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YES! I've finally handed in my last exam for this semester!

May 14th I created this timeline to get an overview of what to come:


As you can see, I had shit to do every, single day. Today at five to eight p.m. I uploaded my hopefully final edition of my work on Hobbes' Leviathan and Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right to the school network. I barely had a print-out fresh in hand when they closed. I'm gonna have to read through it just in case, but unless there's something huge I need to deal with, it's SUMMAH TIME!

Edit: 6th of June 2013
Couldn't help myself. I just had to correct some grammatical errors and make my own conclusions a little more pointed; but today, 24 minutes before deadline, I FINALLY FINISHED! Got home and said: I'M DONE! and Lady C was all like:
- GREAT!
- YEAH!
- So that means you can shower now?
- ..umm, yeah?
- And shave?
- uhuh
- Cut your hair?
- Alright! STFU & GTFO, IT'S SUMMA TIME BEYBEY!

These past three days there's been construction work going on at basement level at the opposite side of the street, they're carving out a couple of window squares in the old wall to create a new ground floor flat, and yesterday they got them done and boarded them up while waiting for the windows to arrive. If you've seen Grand Designs, you know the windows are always late.

Today, when I was formulating an introduction to Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right in my written exam, I noticed a couple of gals standing there, one of whom had her arm between the boarding, and fished something out. It looked like a cellphone, so I just guessed she had taken a picture on the inside of the boards, dropped her cellphone and then retrieved it. Then they walked away while, curiously, looking at her wallet.

People are weird and do weird stuff. I always assume this before foul play.

Then, about forty minutes later, I noticed the girls were back at the window! One of them were conspicuously inconspicuously tying her shoelace at a tree next to the window, while the other gal dropped something back in. Then they left, sort of hurriedly. Huh.

Plus five minutes and one of the familiar faces working there came out looking through his wallet and talking to his colleague, pointing at the window, when I realized that the gals had seen his wallet through the boards and decided to steal it!

I grabbed my furious Boston Terrier side-kick Elvis and headed out to talk with them. By then the guy in the grey shirt, whose shit had been stolen, was gone but his coworker was left. I got him out of the flat-to-be (the dust is terrible) and told him what I'd seen; a couple of young, Spanish-looking girls, who'd reached in and grabbed something! I couldn't see them around, but IF they were Spanish, then perhaps they go to the Norwegian-classes at the nearby school and had decided to do some mischief during a break or something. We exchanged numbers just in case.

While he tried to get hold of grey-shirt, I decided to head up to the school and look for them. This is when I met my furious Homo Sapiens side-kick Lady C, coming home from work carrying the groceries, and got her up to speed. I suggested we headed for the school and she reluctantly agreed.

Elvis decided that crime-fighting aside, it was time to pee, so he jumped into a hedge running around a small park outside a nearby apartment complex doing his thing. I was talking about how shitty thing it is to steal from the immigrant workers who work here for pennies, when I noticed a couple of gals sitting on a table there in the shade smoking a cigarette. "Look! Perhaps it's them?".
- It's them?
Lady C was not intrigued. If this was the case, they had moved a mere 150 yards from the scene of the crime. Then again, they had thought that nobody had noticed. NEVER UNDERESTIMATE the nerds at home WATCHING YOUR EVERY MOVE!

We casually walked around the park, C put down the groceries, so I could properly identify them. Elvis farted. It was them, I was sure. I nonchalantly took out my phone and called the other guy's number, but got a busy-signal. So we circled the park properly, sat down in the grass on a slope behind them, so we could keep an eye on them while I tried to call again.

Then the girls stood up to leave, and Lady C was like: "No fucking way I'm gonna let them get away with it!" headed for an intercept, while Elvis was squealing like a little girl and me following close thereafter (sans the squeals). Must have made some impression.

We caught up with them, and it turned out to be a couple of 17 year old Norwegian biatches. Lady C promptly said: "Hey Girls! We saw that you stole some shit from the window down there, and if you hand it over immediately we don't need to call the cops."
Their face shone up in the brilliant light of BUSTED! (Jean-Paul Sartre has written extensively about this exact moment.)
The blonde girl just said: "OK!" pulling stuff out of her purse.
Lady C added: "And you don't do that again!"
"OK!"
And they swiftly left.

I tried calling the other guy but still busy, so we just took the stolen goods (a digital camera and a VISA card) and headed homewards. Luckily enough, the other guy was still there, smoking a cigarette. We told him that we got the girls, and gave him the stuff.
He was dumbfounded, thanked us and said he had to get a hold of grey-shirt.

At this point we just headed home to get the groceries into the fridge, and were chatting about it, and when I got back into the study to continue my introduction I noticed the car was back and grey-shirt was waving at us.

I opened the window only to get showered in gratefulness. Grey-shirt was so happy, because he had a lot of pictures on the camera and this was his only bank account (typical for immigrant workers) with all his money. And do we like beer or wine?

