"Oink", quoth the pig.

Cancerboy revisited

Some years ago, in 1999, I was diagnosed with a mild form of skin cancer. It was treated with a then-newfangled method called PDT, with gaffa’d boxen and much interest (I wrote about it then). Since some time, oh maybe a few years, I’ve suspected that the cancer came back, and today I got that affirmed, causing immediate treatment. This is why I sit here at 4.30 PM drinking wine. Because the feeling of PDT is akin to being burned by a fat ass cigar, at least in my case. Like I wrote last time, small tiny fireworms move around under the skin, and although the pain isn’t flashing, it’s fucking unyielding. Hence the vino. Anyway, I’ll finalize this treatment next week, with another batch of laser & ointment. Yay! I still bless Sweden for being fairly cheap when it comes to medical care, though.

I have forgotten to write about The Conet Project, a highly scary 4 CD album, downloadable for free from hyperreal, those stalwarts. The Conet Project is a collection of recordings of so-called “numbers stations”, shortwave radio transmissions of - mostly synthetic - voices reading strings of numbers and letters accompanied by eerie squirks and distant music. Allegedly, those stations are spy transmissions. Noone has given any other feasible explanation.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round. One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official “end of the cold war”, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

At any rate, this is truly scary listening. Try it alone, in the dark. Things will feel cold and hostile and not like they seem to be…

What is it to be human?

It sounds like a very pretentious kind of title for a blog entry, but I just cried my ass of after having watched the docudrama Touching the Void on DVD. Partly, of course, because it’s an incredibly human story with so many levels of humanity, and partly because it’s about heroism in a way different from what is often showed in movies. It’s about pain, sacrifice, friendship, shame, love, life and what have you not.

But what also made me cry about it was the realization that we humans are stunningly complex and beautiful beings, and still we so rarely ARE these things. I’m thinking about every sad fucking thing humans do, like the Abu Ghra�b degradation scenes. The contrast of these things against this little story about 2 people in the Andes, struggling to survive, is staggering. I know it might be a childish thought, but to me it was an extremely emotional point.

Multilateral thinking

My friend Naffa told me a story yesterday, which I thought was brilliant: some years ago, Zanzibar had a huge problem with tsetse flies which affected the cattle. Now, this could have been “solved” like any typical development project, ie resulting in a massive loss of funds, lining the pockets of sundry officials. But in this case the solution was much different: First, economic control was removed from Tanzania, minimizing the risk for corruption. Secondly, total control of the project was demanded by the commission that solved the problem, namely IAEA.

What they did was this: instead of trying to kill all tsetse flies with pesticides and such, they directed their efforts directly toward the male flies. Since the males of the species has the distinct feature of only being able to mate once in their lifecycle, the scientists decided to lure the flies into shooting their wad in a sterilized female. So what they did was to build a “tsetse factory” in Tanzania, that produced 70 000 radioactively sterilized female tsetses, which were then let loose. True, there was a period when there were A LOT of tsetses flying around Tanzania, but very vey quickly, there were no more males with loads to spend, and thusly, all tsetses on Zanzibar died. To this day (the project took place in 1997), there are no tsetses on the island.

True, one might argue that using “mutated” flies is to meddle with the forces of nature, but it did get rid of the problem, and in a much more efficient and economic way than any normal pesticides would do. What would be a better method? Infesting the island with fly-eating lizards?

I think I wish I had a camera

My friend Naffa, who lives on Zanzibar those days, is visiting me. Actually, he’s been living there for almost a decade now, running a small-ish cabinet making business, and a sawmill. I don’t know if the mill is up and running yet, though. Any which way, he’s in Sweden again for a combined vacation and machine-buying trip. Apparently, those old machines he bought when first moving there are a bit on the run-down side. Hence, he’s going to carpentry machinery auctions.

I’ve often been thinking of going to Zanzibar to visit him, but first, I was short of time, and now money. That’s the way things always seem to be. Having read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s brilliant The Shadow of the Sun, made me even more interested in going to Zanzibar. Or somewhere in Africa in general. As a westerner, I believe it’s the only part of the world that is still shrouded in a vast mysterious veil. Perhaps I’m just romanticising & exoticising, but think about it: how often does one read about the non-arab (I use the term loosely as all hell) Africa in the dailies? Heck, the Rwanda genocide had been going on for months before it gained any headlines in the West, and even then those headlines faded fast. In a Europe that lost part of its mystery with the decline of the East Bloc, I believe we are in dire need of places that feel like they belong in a story. Adventure. Mystery. Suspense. Danger. Perhaps it is only to be found in fantasy, but I’d like to experience that feeling some day again, much like I did when me and Naffa did our big Europe trip ‘87 - ‘88. But maybe I’m just too afraid, and too lazy. Fuck it.

