You know what I really, really don’t like? Well apart from a whole lot of other things then…

Well yes, I don’t like that either…

No, what I don’t like is pretentious art that has a pseudo-suicidal theme to it. See this photograph for an example.

There’s a variety of reasons why I find this type of “art” offensive.

The first one is that I’ve been in the darkness. I know what it really is like to be suicidal and to not want to live. There is no way that you –yeah you, I’m looking at you, you tiny little spoiled teeny-boppers who think you’re emo and that your mom doesn’t understand you and you sit in the mini-van and like, text your friends about how, like, totally intolerant your mom is– could ever understand the anguish that depression is. It’s not trendy, it’s not cool, it’s not emo. It is pain beyond anything your small mind could ever imagine.

Secondly, it’s such a cheap way to elicit emotion. Art is about peeling away the fabric of something and finding the inner core, your own inner voice. It’s not about cutting yourself with cheap razors, taking a picture of it and trying to shock someone. That’s not art. It’s a cheap and easy way of attaining instant “depth” in your “work”. It’s also bulletproof as far as criticism go, because no one dares question the heart of your work. You get immediate and complete immunity from any scrutiny. Sure, people will still think your art is pretentious amateur crap, but everyone will be way too politically correct to dare say anything.

Third. Almost all of this generic depressed garbage is so bland that it makes me want to gouge out my eyes with a spoon. Seriously, do you really think that someone who’s actually REALLY depressed has any desire to express it through a photograph, or a poem, or some other tacky means of vaguely artistic merit. Sure, I agree that art is pain. It’s like giving birth to something. You can’t have a birth without some pain. But crap like this is just insulting to people who actually have pain inside them, people with genuine issues and not some spoiled brat who’s acting out so her mommy will understand why she needs a Mercedes for her sweet sixteen.

Yeah, I know that I’m one very tiny voice of intellect inside a huge shitstorm of insanity that is sweeping the globe and has been for the last decade and a half. Whatever. You wouldn’t comprehend what I’m saying even if it bit you on the nose. Go back to watching MTV and soaking your brain in retardation.

(For those of you who don’t know what COOP is, it’s a large chain of grocery-stores here in Sweden. It’s a “cooperatively owned corporation” and it’s the place where a large number of swedes - including myself - buy most of their groceries)

Dear COOP.

Once again I found myself strolling down your aisles. Today was no different than any other day - I was hungry and my stock was running low. So I bought what I needed and then headed home. During my bikeride home my frustration over a few things of your otherwise quite decent establishment grew inside my head, and now I need to ventilate.

I should point out that when I don’t bitch and moan about your existence I actually do find you quite acceptable. But as with pretty much everything today there’s always room for improvement.

1. Your freezers.

I know some basic physics. I’m not a scientist, but I know that cool (or cold) air is heavier than warm (or hot) air. I also understand that your freezers are based heavily on this principle. That’s why they’re open at the top for easy access, yet manage to maintain a cold atmosphere inside of them.

However, the limit between warm and cold air in the freezers is not an exact one. You should look into this.

I grow weary of buying frozen goods only to come home and discover that they’ve been thawed and refrozen a number of times. Why does this happen? Because you stack the goods so high in the freezers that they reach up into the warm air. Later the goods get shuffled around and refrozen. It is not unheard of that this happens a number of times and I don’t like it. Not only is it of dubious sanitary value to buy food that has been treated like this, it’s also incredibly annoying to buy a bag of assorted vegetables and finding that they’ve been refrozen into a solid lump. Or buy hamburger patties that have been fused into a large beef-blob.

So, let me suggest this: Put some goddamn lids on your goddamn freezers!

2. Your bags.

I generally buy (only in Sweden!) plastic bags but this applies to a minor extent to your paper-bags as well.

Please redesign them. They’ve looked the same for at least 30-40 years and I assure you that they were not perfectly designed from the start. The plastic bags used to transport groceries are in fact one of the most under-engineered items that I have to contend with in my life. Discard the damn things and do it right.

