Future’s bright

Mirthful

Saccarina‘s dismissal of “trendforskning” reminded me of a “news” item a week or so back, where people who are supposed to know about these things made predictions about the future. The predictions mainly fell into the category “blindingly obvious, aaargh, hand me my sunglasses, please, for the love of God!” but one or two – ok, I exaggerate: one – stood out:

“Planes will be increasingly automated and we will no longer need pilots.”

Yeah. Despite the last few days chaos in Scandinavia because of dissatisfied pilots calling in sick THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL I’D GO UP IN A PLANE WITHOUT A PILOT!

I don’t doubt that planes will become more automated. But machinery fails. Machinery fails quite alarmingly often, in fact. And I can’t really see the stewardess pressing the reset button and not-so-automagically everything is hunky-dory again. Can you?

About books

Mirthful

I’ve been tidying the bookblog. A few days ago (it may be weeks by now, actually), I decided I really needed a category for book-related posts. I could just put them in this blog, obviously, but I like being able to include them in the bookblog, I feel they belong there somehow. Still, they obviously don’t belong under a specific author, so hence the new category “Aardvark – on books in general, booklinks, bookmemes and such”.

Aardvark because it’s the first word in the dictionary and so likely to keep the category on top of the alphabeticised list.

Today I decided to do something about the stupidly long category list I’ve aquired by reading books by too many different authors. It’s not a problem as such, obviously, but MT creates one file with the individual entry and one for the category archive and for all these 1-book authors those two files were basically the same. So I created a one-hit-wonder category for all those books that, for some reason or another, are likely to be the only entry on that specific author for the foreseeable future. It’s not a reflection on the quality of the book, at least not necessarily, in some cases the author simply hasn’t written any more books (like Sylvia Beach), in some cases I mean to read them, but not any time soon (like George R.R. Martin). Sometimes, of course, it’s because I didn’t much like the book, but those are actually the exceptions rather than the rule. It should be obvious from the entry which category the book in question falls into.

The question now, of course, is: What is the second word in the dictionary. I need to get the category listing moved up from the O’s.

Thar she blows

Mirthful

Or, rather, it blows. The weather front affectionately known as Narve, that is. You could call it windy.

Martin, unfortunately, had to go to a meeting in Oslo today. His plane managed to leave Trondheim, which is impressive, no planes were allowed to land here in the early morning. Hopefully, Narve will have lost some of his huff and puff by this evening when Martin’s du to come back – since we’re supposed to go to a birthday party tonight…

It’s only a fresh gale, apparently. Well, at least one can still stand on one’s feet. The dry snow blowing into every possible opening is a bit unpleasant, and, on the whole, I’d rather not go outside unless I have to (unfortunately, this is not a job that allows for a home office, so I had to brave it this morning).

The expected weather this morning is -3.3

Just a note

Mirthful

… to say that voice in my head this morning is, I think, Dean Martin. Singing King of the Road. Except when he gets to the “trailers for sale or rent” part he sings “Sailors for trail or rent” which is very whimsical of him. I find the transposition rather entertaining, though it’s possible the sailors might object. And why the king of the road would sing about such goings on I have no idea. He does, though.

Rush-tid, kaller du dette rush-tid?

Mirthful

I går var vi som sagt i bursdag. På Tiller. Vi tok derfor buss 46 fra Munkegata, og turen var mer enn vanlig interessant. Jeg skal ikke si så mye om våre medpassasjerer, ikke engang han som satt bakerst og sang på et noe uforståelig språk (definitivt “midt-østensk”) innimellom brokkene av samtale han hadde med kameraten som satt noen hakk lenger fram.

Derimot skal jeg si et par ord om TT-sjåførens serviceinstilling. Men ved holdeplassen før City Syd sto en gjeng på 7-8 stykker og ventet på bussen (tror forresten sangeren var en av dem), og en av disse hadde sykkel. Før han i det hele tatt hadde rukket å prøve å få sykkelen på bussen sa sjåføren bestemt at han ikke kunne få ta den med da det “fortsatt er midt i rushet” – “vent til City Syd stenger” sier han. Joda, vel og bra. Men bussen er knapt halvfull, og nær slutten av ruta si. Det er ingen barnevogner på, og ingen står i rommet der de eventuellt skulle stått. På neste holdeplass kommer det riktignok på en dame med barnevogn, men det hadde fortsatt vært plass til både en sykkel og en barnevogn til. Det er greit at bussjåføren vil sikre seg, men kunne han ikke sagt at “hvis det blir fullt må jeg be deg gå av igjen”, for eksempel?

