There is something about a blank sheet of paper and a comfortable ink pen, and putting those two together. There is also something about having spent years preferring the speed and ease of touch typing and so ruining what legibility my handwriting used to have. Girls seem to go through stages of testing our longhand […]
Wordless Wednesday Welcome to the future. Nothing’s changed.
A scene from work: My boss comes over to talk to me, and I am typing something, and continue to do so as I look up at him to answer him. He stares in horrified fascination at my fingers accurately producing words on the screen without me looking, and finally can’t stand it any more […]
Wordless Wednesday
I first saw a computer in the 1970’s and my first job out of high school was for a manufacturer of so-called mini-machines: The size of a washing machine, with storage and memory measured in kilobytes, not megabytes, and running BASIC. Barely 10 years later, I was an expert with WordPerfect on an IBM PC, […]
Wordless Wednesday
Here I was, thinking that the data the Norwegian meteorological institute (NMI) uses to forecast the weather for the 70,000 places it brags about forecasting via the website yr.no was collected by charming geezers in wayward places, who empty little cups marked in tenths of millimeters to say how much rain has fallen and observe […]
(This is an English translation of a Norwegian original.) Today I came across a well-written essay from a Swedish teenager. She was scared to death about her generation. She is worried about what will become of them. They seem to be so self-destructive. They are still embarrassed in the school locker room, while being happily […]
I dag kom jeg over et godt skrevet innlegg fra en svensk jente via Aftenposten. Den svenske jenten er livredd for sin generasjon. Hun opplever generasjonen sin som selvdestruktiv; de er sjenerte i fellesdusjen, men publiserer nakenbilder på nettet. Hun savner at foreldrene bryr seg, og henvender seg til oss som født på 60-tallet. Det […]
This year submitting the income tax forms was done entirely via computer. Forms were received via a web page, and submitted via a web page. A little too quickly on my part. (Next year I won’t try to be first.) I should have reacted at the print-out my bank gave me; it showed me owning […]
I’m watching the Eurovision Song Contest for a change (it’s been a few years since I last did that) and it is a perfect opportunity to do some housekeeping on the computer. But what to do with pithy sayings found here and there? Put ’em in a blog post, that’s what to do. Truth was […]
I knew I had to rush out and take pictures of certain flowers before the first lawn mowing of the year. I mean, how awesome is this? “This” is what the Norwegians call “engkarse”. I have never heard its English name, but Wikipedia has. And contrary to what Wikipedia says, in Norway, children pick them […]
Remember me talking about “Getting Things Done”? Well, I used what I could find on the internet about the nuts and bolts of David Allen’s GTD system, without having a printed book before me, and cleaned up my e-mail boxes both at work and at home. I think I found the electronic equivalent of the […]
You know how it is: You get a new toy, so you just have to try it out. I installed iLife and iWorks and set iLife to updating my iPhoto library (that thing has gotten pretty big!), and then tried the face recognition software which supposedly can label portraits for you more or less automatically. […]
No sooner had I rattled on about not blogging, when I discovered a very good use for it: The LaCie disk I use for backups stopped working. I was trying to remember when and where I had purchased it, and searched through my electronic bank account files. Nothing there. I hunted on my hard drive […]
Yes, I’ve been missing in action, without saying why. Nothing serious. A bit of idea drought, RSI, and happy moments that involve friends that are not comfortable with being blogged about. About that latter, I will merely say that I made a new friend on my trip to Trondheim this summer. About the RSI (repetitive […]
One of my regular diets is Fail Blog and recently it gave me a really good laugh: Now, if that guy were Norwegian, he could be a proud man, because the Norwegian alphabet runs from A to Å (not Z):
I find myself hungry for knowledge, but unsure about what to read to get said knowledge. I surf blogs looking for someone who “speaks” to me, without much success. Now I’m surfing the podcasts at iTunes and am trying out iTunes U. I love listening to good speakers, people who present coherent thoughts in complete […]
Do you ever catch yourself thinking somebody else’s habit sounds at best uninteresting, only to find yourself with the exact same habit somewhere down the road? As the Norwegians say, that’s meeting yourself at the door. And I have done just that. Several years ago, another single co-worker told me about his morning routine, of […]
(No, this is not about letting telecoms get away with illegal wiretaps.) You Are a Mac You are creative, stylish, and super trendy. You demand the best – even if it costs an arm and a leg. Are You a Mac or a PC? OK, obviously, if you don’t even have Internet Explorer, you’re most […]
A Roll in the Universe 