'll try to leave it as.

Play around with Meqon and RidigBody. It's great fun.

I realize that my site features a depressingly low amount of pictures, and while content is all yummy and such, I figure that a few pictures every now and then won't hurt. For instance, take a look at my neighborhood:

It's cold and icy, which means I'm freezing my butt off and can't do parkour, respectively. Here, check out my workstation:

To the left of my keyboard is my TI-83 Plus graphical calculator, which I wish were a TI-83 Plus Silver Edition (the former has a processor running at 6 MHz while the latter's runs at 15, making the rendering of graphs so much faster). To the left of my monitor is a bottle of Coca-Cola, which I really should be drinking less of. On top of my monitor are Elijah and Daneel, my two magical easter chicks who make sure that Fisher doesn't sneak up behind me and captures me while I'm consumed in my work, and who make sure that the gnomes residing in the walls of my house don't come out from the power outlets during the night and infiltrate my CAT-5 cable's RJ45 plugs, thus ensuring my computer its incessant connection to the Internet. No, it's true!

I've almost completely rewritten the About Me page, and it's now in a state which almost doesn't make me ashamed of who I am.

It's amazing to read Asimov's robot stories, because a lot of the events in them revolve around the Three Laws and the consequences thereof. In a particularly funny scene in The Caves of Steel, a character tries to strike a robot (whom it is very hard to distingush from a normal human being) in the face, and only partially succeeds; the robot moves backward, but doesn't entirely manage to dodge the attack. After that, the robot says That was a dangerous action, Francis. Had I not moved backward, you might easily have damaged your hand. As it is, I regret that I must have caused you pain.

I am (unfortunately?) becoming ridiculously good at StepMania.

Finished gathering quotes from Deus Ex. Most of them have already been there for some time, though.

Adam Guthrie has released his site! It looks very nice and I wish him the best of luck with it. :-)

dataportalen.com will be sold on June 1, and therefore it will no longer host my pages. This means I will have to find someone else to host my pages, but that's semi-impossible right now, so I will have to go with the alternative of hosting them myself. I was hoping not to, but the new canonical URL for my site will be http://havard.no-ip.info/, and it shouldn't be stable for more than a decade (at which time I expect I'll have bought a proper domain and proper hosting).

Incidentally, my E-mail address of pho@dataportalen.com will cease to work, and I ask that my new one, which is havard.skjaeveland@gmail.com, be used. All E-mail sent to pho@dataportalen.com will, however, be forwarded to my new E-mail address until June 1. This new address should be stable for at least a few decades, unless Google does something incredibly wrong. But that's highly unlikely.

Aggravatingly, my teacher gave up trying (before really trying at all) to get all teachers to agree upon a uniform format for the classes I take (you will remember my rant about our school's filthy intranet, it's:learning), reasoning that because she can't manage to get them to do other, completely unrelated stuff, this wasn't worth a try either. I was too depressed to pursue the matter any further, so I didn't.

I have permanently moved to Saneville. If you want, you can come join me. Otherwise, stay the hell away from me.

More people should read stuff from Asimov; he writes so extremely clearly and without ambiguity, it's almost scary. I picked up Counting the Eons, which is a non-fiction book, from my library today, to take a break from my reading-through of his Robot series. Listen to this:

"If the creationists had their way, this book and many others would be burned, and we would all be compressed into the narrow, narrow bounds of their tiny and unthinking view of the universe.

Well, I, for one, refuse to cower before them, refuse to truckle to them, refuse to compromise with them, and intend only to fight them—in order to preserve my simple right to think."

My crusade against redundant pages continues, and the poor victim this time is the Test Page. I also updated the 404 page to list deceased pages, so now, hopefully, the 404 page is even more helpful.

I offloaded the random stuff I had on Index & News and put them in the newly created Random page.

If you use a monitor with a physical 4:3 ratio, you should use the 1280x960 resolution and not 1280x1024, as the former has a 4:3 display ratio and the latter has a 5:4 display ratio.

So. I finally finish NaI. Enjoy! New stuff includes:

• The easily navigable Archive I've always wanted (and, by extension, permalinks). I might add more functionality to it in the future (like the ability to show a specified range of news items instead of just one at a time), but right now I'm just happy to have pushed this thing out the door.

• The Full Archive, completely equivalent with the old Archived News so as to not break links (and not having to do rewrite magic).

  "With a warning label this big, you know they gotta be fun!"

• The Articles page has been culled.
• Internal cleanup to make my life even easier.

