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.

This is the occasional fish.

I did say it'd be about that, now didn't I? I watched the movie Happy Feet today. Quite a beautiful one. I might just save up and get this one on Blu-ray.

Some of the points of the movie got to me though. In the movie every emperor penguin has to find its heart song to find his or her mate, but whilst poor Mumbles shockingly enough can't sing, he can tap-dance something fierce. Without giving too much away this reminds me that to play the game we call everyday life you have to be able to do the expected song and dance. You keep the rhythm, accept the norm of the beat.

I can't do that.

Sure, I want nothing more than being able to sleep and lose all the side effects the insomnia has brought upon me, but I no longer shelter much hope for that it will ever happen. Maybe I'm just wearing too dark shades today, I've lately struggled with indifference, a total lack of motivation to do anything. Depression usually drains me of all energy, but at least the hurt is near tangible and something I can grasp on to, get angry about. I can curl into a ball in the bed until the worst passes, gather up some energy to kick myself in the pork pillows. No this is a different beast and leaves me just as indifferent to staring into a wall as sleeping, eating or doing anything that I know I used to find fun, relaxing or enjoyable. I have better days where I can find the energy to try and motivate myself into something like watching a movie, taking a walk or try to socialise but I usually end up feeling empty and drained afterwards. No wonder I don't like watching movies much any more.

I just...wish there was a slot for me in life that didn't make me feel like the square wheel reject in the car factory.

Anyhow, the movie's good. I recommend you see it.

Go now.

Yay!

Sometimes a simple title tells it all. No I haven't won any money or anything, but I've forced myself to rest more, eat a hearty breakfast and the sun is shining in spite of the 9°c the thermometer insists on. To boot, Ann-Jeanette called and we're going to the gym, which I haven't been able to motivate myself to do for oh, two months now although I in theory really want to get cracking at it again.

There's no time to restock the iShuffle, but I'll do that tonight for further sweaty adven...that sounds wrong doesn't it? Okay - for the next time at the gym, m'kay? Watch out Big Tits - here I come!

Selective memory impairment - or why my tea occasionally taste like mud.

Ever seen, heard or been one of those people that during a severe hangover swears to never again consume such amounts of alcohol, only to when the week starts to near Friday, make ingestions of the same amount be planned? Sure you have. I'm like that with tea. Every now and then I'll gravitate towards the tea section at the grocery store and pick up a bag of Lipton's - as always, it's an instant regret the moment I take the first sip. With a bit of luck you can find cheap and still good tea, but Lipton fail in both categories. The ucky dry, tart and soil-taste of the Lipton Earl Grey leaves me with a great sigh whenever I replace it with something else, usually Twinings. Just by looking at my teacup after makes me wonder what the heck they do with it. The Lipton leaves almost thrice the amount of black gooey residue on the inside of the cup and it doesn't come off very easy either. This time, I hope I'll remember what an awful brand Lipton is. After all, who hasn't wrinkled their nose at Yellow Label? I'm calling The Raven on this.

The little DNS entry that could.

I managed to lock myself out of my blog by having a (beware, techie speak here) several day long TTL on the DNS entry while having it malconfigured. Thus, most people could view the blog alas I could not access it myself since the wrong one was in my ISP's DNS cache. I actually ended up on Google.com if I tried accessing it. Anyhow, the bad DNS entry has expired and it is working again. You didn't think I'd give up blogging this fast did you?

I helped a friend move on Saturday and I know that it is Tuesday today, yet I'm still seven shades of sore. Serves me right for a) not going to the gym more often and b) getting angry and picking up the pace when people are just standing around with their hands in their pockets. My allergy to cats and dust isn't that extreme, so although the place was a haven for dust rhinos and cat hair tumbleweed the only result was itching, red spots and a breakout of zits. Funny though, the day after my feet suddenly felt really warm and swelled up so my toes looked like tiny deep red sausages. It went away after a couple of hours. It was more weird than a bother, I should have taken pictures.

of course, the whole time while the blog was inaccessible I've had lots of things I've wanted to write and now it's all gone with the wind. I'll try again later today.

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13:38.

There's scary faces and there's scary faces. Everyone knows of the classical Jack Nicholson one from The Shining, but I have my own scary face and it's on the can of L-carnitine that's on my kitchen shelf. He beats Jack Nicholson hands down. It's not just the mutated body but the expression on his face which creeps me out whenever I walk past it. Even though I've vowed to print my own label for the can with huge pink capitals spelling out 'BIG TIT POWDER', I keep it as is. It fascinates me.

Now close your eyes (or not, if you want to keep on reading) and imagine Carlton Banks from Fresh Prince in Bel-Air, mix in a some Jeff Minter craziness, lots of injected hormones and a huuuuge butt plugg and you get, well I just have to throw in a picture of Carlton Banks to for comparison:

Early bird gets the tea

If you were a stalker, you'd not find it odd at all finding me sitting here at the computer early in the morning, looking slightly dazed and desperately grasping a big cup of tea. I've not been able to sleep and just barely dozed off last night. So far I've spent a couple of hours making breakfast, looking at DNS entries to see what I could have done wrong and most important of all - Beat Bengt.

Bengt is a peculiar online friend whom I've made a habit out of beating severely in every possible game we've both played, and although this isn't perfectly true any longer since he has become quite good at FPS games, I do my best to do what is more or less the basis for our friendship - irritating each other as much as possible. So, I just spent an hour improving one of my highscores in Super Stardust HD - Have at you Bengt!

This day so far shows great promise of rain. My only plans involve taking out the trash and change electricity provider. I can't very well say no to cheaper and renewable sources can I? Oh shush you.

Let's start this off then shall we?

You know how it is with blogs: They come and go, people swear they'll keep posting yet the blog dies a dry rot death after just a few posts. I've done it and hope to not make the same mistake again - yet I make no promises aside hoping to feel well enough to have something decent to ramble about at least once a week.

So, I just transferred my domain's MX record to Google and mapped a CNAME to this blog. If it'll work - not sure. Does this sound like voodoo to you? DNS records are half a mystery to me because I've yet to see a good summary on how they are to work. Are you still lost? I'm talking about the hidden mechanics that lets mail find your mailbox on the net, lets your computer find the way to my blog when you enter the adress to it. The gnomes and gremlins that chew on your wires when you don't watch if you will, to make it even more obscure.

What actually inspired me to finally realise this blog today was a debate about shapes, figures and some ramblings of the nature of porn, but I feel I've spent all the oomph on setting this up and will leave that for tomorrow. I'll just leave this with a short note. Want to buy a camera? I've fucked up my economy and have to sell my Canon EOS 30D. Can be bought with or without lens/es ( Canon 1,8 50mm MKII, and Canon 70-300 IS )

PS. Blog colours brutally nabbed from Gaijin . I am SO tired of all these dark gloomy webpage themes. DS.