We used to build civilizations. Now we build shopping malls

In September I will be flying to New Zeeland to visit my brother, who's spending twelve months there, thanks to an exchange program his company has. The most exotic traveling I've done through my job was when I went to Vilnius to educate a bunch of tech geeks who could barely speak English about the inner workings of SMSCs and MMSCs. Oh, unless you count the trip to Istanbul. But that was all pleasure, no business.

So two weeks in New Zeeland. I'm really looking forward to it. Not only because I haven't seen my brother since October of last year, but also since NZ is supposedly a spectacular country, and we'll be doing some spectacular things, like this:


It's called cave tubing, or black water rafting. This is where you get into the water, hold on to an inflated tube and then float through caves to look at rock formations and glowworms. Yes, pictures of me in a wetsuit may be taken. Prepare to gouge your eyes out.

On the way home I will stop in Kuala Lumpur for six days. My plan is to look at some building and go on a massive shopping spree. That city seems to be adapted to my shopping needs. Massive malls, with hundreds and hundreds of stores. One dedicated entirely to electronics and home entertainment. One with seven streetwear stores within spitting distance of each other.

The main objective is a laptop, to reply my current LG which is getting old and tired. I will also look for some sort of portable video device, something with a meatier screen than my iPod classic, to view TV shows on, on the train. Clothes will also be a focus. I will bring my favorite shirt with me and have a tailor make copies, as well as Mah Girl's favorite pants, and will try to find some other stuff as well.

I may also buy some toys. As in “actual toys”. To crowd our bookshelves further. You must please your inner child as often as you can. Otherwise he withers and dies. And you don't want to be a child killer, now do you?

Only after disaster can we be resurrected

It's always nice to have someone around to make you laugh. And I mean really laugh.

My day began with the realization that I had forgotten my work laptop at home, tucked away in its rather stylish bag. I realized this as I walked across the parking lot outside the office, and seconds later I came to the conclusion that going back was not an option.

Work continued as a total clusterfuck. FUBAR. It crescendoed in the afternoon, with a meeting where I wanted nothing more than to storm out of there and go home. Angry emails will be written, and I'll be told to forget what has been and look ahead instead. I won't. I don't forget things like that. They take root and grow into a twisted tree covered in nasty thorns that keep lacerating my mind. OK, a bit over-dramatic and gothy there, but whatever. Close to the truth, anyway.

We're a very fast and adaptable company, yes we are, but we totally suck at learning from past mistakes. Suck-didely-uck. I am determined to at least let people know that they made the same decision twice and because of it we be fucked. Which will be seen as unacceptable. Which means I'll have to make some sense of a lot of things that don't make sense, launch it regardless of whether it makes sense or not, and proverbially tape it all up with proverbial duct tape to keep it from proverbially going all Titanic on me.

If Mah Girl hadn't been around (digitally, that is) earlier in the day to make me laugh, I may just have gone postal.

And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you.
- Narrator, Fight Club

Won't happen though. I'm Swedish. I'd much rather internalize all those feelings and bitch about them here. Plus, I don't wear Oxford cloth. Ever.

So I was at work, chipping away at my inbox and trying to figure out how to send my old laptop back to the company that handles our IT stuff, when my girl, otherwise occupied with Word Twist, suddenly realized that the TV was playing something that might be worthwhile looking at. “There's a cave with something egg-like in there, and a guy walking in to investigate”. Now, as you all should know, walking into a cave where there are egg-like things is never a good idea. Have we learned nothing else, this we should know.

Dan realized the litter box was overflowing. Again.

Then came what might be the funniest thing I've ever read on MSN.

“...and now he died”. I laughed so hard I cried. Co-workers looked at me with a “he's cracking, he's cracking” kind of panic in their eyes. I laughed so hard I lost my breath. Yes, yes, I was, and still am, really tired, but still. It was funny, huh?

Here's the story, if you care:
The story begins with a team of astronaut miners who complete a daring space expedition and embark on their journey home. But by the time the craft returns to Earth, their commander has gone insane. Three years later, a link between the mystery of the commander's madness and a series of bizarre disappearances in San Francisco brings archeologist Lloyd Walker and entomologist Marianne Winters into conflict with police and government officials who have been taken over by aliens masquerading as humans.

Ooooh. [ begin irony ] Intriguing. [ end irony ]

Later, I fled work, went and got myself vaccinated for my trip this fall, and then came home to “pizza-smörgåsar”, which I can't even begin to translate, and chocolatey snacks. Happy happy joy joy. Now I've reached some semblance of normalcy, and might just go and shoot some Nazis before I go sleep. A good ending to a crap day.

Tomorrow may be hell, but today was a good writing day, and on the good writing days nothing else matters

I haven't written here in a month. No real reason, it just kind of happened. Inspiration has been running low, and I have been focusing on other things. My fiction writing has been suffering as well, though I have managed to come up with two embryos for stories for the workshop I hope to be part of next summer (one about time travel and JFK, and one about angels, kind of).

