Det er ikke ofte det er ufred hjemme hos oss, men i går var det i alle fall uenighet. Jeg får nemlig litt vondt i hjertet mitt hver gang Calcuttagutta kaster meg av min autoinnlogging med min innlagte fine css, og dermed utsetter meg for det pastell-grønne jævelskapen som jeg opplever som litt styggere og litt ondere og litt jævligere hver gang.

Etter gjentatte mindre opprør satte jeg derfor foten ned, og krevde av Calcuttaguttas default css endres til noe litt mer avansert. Aller helst noe med et bilde og noe halvgjennomsiktig, slik både jeg og et par andre (minst) allerede har på vår private css.

Tor har lovet meg at han skal legge opp en avansert poll hvor man kan prøve forskjellige eksempler. Alle er laget med bilder jeg har tatt, så vi vil ikke ha noe problem i så henseende. Men jeg ser gjerne at andre kommer med bedre forslag.

Men her er poenget:
Det er litt viktig at de som ikke vanligvis er innlogget tar seg tid til å logge inn og stemme. Det er tross alt dere som hver dag utsettes for default-layouten. Med mindre dere synes den gyselige grønnfargen er fin, selvsagt.

The Leveson inquiry holds a strange fascination for me. I don't really have time to watch it, especially not if I am going to have any hope of finishing my PhD in the near future (or any future); but I find the whole discussion of the British Press and its strange standards of behaviour terribly interesting. In my mind, it is tied up with the absurd wonder that is the English legal system, perhaps through the libel link.

I believe Ian Hislop is to blame for originally getting me interested in it all, in part through Private Eye; but at the root of much of my fascination is my ingrained distaste for Rupert Murdoch and my uncontainable delight in seeing things fall down around him and hopefully hitting him in the head.

In case you have been living under a rock (or somewhere equally sheltered, but perhaps more sensible, and without internet or any other media access), the Leveson inquiry is led by Lord Leveson and looks into the ethics and practices of the British Press. This springs out of the recent bad behaviour of the Murdoch-owned News International and the subsequent phone hacking scandal.

At any rate, while I had been reading the Guardian stories on the subject, and had bought my first ever e-book (Phone Hacking: How the Guardian Broke the Story, which to my great dismay is not available as a proper book), and following both Alan Rusbridger and the Leveson inquiry on Twitter (my second ...

Today, according to the lovely doodle at Google, is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Stanislaw Lem's first book.

Lem is for me the man who turns Science Fiction into Literature (note the capital L), and while I really do like His Master's Voice, The Perfect Vacuum and Solaris, The Cyberiad is the book I love.

Here is a poem made by a poetry-machine made by one of the robots in one of the stories of the book, when that poetry-machine was faced with the seemingly impossible task of writing a poem about love and tensor algebra.

One day the proverbial straw will come along and I will do something violent to my computer.

I have this wonderful writing program called Writeroom. I have mentioned it elsewhere, and I turned to it today to help me focus on writing a lecture. I turned it on and was told there was an update.

`Ok', I thought. `An update from the nice people who made the nice program; I am sure that is a good idea. They are always improving and patching and generally working very hard to make my life easier. It is very kind of them.'

And so I clicked it through.

The update ran, and Writeroom told me it had to restart for it to take effect. I clicked `restart'. It turned itself off.

And stayed off.

`This is not normal behaviour', I thought. But sometimes technology is temperamental. I know that. So I decided to help things along, and clicked on the icon in the dock.



In Tor's immortal words, WTF?

Surely there must be some way to make sure you don't encourage (or allow) people to install an update which does not work on their computer. Is this an evil ploy by someone to make me upgrade to Lion?

To make matters worse, I can't undo the update.

Damn them.

Many, many years ago (at least five), Finn Arne linked me to this essay on structured procrastination. I was struck by its good sense and wise suggestions. And I have been trying it out ever since. Not always with great success (unless you count knitting sweaters and reading books quite unrelated (or only vaguely related) to my work -- not to mention keeping up to date on geek culture and a selection of television series -- as a form of achievement), but certainly with a bad conscience (which is the standard second place when procrastination is concerned).

Recently, however, I found a very good tool. I have been well aware of the benefit of keeping to do-lists. The trouble is that they tend to either be on post-it notes or pieces of paper that I invariably lose, or expect to lose; and the other is that they frequently disappear from sight (and consequently mind) and therefore fail to remind me of the thing I need to do. This has not been a big problem in terms of getting things done, but only because I never quite relax and trust these notes. The downside to that, however, is a constant presence of low-level stress which is the perfect breeding ground for procrastination.

I have lately (over the last year or so) taken to using the ``Stickies'' application on my mac, and that worked quite well (because I would have a look at them whenever I was procrastinating, and therefore could do something sensible ...

