Author Archives: itlandm

…or your time back!

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In Japanese thought, it is not uncommon that the flow of time can stop. Perhaps there is more to that than we have known, in a manner of speaking.

I wish I could guarantee my readers full satisfaction or their time back, but that may be a bit over the top even for me. There are others who can actually give you time back, though. Jesus, Morpheus and your local training studio come to mind. What?

Well, it all began when the Norwegian National Broadcasting told about a Danish study. It looked at elderly people who habitually either went to church or listened to the church service on broadcasting. The women who did this lived on average 2.6 years longer than the control group who did not. For men the profit was slimmer, only 1.6 years.

It is worth noting that Denmark, like my native Norway, is a post-Christian country. For the last couple generations at least (which I remember) the norm has been to not be Christian, except for certain ritual like church weddings and funerals. So this is not a case of the poor unbelievers being harassed and stressed to death. On the contrary, at least in youth it is pretty common for Christians to be harassed. I bet it is no better for other religious minorities, but evidently this study was of Christians.

What struck me as I reflected on this, was that these 2 years of extra life may have been similar to the time they had spent over the decades listening to sermons and singing hymns etc each Sunday. How about that?

It is not like it would be completely unique. Many years ago I read a theme issue of Scientific American about aging. One point was exercise. The article said that if you start exercising at 40, the extra hours you add to your life are about the same as the hours you spend exercising. So for those of you who think exercise is hell on earth, you may as well cut it out unless you expect a worse hell after life.

But even this is not unique. Another study a few years ago showed that sleeping an extra hour adds an extra hour to your life. This only works up to about 9 hours a night (it varies a bit from person to person). After that, sleeping more correlates with shorter life. That may be because only a sick person could sleep that long, perhaps. But what is certain is that most of us sleep less than what would be good for our health. This has various side effects, like inactivity, overweight, diabetes and hypertension, and eventually an earlier grave.

On the other hand, we pay bills for every month, so if we could be awake the same number of hours in a shorter time, we might come out ahead financially. That is certainly possible, but I think I am curious enough about the future that I want to live a bit longer if I can. Even if it means sleeping a little longer, taking a long walk each day and perhaps even spend some time (or timelessness) in spiritual practice now and then.

Fury of the Northmen

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I must admit that I have a couple characters in City of Heroes inspired by Norse mythology. It lends itself quite well to warlike heroes… in a fantasy world.

As I expressed on Google+, there was something off about the bomb in Oslo. It did not follow the pattern of al-Qaeda or their Islamic copycats. The timing in particular was a bit off. Once I heard that someone was shooting at Utøya, the traditional summer camp site of the Social Democrats, I knew it had to be a nationalist. At that time, I still did not know he was also behind the bomb, just that something was subtly “off” about it.

You see, this guy was not the only one thinking of the (more or less) ruling Social Democrat party as quislings. I would guess somewhere around 1/4 of the adult population would agree with that, possibly more. And I mean quisling in a very literal sense. Nationalists consider the Muslim immigration more of a threat to Norway than the German invasion ever was. As it happens, I agree with that, in a manner of speaking. But it really does not matter now. History is coming to an end, and Norway and Islam both will become like dust on the wind. Not in my natural lifespan, perhaps, but in less than a century is my guess.

But most people don’t look forward. They don’t even look backward properly. They don’t realize that the world has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500, or quite possibly 5000. They don’t notice that the acceleration of accelerating change is accelerating – that the pace at which chance increases is itself increasing. An exponential function of knowledge and change. All that you knew is slipping between your fingers. Your grandchildren will either be as gods, or not alive at all. The squabble between cousins that we call a clash of civilizations is … insignificant. Unless it somehow manages to inspire us to blow up the planet, I guess. And you have to wonder, after days like these.

As I said, nationalists consider the current stock of politicians to be guilty of high treason, so it would make sense to assassinate them. I can certainly understand their feelings, having been human myself. For much of my life, there was this constant undercurrent in my life of thinking “evil people must die, evil people must die”. It took me many years of self-reflection to realize that I was basically one of the evil people, and I am still not completely dead, although I am certainly much reduced. For someone stuck at the mental level I was at in my 20es, blowing up a government building or executing Evil People (TM) would certainly be a holy duty and a great joy. Having a good enemy to project your evil on makes life a lot more bearable.

