Category Archives: slice of life

New router – sort of

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di090708

New router. And hopefully better.

Continued from yesterday.

It was a good thing I had the old D-Link router lying in the cupboard, since otherwise I would have been limited to one computer at a time like other humans.  With the spare router in use, however, I no longer had a spare router.  So I went to the electronics shop today looking for a new one.

I first looked for one of those that send signals through the mains wiring rather than radio waves, but there was none. I guess it is an idea whose time has gone.  But there were several models of both D-Link and Jensen (the one that stopped working was a Jensen. The ones they sell now boast a 20 year warranty.  Perhaps the one I had also had that, but the receipt was no doubt lost in the move is not before.) There was also an even more obscure brand than Jensen, so obscure that I don’t even remember it now.  That’s a pretty strong hint that I did not buy that brand.  In the end, I bought another D-link.  While I liked Jensen better, and they certainly are easier to set up and control, I have a deep distrust in electronics that are on the verge of catching fire even during normal use.  After all, I am descended from thousands of people who did not die in fires, or at least not before passing on their genes.  In this particular regard I would like to follow in their footsteps.

The old D-Link router is remarkably cool.  Mostly in the temperature sense, although the design is also more attractive than the flat square-edged block I’ve grown used to over the years. The new model looks different, unfortunately, even smaller and almost as square, but with pretty green lights in front.  It is also faster in its wireless transfer, although I am not sure if the receiving units on the old computers at least can handle more speed.  The latest laptop probably can, though. One of the attractions of a wireless network is being able to escape the heat in the underground basement with a good laptop and still have access not only to Internet but to all my music and all my documents through the local network.  Although today was not hot enough to warrant hiding in the washer room, such days may soon come again.  It was warmer than yesterday already.

The new router, despite being even smaller and having a stronger signal, is barely lukewarm. I am not too happy about it having a stronger signal either, it being barely a yard away from my brain.  On the other hand, my old PC in the living room now has Very Good signal instead of varying between Low and Very Low, with the occasional No Signal. (And that was with the Jensen.  With the old D-Link there was now no hint that the network even existed.)   Perhaps I should spend more time in the living room now?  It is for the most part cooler too.

I had to change the password of my local network. I suppose I could have just left it open, so any neighbors could benefit from the amazing upgraded capacity as well.  (No reason before to worry about that when I barely had signal in the living room.)  But this is not only a connection of Internet access, but also a local network. While I don’t begrudge my neighbors my music or my anime collection, I would have had to find some way to password protect the folder with sexy pictures of myself and the imaginary girlfriend.  (Just because you’re imaginary does not mean you can’t be sexy. In fact, I suspect the only sexy pictures of me are imaginary too…)

Anyway, the old router goes back to the cupboard, the new router works like a charm, Opera Unite still doesn’t work (but then again it hasn’t after the first few days) and I have to find out again, for the third time, how to make the same hole in all three of the firewalls between my computer and the Internet:  The Windows firewall, the router firewall and the modem firewall. At least there should only be one new unit to learn this time. Whee.

The packaging claims that it also supports Wii, Xbox Live and PS3, so perhaps it also supports the Nintendo DS, which I never got to run before.  Then again the old network supported the PSP, not that I use the PSP except a brief burst a couple times a year.

But right now, I want to be lazy.

Thunder and router

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di090707

Old router brought back after years in a dusty plastic bag.

Last night as I was about to go to bed, very sleepy, I thought I heard far-off thunder.  I turned off all the computers and the network (router and ADSL modem) and disconnected them from the mains.  I did not however unplug the phone cables.  Perhaps I should have, but probably it would have made no difference.

When I woke up, it had rained but was already clearing up.  The air stayed cooler both indoors and outdoors for all of the day.  But I could not connect to the Internet.  I decided to give it time and went to work. It has happened before during thunderstorm season that the ISP’s node has been out of commission for a few hours.  But when I returned, I still could not get online.