Big thanks go to Alexander, of course, for giving me tons of help. :-)

In sadder news, I have been very confused lately about my feelings for The Girl. I'm simply not sure if I really want her or not. On one hand, she is an extremely sweet, intelligent, independent, and idiosyncratic girl. On the other hand, I think that we may be too different to be a good couple. Yes, that is vague and yes, that is intentional; first of all, I'm not at all sure she'd like it if I put "sensitive" information about her on the Internet (as far as I know she doesn't even know I have a site) and secondly, most of the stuff that I think makes us incompatible wouldn't really interest most of you anyway. I don't know. I'm really confused about all this. Remember, I haven't been in love, much less been going steady with anyone, for approximately four years. Call me rusty.

Oh well. I guess I'll figure it out sooner or later.

In happier news, I have reserved The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire from my local library, all by Isaac Asimov, and will be picking them up tomorrow. I'm excited.

My personal hell begins; we've started using FrontPage in my IT class now. For our first try at messing around with it, we were copying a little information sheet for an imaginary sports shop. The thing was written in a completely monotonal way: Same font, same size, same lack of bolding and italicizing. That thing would have been a great way to teach us about headings (though everyone probably knows what they are, they need to learn to use them properly), paragraphs (everyone knows this and FrontPage even inserts them every time you hit return), unordered lists (they were pure paragraphs in the text), and definition lists, but no, we wrote it like we would have written it in Word. There are even options from a pull-down menu for most of these elements, but our incompetent teacher didn't even tell us about them. While writing the thing in the code view panel (or whatever it's called), I noticed that FrontPage doesn't wrap long lines. I looked around for a while for an option to turn that on, and when I couldn't find it, I asked my teacher for help. She refused to help me on the grounds that I used the code view. Discriminatory bastard.

Here's a semi-random thought. The correct phrase is "you and I", not "you and me" and by this fact alone most songs today are rendered grammatically wrong. Heh.

Yesterday I dreamt that The Girl and I featured in Shaolin Soccer 2. Yes, I am going insane.

A thing that has slightly annoyed me lately is the fact that Norwegians say, for instance, "this was good" while still eating the food. You don't use past tense until after the event, damn it.

I no longer underline my book titles. I have to think of the monochromats.

Listen to Shadow of the Beat now, or forever be sorry. Sahara 7 and Another Sin are magical.

Up until very recently, I have been using mIRC for all my IRC needs, but I've come to realize that XChat is very good. Not in the same way as having CSS3 readily available and supported everywhere would be very good, but in the same way as having CSS2.1 half-decently supported everywhere would be very good. The only complaints I have about the program is that there doesn't seem to be an option to turn angle brackets around nicks on (you have to hack them in yourself), and that there doesn't seem to be a way to remove the redundant space it appends to tab-completed nicks. And now for the good stuff. Something I've always wanted is for the logs to have a different timestamp format than the channel windows (or the private message windows, for that matter). XChat does that. Another pretty genius thing it does is grey out the nicks who are /away. And the logs are in UTF-8! Hooray! And finally, a client where marking text doesn't automatically copy it to the clipboard.

I finally managed to write some PHP code that extracts all occurrences of PHP code in a string (in particular, a string from a database), returns the evaluated code, and plugs it in at the right places. I love it when stuff works, especially when you've spent a lot of time on it and finally reach an epiphany where you understand the whole thing. Would you like to see it? I knew you would. :-)

function return_eval($code) {
  ob_start();
  eval($code);
  return ob_get_clean();
}

function return_php_output($arg) {
  $pattern = "/<?php ([^?]+) ?>/";
  preg_match($pattern, $arg, $matches);
  while ($matches) {
    $arg = preg_replace($pattern, return_eval($matches[1]), $arg, 1);
    preg_match($pattern, $arg, $matches);
  }
  return $arg;
}

Here, have a go at this puzzle. Just read the instructions, click around, and experiment. Don't worry. You'll figure it out eventually.

I have managed to muster seven Wilburers. Keep them coming.

I got a hold of another Douglas Adams omnibus, The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide, which, to my delight, contains Mostly Harmless, as well as all the others that are already in The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide. If this book-reading thing turns into an obsession, I might make a book reviews page. Hmmm...

I spent about an hour and a half yesterday making a text file of all my news entries for use with LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE, and actually managed to write some PHP code that extracts them and displays them all on a page! Yay! I got tons of help from Mr. Schrøder, of course, where I should have RTFM; incidentally, he needs to be less helpful, or else I won't learn anything properly myself. ;-) All of this back-end stuff is pretty new to me, and compared to this stuff, HTML and CSS is easy.