Here’s what’s wrong. Your bags are soft and generally act as if they are one of these shapes:

I know they’re not actually these shapes, but they might as well be. I’m getting tired of coming home and finding that bread has been squished, vegetables have been knocked around and other soft groceries look like someone has sat on them.

And finally, my third complaint, and I know this has the makings of a bigtime asshole-attitude from me but I don’t care.

3. Your employees.

I’m getting a bit tired of your snooty personnel. I think they’re confusing working at Coop with being the Maître d’ at a four-star restaurant. 9 out of 10 times when I seek some service I get some punk on a powertrip who yaps at me that he’s too busy to help me. Or, I get some high and dry piece of toast who treats me as if I came straight from the leper colony.

Now, I know you don’t exactly pay them a lot of money to work there. In fact, I would assume that employment at Coop is like some messed-up semi-voluntary slavery where you get shitty pay rather than regular beatings. But it would be nice if I occasionally got some decent service. I don’t expet to have my ass kissed as if I was a visiting dignitary from a richer and wealthier nation but it would be nice to actually be pointed in the right direction when I ask for something.

If you only have time to fix two annoyances, lay your energy on the bags and the freezers. I can accept crappy service since I usually manage without bothering your employees.

This is a minor gripe, but I’m getting tired of how most of the major swedish news-outlets today have forced reloads of their sites every now and then. DN, SvD, Idg… they all do it.

You’re sitting there, semi-happily browsing their page and then suddenly it reloads, you’ve lost your place in the page and you’re back at the top. Sure, I understand they think this is a neat way to always make sure the viewer is viewing the latest possible version of their page. Except it’s not, it’s just really annoying.

It’s the equivalent of reading the paper, and suddenly finding that someone has yanked it out of your hands, refolded it and placed it on the table in front of you. All within a split second.

I min tvättstuga finns det tre stora maskiner att bruka. Dessa maskiner har en väldigt praktiskt och samtidigt vansinnigt irriterande finess. Denna finess består av en timer som räknar ner tiden.

Detta hade varit vansinnigt praktiskt om det inte var för en liten sak: den räknar inte ner tiden tills maskinen är färdig med tvätten, utan räknar ner tiden till NÄSTA MOMENT I ORDNINGEN.

D.v.s. när du slår igång maskinen visar den glatt “25″ vilket betyder att det är 25 minuter kvar tills maskinen är färdig. Kanonbra, tänker du och går upp till din lägenhet igen och tänker att du går ner om 25 minuter och kastar in tvätten i torktumlaren. Givetvis lite misstänksamt, 25 minuter att tvätta känns väldigt snabbt.

Så när du går ner igen så inser du att 25 minuter var bara förtvätten. Räkneverket har börjat om och nu är det 25 minuter tills nästa del i processen. Efter det startar räkneverket om igen. Osv osv osv.

Slutsumma: trots denna egentligen praktiska lilla finess måste du lik förbannat gå ner och titta till tvättmaskinerna helt i onödan! Otroligt korkat! Varför gjorde de inte räkneverket så att det visar tiden TILLS ALLTING ÄR FÄRDIGT istället? Så hade man ju sluppit sitta barnvakt åt tvättmaskinerna.

*suck*

… but I don’t really know about what. A lot of things I need/want to write about are pretty local in tone, at least as far as the global community goes. Most of it is Sweden-related.

For example, I’m still completely aghast that the minister of justice here in this country apparently thinks bribery and corruption is an acceptable and completely tolerable policy. At least if the briber is wealthy enough to pay off real big.

The story behind this is the same one that has been causing reality to distort for quite a while now. The police officer Jim Keyser, who got a well-paid job at the global mediamaffia, caused some stir a few weeks (months?) back. Beatrice Ask, the swedish minister of Justice, basically said that she approved of it, and said it was nice that the “competence” among swedish police-officers is at a level that it allows them to use it for their own personal gain. This is the same minister who wants to allow the mediamaffia to completely undhindered pursue filesharers and also wants to introduce complete data-retention in order to spy on her own voters.

Completely crazy. The only real conclusion I can draw from her insane statements is that she’s as corrupted as everyone else involved in this ludicrous pursuit.