Still, there was something strange going on.  My Winamp Remote icon in the Windows tray showed that I was connected, although I had been unable to connect to it from work.  (I often play music at work from my hard disk at home, now that I have transferred all my CDs to hard disk.) When I tried to load a page, it started, seemed to load a tiny bit of it, but then gave up.  And when I ran network diagnosis on the Vista machine, it said I was connected to the Internet after I fiddled a bit with the cables.  (I am not sure that was actually necessary.)  I even got City of Heroes running on that machine. It took some tries to get connected, but once it hooked up, the speed was just fine.  Still, I could not load web pages on any of my computers, nor connect the LiveJournal client or Opera Unite.  Something was amiss.

I unplugged the WAN cable from the home network router and plugged it straight in my main PC.  It warned me that there might be limited or no connection, but moments later I could connect to everything at the speed I have purchased and then some. Of course the other machines were now disconnected from the Net.  The main problem with this was that I could not dualbox in City of Heroes.

Lately, after  days of a strict Sims 3 gaming diet, I have returned to City of Heroes. My imaginary girlfriend, who for good measure roleplays my imaginary wife in that particular game, has several characters around level 30 on Virtue, the unofficial official roleplaying server.  (There are no official roleplaying servers, but the players have decided on this one for roleplaying.) Anyway, level 30 is a good time to start on the zone Brickstown, which has a nice mix of smaller and larger groups of villains shortly after you leave the train station. Well, the short of it is that my imaginary female companion has mostly support characters, defenders and controllers, which are not all that good at playing alone.  Sometimes she gets a spot on some random team, but if not I will log on one of my official characters and help her out. I have a number of tankers and scrappers on Virtue, which go well with her defenders and controllers respectively.  (By “her” I am referring to an imaginary player, but the dynamic would be the same with real players.)

Because of all this I really wanted to have at least two computers online, but I could only get one to work.  On the other hand, when the router was connected, I could call up shared files on another local computer in the blink of an eye.  Clearly both the router and the ADSL modem worked, but somehow it seemed that they hated each other’s guts.  I could even connect to the modem through the router from my PC, so clearly the connection was there. But the router did not want to route data to and from the Internet.

I am not sure the thunder was part of this at all, truth to tell. The surge would have needed to go through the modem without hurting it, then hitting the router, yet doing so little damage that it could do anything else than load web pages.  Suspicious.  If we exclude malicious intent, the most likely cause is probably overheating.  The Jensen router is very compact and gets hot even in winter. In summer it is disturbingly hot to the touch and could really have needed some cooling.  It may be too late now, however.

Around bedtime I decided to fetch the old router, which I had stopped using sometime before I moved here.  The problem was that its wireless network was very weak and had a ridiculously small radius, something like the size of my previous living room.  I did not get a good connection from my bedroom. There may have been other issues too, but if so I have forgotten them.  One nice thing about it is, it is much less hot.  I unplugged the old and plugged everything into the even older, which had spent the last several years in a dusty plastic bag in my cupboard. It did not work.  I was not too surprised.  I had a new ISP since then, probably two.  I found the user manual (which was on a CD) and managed to log into the router. Here I changed the setup from PPPOE to Dynamic something, and within a minute the computers were connected!  Good as new!

Happy ending, except that I was now extremely sleepy again and also felt a little sick. I went to bed, the computers happily chatting with the Internet.

To be continued?

Heat wave

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di090704

Even the characters in the anime “Lucky Star” talk about global warming when the weather is hot.

These have been two hot weeks, despite a couple days with at least some hours of overcast. The heat just seems to build up, and by now I am reduced to wringing a thin shirt in lukewarm water and wear it. That way the water that evaporates does not come from my own body, at least.  Earlier years I have had bad leg cramps in the summer, which one doctor believed came from not drinking enough water. I am not sure about that, it seems I eat very few things that contain less than 90% water: Yogurt, yogurt ice cream, juice mixed with water, soda mixed with water.  Well, a couple bananas this weekend.  But mostly very watery stuff.

