{quote} "I asked for Guinness and this is obviously Lagunitas. Guinness isn't clear. Guinness isn't golden. How do you get those two confused? Can no one hear me? This is what's wrong with life. This is the way the world ends. Lagunitas for Guinesss, boom."
--A girl at Cafe du Nord, at the Mike Doughty concert {quote} (from this entry at In Passing...)

And in other news, my eyeglasses are very soon officially Very Broken Beyond Use (I am wearing (carrying?) them right now, but I don't dare touch them since they will most probably fall in pieces). And life sucks more than it does ordinarily. And I smoke too much.

http://www.deviantart.com/view/4358348/
http://www.deviantart.com/view/5005568/
http://www.deviantart.com/view/5753868/

I stumbled upon it by doing a GeoURL ping for sites geographically near me (not very many, unfortunately), and via skalman's page I came to garrit's breathtaking winter photo listed above (the second).

Meanwhile, I'm trying to explore my own artistic sides. Or rather, I'm trying to see if there are any. I seem to be constantly wanting to be an artists of some kind. I have attempted music (I tried learning to play piano and cello when I was young, which didn't turn out too well), photography (but most everyone goes through a photography phase, don't they?), writing (in this area I have achieved some compliments, especially when it comes to my more prosaic writings, but I have a long way to go before I can finish The Novel) and finally, drawing, where I, during the last couple of days, have read and attempted some sketching courses I've found on the 'net. A spent a few hours yesterdays, and here is one result and here is another (sorry about the bad quality of the photos). Obviously, putting together an entire portrait is much harder than just drawing a single detail such as an eye or a mouth. Getting the angles and proportions right is really hard. And the fact that I only own a single old pencil, no pencil sharpener and no eraser at all makes it a bit more difficult... but nevertheless a challenge. And here too I obviously have a long way to go before being able to produce something like this (which was what I based my own drawing on, but since I got some of the features wrong from the beginning (and the viewing angle), and didn't want to start over, the resulting similarities aren't many (nice excuse, huh?)). But I hope I can retain interest in this long enough to actually learn something.

In other news, I came upon WatchBlog, which seem to be aiming at presenting american political discussions and reasoning from three different sides (democrats, "independent/third party" and republicans). An interesting take, and from what I can see, many of the postings there seem to be of quite good quality. (found via a comment on this post at Sean Bonner's)

There are a lot of buzz around the bombings in Madrid and their political consequences, especially, of course, in Spain. This post on Crooked Timber pointed out, among other things, the focus shift that appears now; because of the bombings, people now want Spain to lessen its involvement in Iraq, not because the cause of the Iraq war may be unjust in itself, but because it places Spain on Al Qeada's maps of desirable targets. Which is understandable, considering the tragedy the people of Madrid is living in right now. We all mourn for the victims of the tragedy, as we mourn for all victims of violence.

Meanwhile, in Sweden, a tendency to restrict where an immigrant/refugee may live is sweeping throughout the country. Immigrants naturally have a wish to live where they can find relatives or people of the same ethnicity and language, which consequentually leads to large ethnic concentrations, sometimes huge blocks where a single ethnicity is dominating. This, of course, tangles the vision of immigrant integration held by the Social Democrats and others, so now many municipalities are pleading for a complete halt of immigration and restriction of the rights of the immigrants to chose their own living, in order to halt the increasing (and indeed troublesome) segregation. In my small home town of Katrineholm, I feel there is a somewhat natural integration - of course, segregation and cultural barriers are still problems, but the city isn't large enough to hold any parts that are more-or-less completely segregated, like many suburbs in larger cities. An article in Stockholms Fria (in Swedish) takes a critical stance against these anti-segregation-politics, but it fails to give us any alternative solutions or even acknowledge that segregation might be a problem.

Thinking about the blogosphere at large, I was pondering when my blog would start appearing in Google, until i realized that it probably won't, at all, since the domain dll.nu is banned from Google. This is most probably a result of a silly experiment I undertook about two years ago, creating a robot-trap using different kind of techniques, mostly as a fun way to confuse people with an endless maze of links and almost real-looking text, and I certainly didn't have any malicious intent. But alas, as I apparently caused some damage, I have since been banned from Google. I think I've mailed them begging for a lift of the ban a year ago, but I'm not sure. And it's still kind of cool to be invisible to Googling. :-) (Someone mentioned it on Susning.nu, too (Swedish).)