I didn't feel like doing so much out of it, but we opted for a red wine, because grey-shirt clearly would like to give us something in return. And they were off. It's in moments like these you realize you just experienced a whole range of concepts in Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

I'm writing a couple of exams WAY overdue these days, so I haven't got much time for anything else. I'm lagging behind in a class on Perception, which is the most terrifying and bizarre metaphysical works ever written. Each writer seems to _willingly_ misread the other, and there are no foundational works (no real tradition) because those bastards kicking this off in the 60's felt so goddamn advanced that they forgot 2000 years of metaphysics.

So everyone's talking about objects, properties, representatons -- usually regarded as the same thing but from different perspectives -- without getting into the ontology at all; because "everybody knows" continental philosophy is bullshit. The professor even laughed at some notes from Heidegger written on the whiteboard one morning, even though the class reaches right into a few subjects in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit. What a bullshit attitude.

I have this extreme resistance against the field that I struggle through every page. (And I read Hegel in German!) It is probably because most of it is so shallow, obviously ignorant of philosophical traditions, and IN ENGLISH -- which is a terrible language to dissect states of being in because you need constructs like 'the ..ism of the .. of .. of the ... in the ..ist view is wrong with regards to .. of .. in ..!' In German (and Norwegian), these constructions can be joined together to form intelligible concepts, thus avoiding the huge potential of misidentifying 'x of y' with the subset of x that is y, when y was intended as an ontological aspect of x ("y's-x" in ONE term).

I have 5-6 days to write 10 pages, but I am considering just forfeiting this exam and focus on the other one (which gives 2x the points). The closing date is May 16th, so I will read today and tomorrow and see where I'm at. Forfeiting costs me real money that I don't have, however. Better just get on with it.

I am going to be ripping a whole lot of CDs in order to digitize my CD collection (500+ CDs). I want lossless or close to lossless FLAC files of every single one. But I am lazy. And the GTK based rippers are slow and cumbersome (i.e. require my attention). Why not just drop down to the commandline and run cdparanoia? But then I'd still have to FLAC'em and tag'em, sort out the folders and correct wrongly named files..

This is where you go "There's an app for that!" and narrowly escape my swinging fist. Of course there is. There are millions of apps-- I mean programs that does this. But this is also the perfect excuse for actually getting to know bash scripting in GNU/Linux, and at a comfortably simple level. So for the last 3-4 days I've been writing a bash utility called FLACRIPPER that does exactly what I wanted and MORE. Which explains the 1.2 version number:)


Ripping Stranger in Moscow because it's the shortest single I have

The GPL v3 licensed source is here:
Flacripper (directory): sigg3.net/blogger/flacripper/
Flacripper (latest): sigg3.net/blogger/flacripper/flacripper.sh.txt
Please report bugs in the comments or by this form.

What is FLACRIPPER
Essentially, it's just a smart bash script that runs Monty's cdparanoia and Josh Coalson's flac. But it also queries the CDDB (freedb.org) music info database using cddb_query, auto-tags files with metatag after you've confirmed them (see screenshot), creates directories and keeps a log of your ripping. Script has been updated to accept commandline arguments (see below).

CONFIGURATION
Just edit the .sh file in your favourite editor (e.g. nano). It's pretty simple:

# CONFIGURATION



# Path to your music root directory (NO trailing slash!)

musicdir="/home/`whoami`/Music"



# FLAC compression level (0 is none, 8 is full)

flaclvl=2



# Keep original WAV files? (default: disabled)

keepwavs=0



# Enable log? (saves flacripper.log in $musicdir)

enable_log=1



# Enable log check? (default: enabled)

# Exits if disc ID is found in log file, but without regard

# for earlier erraneous rips and CDDB ID duplicates.

enable_logcheck=1



# Confirm CDDB information? (default: enabled)

# Leave enabled to avoid CDDB misinformation. Laziness is key.

# (e.g. "Michael Jackson" vs. "Jackson, Michael" artist field)

confirm_cddb=1

So far it's only been tested on my Fedora 17 machine, but it should work on any GNU/Linux operating system as long as these dependencies are met: cddb, cdparanoia, eject, flac and metaflac.

INSTALLATION:

# DEPENDENCIES: cddb, cdparanoia, eject, flac, metaflac

wget http://sigg3.net/blogger/flacripper/flacripper.sh.txt .

nano flacripper.sh.txt # Edit config section if you want to

mv flacripper.sh.txt flacripper

chmod +x flacripper

su

mv flacripper /usr/local/bin/

exit

The out of the box experience will rip your CD to WAV, convert these to flac using compression level 2, create folders in your root music dir /ARTIST/ALBUM and tag the flac files according to the CDDB query. If the CDDB query fails, which can happen on brand new CDs as well as obscure ones, flacripper will dump you into an ncurses based interactive editing mode PRIOR to ripping. Cdparanoia is excellent, but can be slow if your media is scratched/old, so the idea is to get all the information gathering done before the machine takes over.