One of them was conceived and written today, aboard the train, using Laban, my new-ish laptop. Yes, of course laptops need names, don't be silly. The other one's called Lelle. He's in love with Mah Girl's laptop Lina. We were expecting a flock of little Palm Pilots or something, but alas, they're either saving themselves for marriage, suffering from reproductive problems or practicing safe sex. If they've gone religious on me, we'll be having us a laptop skeet shoot any day now. Just as long as they don't have an STD (Serial port Transmitted Disease).

Life has been a roller coaster ride of ups and downs lately. Tuesday was one of the worst working days I've had, ever. Actually, maybe top ten or twenty crap days ever, regardless of work or other circumstances. The Friday before was also epically bad. Just horror show bad.

Then Friday, three days ago, I began three days of bliss. Barbecue on Friday with good friends and then a visit from Mah Girl's best friend over the weekend, which included beer, drinks, steaks, movies (some good, some disappointing, some sooo bad), pizza, more beer and Wovenhand live. Excellent.

Some kind of balance has been reached, then. I'm hoping the universe won't read this and decide to pummel me again.

I should go to bed. And I will, soon. I intend to write more often than once a month from now on. Here's hoping I will.

But I'd trade it all for just a little bit of piece of mind

So here I am, Thursday night, watching Criminal Minds, a semla in my stomach and a smile on my lips. A shitload of things to say, but no real peace of mind to say it.

It's not that I am in a bad place, I'm actually feeling pretty good, but I can't seem to be able to structure what I want to say. There are some things that I feel I need to get out, but they will just have to wait.

For now, a short list of wohoos!

- Faith No More is reuniting. One of my all-time fave bands is playing in Europe again this summer, after a ten year hiatus. Apart from dead bands and The Tea Party, they're the band I thought least likely I would ever get to see again. Wohoo!
- I've bought a new laptop. A Lenovo Ideapad 10-inch. A pretty sweet little machine. Wohoo!
- Tomorrow I'm hopefully getting a load of DVDs from Amazon in the mail, to go with the package already waiting at the post office. We're mostly looking forward to seeing The Escapist. Wohoo!
- I'm currently reading Starbucked, about the rise of Starbucks. Excellent stuff. Wohoo!
- Tomorrow night a bunch of people from work are going out to down ridiculous drinks and get Jakob, who is leaving to go to a small web development company, drunk beyond relief. Wohoo!

What are your wohoos right now?

I say listen to all voices, but mine's the final decision

I borrowed an Asus EEE from work yesterday. I've been considering buying some sort of mini laptop or web book for quite some time, and wanted to try one out for a while before making any kind of decision.

My current laptop is an LG LW25, which has a 12-inch screen and weighs in at 1.8 kilos. I've used it for about a year and a half, and I'm very happy with it apart from the start-up time, and the current battery time which is crap, but I didn't expect anything else after 18 months of frequent usage. The size and weight are just right for my purposes, which is writing, emailing and loitering about on the Web. Nothing major.

(of course, I was less than happy with the crash, but I'm not a Mac person and have to settle with Windows, so I'll just have to deal)

So. The Asus. So far a nice little machine. I wrote parts of this on it on the train this morning. Initially I had problems with the small keyboard (I have sausage fingers), but I've managed to up my typing speed considerably in only ten minutes. It still needs some getting used to, though.

Not sure if I have reached any kind of conclusion yet, other than the fact that I will need a new laptop of some kind within the next six months or so. I'm seriously considering using two, an Asus EEE-type machine for carrying around for writing purposes, and a bigger machine at home to use for editing purposes and storage. Of course, an external hard drive solves the second part, so I need to do some serious thinking whether I need a bigger screen than 10 inches or not. The other option is to go for a new 12-inch. Decisions, decisions.

Now children, this is what we call a luxury problem.

Another problem, is which video game console to choose. I'm still undecided between an Xbox 360and a PS3, but leaning towards the Xbox, if only because a lot of people I know have it, plus it's a boatload of cash cheaper.

Oh. And Wintersleep's "Search Party" almost makes me cry each time I hear it. Awesome stuff. Thanks, Spotify.

The stories of my death are highly exaggerated

In response to EGE's question on my last entry, and just to dispel any rumours that might be flying around out there on the BBI (Big Bad Internet), I am not dead. The laptop, however, remains so. Though not really.

Without going into mind-numbing detail about all the trials and tribulations surrounding the laptop, I can say that I am not a happy camper, and that a CD with a new, proper OS is on the way from LG. I expect to be up and running sometime next week.

So. My absence is mostly due to that but also due to a general lack of time. I will be back, though.

And as an observation: scraping ice from the windows of the car on October 6th is not OK.