Equally embarrasing are opponents of same-sex marriage. What are they afraid of? And why do they get everything so wrong? I just stumbled upon this article: Are Gay Rights Civil Rights? where all the conservative dudes get all worried about the fact that being allowed to love anyone you want and do anything you want with your body may in fact interpreted as a civil rights issue, at its very core. It is so ironic that, in a country founded upon bold words such as that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness (The Declaration of Independence) and \[...\] \[to\] secure the blessings of liberty (U.S. Constitution preamble), they still, three hundred years later, haven't quite figured out the "liberty" part. The civil rights is all about securing the rights, for every human, to endure a fullfilling life, in any way she pleases, as long as it does not harm the liberty of any other human. But of course, all that the conservatives see is a sodomic sexual act which they have read that God does not approve of. As is quoted in the article:

{quote} \[...\] In Los Angeles, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson says it's "offensive" and that the civil rights movement "is not about sex." {quote}

I can't help but feeling sorry for Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson. I'm sorry, Rev. Peterson, that you fail to acknowledge the very basics of civil rights. That "freedom of speech" is as important as being able to say "I have joined this person \[of the same sex\] in matrimony and I want it to be protected by the law in the same way as my neighbour's \[straight\] marriage, because that it what makes my life complete and denying my wish to do so is to deny me what you grant my supposedly equal neighbour". If denying a choice because of sexual prefences is not discrimination, I don't know what is.

Oh, and here's another "funny" quote from the same article:

{quote} "I was born black," said Thompson. "I was born male. Homosexuals are not born, they're made. They don't qualify." {quote}

Oh, Mr. Thompson, I presume you know how to make a homosexual? From what I've heard, many homosexual fights vigorously against themselves upon the realisation that they do not fit in, and I'm sure many of them has wished that they had not been "made" homosexual at all. Not because of any inherent badness of being gay, but because of the inevitable hell they'll have to go through because of biggots such as Thompson and Peterson.

Not that it matters wether one is "made" homosexual or "born" homosexual (in Mr. Thompson's eyes it does, of course). As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to any persons given rights, it could equally well be a simple matter of choice. The sexual orientation is not, in fact, the key issue here. The key issue is that man should have the full right to her own body and life and that there are no ill-effects of granting that right in the case of same-sex marriages.

As pointed out in a comment of this post at Crooked Timber the conservatives are facing a troublesome conflict in that their old pro-marriage arguments can now be used as arguments against their anti-gay-marriage laws.

And yet again, I can't see what they are afraid of? The Wrath of God, for letting our brothers and sisters engage in sodomy? Seriously, that is the only "plausible" reason I can come up with. Even if so, wouldn't the Wrath be upon them who actually commits the sin, assuming that it is in fact a sin in His eyes? Oh, well, I should definitely back off this subject. I'm not very fluent in religion and should probably stay way of such discussions to avoid myself any embarrasment.

Och det värsta av allt är att det finns en massa människor som tycker om mig. Jag förtjänar det inte.

”the places you have come to fear the most.”

jag lyckades i alla fall hindra de värsta lustarna i natt. på gott och ont. jag borde isoleras.

”The bottle is waiting
the cap is twisted begging to be used
and so are you.”

shit, mister carabba, you should be shot for your lyrics. they are way to much me.

”With it’s measure only equal by the power of my stare
glaring over you and over you this feeling of despair
is never wearing out.”

hör honom skrika ut ”wearing out” och du förstår. Du förstår varför du gråter och varför du skrattar och varför du fortfarande längtar, trots allt. Det är inte lätt, men vi gör alla vårt bästa för att skrida vidare i den lek vi blivit tilldelad. Ingen vet egentligen vad den går ut på, och vi alla gråter, skriker, låtsas, hoppas, men det är en och samma lek och det enda vi vill ha är kärlek och någon som faktiskt förstår vad vi menar när vi gråter eller bara snyftar ut korta stavelser som egentligen inte betyder något men som är allt vi tänkt på i tjugo år, som är allt vi drömt och och fruktat och allt vi verkligen inte vill vara med om men som ändå är den enda färgen som rycker tag i vårt liv och skakar om oss och berättar för oss att vi lever, gudskelov, tyvärr lever vi fortfarande och det är inte så mycket att göra åt, vi vet att vi avskyr det, men en gång på tusen så kommer lyckan och fyller oss med känslor vi för länge sedan begravt, och då får vi för oss att livet är värt att leva, då får vi för oss att vi betyder något, och då inbillar vi oss att vi ska kunna ta oss igenom det här.