If your CD is known you'll usually: put it in the drive, type flacripper go [ENTER] and hit [ENTER] to confirm artist and album info. That's it. If your CD is unknown to freedb.org you'll be asked to enter Artist, Album name, Genre, Year and the track list before the machine takes over.

What have I learned?
Much thanks to The Linux Commandline and Shell Scripting Bible by Richard Blum, I was able to solve most problems without resorting to google, which was sort of the point. I've come to learn a lot about sed, awk and tr, which are excellent tools for manipulating piped output, and without which I wouldn't know where to begin. But I have much to learn, so I decided to release my godawful code under the GPL v3. I know there are many places where I could probably just reverse the stream to avoid temp files, but I'm not too confident about that just yet. Thanks to the brilliant guys @ bash.cyberciti.biz for their dialog --form write-up and BeGood at stackoverflow.com for a nice renaming while-loop. Happy ripping!

EDIT: UPDATED to version 1.2.2
Fixed a bug where a couple of missing quotes left 2 meta tag fields empty in configured mode. Updated the script so that it runs like a regular GNU/Linux utility:

• To run in configured mode: $flacripper go 
• To run in simple mode: $flacripper --quick 

I also added --help and --usage, the latter being displayed also if flacripper is run without arguments. --help will display the current configuration settings in addition to usual help information. Finally, I added a cleanup function to do a little housekeeping if flacripper receives SIGHUP, SIGINT or SIGTERM signal.

EDIT: UPDATED to version 1.2.3
Fixed a couple of bugs stemming from the feature creep above. Also added directory listing so you can browse the sources. I expect no other changes to the script from now on except bug fixes, though I am toying with the idea of an experimental post to $socialnetwork option.. But I need to move on to actually ripping CDs now, studies, and any bugs you can find or fixes you submit. Thanks!

Happy Belated Birthday to me That's right. This Saturday the 6th I turned 29 years old. Hoooray!
I was working through the weekend and things have been so weird that I haven't had the time to update the blog. Until now.

So, working Saturday and working Sunday means no fun and games for good ol' Jack on his birthday. We stayed in watching Django Unchained eating bacon chocolate pancakes, ma favorite! And while I was gobbling down a particularly difficult and large pancake composition, Lady C interrupted me.

- Hey! You haven't gotten your birthday present yet, Sigg3!
- You know, you ARE right! I haven't.
- The problem is, I haven't really had time to go shopping yet so I was wondering instead if it would be alright to just ask you what you want for your birthday present
- Within what scope?
- You can ask for anything
- What do you mean "anything"?
- Anything in the world?
- Absolutely?
- Sure!
- ....anything?
- OMG YES!
- Oh.. I'm gonna have to get back to you on that one.

At this point she was probably thinking along the lines of 'beef burger & blowjob', but since I could have anything AT ALL in TEH WORLD, I thought my answer had better be good. I kept my mouth shut until the movie was finished and we were bringing out the dirty dishes to the kitchen.

- So, Sigg3, have you decided what you want for your birthday now?
- You said I could have anything at all, right?
- Right.
- omg omg omg!
- What do you wish for, as your birthday present, from me?
- I wish for.. hold on.. THE DEATH OF MARGARET THATCHER!
- .....
- .....!
- WHAT?!
- The DEATH of Margaret Thatcher!?
- You want me to kill someone as your birthday present?
- You said I could wish for ANYTHING I WANTED!
- But an assassination? Isn't that illegal, let alone immoral or something?
- Hey! It was you who said and I quote "anything"..
- *sigh*

Nothing more happened that evening, except we was both farting from all the bacon chocolate pancakes, and Elvis passed out due to the poisonous fumes.

The next day, Sunday, I was working all day and didn't see Lady C before I left for work around 9 am. But when I got home she had left! I texted her, and apparently she was "going to Sweden" in order "to study". And that's all I know. That, and the fact that Maggie Thatcher was found dead Monday.

Needless to say, it's been a crazy week. Happy Belated Birthday to me this last Saturday, Happy Birthday to Lady C today! and RIP Maggie Thatcher the Monday that just was.

If you missed the 10 hour long epic sax clip that replaced Sigg3.net yesterday, click the screenshot below:



You can also upvote me on the Aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com database!

The best 5 entries I saw yesterday was dominated by Google:

1. Google Youtube is closing, selecting a winner 
2. Google Mail Blue - it's better 'cause it's blue! 
3. Mojang - Minecraft 2.0 with hardcore mode:) 
4. Google Android: Teleport app 
5. WhiteHouse.gov - Egg roll vid rick rolled 

Please let me know if I missed any good ones. On a personal note, I tricked Lady C into believing that our dog Elvis had managed to lose all his whiskers on the left side by attacking my nose hair trimmer which I'd dropped. She tried to fool me back, but NO ONE can fool me on April Fool's day Muhahahaha!