You may have heard that Norwegians are eager to help all kinds of people and try to negotiate peace all over the world. That is certainly true. What you don’t know is that we do all this because we know, but dare not think of, that deep inside we want to throttle people with our bare hands, or at least cleave their skull with a good axe, and laugh as we watch the light die in their eyes. Do you really think our genes have changed that much in 1000 years? They have not, we just go out of our way to not trigger them.

“From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, o Lord!” So prayed the English monks during the viking age, and rightly so. Scandinavians may be slower to anger than people in warmer climes, but once the bloodlust rises in them, there is no holding them back. I am not really surprised that we have a throwback to that time: In school we used to learn a slightly glorified version of the old Norse history, with the strong and proud warriors as an ideal. “Noregsveldet” was it called in my grade school, meaning roughly “the lands ruled by Norway”, encompassing such vassal states as Ireland and Great Britain and parts of France, not to mention Iceland, Greenland and snippets of North America. I am sure Swedes are thinking back to the time when they ruled much of Germany as well, but let us stick with Norway for now.

It should not surprise anyone that people who take the Vikings as ideal, can get a bit … bloodyminded, so to speak. And one habit of old (which is unfortunately not restricted to this corner of the world) was, when you had an enemy you really hated, to kill his children in front of him before blinding him.

I see international media represent Utøya as a political youth camp, and that it is too. But especially for the younger (and more vulnerable) teens, it is mainly a summer vacation resorts for children of the Social Democrat political elite, the leaders locally and nationally and their friends in the party. I think you see what is coming here.

“They were friends” said Norway’s Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg, after the massacre, and he was right. Those kids were his friends and children of his friends.  “This place was my summer paradise, and it has been made into a hell.” The Oslo-bomber did not kill the traitors, as he (and many others) thought of them. Instead, he killed their children. I have on good authority that this is far worse.

And it makes sense. You destroy our future, we destroy yours. An eye for an eye. This man was perfectly sane – within his worldview. If the world he lived in were the real world, he would have been a hero. I am sure that is how he regards himself even now.

I am pretty sure there aren’t many others who think of him as a hero, though. Not even among his fellow nationalists. Most of us have the good sense to notice when the berserker rage begins to creep up on us, and go to extremes to avoid it. Because once it takes us, the old gods of thunder and spears are very much alive and well in the land.

From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us o Lord!  Amen.

 

I don’t live in Oslo

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I do live in Norway, though. Luckily there have been no terror attacks here on the south coast where I live, so the huge bomb blast in Oslo and the shooting episode are really not much “real” to me than it is to you.

The aftermath will probably be, though. Depending on who is found to be responsible, the political climate will change dramatically, I am sure. There is a strong undercurrent of resentment and scorn toward the Muslim immigrants in Norway. And rightly so, actually! What has happened is that Norway has taken in a large number of refugees from various Muslim countries, for the obvious reason that Muslim countries are among the few where killing people is still government business.

Now, the refugees are not necessarily political opponents, although that happens. They may often be common habitual criminals, which is enough to get you killed in those countries. So they are not criminals because they are Muslims. They are criminals from countries where being a criminal is highly unsafe, and we take them in because, well, we’ve signed various treaties to that effect.

As a result, “Muslims” – as in people form Muslim countries – are now a major part of the criminal underclass. They are responsible for the overwhelming majority of rapes, most robberies and all but a few murders.  (The exception being homegrown psychiatric patients with sufficiently serious mental afflictions, and a few jealous boyfriends.) Again, this has less to do with religion than absence of religions. That does not really help the public opinion though.

So today I put up a brand new smoke detector. I don’t really expect a Kristallnacht thing, or for that matter a preemptive strike by the foreigners, but I do share this house with a family that is not ethnic Norwegian. Since I have only newly arrived, I am not sure how many locals know that I am even living here yet – the upstairs family was alone in the house for some time, and people may still think they are. Just saying. A smoke detector may not be enough if push comes to shove, but it is generally a good idea to have anyway.

So yeah, the bombing could affect me  even that distance, in a subtle and indirect way. But hopefully not.