Vet ni vad det sjuka är? Det är att vi faktiskt tar oss igenom det hela. Det är att vi överlever. Hur gärna vi än vill slippa så sitter vi där, en vecka, månad, ett år senare, med samma bagage, med samma historia, men helt plötsligt har vi levt oss igenom en hel episod, något som vi borde tröttnat på för länge sedan. Men vi finns fortfarande, vi har inte gett upp trots att vi önskade att vi gjort det, vi har kravlat oss upp på en sandstrand som kanske inte var den mest gästvänliga stranden man kunde hitta häromkring, men vafan, uppenbarligen fungerade den, den gav oss näring, den gav oss kärlek, vi ville inte gärna ha den, men det fanns massor av människor där som var bestämda i att vi förtjänade någonting som vi tyckte var helt förryckt, att vi inte skulle ha det. Men det är inte vi som bestämmer, det är resten utav världen som slussar oss igenom bisarra portar, igenom konstiga val och mer eller mindre lyckade fyllekvällar, det är livet, det är det som skapar något som vi inte har någon kontroll över, utan vi kan bara flyta med, och vi skulle gärna hoppat av för länge sedan men de låter oss inte göra det, och troligen så låter vi oss inte oss själva göra det, för någonstans så inser vi att vad som skall göras måste göras och att determinismen är stor, i själva verket är den naturligtvis bara en slumpmässig serie handlingar, men lik förbannad är det detiministiskt därför att vi inte har någon kontroll, vi blir bara slussade runt världen och hoppas att endera dagen ska vi veta vad vi talar om.

Det kommer vi naturligtvis aldrig veta. Dessutom är klockan tjugo över tre och jag sitter och pratar strunt på fyllan i min Lunardagbok (och blog). Det är tur att jag inte tvingar mig att ha kontroll. För den är för länge sedan förlorad, och det vet jag, det har jag accepterat.

God natt.

Which of the standard lines will we use?
I’ve been meaning to call you. I’ve just been so busy.
We’ll catch up soon.
Let’s make it a point to.

(Dashboard Confessional/Standard Lines)

Oh, and while I'm at it this oh-feel-sorry-for-me-because-I-have-lost-love mood, I just feel the need to recite Davan in the latest S*P comic:

”I’ve marked the area around my heart so pulling it out and crushing it will be easier for you.”

That will be my pick-up line from now on. Or rather, "go-away-I've-figured-it-all-out-and-I'M-ONTO-YOU-backstabbing-bitch"-line.

1. RSS feed is weird. The published RSS URL (http://blog.dll.nu/exec/rss) just gives me a Jetty Internal Server Error message. My clicking around on snipsnap.org, I found out that by appending various parameters, I could get it to at least give me some kind of information. For example, using http://blog.dll.nu/exec/rss?snip=RSS&type=recentlychanged one can get the latest changed snips. But the problem is that it is indeed returning all of the snips, whilst the ones I'm interested in, of course, are the "weblog" snips. Also, the snips are in raw SnipSnap format, with formatting stuff unparsed. Not very pretty in a feed reader. 1. The friggin calendar to the left isn't serving any purpose beyong being eye-candy. I had expected it to have at least clickable dates for the days when I've posted a blog post, but nooo. In fast, not even the "<" and ">" links for previous and next month seem to be working. 1. As I begin to suspect that I somehow have corrupted my SnipSnap database, I wanted to export it and then re-install SnipSnap and re-import my data. But nooooo. Exporting also causes an Internal Server Error. 1. While posting yesterday, I tripped (hm, sort of) on my ethernet cable while the post was being submitted to the server, thus probably interrupting it half-way throuh or something like that. Somehow, that rendered a single post saying "null" (probably a StringBuffer.append() or similar that doesn't check the reference). I can't edit nor delete (trying to watch that single snip causes - guess what - an Internal Server Error). 1. It's slow. Why is it slow? Our Resin gladly spits out well over 100 requests per second of dynamic JSP-generated pages (with MySQL backend). The Jetty my SnipSnap is running on sometimes takes seconds to respond. The snipsnap.org also seem to have performance problems, and sometimes I even get a connection refused there. 1. The snipsnap.org website is a little too wiki-focused when it comes to requesting help. People don't seem to check new comments very often (after all, they could be attached to any of the thousands of snips on the site), so replies seem scarce. I would really like a mailing list to post to; I think that is far more appropriate for the kind of interactive communication you want when trying out early-stage software.

The thing is, I will stick with SnipSnap for the time being anyway, since I think the concept is really cool. I'd like to get into coding a little for it, too, but the entry level seems a little steep with it being based on Jetty and a lot of other stuff that I don't know very much about. We'll see about that. If they make a working WAR (I tried the one they had in my Resin; it didn't work too well) it might be easier to get around to help out a little.

And mind you, of course I realize that I'm dealing with alpha software here. It was just that everything was very shiny and happy faces in the beginning, and then the bad stuff rolled up on me. I just wanted to wine a bit. I think that's what blogs are for.