My brother Koew e-mailed me a quick promo for Daft Punk's upcoming album Random Access Memories -- to be released May 21st. Good news, everyone!

I was hunting for Bigfoot on youtube, when Google suggested a video by Eugenie Scott from the National Center for Science Education (USA being the nation in question) called Genie takes on Bigfoot--and wins!. It's a good presentation if you're already into the cryptozoology scene. Otherwise, read about BFRO and the Patty/Gimlin film, for starters.

Anyway, it turns out that the NCSE is a main force in the battle of young American minds, fighting against the teaching of quote unquote "alternative theories" (i.e. creationism) in schools, and I ended up watching 3-4 hours of her presentations. Eugenie "Genie" C.Scott, Ph.D., is an inspiring scientist and her presentations are clear and balanced. Below are three videos (around 55 minutes each) that I really enjoyed:


Creationism: Still crazy after all these years


This talk from the Atheist Alliance International Convention in 2009 gives a great rundown of the history of "Creation Science" up until today.


Getting evolution right: Tips for writers


This video that is aimed at journalists targets the traps you should avoid and common misconceptions about evolutionary biology and, notably, why we should talk about evolutionary biology as opposed to 'Darwinism'.


In the Beginning: Explanations from Science and Religion


The last video featuring Eugenie C. Scott, Francisco Ayala, and Denis Lamoureux (the two latter being devout Christians); talks about why evolutionary biology and Christian faith is compatible and can even be an inspiration for worship. It is really good, and underlines the fact that you can be a Christian and a proponent of evolution at the same time. This video is particularly nice, because even though I am an atheist, I cannot stand the recent poisonous debates by Richard Dawkins and the like, who strategically confuses opinions with facts. I am an atheist, but it is unscientific to state that my opinion (which I do believe is scientifically founded) is a scientific fact. You cannot prove that God does not exist scientifically, end of story. Trust me, I'm a philosopher.

Dawkins' ad hominem attacks on Creationists as being stupid is a very bad strategy, and plays right into the hand of the creationist politics of displaying both evolutionary biology or 'Darwinism' and Creation pseudo-science as two opposing theories in a field -- the "alternative theory" approach -- when the former is a core idea spanning several fields of science with volumes of intersubjectively accessible evidence and demonstrable proofs, and the latter is a political strategy to allow teaching that God created everything _as-is_ in exactly 6 Earth days. Stop referring people to Dawkins and point them to NCSE.com instead, unless you want this ridiculous debate to go on.

This January, like two months ago, we received a letter from the city informing us about the chimney sweeper expected at our address the 13th of March, advising us to close the fireplaces, cover them up, and that we'd be responsible for any flame-incurred death(s) if we lit a fire at the time in question. Now, between that letter and THE TWO MONTHS that came and went there's been shit happening, like life, and we sort of forgot. Until yesterday afternoon when I entered the livingroom to find a black fire place and a fine layer of soot EVERYWHERE.



It's like EVERYWHERE. Check out the illustrating photograph on the article submission guideline above. You can see the whiteness turn into a dull grey at the corner where the paper was not covered. It doesn't look like much, in fact it's nearly invisible, but put your palm on any surface and it'll come up BLACK!

So after the raging anger and tearful lamenting was ceremonially finished, we had to get to work cleaning the place up. In fact, I've dedicated 80% of today to do it. As I was vacuuming the backs of 900 books in my library, it hit me that this is what it must have felt like in Iceland during the 2010 eruption, and promptly stated my hypothesis in Lady C's general direction;

- This is EXACTLY like it must have been in Iceland 2010!
- Yes. Except for the amount of it. I lived next to a volcano in South America.
- You had eruptions there?
- Like, behind the house. We'd get a foot of ash on everything!
- Oh.. Well, except for the amount, this must be exactly like Iceland in 2010!
- And this only came from the chimneys, not through windows and ventilation, the air..
- Yes, of course, except for that.
- And it doesn't fall from the skies, killing your livestock, foodstock, cars..
- Well, apart from that, naturally.
- Only to destroy your entire livelihood and 500 year old heritage.
- Oh, yes
- And then there's no fear for your life in case it turns out it's a super volcano
- ....
- ....
- But EXCEPT for the amount, the very local spread of the ashes, the fact that no livestock was injured (dog's doing alright), and the apartment building itself is in no danger of collapsing and ignoring the lack of possibilities for a super volcano erupting, this must be EXACTLY like it was in Iceland in 2010, right?
- Right.
- That's what I thought too!
- *sigh*

Lady C has decided that we're on a diet since spending two weeks straight studying adverse effects of not eating greens (i.e. cancer and stuff). Since she got back we've cut back on bread and instead have some fruits. Plural. It has to be different fruits, for flavour and diversity, apparently.