I can certainly imagine elderly, severely disabled people dying from this heat.  Although in Norway, it is mostly the winter who culls the elderly population.  As long as they stay indoors and keep the heating on and dress in warm clothes, they are fine, but of course at some point they venture outside and their hearts go poof.  In comparison, the summer is a minor problem, at least for now, and in most of the country.  But heat waves like these certainly do push the border.

An online friend rages today because most people don’t know the difference between weather and climate.  “It’s so hot, it must be the global warming!”  “No, there is no global warming, for it was so cold this winter.”  I kind of feel her pain.  But in America it is even worse, because not just opinions but even factual climate data depend on what party you vote for, and this again depends on your opinion of abortion and your grandmother.  I joke that if this continues, eventually one day they will wake up and find that everyone from the other party is just gone, kinda like the Rapture.  Because their two worlds will have moved so far apart that they can no longer see each other.  Wouldn’t that make an awesome SF story at least?  Perhaps there is a transition phase in which Democrats appear ghostlike and foggy to Republicans, and the other way around, and most people don’t notice because they habitually avoid them anyway.  And then they’re just gone. Woo!

What do you mean, heat gone to my head?  The voices in my head say they are just fine.

Happy 4th of July, by the way! I hope the terrain is less tinder-like than here if you’re having fireworks.

Finished ripping CDs

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di090703

Two bags with my favorite CDs, which I once assumed I would leave behind when I died, hopefully far into the future. Now in the trash they go.

Finished at last! Every CD I could find is ripped to the hard disk, and a backup is made to an external disk.  The CDs from USA and Europe are stuffed in bags to throw in the trash, those that are not there already.  I keep the Japanese ones, for now. I originally planned to keep the CDs from my favorite artists:  Enya, Leonard Cohen, Chris de Burgh.  They are all awesome, compared to pretty much anyone else, in that the consistently make good songs and perform them themselves with great enthusiasm.  And they fill up all or much of the CD with good songs instead of spacing it out with one good song and 9 boring on each CD. So I was really planning to keep them, until the Jammie Thomas judgment. Now I am not planning to have an American or European CD in the house ever again.  Nor do I intend to buy any from online shops like iTunes etc.  They had their chance, and they blew it.  This means war.

I have decided on Sound Converter, a Linux program, to make all the tracks into MP3 files for easy streaming.  The Opera Unite music streaming program only handles that format.  Unfortunately it also panics at the sight of non-ASCII characters.  Perhaps it thinks they are malicious code?  I am still not sure what to do with my Japanese music in that regard, I have found English translations for one (DearS) but may have to either translate or transliterate the others manually, a Herculean task, although not Sisyphean.  As it is, just converting the hundreds of non-Japanese CDs will likely take weeks, as my Linux CD at home is so old, it is slow even with Xubuntu.

Once the tracks are converted, I intend to use Opera Unite to stream them so my friends around the world can listen to them.  That’s illegal, of course: According to the recent Norwegian law about intellectual property, it is illegal to play music for your family. You can only perform copyrighted works at home if you do so “without the help of strangers”. Since your stereo is almost certainly made by strangers, using it to play for your spouse and kids could get you arrested.

That is not very likely though, because the police is locked up in a long struggle with the government.  They are refusing to work overtime – crimes should please be committed during office hours until further notice.   Things have been going sour over a very long time:  The Norwegian police was reorganized, as are pretty much every tentacle of government, including the one in which I worked.  And like that one, the police also found themselves doing more work for the same pay, and less meaningful work as well. As far as I know this has been the outcome of every “reorganization” in public sector in Norway, as it probably is everywhere else.  Anyway, after years of this they have had enough.  So they are doing only what they absolutely have to do.  And this means as long as we have crazy people running around doing actual crimes, there won’t be police left over to make sure I don’t let my best friends listen to my favorite music.

Trade Day again

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di090702

Unfortunately, the rest of you is gradually going to get bigger and bigger too, until you’re just a quivering mound of fat.  Luckily it takes decades to run its course.