Another thing that is causing frustration in my head is religion. I’ve been meaning to write something about why I find religion so crazy and backwards. The trick though is to manage to do it with a somewhat maintained level of grammatical and vocabular style. As it stands, my thoughts on religion are usually peppered with some very rude curses. I really don’t give two hoots if I offend some bibletoting fundamentalist wackjob out there, but I don’t want to stoop to their level either.

And finally, I’m still working on my pro-FOSS posting. It’s been on ice for a while, but I might thaw it out tonight and have another go at writing about FOSS, why I like it, why I want to promote it, why I think more people need to leave proprietary software behind and the direct as well as long-time advantages it will have for every human on this planet!

Yes, I can be quite pompous. Whatever.

Has anyone seen a movie called “Interstate 60″ produced in 2002, featuring among other people Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd and James Marsden? If you haven’t, then I strongly recommend finding it and watching it. For some reason it never got a big marketing campaign behind it, but it’s a real gem of a film.

There might be some minor spoilers down below, in case

Either way, there’s this excellent supporting character that shows up at one point in the film, name of Bob Cody. Played brilliantly by Chris Cooper, this character will almost always stay in my mind. He’s excellent, being a man who “says what he does and does what he says”. Essentially he’s a free-roaming cynic, and one of his pastimes is listening to the radio and loudly debunking what’s said on the same.

Example:

Woman on radio: The choice is clear. The Arion 620, the American-made car for the American driver.
Bob Cody: That’s a lie. The Arion engines are made in Japan.
Man on radio: Kill Signal, the movie everyone’s talking about, from Weber Films.
Bob Cody: [laughs] That’s another lie. We’re not talking about it.
Another man on radio: We’re the U.S. post office, and we care.
Bob Cody: Oh! That’s the biggest whopper of all.

Often I hear a Bob Cody inside of me. This is especially true whenever I see a commercial, and it’s unusual that I can contain my sarcasm about commercials and their claims. My friends and family know this well.

And all this yapping brings me to the point of this entry. There’s a company in Sweden called Viasat. The history behind the company is somewhat convoluted, essentially consisting of several different companies in various genres of business merging together over a period of some fifteen years. These days Viasat is one of the largest suppliers of satellite-television, but also maintains holdings in several of the major swedish TV-channels, as well as being the producer of the TV1000-network, one of the major premium movie-networks in Sweden. Essentially TV1000 is a swedish counterpart to HBO, but without the original productions. They broadcast movies and have no commercials, instead you subscribe to the service.

Viasat-channels are also broadcast via cable, in my case through Comhem which is probably the largest cable-TV supplier in Sweden. Me and Ann-Sofie pay for TV1000 since it’s a good way to keep track of movies, as well as being a good source for bored movie-watching in the middle of the night.

Whatever.

Viasat launched a service called Viasat On Demand a few months ago. I really haven’t checked it out until a few hours ago when I went to their homepage. Essentially it’s a video-on-demand service, you can rent movies over the internet and watch them. Nothing new here, it’s all been done before. The reason for my curiosity was that since me and Ann-Sofie already subscribe to TV1000 I was wondering if we could get a free account at this webservice. It had been implied through the commercials, so I got to wondering.

Those thoughts came to an abrupt halt when I saw the technical requirements. Translated from Swedish they are:

* PC with Windows XP or better.
* Internet Explorer 6 or better.
* Flash Player 8 or better.
* Windows Media Player 10 or better.
* A minimum of 1mbit/s broadband connection. 2mbit/s recommended.
* An updated WMP with individualization for DRM-encryption.
* The clock on your computer may not deviate more than 15 minutes from the clock on our servers.
* You must allow cookies.

This means if you’re running anything except 100% Microsoft-products or Microsoft OS’s you’re shit out of luck. It’s absolutely pathetic in my opinion. Why not just put a slogan on the front page saying “Screw you if you’re not a braindead lemming”?

The irony is even more obvious considering that Viasat On Demands slogan translates to “Entertainment On Your Conditions”. When I read this I heard Bob Cody inside of me shouting:

“Liars! That’s not entertainment on my conditions!”

This is a very minor (and major at the same time) gripe, but I don’t understand why society still is so deeply unequal and unfair.