Oh, and speaking of blogs, I've been blogged about! Now I feel like a real blogger! :-) (And remember: it isn't paranoia if they really are blogging about you.)

UPDATE: I got rid of the "null" snip by locating its corresponding directory in the file system and deleting. Hopefully I didn't screw up any dependencies... Also, I downloaded the source tar ball for SnipSnap, hoping I could see what's broken with the RSS thingy (surprisingly enough, compiling on your own was simpy a matter of runnig "ant").

UPDATE, AGAIN: Wooho. Patching the RSS feed servlet so that it by default returns a feed of the "start" snip was a very easy two-line hack, so now my RSS feed works a bit more sensible! Also, it turns that it does in fact output HTML, but not in the "description" field, which was where I was looking. However, now it works as I want it to. I'm such an open-source participant. Here the patch: {code:none} // diff src/org/snipsnap/net/RssServlet.java~ src/org/snipsnap/net/RssServlet.java 72a73,76 > // XXX: the default snip name should be read from config > if (sourceSnipName == null) > sourceSnipName = "start"; > {code}

This is all good and well, people doing good things to benefit mankind - who could possibly argue any downside of this? The in my opinion most disturbing downside to all this is the off-shooting and the waste of energy when people desperately want to contribute but don't know with what, so they'll do whatever comes up. Some environmentalists seem to jump on any bandwagon which has "ecology" in its name, or, for that matter, fiercefully react to anything that mentions "nuclear". In the software world, there are very many novice programmers that want to give their stuff to the world. The problem is, of course, that most of what they contribute is crap. Just have a look at the OSS directory Freshmeat - with their tens of thousands of registered applications, most are, in all honesly, quite crappy. Mind you, there are an awful lot of bad commercial software tot. But the point is, that there are tens of thousands out there willing to contribute to the greater good while demanding nothing (well, apart from a little credz) in return.

Not that I know what to do about it - I'm merely expressing frustration over the fact that so much effort is off-target. When it comes to the environment, one thing I'd like is more charity-funded research organisations (such as those that exist for heart diseases, et.c.) that focuses on environmental development. It's always easy to give money (if you have). For now, if you want to contribute to any environmental organisations, there aren't many alternatives besides Greenpeace (who are doing an incredible job in many many areas but alas, quite misses the target sometimes). And perhaps the people producing lousy OSS software could do better in another area - like documentation or simply advocating the use of open source software. Not entirely easy, though, considering they both have quite high entry-level if you want to get some results. And also, of course I'm not really entitled to complain. I'm free not to use the software. The problem is when the activism starts being so off-target that it actually damages the movement as a whole. Examples of this are many; such as the constant whining about Microsoft, the DDoS attacks against SCO (don't get me wrong here, I don't think that the "open source movement" is behind these attacks (and from what I've heard it's more likely to be the regular spam/virus/worm community using SCO/OSS as a deflector), but I think that's how people perceive it, and I've heard many people quietly enjoying it). Or when someones crappy software (most annoying notoriously insecure software such as BIND/Sendmail (historically) and UW-IMAP) damages the reputation of the entire community.

I'd like to have some kind of solution to this. Such as "shut up, you morons, you don't know what you're talking about". But since I'm a friendly and in heart cooperative (at least I can convincingly pretend that I am) being, I don't think that's the way to go. Rather, I'll hope that we can make sure we are communicating effectively in order to reach out (and drag in!) to potential resources among all areas.

And I think my neighbours are revenging yesterdays loud music. And they really should get themselves a set of new speakers. :-)

but it was very fun yesterday. Nevermind that I had a very evil cold. We did all the fun stuff, including stealing stuff from the construction site nearby. So now I have a ... construction cone (or whatever it's called) ... in my apartment. Nice.

Jonas is sleaping in the armchair right next to me. We had some kind of party here when we came home. Now I'm wondering just how ill I'll feel in a couple of hours.

However, getting tired of not being able to actually use the camera I was carrying along in my [brick-like phone|Nokia 7650], I took another stab at implementing the Nokia Image Upload Server API in JSP. I had taken a shot with this before (about a year ago), but with an earlier version of the spec and a very early firmware on the phone, none of which were very friendly to third-party developers. Things went smoother this time, and eventually, I had it all put together. So now I can upload images to my web server with a couple of button clicks on the phone. Very cool! They all end up on http://dll.nu/iu/rs/ (accessible via WAP, too!) (forgive the uninituitive URL, I just wanted something should that should be easy to write on a T9 keyboard). It would be cool to integrate it with the SnipSnap somehow. Well, any year now...