And hopefully we won’t take a nosedive into “homeland security” society, like a certain other nation that used to be admirable. But you never know. Humans are just barely rational even at the best of times.

On the bright side, if this turns out to actually be an Islamic terrorism, we might finally get a conservative government after the election. That would be a silver lining indeed, since conservatives here in Norway are rather different from the American version. The correct name for them is actually “Moderates”. This is the name of the corresponding Swedish party, “Moderaterna”. I was briefly a member of Moderat Ungdom (Moderate Youth) in high school. And no, it did not mean that I was only moderately young.  Now, however, that would be a more fitting description!

 

Plumbbobs and chandeliers

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Oh, my platinum plumbbob lights up the paintings on my wall…

The plumbbob, of course, is (in addition to an actual real-world tool for finding the direction of Straight Vertical in mines and constuctions) the soul crystal over the head over the small electronic people in The Sims games. Its highest level, the pure white shining Platinum Mood, represent the highest possible level of happiness and contentment. This is how my sims usually live out their later years, and how I usually feel as well.

That seems like useful preface before mentioning that I came across an old country song today, called “Crystal Chandeliers”. Like almost every country song I can think of, it is at the very least verging on the self-pitiful. At least it is better than the Norwegian version, which was the one I could remember. Anyway, I don’t really recommend getting anywhere near country music unless you have a permanent platinum plumbbob of your soul, an unshakable mind, invincible thinking etc, or at least nearly so.

And of course, thinking that you know me, it would be easy for you to read me and a certain someone into that song. After all, I never fit in too well with folks she knew etc etc. But that’s just the way it is – I don’t even fit inn well with the folks I myself know! In fact, I would probably worry if I did.

In any case, the song is pretty, but it is also subtly evil, because it mis-portrays love. Love is not about having expectations of reward, never. Love does not even have expectations about how the other person will behave, even though we would of course want them to Don’t Be Evil (TM). Happiness is different to different people; in part, we are born different, and have different fates.  While there are certain laws of the mind which promote happiness, some people are made for a life of crystal chandeliers, and some for one of plumbbobs. Love only blesses. Love only gives. Love leaves another person with more freedom than than they had before. This is true and essential.

***

So anyway, now I have this overwhelming urge to name one of my minor characters Kristel Chandlers. Although, knowing the madness that seizes new parents, I am convinced such a person already exists somewhere, probably in America.

Reflections on quiet

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“The only person who truly knows your innermost thoughts is yourself.” And even that is a very optimistic view.

Back when I first started to experiment with the Holosync Solution, I briefly mentioned something important: If this could make people sit down and shut up for an hour each day, it would lead to rapid personal growth regardless of whether the brainwave entertainment actually worked.

This is not to say that I don’t believe the brainwave entrainment works. It probably does, at least part of it. And it probably does have health benefits beyond what you could get by just staring at the wall for an hour each day. But the fact remains that staring at the wall for an hour would indeed be an improvement for most people. Or at least half an hour, but if you really want far-reaching changes in your life, why not go the whole hog and just sit there for an hour.

This may seem like an absurd thing to do. And for all I know, it may be better to play Bach for an hour each day. I keep hearing good thing about Bach, although he is a mite too subtle and refined for a barbarian like me. ^_^ But the thing is, each of us has a profound need to sit down and shut up, if at all possible. And it is a need we usually repress at all costs until our health and even life itself is in danger.

There are different levels of quiet. What we today call meditation (and which the monks of old called contemplation) is a much deeper quiet than just sitting there and shutting up. There are also different levels of meditation. But we have to start somewhere, right? And the first thing we need to do is shut up.

Even if we shut our mouth, even if we go sit down in a room by ourselves and don’t turn on the TV, or the radio, or the stereo, or the computer… even if we just sit there and say nothing, that does not mean we really shut up. Our mouth shuts down, but the brain keeps making talk as if we were not alone.

Actually not all people have that particular brain that talks incessantly. Some think in images or even in music by default. But it is extremely common that our thoughts take the form of a flow of words.  This inner monologue (or in some cases dialogue or more!) tends to go on and on when we are alone.

