Skip navigation.

sub Blog

return @entries;

October 2009

( Monthly archive )

Ruter# BSOD close up

Hi thar Windows 2000!

Ruter# BSOD



Books

My top 5 TV series aired the past 5 years

,

Writing lists is fun! This list I am doing with a twist: I'll arrange them in reverse order, putting the most “exciting” at the bottom.

5. Poirot
Crime is one of the best things I can watch at the TV, and Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot is a great classic. We've watch almost everything, but still have a couple of seasons left. Of course, when watching Hercule Poirot, you just have to adore David Suchet's interpretation of the character. To me, it is the only true Hercule Poirot, and he's still going on about it. In the beginning, when it started airing in 1989 and about five years forth, the episodes were about 40 minutes in length, which is okay, but when they started doing only double episodes, it got a more and better depth of the story, and you got a better impression of the characters in each show. The most recent episodes, from 2008, were awesome, and two new episodes are scheduled for airing in December this year. I'm excited as the latest Poirot episodes has proven to be even better than the first ones. Poirot is pure win, and since it's technically still running, it qualifies for this list.

“Superintendent? I have some very good news for you. No no no no no, no, no. It is that someone has attempted to kill me.”

4. Numb3rs
We all use math everyday. That's what Numb3rs' initial tagline said. We are following the brothers Don and Charlie, where the first is the leader of FBI's department in Los Angeles and the latter is a mathematician professor. Although it seems like the most geeky series ever, but in fact it's really entertaining. It's like I want to throw everything away and do mathematics, because mathematics is cool. That's how it's put in this show. The characters are easy to get to know and you get amazed by some of the plots they solve. At some point they said that most of the episodes were inspired from real life occurred events, but I cannot find the source anymore. Be it inspired from real life or not, it's addictive and you feel inspired to look more into the mathematics.

“Math is the real world, okay? It’s everywhere.”

3. Criminal Minds
I'm fascinated by criminal investigation, and Criminal Minds does not disappoint in its psychical evaluation, narrowing down the suspect list. It's entertaining and thrilling, and you feel you are part of the investigations, even though you are just mindlessly watching the show. There's not really much to say about it, except that it's awesome. The characters are easy to get acquainted with, yet they are a bit more versatile than you'd imagine. Dr. Reid is greatly nerdy, but who wouldn't be with that pace of reading?

Garcia: “Okay, you know how on Star Trek when Captain Kirk asked McCoy to do something totally impossible and McCoy says, "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker!"?”
Morgan: “Hey, what are you telling me? Not to expect a miracle?”
Garcia: “No, I'm saying I'm not a doctor.”

2. Battlestar Galactica
I love sci-fi. Battlestar Galactica is an awesome series that takes you right into the action through a pilot, originally aired as a mini-series, that blows your mind away with dozens of questions and no idea of where the journey will go or what direction the series will take. Even better, you don't know who will live and who will die. I love “waiting games”, where there's lots of unknown factors and many theories that will puzzle your mind. Who are they? What do they want? How will they proceed? It's hard to just watch one episode, as you would very much want to toss the next episode right after.

“[...] And Earth will become our new home. So say we all!”

1. Castle
Have I mentioned that I love criminal investigation series? Richard Castle is a mystery novelist that is called in to assist the New York police department when several homicides from his books are being replicated in New York. Castle's character and behaviour is awesomely geeky, cocky and has perfect punchlines. There is not really much to say about this series; Castle rocks hard. It's one of the best series that I have seen the past years, if not all time.

“It can't be random. How do they know what's in the safes? Safes...is that a word? Is it "saves?" That can't be right.”

The fall of my iPhone, or how the warranty is lost when using the iPhone when it rains.

,

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up my iPhone from the table, and the power button didn't want to follow. After contacting both the place where I bought it and the company that does repairs for it. I got notified that Apple has a no-repair policy and that the phone would be replaced if they deemed it worthy, but after listening to my story they thought it would be reimbursed. I delivered my phone to where I bought it and they delivered it to the repairing company.

However, after they finally did the check-up of the phone, they said that it was not worthy of a reimburse as it has “some signs of beginning water damage in the audio outlet and charge outlet”. I have never been in contact with water with the phone except for when it was the great rainfall in Oslo earlier this summer. I got annoyed and called them asking if this meant that any iPhone being close to a rainy day would loose its warranty, and they simply replied: “Yes, that's correct”.

I then tried to call where I have the insurance for the phone, and they simply shrugged it off saying that they can't reimburse the phone either as “there were no sudden, unexpected and outer forces causing the power button to fall off”. Basically, if Elea had tossed the phone down the stairs, I'd get it reimbursed, but not when it's caused by something unexplainable.

So now I am downgraded to a lesser Nokia phone, which worked fine until today, when its “decline conversation” button stopped working, so I'm having yet another Nokia phone now. Oh, the joy of random reserve phones. At least Opera Mini 5 works on the new one, as the old phone had a serious problem with allowing Java applications to access the Internet.