NaI is coming along pretty well; I have managed to successfully (although after serious fiddling) implement a working database, and the things I can do now are amazing. I could not have made it without the perpetual help from Mr. Schrøder, though. Well, I could, but it would have taken far longer. The rudimentaries of the database are more or less set up; the only thing remaining is getting to know SQL better (and thus be more, uh, efficient with it) and getting various features I want in place. In related news, allow me to explain a pretty cool thing you can do with PHP and while loops. Check this out:

$query = mysql_query('SELECT * FROM foo');

while ($current_row = mysql_fetch_row($query)) {
  [...]
}

What's going on here is actually pretty ingenious, and beats my old method (which is not even worth mentioning). For each iteration through the while loop, it both assigns mysql_fetch_row() to the variable and checks that mysql_fetch_row() returns evaluates to TRUE (it will return FALSE when there are no more rows, which is the ingenious part of it), enabling you to simply choose which key you want from the array that mysql_fetch_row() returns. Of course, this works essentially the same way for mysql_fetch_array() and mysql_fetch_assoc(), too. I can't take credit for this, of course; that belongs to Mr. Schrøder, whom I've dubbed The Efficiency Whore.

I'm almost finished with my omnibus collection The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide; I have a little left on So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, and the entirety of Young Zaphod Plays It Safe. I found another collection (by searching my local library) which contains Mostly Harmless, but unfortunately the person borrowing it hasn't returned it yet. Blast. Also, the librarian at my school ordered the third and fourth Planetes books over a month ago, and they still haven't arrived. Oh well. It's not like I'm going to run out of stuff to read.

I have been playing a fair amount of StepMania lately, and it is, contrary to the proclamations of my more testosterone-filled friends, insanely fun. It's an emulation of Dance Dance Revolution for the computer and is played by hitting the right arrow keys in synchronization with the arrows popping up on the screen. You can also, if you feel like it, buy dance mats that you can connect to the computer for a more authentic experience. Don't worry, I won't go that far.

I "fixed" some of the havoc IE wrecks on my site by serving its own style sheet using conditional comments; the navbar is no longer stretched insanely, the date heading styles have been simplified (that is, it's now left-justified and doesn't use absolute positioning to get the cool effect that Opera and Mozilla are getting), and I managed to track down the bug that made content progressively shift to the left and then almost pop back again whenever you hover a link (provided, of course, that there is a link). It turned out that IE doesn't like left borders on <blockquote>s. I hate IE's seemingly random implementation of things and its plethora of bugs.

I added links to three artists that have totally owned my ears lately: Miika Kuisma, Aura, and Labworks.

Although it hasn't been evident on my site much, for the past few weeks my emotions have been wrecking havoc with me (presumably because of my being in love), but are now finally starting to settle down again. Blasted phenylethylamine.

Let me tell you a little story.

I'm driving along the deserted coastline of Highway 17 in my buggy. Up ahead I can see what looks like a deserted, run-down house. Next to the house is a shack and around the house is a half-completed, white, wooden fence. I continue down the road toward the shack when suddenly an explosion in the background tears down a telephone pole and a piece of the mountain, and I hear the distinct sounds of Combine soldiers' chatter over their radios behind the fence. Using the Tau Cannon mounted on my buggy, I rip a part of the white fence down, revealing, as I expected, a couple of Combine soldiers. The Tau Cannon makes short work of them. I exit the buggy and make my way toward the house. From the outside, I can hear more Combine chatter inside the house as I see one of them coming toward the door through the window. I ready my shotgun and take down the one coming through the door with a timed shot. Inside, I see two more of them. A well-placed grenade from the MP7 takes them down. I take a short walk around the exterior of the house to make sure there aren't any more of them; I find none.

The house is almost rectangular and has two entries: One at the front and one at the back. I walk into the house. It has a very simple design; the first floor doesn't have any doors or doorways, except one where the door has been taken down. There is what seems to once have been a living room with an old sofa, a small, primitive kitchen, a general storage room containing a few empty wooden boxes and a wooden cabinet, and a tiny washing room just near the door. There is another floor in the house, a small attic, accessible via a rudimentary stair-case. I carefully make my way up there. There's a few mattresses there, some wooden boxes, a pair of old boots, a steel bed, and miscellaneous furniture. I make my way toward the boxes, which I suspect contain supplies, located in the far end, near a window, when suddenly I once again hear Combine soldiers approaching the house (their equipment makes a lot of noise whenever they're moving). I crouch beneath the window as one of them starts firing through it with his Overwatch pusle rifle, and finally shredding it. The shooting stops and I can hear them moving closer to the house. I quickly whip out my zero-point energy field manipulator (a contraption that allows you to pick up and suspend heavy objects in the air, used mainly for heavy lifting) and start throwing all I can find down the stair-case (the steel bed, mattresses, a wooden cabinet, a chair, even the old boots) to block their way.

I carefully approach the now-broken window to make sure there aren't any soldiers outside. There aren't, so I quietly slip through it and fall to the ground. I sneak around the corner and make my way back into the house. The soldiers' attention is all focused on the stair-case; they obviously didn't notice my escape and still think I'm up there, which makes for a relatively easy fight since I have the element of surprise.

Moments like this, my friends, is why you should play Half-Life 2.

