Why I don't get choked up over ribbons.

The last couple of days have had Swedish media swamped with reports, comments and news in general about Engla, a ten year old girl who it turned out had been killed by *drumroll* the 42 year old male. Ooo-eee, mysterious enough to require the Twilight Zone theme playing in the background.

Now, before I get started let me do state that it IS a shame what happened and I am in no way against grief taking its course or showing support BUT:

Please, please please stop sending me text messages e-mails and instant messages about lighting a candle for her in my window, putting a flower-emote in my MSN nickname, pass on text messages to everyone I know et.c.

Here's why.

The POINT is, that I do not feel heartbroken over Engla in particular. Do I know her? No, will her parents know if I light a candle? No. Will they see a darn flower emote on my MSN list. No. Will they appreciate if I pester everyone in my cell phone address book by passing on a text message encouraging people to do any of these things. No, all this does is make the media companies and the phone companies happy and let whomever gets fooled by the hyperbole to feel a little bit better about themselves, it's absolutely daft. Just go masturbate instead, it's a less hypocritical form of self gratification. If you really need to feel better about yourself, donate to a cause or do some charity work - at least that has a tangible effect.

Short, brutal and to the point, I'm all ears for comments on this and will address them if they're thought through and valid.

A sign of life.

I know, it's been long. Ironically not because I've not had anything to write, rather way too much has been going on and I just choked up on writing completely from it all. Some of it was good, some of it less so. Let's just fast forward a bit and blatantly ignore the past.

What's happening right now is a planned trip, selling my camera gear, some weekly cognitive sessions for my depression and what else? Oh yes, I have finally, gotten a time at the Uppsala sleep lab, which is just awesome. I can't wait to go there.

The weather here has been confusing. Basically snowing and raining taking turns one day at a time. I'd almost say the snow looks like someone stumbling into a party uninvited, embarrassed and unsure if it's supposed to be there. Yesterday though it snowed all day. Huge mittens of light fuzzy snowflakes that kept flying off in every possible direction - even up and that now covers the ground in a decimeter thick layer - pretty cool!

Generally I've been feeling better lately, so I've actually managed to watch some TV shows which I normally feel uncomfortable doing. I've also managed to get to the gym a bit even though getting out feels hard to do.

It's almost 6 AM now though so I am cutting this short and going to bed for a little bit. Be good everyone ,I hope to write again soon, having a bit more content.

Photophlow - Web 2.0 strikes again.

There was once a place called FlickrLive, a small web interface that combined chatting with browsing pictures from Flickr. Sadly this little creative spawn died due to security and scaling problems, but thanks to my friend Juju I was made aware of something New. Something Better. Something Shinier.

Photophlow.

Photophlow does everything that FlickrLive did and more, it integrates talking to your fellow Flickr user friends in different rooms, exchanging images with an easy way to comment, favourite, tag, search and it has a keyword generating chat engine that allows one to find new pictures in an intuitive way. I'm hooked on it. Since I found it the number of favourites in my list has quadrupled.

Nowadays you'll find me in the welcome room, helping new users to find their way around. I'm not going to do an in-depth analysis of the system, but rather I'll tell you that I have ten invites doing the First Come First Served dance for you, so come see for yourself.

I doth think too much - you should try it.

I've been thinking about posting again. A lot. So much I haven't found the right topic to post about, but I'm done sweating the details, so this will be an erratic post.

First, here's a chance to link to my friend Ahnìon's thoughts about IM manners and use, or in his own words: A simple guide to status modes in IM clients

A few words more on that topic. Recently I made a new friend and was delighted to hear, that she has completely turned graphical smileys off in her client. Delighted. Her choice and my reaction says something about how wrong the basic usage concept of these have become. Some people spam them out, some can't write a simple sentence in an IM client without half of them being replaced with smilies, and have you ever talked to someone who is bold or daft enough to use the ICQ smilies? Suddenly the words *JOKINGLY* appear on your screen if you don't have the "proper" client. What heck of a trigger is that? Don't get me wrong, smilies fill a function, that's why we got the text ones in the first place but it has gone too far, we've lost the how and why and it became just a bit too much. Here's a thought: Take five minutes to delete the tacky, unnecessary ones you might have added to your client and think of if which ones that might actually fill any other purpose than to annoy the recipient.

The face to ass that could break a heart.