In meditation we make a distraction of sorts, by binding our mind to a mantra or some other symbol. This serves as an anchor for the mind, so that we can quickly jump back to that point of stillness when we realize we have been carried away on the stream of consciousness. It is like a teleport spell that takes you back to the anchor in a moment. No need to flail and get upset or disappointed or even surprised that an important person like me got carried away by random thoughts. Just jump back to the point of quiet and start again.

But – at least at the outset – the truth is that this inner silence is not really what we are aiming for. I mean, each of us is aiming for it consciously, I suppose. But not having it is an important lesson in itself. By seeking the stillness inside, we become aware of the mind-chatter, the inner talk show, the often inane babble that it all comes down to when there is nothing more to say and the mind just can’t shut up.

If you never sit down and try to shut down your thoughts, if you just distract yourself until you cannot stay awake any longer, you can delude yourself. You can think that you are this particular person, “I”, who has some clearly defined personality traits and is pretty much the same person at all times, and simply creates thoughts by the amazing power of your brain. You don’t need to wonder what to think, say or do: By virtue of simply being you, it all pops into your head when you need it.

Once you become quiet enough to listen to your own thoughts, you will realize that no, you are not that unified thing, like a pearl that is whole and looking the same from all angles. Rather, your mind is like a flock of sheep, or a kindergarten with overly excited children squabbling and laughing and crying and doing random things, talking incessantly and mostly about useless stuff. But you have to be still enough to observe yourself to find out these things.

Is that really useful to know? Yes, it really is. If you don’t know at least roughly what you are, you are deluding yourself. You will make a history, a narrative, that is actually, factually wrong. And you will be surprised over and over by things inside yourself:  Feelings, irrational impulses, sudden urges, subtle tendencies. Among all these, you are blown off course again and again and cannot understand why.

But even if not, you really need that quiet. For your body to relax, for your mind to defragment itself and settle down. For your thoughts to stop flapping their wings quite so vigorously. And to become able to fall asleep without chemicals and without being so exhausted that you cannot wake up in the morning without (more) chemicals.

So if you haven’t already, please take some time to sit down and just shut up for some minutes. Your future self will thank you.

Quiet entrainment

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Bedroom stereo is up in Cherryview. The diskless computer is connected. And, just in case, a steel plate is under it in case it might otherwise start building up heat. It is time to resume brainwave entrainment. Quietly, very quietly.

(In all fairness, the toddler upstairs seems to be awake till near midnight, so I don’t really think they have much reason to complain even in the unlikely case that they can hear a soft hum around 11 in the night. Now if their cat doesn’t return, they have reason to complain. Hopefully it won’t go that far.)

I am not really surprised that I wake up more often the first week in a new home. Anything else would be unnatural, or supernatural or something. But with the delta brainwave entrainment, it should no longer be a problem, more like an opportunity. Let’s see if we can get that Red Bull out of the lunch before it becomes a habit…

Foot and rain. Oh, and souls.

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Half a minute’s walk from home. Not quite Manhattan.

Another slice of life in the three-dimensional world of Earth! Well, mostly.

On Thursday and Friday after work I walked for half an hour. Saturday morning I took a walk for 45 minutes and another half hour in the afternoon. I could barely notice any pain in my foot even after that. So it seems my foot is almost fully restored. It seems to have been healing at almost supernatural speed from the day I decided to give in and move to this place rather than keep looking for a house. Hmm, that’s an awful lot of coincidence, seeing how it began to hurt only a few hours before I heard that I would have to leave Riverview. The “before” of the previous sentence implies that it is not something my subconscious could do without divine intervention, or at least telepathy. It is still kind of suspicious.

The last part of a long walk is the only time I stay warm lately. Well, except under my duvet. This has probably more to do with the weather than the location. It is around 16 degrees C / 61 F outside, and no sources of heat inside except me, my quad-core computer, my fridge and occasionally the stove or washing machine. Not a lot to heat a family apartment. Those on the second floor probably get a small boost of heat from below, as hot air rises to the ceiling. Given how rare rainy days are here on the south coast, I am not eager to swap with them.

The funny part is that in my home office, the electronic thermometer shows 22 degrees C, which is only about one degree less than when I was wearing boxers and still feeling hot back in Riverview.  (No pictures of that, for some reason.)