And today I'm up for dinner. I'd usually hit the spaghetti teat, 'cause who can resist a sprinkle of Parmeggiano on some steaming al dente, right? Nobody! ... but fish was more to her tune, so I suggested my African fish casserole that I learned to make in school. It's pretty good.

However, once I got in the store today, I had naturally forgot my list of ingredients, so I was forced to improvise. Now, what dish can possibly satisfy the Five-a-day requirement except tacos, which we had yesterday? That's right. Hamburgers.

I bought lettuce, tomatoes, yellow onion, red onion, crisp onion, cucumber and hamburger bread with extra fibre! In addition, I'm using chicken instead of beef, for added healthicity! You see, hamburgers solve all your dietary problems. You get 5 plus greens a day, and you can vary the menu by making beef burgers, chicken burgers, fish burgers, turkey burgers, bread burgers, whale burgers, tobacco burgers, veggie burgers, cheese burgers and bacon burgers..!
And on and on it goes. Awesome.

Since the LOL funny press release at 8:45 pm today, people seem to think that The Pirate Bay has moved to North Korea. In fact, if you run a traceroute on thepiratebay.se the last IP address you'll hit is 175.45.177.217. This is probably a routing trick, I think TPB would never risk putting themselves on the "terrorist platter" so to speak. It's a joke.

So where is the Pirate Bay? Perhaps in Cambodia.

Anyway, I thought it was a bad idea to go to Norway to begin with. If anything, we are _even more_ conformcrazy than our Swedish brothers. I thought Iceland reformed their Internet laws after the Wikileaks scandals? How about Iceland?

The four young yet incredibly tired and downbeaten adventurers sat foot ahome in Oslo yesterday. We had a great ride! That is, me and Koew actually only had the ride as we didn't get to leave the boat in Kiel, Germany. It had nothing to do with being too awesome and anyone making up stuff to that effect are lying thieves! We just didn't get up in time. But the mysterious mr. S and K got off the boat, and apparently Germany was both okay and big-breasted. But even they only got half a bratwurst each, as the mysterious mr. S's credit card was set up not to yield cash in a foreign country..

We had a nice cabin on the 10th floor without a window and a TV that turned itself randomly off for unknown reasons. As you can see, we kept abreast with current events using advanced television technology, while downing our semi-cold TAX FREE 1664 and Warsteiner beers;



We had a great time, tried the casino for a bit, but generally just enjoyed the luxury and any advantageous discount offers. When we got home yesterday, we were pretty exhausted after two days of stimulating conversation (and beers and drinks), and decided it was best to recover and re-group before our next adventure. I came home, picked up Elvis at Lady C's mother's place, and spent the rest of the evening watching the three seasons of Black Books on the recommendations of my cabin mates. Thanks for the trip, guys!

Bollicks to this, we're off to Kiel!

That is me, Koew, K and the mysterious mr. S. It's a gentleman's adventure, a cruise, a casino, and a suspicious looking but undeniably cheap buffet. We are going where many have gone before and most returned. An armchair apocalypse, a pragmatic crusade, a Viking invasion befitting our meagre means.
To Germany and back again (in a couple of days)!

Please check out the Sonar project! Currently under the watchful eye of Jonathan Nadeau, the project aims to build a Linux operating system focused on accessibility. There are 1 billion people in the world with some type of disability, and if they want to access the Internet, check their e-mail, chat on Facebook or write some python programs; they have to use Expen$$$ive proprietary software. Sonar will be Free as in beer and free as in Freedom.

If you've got $25 or just $5 USD to spare, head to indiegogo.com/sonar

This is not kickstarter, so you donate money (as opposed to pledging money). This means that even if the project doesn't reach its goal, they will make the best of the money they do get from us, to make computing more accessible and effortless for blind or low-sighted, dyslectic or learning disabled, low motor skilled people and quadriplegics.

I think this is an area largely ignored by the public and the programmers, and the solutions that are available are closed-source and very expensive. If you lost your eyesight, you wouldn't find it fair having to shell out more than the next, just to get your browsing on. I've heard Jonathan on several of the GNU/Linux and F/OSS podcasts out there, and though he is a free software advocate, his mission has practical consequences that would go beyond the GNU/Linux distribution they're planning. Imagine where a world where modern equally capable screen readers for instance would be standard issue in off-the-shelves computers because it could be included free of charge by manufacturers! It's not rocket science, we've got the means and now we've got the programmers. Let's do this!

Edit: 21st of February 2013
The fundraising ended with $9,808 raised of the $20K goal. If you're interested in donating some cash towards this cause, but didn't make the deadline, don't despair. The official Sonar GNU/Linux website has a Paypal donate button! Thanks for reading:)

My good friend Pauly tipped me about this short flick feat. Inspector Norse with music by Todd Terje. I think it nicely captures quiet life of most towns in Norway, how everyone wants to move into the big city when they're young (like I did), and the mountain of stuff you never got to do making you feel like a failure.