After two days of gruel, pasta and bananas for only food I managed to crawl out of my cave and do groceries. I've spoken once or twice before with the manager and last time he asked me about the Internet. He said he just recently tried his hands on this new phenomena and managed to stumble onto some chats, and was left more than a little thoughtful. Those of you that are Swedish might well understand why if I say that one of the chats were Aftonbladet's, for the rest of you, imagine a very basic web based chat where 80% of the names and chat entries contain crude sexual references. A bit cautiously he inquired if there were no sane people to be found on the net.
I've been given this a lot of thought and today I reminded him of his question, and gave him the answer. No. Of course it's not that simple, but in general finding sane people who also manage to be themselves on the net AND appealing to boot may well be compared to sifting through a swimming pool of liquid dung after pearls - using your teeth. Of course there are places that are more likely than others, but they're still few and far. The poor man looked mortified. I don't know if it was the sad fact or my analogy that shocked him the most, but I do know that this friendly somewhat naïve man in his mid forties should never ever be allowed to face goatse - it'd destroy his world.

A brief visit by Mr Snow

Lately, I've been keeping an eye on the long term weather forecast just to see when we were expected to get snow. Well surprise surprise! Last night we got more than our fair share. I love snow, but I really don't like what I refer to as the Days of Sludge before it really settles in. Still, the snow king really put in a good effort here and it went on for hours. Think of it as nature's way of giving you a sneak peak, a preview, a trailer, coming soon to a world near you! I'm hoping for more soon so I can try out making a ice lantern, but If I am to trust the weather forecast this time we'll have some on and off snowing and raining for the coming ten days. We'll see.

Today the hockey rink near here is finally active for the season. Usually I am very sound sensitive and can get very irritated at say, the neighbours hammering away at their never ending backyard contraptions, but the clacking sound of club against puck is one I quite like. I've no clue why. I've been doing a lot of introspective thinking the last couple of days, yet I've reached little to no conclusion. Perhaps I'm better off sweating it physically at the gym, I've still not made it there, so if you're in the neighbourhood, come drag me there on Monday - please.

A driver's license for Instant Messengers.

As George Carlin so aptly put it:

"I don't have pet peeves, I have major psychotic fucking hatreds, okay? And it makes the world a lot easier to sort out."

When you eat, do you chew with your mouth open? Do you leave inaccurate messages on your Answering machine? Do you fill in "LOL My flower has died!!1" in the name field of your library card? Okay the latter may actually be obscure and weird enough to get my liking, but appreciate the analogy, work with me here. It's not so damn hard to handle an IM-client, an instant Messenger like AIM, ICQ, MSN, Pago-Pago, Bohoo Messenger or whatnot, there's a plethora of them. What most of them have in common is that you can set a status message, and I'm so tired of the blunt social ineptitude of many of their users. Here's a little manual for those of you that are the Internet's 'special children':

A status message is used to describe your current status. If you're around, if you're busy, very occupied et.c. These are there to tell people if they can talk to you or not. Easy concept, doesn't take a science degree to figure out. Most clients have an auto-away function if you happen to wander away from the computer and haven't set a specific message. Very easy. If you're busy, put yourself in busy mode to show people that you may or may not have the time to answer and if they have any common sense at all they'll either think twice about leaving a message, especially if it's just another youtube link or a "fuhneeh pecteeer!", or at least not implicitly expect you to read your message/click that link right away - or at all. If you're using the same status message constantly no matter if you're at the computer or not, I can only pray you don't stuff your food into your nose by mistake, because you're obviously struggling with basic manners here.

Some messengers have a comment field. This can be used to further describe what you are doing. For instance, you're busy but will reply when you have the time. Fine, tell them that in the comment field. Many a user seems to think this field is meant to put a totally context-less Latin/Japanese phrase in it to look smart or they might decide to put a comment in and leave it there to pass best before date. Just by looking right now I have a friend who put "Today we open the store!". He's had it for a week now. Another one has "fucking shit", because a couple of days ago he had to return a new jacket that turned out to have a rip in it. Remember I don't have any pet peeves? Right. So Mikael, GET FUCKING OVER IT ALRIGHT - BOO HOO! :).

Name field. This seems to be a tricky one for some people. It's for putting your name or nickname in so people can identify you on their list. It doesn't take many brain cells to see the difference from the comment field. For instance, my good friend Mike seems to currently have the nickname "...You can't milk a cow with your hands in your pockets". I guess it was way too hard to find the comment field.

A further note on statuses: Respect your friends status messages! If your friend is in say DND mode, you MIGHT want to actually do that. Three simple words tells the tale! Do...not...disturb. If he or she talks to you they might be generally occupied and find the time to talk to you specifically but not everyone on their list.

If you have complaints on this. Then please take your skewered, three letter acronym soiled English and go play Counterstrike again.