***

I guess the topic today is that the body and the soul are highly intertwined, like the spaghetti and the past sauce. Or, to use a more correct but less amusing symbol, like the metal of a coin and the pattern engraved on it.

New research has shown that the placebo effect – the ability of fake medicine to heal – works to some degree even if you know it is placebo. So if your doctor gives you calcium pills to reduce your pain, and tells you that they are actually not supposed to work except for your belief in them, they will still work to some degree. If he does not tell you, they will work better. If the doctor also thinks the pills are genuine painkillers, they will work even better again. I suspect this may be ramped up even more if a whole nation thinks a form of medication works, even if the laws of nature do not explain it.

The other day I had the amusement of meeting someone on Google+ who claimed that his mind did not exist. What was called mind, he insisted, was simply a function of the brain. In my brain, this was translated into the following:
“My computer does not need software! It comes with Windows built-in!”
“Bah, my Mac does not even need Windows! I just turn it on and it works!”

I’ve been working with software since I was a teenager, back in the 70es, and I think this may have influenced my view of the mind. The reality is probably a little different again. But I believe it is the closest metaphor we have right now, and also closer than any metaphor our ancestors ever had. When an atheist goes so far as to deny software, you know that their (un)belief is truly important to them. Whether it can also heal their foot, I do not know.

 

A deeper difference

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Many of my online friends are people who might just say things like “I am a bird” or “I am a dragon” or “I am a woman in a man’s body” or “it is a scientific fact that my mind does not exist”. They all consider me a bit weird.

I am fed up with writing about moving. I am sure my birth family, if they even read the journal still from time to time, appreciate reading about my life. Even I would probably like to know if they move.  (One of my brothers evidently moved a few years ago, not that anyone told me for a couple years, so it is not entirely theoretical.)

But how interesting is it really? Unless you plan to visit me, or get some good ideas for your own moving, there is nothing in it for YOU. And I don’t write to get things off my chest. I write mainly because I love you and want you to know that life is not as limited as you thought when you just looked at your neighbors and relatives and wondered: “Is this all?”

To be human is to have an immense degree of freedom. There are many lifestyles, and you can mix and match and make your own … although some combinations are probably not as good as others. And of course there are some combinations you cannot technically achieve. You cannot live as both married and single at the same time. (Or at least hell will break loose when your spouse finds out!) You cannot go back to being a virgin later in life. You can’t spend all your money and save it too. So nature puts some limits on us. (That’s why we have The Sims, to try out those other options. And online journals, to see what happens when someone tries them out in Real Life.)

Wherever we go, there we are. If you are in your fifties, as I am, you cannot become quite like me, and I cannot become quite like you, although we could probably approach each other. But the paths that took us to where we are, diverged much earlier in life.

I’ve found a number of new acquaintances on Google+, more so than in all my time on Facebook. But they are basically the same as most of the old ones. There is a deep difference between us, and I have thought a bit about how to express that.

Basically, I think most of them are children of their time and proud of it, in so far as they know it at all. I am… more like a continuation of something very old. My postmodern friends have nothing but scorn for those who think the world was created 6000 years ago, and yet they seem to assume that our cultural world was created only a couple generations ago. They take for granted that there is nothing to learn from the Great Souls that appeared at critical points in the history of our civilizations:  A Lao-Tzu, a Buddha, a Socrates, even Jesus Christ. All these people lived before the modern age, so they must have been idiots.  You cannot know anything unless you got the facts right, and it is only just recently that we know everything that is worth knowing.

The truth is, of course, that every generation has known almost everything – in their own eyes. In the age between Newton and Bohr, science knew that the sun got its energy from gravity – the friction when its mass contracted heated it up to its temperature of about 6000 degrees, and when it began to cool just a little, the reduced pressure caused gravity to compress it just a little more so the temperature increased again. The idiot scientists who had lived before thought it was burning, perhaps fueled by coal. But now we knew the fact: It was gravity all along!

It goes without saying that if humanity soldiers on for another 100 years, scientists will laugh their butt off at many things we consider immutable facts today.  Currently, for instance, we assume that more than 95% of the universe consists of “dark matter” (which cannot be seen or observed in any way except through its gravity) and “dark energy” (which seems to be kind of like gravity but with the opposite effect). Come on. This is disturbingly similar to the “epicircles” that official science had to explain the movement of the planets before Copernicus began to suspect that the sun was at the center of the solar system, not the Earth.  Something is very much missing.