SvD (a major newspaper here in Sweden) reports that our former minister of justice Thomas Bodström has been threatened. Thomas Bodström is actually a lawyer currently working with a case where one of Swedens most famous opera-singers has been accused of raping someone. I really don’t give a shit about the details of that case, since it has quickly become a media-circus of almost OJ Simpson-esque proportions.

Thomas Bodström is probably one of my least favorite politicians in this country, and strong in the running for one of my least favorite politicians in the world of all time. There’s probably a lot of jackasses out there who thinks he’s the awesome, but in my opinion he’s essentially a sociopath moron who somehow got into power.

But, I digress.

No, my gripe is that no matter how vague a threat all stops are pulled out to protect him. Because he’s famous, he’s a celebrity, he’s a politician. The police is very mum about what kind of threat, but confirms that one such does exist. They’ve added heavy security to make sure he’s not harmed. We don’t know what kind of threat it is, it might be Al Qaida or it might be some drunk yahoo with a disposable cellphone thinking he’s performing the ultimate practical joke.

None the less, all stops are pulled out to protect him.

If I called the police and told them that I’d been threatened with bodily harm or even death they would simply tell me to call back WHEN this purported assailant showed up. They wouldn’t post cops outside my apartment door to make sure I didn’t get shot when I went outside to check my mail or take out the garbage. Because I’m a nobody. I’m not famous, I’m not a celebrity, I’m not rich. I’m expendable.

Shouldn’t a decent society provide equal protection for everyone regardless of social standing? I think so. But then again, there’s a lot of things wrong with our world today. Hundreds of thousands of people lack clean water in Africa, for example.

Or: What Really Irks Me With All The Shopping And Comparison Sites Out There

I got a fairly fat wad of cash for christmas. Part of it has been stowed away for future purposes, but I’m considering investing some of it in a new case for my computer. Yes, it’s weird spending money on a computer that I swore long ago not to spend any money on, but I’m getting really annoyed by the HX-08 that I have now, and I don’t have enough money to buy a new computer. This has been my main case for 7+ years, and it’s getting a bit long in the tooth now.

Despite my modifications it now fails at being the decent case it used to be. I don’t mind that it’s big, very heavy (16 kg EMPTY!) or almost painfully beige. That doesn’t concern me. What does concern me is that despite my modifications to the cooling system it’s now running quite hot due to bad layout and too many harddrives. It was fairly cool when I only had one drive in it, but two drives makes it a bit toastier in there, and this means that I need to run the fans a little too fast for my sensitive hearing. This is not helped by the fact that the office here at home is noticeably warmer than the rest of the apartment, due to all the electronics in here. So, the cooling of my computer is becoming painfully noisy. The HX-08 was kickass a few years ago, and it’s held up quite nicely over the years.

But the faults are starting to show now. It’s just not very efficiently designed, and my needs are different these days. I don’t need five full-size 5 1/4″ drive bays. I need two at most! And the interior layout of the HX-08 isn’t really doing the trick any more. Even when this thing was new I wondered who in the hell decided that most harddrives should reside above the PSU, and thus needing extremely long cables since this is a full-size case, meaning it’s quite huge. The drive-cooling also leaves a lot to be desired, and all these years I’ve been too lazy to make the needed modifications myself.

The end result none the less is that my computer case essentially has become a Hummer. It looks huge, looks like it has a ton of space inside and even though it does have a lot of space, most of it is wasted and you can’t seat a lot of people in it despite it weighing four tons and taking up two lanes.

And this leads me to the search that I’ve been doing for years now. The search for the ultimate case. These days, I don’t care about it being the ultimate case any more, just being quiet and more adequate for my needs than my huge honking HX-08. That’s more than enough. A few years ago I had a huge jonesing for an Antec P-180 and such. These days I don’t care about that. I want something that doesn’t cost my first-born child yet isn’t a complete hazard either.

In fact, the Antec NSK-6580 seems perfect. It’s not complete crap, yet it doesn’t cost a fortune. Plus, you get a seemingly decent PSU with it. I like the sound of that, since I know from experience that Antec PSU’s are fairly reliable and decently quiet. Even though my current Enermax (of 2002 vintage) is fairly quiet it’s getting noisier due to the fans wearing out.