Jeg finner ikke noe om sykler på TTs nettsider, så jeg vet faktisk ikke hva slags betingelser de har. For Oslo Sporveier er regelen som følger: “Sykkel, hund og sparkestøtting: Barnetakst. (Du kan også ha 3 måneders kort for hund eller sykkel. I slike tilfeller skrives “hund” eller “sykkel” i fotofeltet på kortet).” Det må jo være en grei ordning. Uansett hva ordningen er i Trondheim er det dårlig reklame for TT som “miljøalternativet” med en slik holdning til syklister.

Det hjalp ikke at sjåføren litt senere kom bakover i bussen i ilfart for å få klipt et klipp til på et klippekort for barn etter at jenta som leverte det ikke hadde sagt fra (eller ikke sagt fra tydelig nok) at det skulle klippes for to.

Eller at han kjørte for fort i svingene og stadig fikk sleng på bussen på grunn av holkene i veien.

Kanskje han hadde en dårlig dag. Det kan skje den beste.

Jaja, vi kom vel fram, tross alt.

Men han med sykkelen vet jeg ikke hva som skjedde med. Kanskje syklet han hjem på glattføret, kanskje står han der fortsatt.

Pictures

Mirthful

Or, as Martin would say, nasty, horrid picturesesssessssss. Never mind.

I’m experimenting, ever so slightly, with flickr. So far I found all of three pictures on the laptop that I felt like uploading. More will follow, eventually. I’ve added a “badge” to the main blog page, until I have more worth viewing I will stick to the one.

Addendum: If anyone uses MT 3.2 in combination with flickr successfully and can explain why I get invalid username/password errors when trying to set it up, please do.

Unger

Mirthful

Vi var på bursdagsfeiring hos svogeren min i går, og da vi ankom var den eldste nevøen og kusina hans på vei opp i andre etasje for, som han sa, å “leke mor og far og barn og disko”.

Dette er en ny lek for meg og viser at verden har utviklet seg siden jeg var fire år.

Random firstliners

Mirthful 4 Comments

According to Donna, it’s an old meme. I’ve never seen it before, and in anycase I haven’t done it before, so here goes.

Step 1: Get your playlist together, put it on random, and play.
Step 2: Write down the first line from the first 20 songs that play or close to it. (I skipped those where the first line mentioned the name of the song.)
Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song the lines come from.
Step 4: Cross out the songs when someone guesses correctly

(Btw – using google is cheating. Honor system, no cheating!)

It occurs to me that it’s the sort of thing one should only do with a long list of regular readers/commenters, but what the hey. I’m skipping the songs in Norwegian, btw. Perhaps I’ll do another one with just Norwegian songs later.

1. You can keep the good times, righteousness
2. Never knew I could feel like this, like I’ve never seen the sky before
3. I can’t stop this feeling
4. Girl when you hold me, how you control me
5. I met my love by the gas works wall
6. Come on, Virginia, don’t let me wait
7. When you rise in the morning sun
8. All these little rejections, how they add up quickly
9. You’re a song written by the hands of God
10. What would you think if I sang out a tune (if you also manage to guess whose cover version, I’ll be seriously impressed)
11. The blue around the morning moon, the colour of your eyes
12. I had a dream late last night, the water was running low
13. All my lazy teenage boasts are now high precision ghosts
14. I saw my love walking down the aisle
15. Happiness, it’s been no friend to me, but forever after ain’t what it’s all cracked up to be
16. You were full and fully capable, you were self-sufficient to a point
17. You can dance every dance with the guy who gives you the eye
18. I met a devil woman, she took my heart away
19. Hey, man, it’s been a while, do you remember me?
20. For a long time I was in love

*Sigh*

Mirthful

I’ve just marked two comments as “junk” that had the from-address: ads@botnet.info

Legitimate comments? Yeah. Sure.

That’s so blatant and uninventive it’s not even funny.

The links, though, were actually marginally relevant and borderline interesting. However, spam is still spam. And no, I’m not going to tell you what they were.