I had forgotten that the first Thursday of July is Trade Day (or Day of Commerce) in Kristiansand, year after year.  It seems to usually take me by surprise.  Not so the people of the surrounding countryside.  I did notice on the commute bus that it was fuller than usual.  In fact, there was hardly a free seat by the time we came to the city.  Still it was not until I saw the crates on the pavement that I remembered.

Extremely regular readers may remember that I have reported from Trade Day almost yearly. In particular the sight of an unusual number of chubby housewives, or something like that, invading the city for the occasion.  My primary theory is that they come from the surrounding countryside, but I have no explanation why women outside the city would be visibly fatter than those in it.  So I have also speculated that maybe these come from the same area as their slightly slimmer sisters, but that they stay out of sight except in dire emergencies, such as half price on frying pans.

In any case, they are back, and they are fatter than ever.  In fact, I think this is getting too far. Perhaps I should say, even I think so.  I find chubby women decorative, but this goes beyond merely chubby.

I’ll briefly repeat my observation of body mass and femininity.  Skinny women, with some few exceptions, tend toward the boyish, or “unisex” perhaps more correctly.  When they fatten up, they normally become more womanly:  Their cheeks grow rounder, their breasts grow larger and heavier, their hips and buttocks grow larger and rounder, and their thighs softer.  But at some point – which varies from family to family, it seems – this process stops.  Perhaps all the feminine fat cells are filled to the max. Whatever the reason, further weight gain seems to just settle wherever there is free space on the body, gradually transforming their feminine curves to a quivering mound of fat.  And once again, they become near indistinguishable from their equally fat brethren. Unisex again.

There is also the detail that it looks unhealthy.  At some point you know that these people will have a problem walking up stairs or a hillside, in extreme cases perhaps even on flat ground, though there are still few of those around here.  But we are starting to see more and more American conditions.  And we know that Americans spend a lot of money on their health and get rather less health for it.  Some claim that this is because socialized medicine is inherently superior in some way.  I think it can all be explained by the fact that most Americans are fat and lazy.  And now we’re getting there too, even the women.  It reminds me of a comment I once saw to the effect that America is a shining lighthouse, and the purpose of a lighthouse is so other people can steer clear of it, not straight at it!

Apart from that, the day was hot but despite the blue sky there was a fairly strong breeze that kept the city from overheating completely.  There was much less wind in the valley where I live, however, so I did not get the house cooled down until right now, around midnight.  Even then it is barely bearable.  Sleep quality (and even quantity) suffers from the heat.  Ironically the basement is downright chilly.  I should have rented that instead, I sometimes think.

I can’t imagine how people can stand being fat in this weather.  Fat is a good insulator, to the point where whales and seals use it to survive the cold of the arctic waters. And unlike clothes, you can never take it off. Wouldn’t it be nice if humans put on weight in the autumn and lost it again in spring? In Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy there is such a mechanism, but then again the seasons there last for centuries.  I suppose “bone fever” is not really an alternative here on Earth. Although I do expect to lose a few pounds during the Mexican flu, if I survive it.  And it seems all but a few people do.  But that is a concern for another time, if ever.

Quick update

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Regular readers may have noticed that the dating of the recent entries has been out of order.  There are reasons for this. Basically, there have been “seeds” for entries on certain days, but they have not been finished until days later.

Tonight I am almost certainly brewing on some kind of virus infection.  Despite no mowing today (for a change), my pulse has been far above normal for most of the evening, around 95 when sitting (!), the same as I normally have when walking leisurely around.  (This is the opposite of what I wrote about some days ago.) It has slowed down a bit now that I approach midnight, but it still well over normal.

The heat does not exactly help. I am not made for heat.  I can put on more clothes if I am cold, to a certain point, but I cannot take of my skin when it is this hot.  The nights are worst, because I can’t keep wet while I sleep.  Perhaps if I had a waterbed. ^_^

Dentistry, summer and fat

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di090622

“Faint praise coming from you” my self-sim seems to think.