Solid weather!

The weather is too nice. It is a bit on the chilly side, but the sun is shining like nobody’s business.

I added a new link to the left: my little icecasted radio station. Check it out, if you feel like it. It is what they call an “eclectic” selection, but I dunno. It is very mixed, to say the least. If you want to hear stuff that is different from empty V and commercial radio, I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. No talk, no commercials, just a nifty 128 kbps feed that KICKS ASS. Mail me at radio[.AT.]sunnerdahl.org if you wonder anything about a track you heard. Recommended players are iTunes [mac & win], Whamb [mac], xmms [linux, X11] and winamp. But that should go without saying. But really, you should check out whamb!

Talking about checking out, about a month ago I reacquainted myself with the fire multiprotocol pager (multiprotocol meaning “supporting several chat protocols, like AIM, ICQ and MSN). It’s still a fairly ugly app, compared to Proteus. The difference, apart from Proteus being super-slick, GUI-wise, is that a) Proteus is shareware, whereas fire is open source, and b) that fire supports GPG encrypted/signed messaging over any chat protocol! That, my friends, puts it apart from any other chat client I have ever seen. In fact, I don’t know of a GPG encrypted pager for Linux, even. Just like the brilliant GPGMail mail bundle for mail.app, Fire is a must-have if you ever feel like communicating truly in private! I’d hope for total GPG integration in OS X out of the box, but that may be a utopian sentiment.

At any rate, I’ve decided to totally dump PGP. Since it went commercial, it’s been going downhill, and downhill pretty fast too. If one checks the console log, one notices that PGP causes tons of warnings. It’s fairly expensive, too, and they have an ass-backward licencing system that prevents site licensing for, say, universities. So these days I rely on OS X “secure empty trash”, encrypted DMGs (128 bits, but still), File Vault, GPGMail, Fire, and GPG as a whole of course. Sorry, PGP, it was fun while it lasted (I used PGP since the mid 90s, I think, command line stylee on Sun OS. Possibly because it made me feel like a hotshot), but now I close the book on you.

FFII does good work

FFII is one of those organizations I’m grateful towards. Their mission-statement is:

to make basic informational resources freely usable
to protect the creator against the plagiator and the public against monopolies
to give political weight to programmers, information-creating enterpreneurs and informationally literate citizens

and that is something I can but say “amen!” to. This world, now, it’s so desperate to bend over for corporations and state it makes me feel ravaged all over. What the fuck happened to the idea of the state protecting and looking after the interests of citizens, not nameless entities? Fucking Cthulu, all of them. They say we get the leaders we deserve, and boyee if that’s true, we’ve surely been very very very bad children indeed…

This is just a test

This is a testposting, using “SmartyPants” and “Markdown”. I actually don’t know exactly what it will do, so this is going to be fun.

OK, then. It changes quotes to curly quotes and such fineries. I suppose it looks nicer, but there’s a whole helluva lot I should do with this page first. But if you’re interested in those two Movable Type/BBEdit plugs, go to daringfireball.net/projects. Daring Fireball rocks.

Hungry Belly

So: this was the week when I bowed down to buying digital music. And since Apple’s iTunes Music store scheme has serious disadvantages (being: i. only available to Norte Americanos. ii. using aac at too poor a quality and iii. using DRM), I bought it from elsewhere, namely Audio Lunchbox. Truth be told, I actually stumbled over it, and truth be told, I only bought a record from them because I feel the urge to pay the piper once in a while. Not that seldom, actually, but my economy being what it is, I can’t afford to pay as often as I’d like to.

Audio Lunchbox - A Capsule Review: pros: i. very good selection of independent labels & artists ii. tracks available as both mp3 and ogg of decent quality iii. documented good artist pay (65% of the prize)

cons: i. slow download speed (at 30 K/sec, this was unexpectedly slow)

So, this being sunday morning, I can not think of much other to write. Except writing “welcome back” to Jenny with her new goodlooking Little Priest weblog. Sweet potatoes, indeed.

Other than that: nicotine, the upcoming !!! album, ubuweb, Molly Roth, Judson Fountain, Sultans, Black Dice, the Hellboy movie, Xiu Xiu, the Lightning Bolt encore video, Mission of Burma’s comeback, Mokira, A Frames, Blankets, Real Stuff, Cocorosie, Modest Mouse, Orkstorm, Astroglides & Thomas fr�n Sverige.