Check this out:

"Usually, stuttering appears slightly before adolescence, and sometimes it disappears after puberty. However, if it continues to a mature age, it usually stays forever."

D'oh! I guess I'm fucked.

"A person who stutters may encounter difficulties with people they don't know, making it more difficult to make new friends, for example. As a practical note for non-stuttering people: most people stuttering would wish that the problem be ignored in normal situations. However, if stuttering causes a problem for the listener, then one should not be afraid to talk about it."

That is so true. Personally, I don't have any troubles making new friends because of my stuttering, as I don't stutter all that much in normal situations. I'm not embarrassed by it; I just think it's a boring topic of conversation. If, however, I become extremely nervous or extremely excited, my stuttering can grow exponentially in severeness to the point where listening to me requires 100% of your attention. Believe me, I know; listening to people who stutter severely can be unbearable, and believe me, it's worse for the stutterer than it is for you. If you ever find yourself in that situation, don't be afraid to point it out and suggest that the person calms down. But please, please try to contain your urge to finish words for the stutterer; it's extremely annoying and can further complicate matters if you guess the wrong word.

Why do I stutter? I don't know. Really, why? The word exists, there's nothing wrong with my vocal cords, and I know perfectly well how to pronounce it.

I don't care much, if at all, about people's disabilities, and this recently manifested itself. There's a guy in my PE class in a wheel-chair who participates in most of the activities we do, like basketball, volleyball, running (or, forgive me for this, rolling), and basically all activities involving the exclusive use of the arms. One day when we were going to play football I, silly as I am, asked him, "Well, aren't you going to play?". A few seconds later, having realized what I just said, I got a silly look on my face (I assume) and said "Oh...". I apologized, so I think he doesn't mind.

Nothing particularly new has happened between The Girl and I, mainly because I'm a total wimp who can't handle telling his feelings to her. I have tried hinting at her; either she hasn't taken the hints (I think she has), or she's expecting me to make the first move (plausible, realistic, and fair). In any case, I think we have a very neat friendship, so there is really no need to rush anything.

In related news, The Girl and I have been watching Red Dwarf seasons 1, 2, 3, and 4, and I highly recommend you watch it. It's like Futurama, only British and without Earth. Smeghead!

"Has anyone ever told you that the configuration and juxtaposition of your features is extraordinarily apposite?"

NaI is coming along pretty neatly. I have yet to implement a working database, but I have been working on other stuff. In the process of making NaI I have learned, and will continue to learn, heaps of interesting (and potentially useful) things about how the back-end works. There really is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes whenever you visit a fairly complex website. Mine isn't very complex, yet there already is quite an amount of stuff going on.

I have set up a local development environment with Apache 2.0.52, PHP 4.3.10, and MySQL. I can't believe I haven't done this before. It eases development that much. Goodbye, pointless uploading!

I have also been working on my new and improved infrastructure which I've nicknamed NaI. It's already beginning to show its merits. Most of the stuff being done is purely for my own ease and comfort and will remain invisible to everyone else, but some things will be visible on the front-end. For instance, all my news posts will eventually be put into a database and assembled on the fly and you will be able to, for instance, select how many news posts will be visible on the front page.

Books are now starting to consume my time. I've always been used to reading tons of stuff on the computer, delving into specifications for this and that, or just kicking back and reading articles on whatever happens to interest me at the moment (mostly from Wikipedia). But holding a book in your hands, sitting quietly by yourself, and getting sucked away by it is a truly amazing feeling. I am currently reading the omnibus edition The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide which includes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, and Young Zaphod Plays It Safe. Unfortunately, it doesn't include Mostly Harmless; I will have to get a hold of that at a later time and when I've finished this book.

Once I've read these, I'll have to get a hold on some of Isaac Asimov's novels. I've heard from several people that they rock.

I have been reading online comics for a while, and have made links to the ones I enjoy and read regularly on the Links page.

Seen on IRC:

DN-Phoenix

Neato. You should make a "Happy New Year" entry on your site too. :P

Havard

What for?

DN-Phoenix

Just because! :P

Havard

Alright.

So, since Alexander made a New Year's eve post and then went on to harass me to make one, here it is.

I spent New Year's eve in front of my computer, chatting on IRC, watching parkour movie clips, playing Full Spectrum Warrior... You know, generally having fun. I've made no New Year's resolutions, because those are silly; instead, I make plans that are revised throughout the year, as needed. I find that much more convenient. My plans for this year include, but are not limited to, the following (first item is the most important, and from there on, listed in no particular order):

• Get a job.
• Get my driver's license.
• Finish what I believe is equivalent to high school in the American school system.
• Start serving in what I believe can loosely be termed community service, although it's not voluntary; it's the alternative you get in Norway when you refuse to do military service.
• Completely revamp my site's infrastructure. Done.
• Make more content for my site.
• Learn stuff.
• Practice lots of parkour.