Our complete and comprehensive worldview based on facts is just the latest in a long series of comprehensive worldviews based on the known fact of the day. The scientific name for this is “mythology”. Each age has a mythology, a more or less unified body of myths that accounts for all the essential facts known by that culture at that time. Ours is no different. We just have dark energy instead of dark gods, as befits our particular culture.

Wisdom is not like that. It is not a collection of fact, but a way of thinking. It operates on a different dimension, and allows for “time travel” in the sense that you can make a stop in any culture, at any age, and apply wisdom to it. Or not, as is the case with most people at all times.

Aristotle honestly thought that one of the testicles made boy seed and one made girl seed, and you could decide the gender of your children by tying up one of them for a  long enough time. That doesn’t mean he was an idiot who has nothing to teach us. The truth is that you and I almost certainly believe in something equally idiotic, which is considered a scientific fact today.

Or to take a more recent example: Sir Fred Hoyle, one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century, invented the phrase “Big Bang” to mock the newfangled notion that the universe had not eternally existed in its current form. At the time he coined that phrase, the notion that the universe had a beginning was considered a form of creationism and inherently unscientific.

So the difference between me and my friends is that they are children of their time, eager to tear down the rubbish of their mistaken ancestors. I am a children of  eons, the words of the Buddha and the Christ ring in my ears as I walk among the spires of steel and glass. “Everything that has form is subject to decay.” “What profit is there in winning the whole world if you lose your soul?”

As my body walks through space, my mind walks through time. I see the land as it was when the first farmers pulled their boats ashore, I see the small unpainted houses of a few hundred years ago, the cattle paths now hidden under the pavement. All things change. And every time the face of the world changes, people live in this new world as if it is the only world possible. This vast number of people are who I call “4-dimensional”, as they are trapped in the three space dimensions and the one time dimension. Their goals lie within the world of space and time and they cannot break the fifth wall – at least yet. That is not to say they can’t be good people, in some cases more so than I. And they certainly know a lot of things I don’t, too.

When did I take this path? My mother, before she passed on, told me that when I was little, I refused to let her read me fairy tales. “Tell me about when you were a girl, mama” I had pleaded her. Although I have read (and written) fairy tales since then, this core of my being has always persisted. When I moved away from home at the age of 15, I came to a house where there was one of those ridiculously long world history book collections, with blow by blow descriptions of ancient battles and in depth analysis of the archives of the Hittite civilization, that kind of thing. I was stuck there for hours a day. I did not think of it back then, it felt natural for me, just as when I was little, to travel in my mind to the past and back.

“I was born like this, I had no choice:
I was born with the gift of a golden voice,
and twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond,
they chained me to this table right here
in the Tower of Song.”
-Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song.

Without broadband

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Computers, computers everywhere, but not a drop of broadband! Or rather, drop may be what it did.

One of the things I first thought about when the house was sold, was broadband access. I had fiber-optic high-speed access. Kind of overkill, but the price was only marginally higher than the slower telephone  cable broadband, except for an initial investment of around $1000, which I found acceptable given that I was renting the place for five years. That cost would happen again if I chose the same solution (it covers stretching fiber-optic cable to the house, while virtually every house older than 10 years has copper cable already).  I can’t keep stretching optical fibers from house to house every year.

So I looked at DSL suppliers, and decided to go back to NextGenTel (a Scandinavian-only ISP), which I had used for several years until I moved to Riverview. The other realistic supplier was the former state monopoly Telenor, which I used before switching to NextGenTel.

I quit Telenor because of their incompetence. On several occasions I was without Internet connection for a week or two, and calling them just resulted in their helpdesk making up some random story to explain, a story which would depend entirely on who I met when I called. The next day someone else would give another story. An engineer would be there tomorrow. No, it was just a temporary glitch. No, they would get an engineer to look at it. Etc, until I happened on one of the few people who actually knew anything, and who could throw a switch to get my Internet back on.

In all fairness, Telenor is OK as long as everything works. I have them for my mobile phone, at least for the time being.