URL: http://vimeo.com/58444378
* For you non-Norwegians, it's not a documentary, but a short film. No bad days.

The Pirate Bay aka TPB is a website that hosts a huge repository of .torrent files, which are text-files with the equivalent of the following quote: "Hello! I have a file to share!" with references to the originator and his/her file that s/he wants to share. According to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) it is ILLEGAL to reference files which the originator does not have the copyright to. There are several problems with this: 1) DMCA is not a law in a country, but an American lobbying group representing rights-holders (and not, as they claim, artists); 2) The link-depth is apparently 1, so if I link to TPB myself I am not doing something "illegal" but if I link to said .torrent file on TPB I AM doing something "illegal"; 3) DMCA somehow thinks their lobby group's copyright initiative magically applies to other democracies where no democratic process has been conducted to this effect; and lastly 4) TPB obviosly was not responsible for sharing a file the file-sharer did not have copyright to, nor are they responsible for the uploading of said file to their servers. In the course of events, TPB even changed the link-depth, so they are now just hosting .magnet files that refers to .torrent files on other servers that refer to the file in question. Members of TPB are imprisoned or wanted by police. TPB is releasing a documentary on February 8th about their struggle for democratic freedom:



I have linked to .torrent files directly in the past. Am I a criminal?

Please consider donating some coin to The Document Foundation. These are the brilliant guys behind the LibreOffice office suit which allows me, you (?) and many others to do our work without paying a Microsoft Tax. Thank you!

I gave $20 USD, which is what I can afford. The project is crucial for document freedom.
(The subsidized student edition of MS Office is approx. $120 USD)

When I wrote the last exam of my Bachelor's degree, I wrote a Norwegian text on Aristotle's concept of Beings (or living beings and artifacts). For the sake of clarity I chose to use the Ancient Greek (polytonic Greek) writing of his key concepts, because their English translations are misleading. In this text I managed to write my thoughts in Norwegian, use polytonic greek for Aristotle's concepts, and quote English and German authors. Sure, I had to plea the Uni to take a PDF instead of .doc(x) but that's not because PDF is something abnormal or hard to create (File->Export to PDF) but because the Uni has obsolete practices. Anyway. Try to see how easy that is in a proprietary framework.

I already have a job, but when I saw this article top 25 oddball interview questions over at my #1 spammer Techrepublic, I thought I'd run through them without thinking. Prospective employers pls read the disclaimer.

1. If you were to get rid of one state in the US, which would it be and why?
   Why settle with one state? In fact, Norwegian philosopher Johan Galtung gives USA 7 more years before she breaks up. Then we won't be talking about states, we'll be talking nations.
   
    
2. How many cows are in Canada?
   Before or after the coming Apowcalypse?
   
    
3. How many quarters would you need to reach the height of the Empire State building?
   None. As far as I know the elevator is free. USA USA USA!
   
    
4. A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?
   He's advertising Fedora 19 Mexican edition, but I think it's drug related.
   
    
5. What songs best describes your work ethic?
   Something in the Way by Nirvana, and also Santa Claus is coming to town by the same.
   
    
6. Jeff Bezos walks into your office and says you can have a million dollars to launch your best entrepreneurial idea. What is it?
   That's between me and Jeff. I signed an NDA.
   
    
7. What do you think about when you are alone in your car?
   Where the hell's my dog?
   
    
8. How would you rate your memory?
   X-Rated, hands down. I SAID HANDS DOWN!
   
    
9. Name 3 previous Nobel Prize Winners.
   Obama, Mandela, Aun Sang Shu Xi (no idea how to spell that).
   
    
10. Can you say: ‘Peter Pepper Picked a Pickled Pepper’ and cross-sell a washing machine at the same time?
    Yes. If I just knew what cross-sell means.
    
     
11. If we came to your house for dinner, what would you prepare for us?
    Dinner.
    
     
12. How would people communicate in a perfect world?
    Like Jürgen Habermas!
    
     
13. How do you make a tuna sandwich?
    I'd ask the girl for a tuna sandwhich, and ready my CC.
    
     
14. My wife and I are going on vacation, where would you recommend?
    Far away from me and your 18-year old daughter! LOL! Nah, just kidding. Go to Rome.
    
     
15. You are a head chef at a restaurant and your team has been selected to be on Iron Chef. How do you prepare your team for the competition and how do you leverage the competition for your restaurant?
    I give a pep talk, you know. Let them know how important this is for ALL OF US, to make them understand that their participation not only matters to me but to them as well. But also that just being on Iron Chef is quite a big honour and privilege, so we should all do our best. And then I'd give them all cocaine.
    