Another Week Quickly Passed

So. Once again it’s friday. Last weekend, my friend Jenina visited from Stockholm. We hung out and DJd together at a big party. Unfortunately, the turnout wasn’t as big as I/we had hoped. 150 or so, but the real partvibe never appeared. Pity. Also, i had hoped that the audience would be more into rock, but the requests was embarrassingly mainstream: Beyonce. Britney. Christina Aguilera. Et fucking cetera. And the party was hosted by an independent movie theatre! Damn, people! Anyway, we rocked some with Scissor Sisters, LCD Soundsystem, Ladytron and such stuff. It was a fun set in the end, 6 hours straight. Jenina, by the way, is the promoter of Ladyfest here in Sweden, which will take place in both Stockholm and Malm�. I wish I had that much gusto, to even come up with a huge idea like that and then do it.

On sunday, the day that SPRING CAME TO TOWN, we walked around and just hung out. Watched American Splendor again (3rd time). Watched Six Feet Under. And this week has basically been ill-spent playing Neverwinter Nights, crack in the guise of a game. I helped save a friend’s ProTools system, yeah (another friend had accidentally attached his powerbook via firewire to a broken USB port, and then the powerbook lost power, and apparently gunked the entire power-on card for some reason), but the main occupation besides work has been Neverwinter Nights. I almost hope my computer will get old soon, because if I keep gaming this much, my dreams will be shot forever. Still, since I have little money, it’s nice to be able to sit at home and have fun for free, even though the fun borders on obsession. I even consider playing it mornings before I go to work. Really! And I’m 36. AND OH, the new Part Chimp single “Bring Back The Sound” ROCKS OUT!

Tell'em like it is!

Well, I was just checking NetNewsWire (which is a WAY nifty RSS reader. And to think I hadn't bothered to learn about RSS until I started this "diary"!) and there was a new post at one of my favourite tech-y blogs, namely Daring Fireball, where he linked to an article targetting one of my pet peeves, the feltching crap-software-of-the-ages RealPlayer. It's really lazy to relink like this, I guess, but I want to maximize the number of people who learns to hate the assware that is RealPlayer. Man, I hate you, Real!
Go read Tomas Jogin's take on the shiznitz!

Waiting for the Man

I'm sitting here, drinking coffee, while waiting for my pal Urban. He has all but relocated to Stockholm, but is down here in the doity South of Sweden to do god knows what. Anyway. While waiting, I thought that I oughtta write a little something. Inspiration doesn't jump at me like a scoundrel in a dirty alley any more...

[Urban appeared, this is the next day]

I'm sitting here listening to London Is The Place For Me - Trinidadian Calypso In London, 1950 - 1956 and the Slayer box, Soundtrack to the Apocalypse, while lappingsipping coffee, a non-guilty pleasure. I think I prefer the former, which must be a solid sign of me getting old, yeah. Ha ha ha: In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida covered by Slayer is fun, in a cartoonish way. Another sign of maturity is that I'll probably stay at home tonight instead of going out. But then again, I use the pretense that I'm strapped for cash, which is altogether true. But sitting at home? That's kind of nice, but not very exciting, if you don't count dismantling a huge shelf exciting. At least I will start removing my records and books from it, a hefty load to carry. Vinyl certainly weighs a ton, like the man said (Peanut Butter Wolf, I think, or DJ Shadow).
On a totally unrelated note: some stuff is certainly easy to find via Internet, like rare bootlegs and untranslated hentai, but something that has been seriously clamped down upon has been typefaces. In ye marrye 90s, EVERYONE swapped diskettes with fonts on them, but since the turn of the century, that has certainly waned. Both free and commercial typefaces seem to get around a lot less, and part of that is probably the decline of ad agencies, which I assume was the main buyer of fonts. My friend Martin Fredrikson Core made several really nice fonts, but I don't think he ever made any 100� bills from them. Pity, really. Collecting fonts was like collecting stamps: one never used them, but only looked at them. And bought them for clients, of course.
Ouch! The coffee is making me sweat. Or maybe it's just Slayer. I think I'll go for a walk.