I ordered DSL from NextGenTel when I was sure I was actually going to move to Mandal. To be honest, I did look for houses in the countryside for a while. If my foot had been OK, I might even have gone for the one that was a 45 minute walk from the bus. (Once the move was imminent, my foot started healing rapidly. Another suspicious coincidence.)

Yesterday I got mail from NextGenTel that they would deliver my broadband on September 20th. That is a bit later than the 2-3 weeks their web site advertises and that is specifically mentioned during summer.  Evidently they had forgotten that their workers have summer vacation or something. I called their customer service which verified the mail. They also pointed out that this was the same for the competition, and I am pretty sure it is. For certain values of competition.

I could get ICE.NET wireless broadband in a couple days, and this is probably true because 1) I have had them before and they delivered fast, they just were horribly slow to stop when I tried to end my subscription, and 2) there is no local driving involved, they just send a wireless modem in the mail. Actually I still have their wireless modem and am testing it right now.

Or I could just continue to use my mobile phone as wireless broadband. It does have a flat rate subscription, and unless they have changed policies without me noticing, the only result of “overdraft” is that the download speed is lowered. I am not absolutely sure of this though, and it would be pretty dramatic for someone in the zeroth world to lose data access on the mobile phone!

About that: I whined on Google+ about the 10 week delivery time on broadband, and was met with absolute icy silence instead of the expected shock and outrage over the cruel and unusual treatment. Could it possibly be that this kind of customer “service” is common down in the first world? Do you still have regional monopolies and stuff? Up here in the zeroth world, every day without broadband is like a day in the Dark Ages. It is just unnatural for a modern human to not be able to videoconference, watch movies almost immediately, and play elaborate multiplayer online games while talking on some kind of IP phone. The death of distance is more or less a part of history for us, which is why being without broadband is so unthinkable.

I may end up getting the ICE.NET wireless broadband to supplement the mobile phone. Between them they should provide me with all the bandwidth I may need during July, August and Septembet. There is as usual a 12 month minimum duration, but the first six months are half price, which is quite reasonable indeed. If that applies also for former customers, I may opt for it.

At least if I have to move again (or find a nice house way out in the countryside), ICE.NET uses a frequency that covers a much larger area per base station than mobile phones, so there is hardly any habitable place in Scandinavia that is not covered. I can bring it with me anywhere there is some source of electricity, basically, with no downtime. That may turn out to be a valuable trait if I keep getting chased from place to place with little time to prepare.

I mean, it is not like you folks want to be without my updates even for a day, right?  Right?

Pigsty Project II

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Not literally looking like a pigsty. More like after a tornado or teen home-alone party, some such.

Extremely regular readers – well, probably only myself – will remember the Pigsty Project from last time I moved. It is a year and a half ago, after all. It was quite simple really: Each workday I would carry something, anything, out of the home, never to return. I could be an empty bottle, used batteries (we are not supposed to throw those in the household garbage around here), a used book to give to the second-hand book store. Anything that was not going to be used again, and that did not go in the regular garbage.

I am not sure when I started. If I had been smart, I had started as soon as I heard I would be moving, but I think I only did this the last few weeks. It was complicated by the fact that I also carried things each workday that I would bring to the new house before the actual move, so as to make that less.

I continued for some weeks after I moved too, because frankly there were still things left. Eventually it came to an end.

Yes, I have started it again. Strangely, there was now a multitude of such things. Partly there are new ones, like empty glasses that have held pasta sauce. Partly there are old ones, like the comics I was sure I was going to read again but never did. If I had a couple more months before the move,  I could probably have made it off with them all. But I didn’t.

Needless to say, perhaps, this time I started as soon as I heard I would be moving.  And I intend to continue until I am rid of everything I don’t need. This time, even the old computers will go, even if I have to carry them bit by bit. That is what I think. We shall see what actually happens. Yesterday and today I carried books. For tomorrow I have set a bag of comic books by the door. I brought along the glasses (as opposed to setting them adrift on the river) so they will also have to go.  I think most of the rest I need to get rid of will be fit to throw in the garbage bin.

I got my own garbage bin! Even though it is only half a house. It is certified family residential unit so evidently I get my own. That should help. Well, if I don’t fall back to keeping everything “just in case” once I forget the packing and unpacking. What is the chance?