     
16. Estimate how many windows are in New York.
    I'd go for 90%. Then almost 10% on Mac OSX and .5 % on GNU/Linux.
    
     
17. What’s your favorite song? Perform it for us now.
    My hours are for sale, not my integrity.
    
     
18. Calculate the angle of two clock pointers when time is 11:50.
    Let me google that for you
    
     
19. Have you ever stolen a pen from work?
    Studies show that average male employees are very likely to pilfer office supplies while their female counterparts don't [citation needed]. So the question boils down to whether I'm average or not. I'm above average.
    
     
20. Pick two celebrities to be your parents.
    Michael Jackson and Pamela Anderson. If I don't get laid, at least I get to DANCE!
    
     
21. What kitchen utensil would you be?
    That weird one you got for Christmas that nobody can tell what does.
    
     
22. If you had turned your cell phone to silent, and it rang really loudly despite it being on silent, what would you tell me?
    WHAT DID YOU SAY??!
    
     
23. On a scale from one to ten, rate me as an interviewer.
    X-Rated, hands down. I SAID HANDS DOWN!
    
     
24. If you could be anyone else, who would it be?
    I wouldn't. Because then they'd be me and have all my shit!
    
     
25. How would you direct someone else on how to cook an omelet?
    That's a job for middle management. 

Ah. There are so many opportunities. Apparently, these are real questions by HR depts in the US of A. Personally, I've never had any "weird" questions because you either know there's only one right answer, or it's related to the job. Bonus: You can always end with "but it's always the context that decides the right course of action". Office weasel, signing off!

It's the Post-Apocalyptic Year of 2013, Christmas is finally over, and normal life returns. How am I? I'm Bachelor of Philosophy, fat and fartin'... Here, lemme explain!

More than a year ago, me and Lady C quit smoking. That's right. I didn't blog about it because I was unsure how the outcome would look like. In fact, without someone to quit at my side, it probably wouldn't have worked. Anyway. When you quit smoking, you start gorging. Here I followed sound advice; I drank plenty of water and ate a lot of carrots. After a while I had to quit, though, because my skin was turning into a carrotish hue. I also ate a lot of chewing gum, a bad habit I haven't kicked yet.

Anyway. I will never be as slender as I was back when I was smoking. I only ate a couple of meals a day, and instead just starved, filling my hunger with cigarettes. I understand completely why super models smoke. It's excellent! But I never smoked as a way to keep my weight in check. It was for the sole reason of smoking that I smoked (akin to, I believe, alcoholics). Since then I'm more of a rounded number. Anyway.

Last year or the year before that, my mother (on my mother's side) and her brother (on my mother's side) had a stroke. My mum had a Japanese kind of stroke, but it was still very similar to a regular American Dream type of stroke. Anyway, since I'm related to both of them, and their father (on my mother's side) died of a stroke, my doctor told me I was all set for the early onset of DEATH.

This started a very shameful chapter of my life, that I won't detail here. Suffice to say, that I go to the gym undercover. Because I go to one of those cheapskate gyms, where the huge weightlifters either laugh or wink at you. But we have come to an arrangement. They don't talk to me, I don't talk to them. We exchange knowing glances. Nuff said.

For half a year I went to the gym 3 days every week, just doing regular healthy stuff there for about an hour, including stretching. I learned to stretch back in my Tae Kwon-Do career. Nobody else stretches, perhaps its out of fashion, but like I said, there is an arrangement.

Today I returned to the gym some 4-5 months since my last visit, and I intend to return on Wednesday. Nothing new, except the taste of blood in my mouth. Good thing I didn't postpone it any further. Afterwards, just for the heck of it, I wanted to see how much I weighed. To my great surprise (!) I had the exact same weight as I did when I was a regular. But I feel more chubby, especially now right after Christmas. All that lovely pork and chocolate bits for the coffee. Mmmmm..

Anyway. What's happened is that the muscles I had built before the summer has become flubber around the waist. If I keep at it for another 6 months, then I betcha I have the exact same weight, but look better. So for me, going to the gym is not about weightloss, but about staying alive and the redistribution of wealth- I mean weight. Bodily socialism!

Enough about me. Let's talk nicotine!

As I said, I quit smoking. But for some reason, during Spring 2012, I found that I could use snus as a reward for having done my homework. What's snus? I'm glad you asked! It's pure nicotine and other shit, that's formed into a ball, and put under your lip. Think of it as smearing your upper lip with tobacco. It's wonderful. Also, as a bonus, you will forget that it's even there! 100% nicotine addiction comin' straight up. It's so bad, that my brother Koew has BEGUN SMOKING AGAIN in order to cut down on the snus.

I'm not going that route, however, because I have tasty, tasty nicotine chewing gum.

Yay.

