Sunday 17 January 1999

Pic of the day: Probably not a good idea to dig into the snow here.
At 7 in the night (when I had slept like 3 hrs) there was lightning and thunders. And I arose and went straight to my modem, which I disconnected from the phone as well as the AC. Then I went to sleep again, absently noticing that the light and the sound came within a heartbeat of one another, meaning the lightning must have been less than 300 meters away. Then I went under in the dark again.
I woke at noon, and found that the snow outside was further reduced to mere patches of white. I got a photo of what little was left, in daylight, but it was hardly suited for digging snow caves or showing off snow camouflage clothing. Not that I'm complaining. If this is the greenhouse effect, keep the engine on while you shop. (Of course, the inhabitants of some tropical islands and swampy coast areas may beg to differ.)

Perseverance in the face of synchronicity:
The lusts of the flesh are well known and their power respected; but don't underestimate the electronic ones either. Today I got the fixed idea that I definitely missed The Realm, a graphical internet game from Sierra. It's a fairly traditional roleplaying game, with elves and ogres and magic. But it has cute graphics, reasonable rules, cute graphics, beautiful music, and cute graphics. I had a 30 day trial account, though much of that time was lost in technical difficulties. Still, I had a nearly doubled phone bill that quarter, so it must have been somewhat addictive. Well, I got the crawings today.
So I fired up Opera, my favorite web browser, and went to www.realmserver.com. I found the Order menu and registered myself as a potential customer. At which point the server returned a null page, or some such message. Continued clicking and petting did not help, so I gave up. For a while.
Later in the day, however, I could not stand it anymore. So I started MS Internet Explorer 4, which I have not yet deleted from my disk. Some sites are designed to be compatible with only one brand of browser (yecch!) and that would never be Opera. So, I logged on and tried again. This time it timed out while trying to put stuff in my virtual shopping basket. This continued for an hour or two.
Finally I came through, and filled in the online shopping form on their supposedly secure server. (They say so, though my browser could not verify it.) Until the end of the procedure, when they added $15 to send me my username and password with US parcel express. (The game itself is $49.95 for a year, and I had already downloaded it.) What they could not know, is that I am allergic to ethnic discrimination (as long as it's in favor of Americans, at least...). This was the spark that made the cup flow over, and I cancelled the whole transaction. For now, at least ...

Do all people tend to wake up with a song in their head if they wake by themselves? I know I do. This time it was, ironically, "Night comes on" by Leonard Cohen. I guess it's still an improvement from the other day, when it was the Norwegian duo Knutsen & Ludvigsen with "Dum og deilig" ("dumb and delicious"). These morning songs tend to keep playing until I do something serious to shake them off.