So, the NSK-6580 is most likely to be the candidate for investment.

This in turn leads me to the irritation that I experience. I’m very fond of the web and the Internet. I use it several hours every day, in fact it’s very uncommon for me to not do something net-related most of the days. I’ve been “online” (whatever the heck that means) since around 1995. This all means I’m fairly net-savvy and know my way around a search engine.

I’ve been wasting the better part of an hour now trying to find a decent review of the NSK-6580 to get some kind of confirmation that this actually is a decent buy. The Antec-page is of course not very informative, according to them it’s the best thing to happen humanity since sliced bread, and not only is it a computer-case, it’s a cure for everything that’s wrong with the world as we know it. Hallelujah. Yeah, not exactly objective opinions from the makers of the case.

Fire up google, search for “Antec NSK-6580 review” and what do we find? Page after page hawking the services of shopping-comparison sites and retailers that carry it. Not one single review from any serious tech-page anywhere. In fact, I’ve gone through the first five pages and nothing except shopping-bots and assorted similar crap. I’ve given up on finding a review-site that has tested the damn thing. I’m tired of trying to tweak my search with different phrases and still finding the same useless crap.

I remember not too long ago, maybe two years, when that same search-phrase would have given me what I looked for in the first two or three results. I’m sure they’re in there somewhere, but they’re lost beyond Page Number Whatever and I’ll never find them. Why? Because the commercial shopping-sites spend A LOT of money on SEO and making sure they end up in the top results. They spend huge amounts of money hiring really smart people and companies to use the whole spectrum of techniques to make sure they’re at the top.

Which means me as a consumer is square out of luck. I don’t want to wade through page after page of shopping-sites who want me to go to them and use their service all the while clicking their ads and what-not. This means that the genuine tech-sites who have done good reviews of consumer-goods are buried beneath a thick layer of commercialized crud.

And people wonder why the web and the ‘net has become a cold and hostile place.

I’ll tell you why. Because of the sites who only care about making money, and has no concern about burying other sites in the waste created by that process.

Alright, the topic isn’t exactly 100% true and I agree that it’s a bit to swooping. But I do think that sometimes humans are so amazingly dumb that it boggles my mind. Also, by “humans” I don’t mean the individual being but us as a collective whole.

Why?

I was spending time in the shower trying to fix our stupid shower-arrangement-thingamabobber. It’s this fancy piece of crap that was installed by the people who owned this dwelling before us, and I’m certain that they chose this thing on looks alone and in order to spice it up visually for whatever buyer was interested. It looks really impressive and adds some flair to the experience of taking a shower, but since it’s a under-engineered piece of crap it tends to break every now and then. Fixing it is relatively easy, essentially you take it off it’s brackets and re-attach the whose that came lose. No big deal.

Now, do me a favor and hold out your arms in front of you. Straight out. Now please count them for me. How many arms did you count?

Unless you’re outside of the statistical spectrum known as “normal” the answer to my question should be two. There are a few rare occasions when humans are equipped with more than two arms, but this is always due to something going wrong somewhere. If a human is equipped with more than two arms, the superfluous arms are never useful; they’re just annoying bits of meat and bone stuck somewhere they shouldn’t be. On the other side of the spectrum are humans who were born with two arms but lost one or both of them. They might have played a little too loose or fast with the chainsaw, or realized too late that juggling live handgrenades maybe wasn’t the best idea.

Thus, humans are never equipped with more than two functioning arms. That’s the absolut maximum of useful hand-equipped appendages that we are capable of commanding.

So why do humans insist on designing things that require more than two arms to install or operate?

Trying to put the thing in the shower back onto the brackets would’ve required that I grow an additional two or three arms. I got three of the screws in place, but the fourth one was at the weirdest angle and would’ve required at least four functioning arms to screw back in. Whoever the hell designed that thing in the first place would’ve received a fat lip if from me if I ever met them.

In fact, judging by my language and complete loss of calm they should count themselves lucky if all that happened to them was being skinned alive and then getting boiled in lava. The fat lip would just be a bonus.