Problem is, the taste of snus is really strong (and minty, if you prefer that taste) so to match that, I started with 4mg chewing gums tasting of "Exotic Fruit", which is another name for mint, apparently. 4 milligrams is really a lot, and today I find that I am more addicted to the actual chewing gum than I am to snus, and I even sometimes use snus just to cut down on the gum! This is strongly recommended against with the health problems (on my mother's side) mentioned earlier.

Anyway, another side-effect with so much nicotine, is that it really relaxes your body. It relaxes all of your body. Including the voluntary musculature surrounding Uranus. In other words; flatulence occurs. Sometimes I blame the dog, but with Lady C it's different. She's a nurse. Nurses know their shit. So when flatulence occurs, there are explanations of how this is really necessary in order to SAVE ME FROM A TERRIBLE DEATH. Needless to say, it has its advantages too. I'm always the funny guy at parties ("Hey, do you have a lighter?") and last night me and Lady C had an entire conversation where I didn't even have to open my mouth.

...

Turd and last, I have to get new glasses. I don't have any money, I'm a student with a temp job at an ISP, but my 5-year old glasses are literally falling apart. So today I did an eye check to see if anything had changed. Ha, I still knew all the letters by heart! Do you get that? That you want to give the right answer to the pretty lady? Did I get that right? Really? omg omg omg is there a prize?! You are so vulnerable sitting there, chin and forehead stuck to a medieval-evil type of interrogation device, and the lady going Which is the best one of this:



*FLIP* ...and this?




And you don't know what to say, but there must be an extra-life or something, so you ask "Can I have them again, please?" not knowing whether this gives you negative points in that little score-book she's hiding from you. Right, she says. What's the best one of this:



*FLIP* ...and this?




You can't take a wild guess because YOU'LL BE WEARING THESE $$$ GLASSES, so you try to improvise, saying "They're both kinda blurry", because you can't ask for another re-run. She sighs. You know that you've let her down terribly, and you suspect that the next four images are the ones you've already seen and now you must remember what you said the last time. IT IS HELL.

Having been through that ordeal, I was taken to the showroom to find a new frame for the glasses. My old TAGHEUER glasses were really cool and I was looking for something like them. I told that to the pretty lady, and she said: That was AGES ago! So much has happened since then! To which I thoughtlessly replied: People have different heads nowadays..? She didn't laugh.

Today's glasses are more Harry-Potterish. Big, bold frames in light materials. I am not convinced. I'd look like a retro-70's television presenter. On the other hand, I wasn't convinced back in 2007 either, and then I ended up becoming quite the sex symbol (at least to some few a couple of people). I decided to take a couple of days to think it over. She was happy to see me go. And in the meantime, I'm staring in the face of every person on the street to see what kind of eyewear they're using.

Anyway, apart from the prospect of dying and death unless I suffer the humiliation of going to the gym and getting a nice buff hamster cheek from all the chewin' + flatulence occurs, I'm all good! That is also among my New Year Resolutions. Stop being good, become excellent! So, now it's your turn. What are your New Year Resolutions and how are your bodily functions doing and do you need new glasses? I have some Tag-Heuer glasses for you here, quite a bargain! Get it all out there. Put it on the web! Read the disclaimer and have a great 2013!

Me and Elvis are chillin' at home, but we've perhaps overdone the heating up, so this post will be short to not ruin the keyboard from my sweat. All in all, it's been a wonderful year! I've finished my Bachelor of Philosophy, meaning that I actually have something to show for, both academically and professionally.

It has been a trying year too. Studying 100% AND working 20% AND taking care of a crazy puppy (not to mention a crazy girlfriend) the remainder of the time is not easy to accomplish, when what you want to do is pushed further beyond other required tasks. As an example, on this, the last day of the year, I am working on the GNU/Linux MCE home media server, a project I began 1,5 years ago. It's within reach, I just never get the time.

I want to use more of my time writing. I have a 7 year old project just calling for attention, as well as a couple of other commercial and/or philosophical ideas. If this is what I want to do for a living, as opposed to being an IT consultant, I must work on it. A lot harder.

I have a temp job at one of the major ISPs in the country, and I'm just a few steps above the bottom feeders. I like clocking in and clocking out at the end of the day, but this work is not very rewarding over time. The big companies leave a lot to be desired in terms of efficient bureaucracy and responsibility. I quit my past job because I could not accomplish what I wanted to, being drained by so many other tasks. However, the experience of starting over again in a new job has been really valuable to me, regardless of the job itself. I have the confidence to do what I want.

For 2013 I am looking forward to using more time to write, academically and artistically, get back in the gym and lose my Christmas pounds, and quit my nicotine addiction. Hopefully, I'll also find the time to migrate and re-vamp this site into something more permanent. It's just a matter of time before my database falls apart.

I hope you had a great 2012 and that 2013 proves to be a challenging, fruitful New Year for you and yours. Happy New Year everyone! Now I'm going to turn off my servers, get myself a beer and dish out some zombie mayhem in Left 4 Dead 2 before Lady C returns from work. See you around!