Stretching the Wallet Beyond Recognition

These are expensive times, expensive times with little money to spend. And they wonder why the fuck record sales go down? That is but the tip of the proverbial iceberg, sire. I mean, I'm not poor, exactly, but there's a high cost of living I haven't experienced before. I guess I'm to blame for living in the city. I guess I'm to blame for only working 75%. I guess I'm to blame for not asking for astronomical wages. Any which way, there is very little money left each month and there's very little I can do about it.
Of course, there is some "luxury" involved, such as food, the odd night out, the movies, computer & network fees, a record now and then, a magazine once in a blue moon, some cheap concerts, things like that, but BEJABBERS! is that not every person's right? I think it is. One mustn't grumble, they say, but why not? I shall grumble as much as I feel like (which is not so much, as a matter of fact). I "accidentally" spent 60-something � on books - comic books to make it worse - the other day, and I realize I should perhaps have spent them on the dentist instead, but easy come, easy go and such flummery.
And I still haven't read them all: need to suck that caramel slowly now. As an aside, I must say something that I've said before: Tony Millionaire is a genius of a man! 3 of the books I bought was Mr. Millionaire's Sock Monkey collections, which are, I daresay, almost as great as his Maakies collection.
But back to the money: is this the way it's supposed to be as I grow older? Not enough money to travel anywhere, not enough money to buy good furniture, not enough money to get a loan and one day buy an apartment or other habitat.
What, I say, is the world coming to? Perhaps it's just me growing old. Old and cranky. I better eat some supper before I start rambling, Grampa Simpson-stylee.

What the fuck was I supposed to write?

Well, the week has been an ordinarily mundane week, much like my weeks have been for the past few years. Except that I played a fair amount of HALO. Halo was once upon a time due to be released for the mac, when Bungie was bought by Microsoft Games. That caused a fair amount of anti-Bungie bias among the mac community. Not so with me. Sure, I like many people in this world dislike Microsoft just as much as (or more) people dislikes/-d CocaCola. Or IBM for that matter. Any which way, Bungie produced a good batch of Mac only games back in the early 90s, like "Pathways into Darkness" and the brilliant "Marathon" series. Marathon was an early FPS, but with an intriguing story. Now, I tried playing Marathon some months ago, and was appaled by the way it looked, even the last in the series, Marathon Infinity. Still, those Marathon moments was some of the more exiting gaming I've ever encountered.

And those moments still reverbate throughout Halo, which in part is some sort of continuation of the mythos suggested at in the Marathon games, a future akin to the one presented in the Alien movies, but not a copy thereof. Corporations, conglomerates, space marines, vastness, cyborgs, space leeches. Any which way, I'm sure most from my parental generation feels that a guy of 36 should not sit at home playing computer games well into the next day. On a working day, to boot. But that I do, at times. Especially now when I have a saucy G5 to play them on. My little brother, Stefan also played Halo a while ago, and it feels kind of strange how having a gaming experience in common can be as exciting as it is. I kept calling him, reflecting upon certain plot turns and conundrums. It was like I was 14 again, gaming on my brother's C=64. Uncanny shit!

Apart from the, I've watched the latest Van Damme movie (In Hell), had a long walk which left my feet warm for 2 days, listened to a lot of music, downloaded Glass/Reggio's "-Qatsi" trilogy, futzed with a new Linux server (my first), re-read the last 15 issues of "Hate", bought the fabled jazz book Hear Me Talkin' To Ya, by Nat Shapiro & Nat Hentoff. It was later used as a template for the brilliant punk biography Please Kill Me by "Legs" McNeill and Gillian McCain, insomuch that both books are biographies composed solely by quotes from musicians and scenesters. If the former is anything like the latter, it will surely be the reading experience of the month.

So, well, it's friday. I haven't linked this page into the site structure yet. I will go to a movie (Lost in Translation or Big Fish) and a party tomorrow. And on saturday I will be an �ber-geek once again, by partaking in some role playing, and not of the "adult" kind, either. Woe is me: middleaged kid. Hell with that, as long as it's fun. Me be homo ludens, shit like that. Too cool for school.

The first post in the new place

Well, duh. It looks normal as the whole hell, like the standard movable type you all know and love. So be it. I will hook it up to some nicer kind of look in the near future, if I decide to keep this fucker going this time around.
I have been around for ever and ever & ever in this biz, before it was called blogs, or even weblogs. By the way, that reminds me of a wee story: when I was barely 20, I was on a long car trip in Europe with a friend. At one point we met 3 US gals who had been studying in Copenhagen and was -then- travelling in Portugal. Any which way, I for some reason or other told them I was writing a "travel diary", whereupon they burst into laughter & giggles. "Diary," said they, "is something the kids write. Adults write LOGS!" Well, excuse me so much! Since then, log suggests to me that the diary you're writing is somewhat on the "mature side". Either that, or you're fucking Captain of the Ship.

After I quit regularily updating good old Pigsville (and before that, quitting on "Castle Figging Greyskull") I started the cerdo.pitas.com "blog", which was kind of silly since I've had direct server access for a long time now. I was actually just waiting to scrap my Solaris box and move to a more updateable *nix/*nux, and this blog marks the spot.