I have lost count of how many weeks I have gone with a loose tooth. It was one of the three ceramic teeth and was fastened on the root of the original with a thin metal bar. This is, I believe, the third time it has been broken. Hopefully it will be a while till next time. Perhaps that depends on my computer shopping habits, however.

I have written in the past about this peculiar pattern. At first I thought the rule was “Every time you buy a computer, God kills a tooth.” (Patterned after the infamous “God kills a kitten” meme, which I am sure Google can explain to anyone who may have been spared it until now.) Later experience showed that I could buy desktop computers without breaking teeth, so I amended it to “Every time you buy a laptop, God kills a tooth.” This time, however, the tooth broke while I still considered buying a laptop for a friend. Actually in part I did this to test whether the cosmic law only reacted to buying for myself or whether it was the objective act of buying a laptop that invoked it. Instead I found that it was the decision to buy. Perhaps at some future point, I will break teeth even by looking at a laptop to covet it?

In any case, I got it fixed at a sufferable cost, and in time before the summer vacation. (Not mine, I don’t have vacation in summer, but presumably the dentists have. Summer vacation is almost sacred up here in Norway, where the summer is short but intense, with warm bright nights that don’t invite to get up early next morning for a long day of hard work.) The dentist’s equipment had broken down today but he borrowed that of a colleague; they are a small team of dentists working together and sharing office services. Despite the unfamiliar workplace he seems to have done a good job.

On my way back to work, I noticed how hot the day had become. It was by now rather late in the workday, around 15 (3PM) and the heat in the city felt almost tropical compared to the cool days of the past couple weeks. I have thoroughly enjoyed the cloudy weather with occasional showers, since I am not really made for heat. The newspaper claims that the heat will last for a week or more. I would not be surprised, the south coast of Norway is a naturally sunny place all year long with only scattered rainy days. No wonder people from all over the country come to relax on the beaches here.

One recurring concern when the word “beach” comes up is the extra pounds from the dark season. They just don’t seem willing to leave in order to render you good-looking in swimwear. Of course, this is hardly a concern for me, since I get violently ill if I eat more than a few grams of fat. And even were it not so, I have long since given up on swimwear. Not so much because of the skin disease that makes much of my body look like that of a toad, but mostly because melanoma runs in my family. I can only hope that I realized this soon enough – I have mostly stayed out of the sun since I was around 20 – but I certainly don’t want to run any risks now. Life is short enough as is.

Fat is not known to make life any longer, at least in our time when there is an excess of it. And that was the thing I noticed on my way back from the dentist: Norwegians really are growing fatter. Norwegians and Sims. One of the most eye-catching changes in The Sims 3 compared to the earlier versions is the wider range of body shapes, from fat to skinny to muscular. A goodly number of the inhabitants of the imaginary town are shaped like couch potatoes, and unfortunately so are also those in the real town where I work. It used to be that Norwegians were still lean and active compared to our American cousins. Well, they are still ahead of us in sheer obesity, but not in overweight.

To make this clear, the border between “normal” and overweight is set pretty low. Unnaturally low, I believe, as studies show that mortality is actually slightly lower in the barely overweight group than in the “normal” group, which includes some decidedly skinny people. I am not sure who set up those categories. They should probably have been set a little higher. But in any case, technically obesity is a different group from overweight, and at this point the health cost is obvious. It is hard for the obese to move around efficiently, and their hearts are hard pressed to keep the blood flowing through the bloated body. Hypertension and diabetes are almost unavoidable if enough years pass in such a state.

Norwegians have become overweight to the same degree as Americans – about two in three is now above that artificial line – but we have far less outright obesity. I am afraid this is only a matter of time, though. Looking around today, I saw a lot of fat. There is definitely more of it than there used to be when I was young. Unless someone finds a miracle cure, we will have the same wave of chronic lifestyle diseases as our American cousins, with all the cost and suffering involved.