So, I guess it was their good fortune they did not have to be present while I tried putting the damn thing back on it’s brackets. I gave up on getting the last screw in place and will wait until Ann-Sofie returns home from her trip, then have her help me hold the damn thing in place while I put the final screw in place.

… annoy the living crap out of me right now. I’m at a loss to muster the energy to write in-depth about them though.

The first one is how Swedish media is reporting about how thousands of swedish homepages were hacked by malevolent turkish hackers. I’ve read a few articles in the daily rags about it, and each and every one of them does the same thing: make it sound as if it was a coordinated attack on Swedish interests.

Which it wasn’t. Apparently it was a competition between two rival blackhat-crews to see who could crack the most sites. They didn’t care if it was a Swedish, English, Russian or a goddamn Martian homepage. They just wanted to add up the numbers.

—

Another thing that makes me want to grab something deadly and go postal is this nonsense about Jammie Thomas and her conviction. Sonys lawyers made the claim that copying a record YOU have bought to YOUR own harddrive is piracy! Absolute and complete madness. Any sane person would say otherwise, but apparently most judges and courts work in some kind of crazy parallell universe. This is just another step in the direction that the mediamaffia wants us to believe and accept - that we don’t own purchased goods, we just purchase a license to use it. It’s even worse in the proprietary software-world, there it’s a reality and have been for a decade at least. Buy Windows and you don’t buy Windows - you buy a proprietary license where Microsoft decides the rules.

That’s the future if people keep buying the mediamaffias “products”. The recording industry hasn’t realized that the Internet and open communication have made them completely obsolete. They are selling a product which is no longer needed. The interesting thing that my good friend Andreas originally suggested several years ago –and a theory which I whole-heartedly believe– is that it’s not about lost profit. No, in fact it’s all about lost CONTROL. The mediamaffia is afraid of losing control over what music people listen to, and thus losing control of the entire industry. They want to keep deciding which artists get popular, and keep shoving crap like the latest Britney-record down the throats of people. They’re scared that people will realize that there are other alternatives.

No, the recording companies have gone the way of the dodo. They just refuse to realize it yet. Band don’t really need them anymore either. Look at what Radiohead is doing. I think it’s absolutely awesome. Radiohead never cared much about the business-and-numbers side of pop music, and they have a dedicated following. They severed their ties with the obsolete industry and are doing it for themselves, selling their album straight to the fans and letting the fans decide what the price is.

In the olden days bands wanted a recording contract for two major reasons: to get recorded, and to get distributed. It wasn’t until bands also realized that by selling records they could get rich that money also became a part of the equation. But ask any genuine musician what they want, and they will answer that they just want people to listen to their music. If you can make a living off of it then that’s great. The way I see it it’s the phonies and posers that get into music to make a buck.

Today you can rent a studio for relative cheap. Hell, there’s tons of community-run studios where you can record a demo cheap or even for free if you’re buddies with the engineer. Record a 2- or 4-song demo. Then get a cool domainname on some hosting, slap a somewhat coherent website there with the demo for download. After that start marketing it through Myspace or what other services you like. No record company involved anywhere.

After that it’s evolution. If your band sucks no one will listen. If you’re fresh and funky, listeners will drop in.

—

Third thing that bugs me are jerks who abuse generous principles. I’m thinking of the moron who my father blogged about the other day. The right to public access is an almost holy principle in Sweden. It’s extremely generous and allows people to enjoy the beautiful nature of Sweden provided you follow some (in my opinion) basic rules of respect. These include picking up after yourself, not disturbing animals and not acting like a complete tool when interacting with the environment.

Yet there’s always dingbats who feel that they don’t have to follow these very basic rules. They leave their crap behind and don’t give two shits about what happens with it. They act as if they can only use the generous aspects of the rules without the equal responsibility.

Therefore it’s heartwarming to see that there actually exists decent people who do the right thing. To whoever picked up after that jackass - I salute you.

EDIT: Ironically enough it would seem that I really DID have the energy to write about them. Hmm, I guess once the floodgates are opened there’s no going back.