I got an offer of getting a new iPhone for NOK 2.600,- - but if I pay the same amount and bind myself to a subscription, I'd get an iPhone 3GS, which is like twice as fast (if not more!) as the original iPhone 3G. I'm going for the latter option, but the problem is that the iPhone 3GS are sold out all over the country, it seems. So I'll just have to wait and be patient.

New e-mail address directive at Oslo University College fails in life.

,

Someone at the Oslo University College, OUC by short, have now come up with the idea that the e-mail addresses should be more unified and anonymous. Here's a snippet from their Wiki page:

As of October 15th 2009, all students at OUC will receive a new emailaddress. The new address format is:
login@stud.hio.no

For an imaginary student John Doe with student number 123456 at our department EST, the new address will then become:
s123456@stud.hio.no

In our standard applications, like Webmail and Thunderbird, the address will be shown as:
John Doe [EST] - <s123456@stud.hio.no>


The previous format was: firstname.lastname@stud.department.hio.no, which should seldom crash. Why can't they just learn from their “big brother” the University of Oslo? The University of Oslo has the e-mail address as with the username in the format first name + 1 or more letters of the middle and last name. If your name was Johnny Frederick Doe, you'd probably have a username like “johnnyfd”. If then user Johnny Fullhouse Doncaster joined, he'd get something like “johnnyfdon” or “johnnydon”.

But the Oslo University College just disregards this and gives the users an anonymous “s123456” username to log onto their network. It's fine, I guess, but the problem is when you are going to send a mail to your friend or fellow student at the college. If his name was as before Johnny Frederick Doe, you could guess that he would be accessible at johnnyf.doe@stud.department.hio.no, but now you have to find out what student number he has in order to be able to send him an e-mail at all. It's working against the bare concepts of e-mails. E-mails aren't meant to be cryptic and hard-to-use. You should be able to just bring up the client and then dispatch the e-mail at will.

Another thing is what people will say when you are sending an e-mail to someone in the real world. What would the random guy in the random business think when he's getting an e-mail from “John Doe [IU]” with the e-mail address “s123456@stud.hio.no”? I don't really know about him, but I would at least think that it's spam. Who else would have an e-mail address with not one or two but six digits in a row? I'll laugh out loudly when people are complaining in lectures that they aren't receiving any answers to their e-mails.

Following this, I'll dispatch an e-mail to all my lecturers saying that I cannot use the e-mail system at school anymore due to my sincere lack of faith in it. I'll monitor it, but I'll never ever send an e-mail with it again in fear of it being discarded as spam, especially if it's containing something important such as an assignment or a project delivery.

5 books I want to read

,

I've wanted to start reading books again for a long time. We recently purchased “The digital fortress” by Dan Brown, which will probably be the first book I'll read, but other than that, here are five books I want to read:

1. Jurassic Park
Since I was a child, I've been fascinated by dinosaurs. And when “Jurassic Park” came out in 1993, I was thrilled to say the least, even though I was only 7 years old. I could tell the names of every character we saw during the movie, although “Dilophosaurus” was a bit hard to pronounce. The movie was awesome, and it has a great soundtrack. It's on Spotify, so I've listened to it quite a lot there. The book is, from what I've understood, quite different from the movie adaptation, thus I would want to read it to experience what it was like.






2. Dune
I love science fiction. “Dune” is a sci-fi novel from 1965 written by Frank Herbert. It is cited to be the world's best-selling science fiction novel, and it is at least the first science fiction novel that actually became a best seller. I would very much like to get acquainted with the book and the Dune universe.









3. The Lost Symbol
Dan Brown has been an issue for debate. His lawyers are onto VG, after VG, one of the largest newspapers in Norway, published a review of the book before a given date. His “DaVinci code” was sued for being too similar to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. I have only read “Angels & Demons”, and the amount of awesomeness the book has is astounding. The Lost Symbol is the latest of Dan Brown's novels, and I have been excited about this since it was first announced.









4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I watched the movie, and I didn't understand a thing. What was the greater meaning? What's the purpose of this story? How's the sequels? What's the answer to life, the universe and everything? If you answered 42, you have either watched the movie, Googled it or read the books. Ooor... just heard it from someone. From what I perceived in the movie, the story is non-linear, crazy and probably better in written form than the movie adaptation. Nonetheless, I want to read the books.







5. “The Wheel of Time” series
Andreas told me to read this series years ago. I purchased it in an English paperback version in a Swedish book store along with The Lord of the Rings. I started reading it, but I didn't get far due to various reasons and the book was simply forgotten. The series came to a halt when Robert Jordan died in 2007 due to cardiac amyloidosis. A fellow fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson, is now finishing up the last book of the series, which will be in three volumes, making it a total of 14 books.







What do you think of the choices of books? Are there any other books that I really should read? Please come with comments and suggestions!
Download Opera, the fastest and most secure browser
October 2009
M T W T F S S
September 2009November 2009
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31