After work I went home and trotted out the manual lawnmower again. As the voices in my head remarked: “I am become death, the destroyer of grass.” (Thank you, Oppenheimer.) But better it than me. I can do without a tooth for a few weeks, but not a heart.

Not dead yet

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Although I am sure I am moving in that direction, at a speed of about 24 hours a day… Well, 19 hours a day in a manner of speaking, since the average life expectancy is still rising by 5 hours a day even in the developed country.  If only it were 25!  Life is too awesome to just end without a really, really good reason.

I am still here, but I am shrinking.  I don’t check my weight every week – it would just get cluttered by random things like whether I have been drinking lots of water – but several times a year.  This was one of them.  It is the lightest I have been in a couple years.  (As regular readers will know, I lost weight involuntarily for nine months after the mysterious illness in Easter 2005, then regained it over about the same length of time after I moved here.  It has been very stable since, at a moderately lower level than before (probably because I still can’t eat more than traces of fat).

I will probably be checking more frequently for a while.  But it is less likely to be an undiscovered cancer and more likely to be just forgetting to eat while I play Sims 3, I think.  After all, if I can forget to update the Chaos Node, I can forget pretty much anything!

Pulse vs pain

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My pulse is telling me that I am in amazing health, and should probably go train for a marathon or something.  The pain in my upper jaw is telling me that I’ve got some kind of infection again (you will remember that I wrote about these 10 years ago too on a regular basis. I still don’t know what it is.)

It is Saturday again, so I stayed up an hour longer and overslept by two hours. The sun was back after a mostly gray week with scattered showers.  Before it could get too hot, I decided to mow the lawn in the early afternoon.  I put on my pulse watch, as I do for such occasions.  To me, mowing the lawn is exercise.  That said, I think I need a new lawnmower. I have failed to sharpen the blades on this one; I am just not a do-it-yourself type I guess.  As it is now, it flattens far more grass than it cuts, so I have to go over the same stretch repeatedly to actually get it cut.  Even then some straws will rise again when I have left.

Anyway, I put on the pulse watch. It showed 65 beats per minute when I was just standing there.  That may not sound strange, but it is.  I have a resting pulse of 55 when I don’t have any infections and haven’t exercised the last day or two.  (Either one of these will evidently set off some internal work in the body that requires extra energy, presumably millions of tiny nanomachines repairing and restocking the broken or depleted parts.) That’s a pretty comfortable number, 55.  There is a good chance that most health personnel will have a noticeably higher pulse than that.  For the most part, only athletes and the occasional mutant will have much lower.  But that’s while lying flat on my back and thinking of silence.

Getting up requires a lot more work for the heart since suddenly the blood has to fight against gravity, almost 190 centimeters of uphill from ground level.  Also, you don’t notice but some pretty big muscles are hard at work keeping you upright and in balance.  So my standing pulse is normally more like 80.  I honestly have no idea why it was so low today, especially since I clearly have an infection in my face.  Infections should normally get the immune system to roll out, requiring more energy and therefore more oxygen.  But evidently my immune system is a lot less worried than I am about this inflammation. Whether this is a good or a bad thing, time will show.

The slow pulse does not seem to be brachycardia/ bradycardia,  since it rises in response to exercise. After a few minutes of mowing, my pulse was within the usual training range, and stayed there.  A doctor will normally not diagnose bradycardia unless there is fatigue, dizziness, fainting or heart conditions apart from the slow beat.  I have such symptoms very rarely, about once a year, and not the same symptom every year either.  So despite having been hospitalized twice with heart monitor after fainting for no good reason (some years ago), nobody has ever hinted that I needed any kind of treatment.  I guess being symptom-free 364 days a year is pretty good for a human.

Now if I could do that well against the perennial infections of my jaws, it would be right peachy.

No dentist today

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The dentist called and cancelled the appointment which was later in the day because he was getting behind and mine was one that could wait.  (One of the false teeth has come loose some time ago, but still not fallen out.) New appointment Monday 22nd.  I suppose that’s OK since I’m not actually in pain, probably unlike many of the other patients.