As those who attended our wedding this summer may have noticed, I am a great proponent of hats. Hats (and I am talking about proper hats, not the baseball cap or similar creations) brighten the day as you pass them in the street.

Back in the day, when I was a conscientious member of environmental organisations, I opposed the culture that sets too great a store by clothing. I parroted the idea that it does not really matter how things look, as long as they wear well and keep you warm. Truth to tell, I never really believed it. It was only the only expression I had come across of an opposition to a fashion culture which was focused on intense consumerism. I wanted to object to the demand that one should wear clothes only because they were fashionable, and then throw them away in order to buy other clothes as soon as the fashion changed.

Bound up with this, I also objected to the idea of spending a lot of money on clothes. I took great pride in wearing jackets that cost 50 nok (about £5), and never having paid more than £20 for any other item of clothing. Again, this was to a great extent due to an impression that what cost money was the "newness" of the item of clothing. And to a certain extent that is true.

What my younger self disregarded, in part because I had not really had any real experience with shops that ...

For et par uker siden lærte jeg noe nytt. Det hender av og til. Jeg ante fred og ingen fare og satt og puslet med doktorgraden, da en av de britiske professorene på engelsk-seksjonen kom innom og sa at han hadde noe som kanskje ville interessere meg: en bok med sketsjer fra et britsk tv-program fra 1950- og 60-tallet, kalt Hancock.

Jeg var meget interessert, for sketsjen, som het "The Missing Page", handlet om hvordan Hancock (etter en serie sprell på biblioteket) leser en kjempespennende "whodunnit" bare for så å oppdage at den siste siden, hvor morderen skal avsløres, mangler. Hilarity ensues. Hancocks reaksjon på alt dette illustrerer meget godt det doktorgraden min handler om: Han har lest med den forventning at slutten ville sette alt det som hadde gått forut inn i sin riktige sammenheng, og han går umiddelbart igang med å forsøke å ressonere seg frem til løsningen på bakgrunn av informasjonen i teksten så langt, forsøker å kontakte den forrige leseren (som har brukt seks år på å forsøke å finne svaret og ytterlige tre år på å forsøke å glemme det hele), forsøker å kontakte forfatteren (som viser seg å være død) osv. Til alt overmål viser det seg at forfatteren døde fra boken der teksten slutter; det finnes altså ingen komplett tekst. Doktorgraden min i miniatyr.

Grunnen til at jeg skriver denne artikkelen er imidlertid noe helt annet: Det viser seg at denne Hancock er originalen for den norske Fleksnes-figuren. Jeg trodde alltid at det ...

What with the wedding and entertaining foreigners (and that pesky PhD), coupled with no money (because of said wedding and PhD), I have not had as much time for the Jazz Festival this year. I haven't been to any concerts, and I have only passed through Storgata twice. We glanced at the program, however, and when we saw the name "Bård Watn" under the heading "NRK direktesending" on the free programme, there was really no doubt we would have to hit the town today.



We tried to catch a bus, but because it was on time for the first time in my life, we missed it by two minutes. And so we walked to town just in time for the final bit of the street parade, and a quick bun and some tea before heading to the park.

The street parade, which it turned out Tor had "never seen", and which we had tried to catch two times earlier in the week, was a bit disappointing. I suspect Thursday at the roundabout is exactly the wrong chronotopia (which may or may not be a word denoting a particular time and place) for the street parade. Everyone looked a little tired. Including the old man from New Orleans, who is still alive.



For the tea and bun we went to Fole Godt, which at some point I will furnish with the official Camilla Stamp of Approval. But on to the matter at hand.

The park was cold and wet, as ...

Despite its ridiculously clichéd, pink cover (in the edition I read, at any rate), this is a very interesting book. It is replete with fascinating information on sexuality in a variety of geographical areas during a large part of human history. William Naphy traces sex between men (and occasionally sex between women) from the beginnings of human history to the present; and in each chapter (covering a period of time) he discusses a number of cultures from all over the world, thereby presenting a series of synchronous slices which also allows a semblance of diachronic lines of development): a world history of homosexuality.

If this sounds like it might be too ambitious, that would be right. The book is just under 300 pages long, which makes any in-depth investigation of such a wide topic unattainable. Possibly as a result of the same restrictions it is at times a little careless with regard to methodological considerations: because there is no room to discuss the complex reasoning behind interpretations of sources that only contribute a very little, there is a tendency towards simply skirting over the evidence for homosexuality (or, rather, sex between people of the same sex, homosexuality being a terribly anachronistic term) in periods and areas where there is little written material. Quite often I found myself wishing there were footnotes with sources for me to look at (simply saying "there is evidence that X" makes me want to see the evidence).

There is also a tendency towards generalisation: despite ...