There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last

I am rarely outbearded. Today, on the bus, I was outbearded not by one man, nay. Not even by two men. I was outbearded by six men. On one bus. Outstanding.

So I should be suffering from inferiority complex right now. Or is that beard envy? But no. I have neither. The reason is simple. There were thirteen Sikh men on the bus today. Of them, only six outbearded me. Six out of thirteen, of a group of people whose religion states they must never cut hair nor beard. Hooray for me!

Not eating meat is a decision, eating meat is an instinct

“Super Bowl Sunday. My place. On the projector. Chili will be served. Chocolate cake will be made. A possibility to kill terrorists before the game. Welcome.”

Now that there is how a text message is supposed to read.

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier

Back in 2005, Time listed the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. Why 1923 you ask? That's the year when Time Magazine was first published.

It pleases me that my two favorite writers, William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, are both on the list, though not for what I believe to be their best books (that would be Pattern Recognition and Cryptonomicon, respectively), and that Watchmen is on there. A graphic novel on that list. Amazing.

Out of the 100 books, I've read 15:
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
Neuromancer - William Gibson
1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

These two are on my bookshelf, waiting to be read:
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

And I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon eight years back, and couldn't get past page 20. I've evolved considerably as a reader since, and I need to try it again. I need to read The Crying of Lot 49 first though. And the dozen or so other books waiting on my shelves.

Which ones have you read?

The problem with troubleshooting is that real trouble shoots back

I can't think of a more manly way to spend the night than how I've spent this one (that doesn't involve actually building something with your bare hands, that is, which just ain't gonna happen).

In the Xbox, Gears of War. By men, for men, with men. And huge frackin' guns. An orgy in aliens, blood, spent shell casings and testosterone.

That'd be me on the left. Taking cover like a real man.
Soon I'll upgrade my puny gun to a Penis Enhancer.

On Spotify, to go with the macho warfare, some Testosterone Tunes. This is music I can't listen to in the car, cause I'll drive too fast.

A home, a place of warmth, or comfort, first of physical warmth, then the warmth of the affections

Back to work today after a week away from the office, a combination of being sick and having a day with our department to discuss strategies and the future.

This morning I got up at six, like I do most days. Sat for a while on the couch, like I do most days. Wrote a note for Mah Girl, like I do most days. It started out as any other morning. Took a shower, packed breakfast, plodded down to the train station, read the paper and started on the latest issue of Wired. Did you know you can get 155 bushels of soy beans from one acre of land?

Walking across the parking lot outside the office just before eight, a sense of unease wrapped itself around me like a wet, cold blanket. I texted Drunk Carl (if anyone reading this works at the same company as me, you know why. The rest of you will have to live in ignorance) and asked if there maybe was a chance I was supposed to be somewhere else. He mocked me.

So I got half an hour of staring at my over-flowing inbox (also a combination of being sick and having a day with our department to discuss strategies and the future), before I took a taxi to our second office. There I enjoyed seven hours of solution presentations for one of my personal Holy Grail projects (that begun back in November), before aiming for home again.

Waited for Mah Girl at the train station, as she was only three trains behind me. Read more Wired. Levees in the Netherlands will be built to specs making the risk of breach 1:100000 in any given year. The levees in New Orleans are being rebuilt at 1:100. Spheres have a lower surface-to-volume ration than cubes, so ice spheres melt more slowly, cooling a drink longer with less dilution.

Walked home, hand in hand, through the snowfall. Made fast food, and then nestled in the couch, Xbox controls and laptops at arm's reach. Arks were raided. Temples were doomed. Crusades were...last? Discovered Frou Frou and Imogen Heap. A good night.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious

On my way home from a nice Italian meal with my parental units, who are in town to see Cirkus Cirkör (I forgot to get tickets, and now it's all sold out. Color me green with envy), I decided to go by The Locker. I don't know why.

It. Was. Vacant.

The green "vacant" light mocked me.

The Locker, the centre of my obsession for quite some time during the summer of 2008 and late 2007, has now become just another locker. No capital letters, no "The". Just a locker.

And I can't help but think, what happened to whatever was in there? Did whoever used it move his oh so secret stuff to another locker? Or has it played it's part in whatever drama it was a part of? I'll never know.

Fundamentally, music is something people inherently love and need and relate to, and a lot of what's out right now feels like McDonalds

I met Alexander Bard two days ago. He spoke briefly before a small group, including me, about his views on the future of the music industry and file sharing.

I had no idea he was coming, and I definitely had no idea I would find myself agreeing with what he had to say.

File sharing is something I've had fairly strong personal views on for a long time, but I haven't taken the time to keep myself informed about what's been going on in the debate around it. Turns out Alexander Bard is one of the most vocal opponents of file sharing, and turns out he had some very interesting points to make about it.

I have been known to rip a CD and send songs to a friend, but I don't use Pirate Bay, I never used Napster, and Kazaa just flickered by at the edges of my musical universe.

Why? Several reasons. But foremost because it's not about the Metallicas and Madonnas of the world. It's about the bands that don't sell hundreds of thousands of CDs, and need sales to keep or even get a record contract. And I really want physical copies, as in CDs, of the music I like.

Mr. Bard's views were an expansion of my views. His opinion is that we've lost a generation of musicians, since illegal file sharing has negated their ability to get record deals. Record labels aren't interested in signing up someone they won't be able to make any money on. Also, he claimed that MySpace and similar sites as a breeding ground for new artists is a complete failure. A fraud, even.

Not sure if I agree completely with the last statement, but I don't know enough about it to have anything other than an opinion. The first statement is very interesting though. I do agree that there has been a shift in the way record labels work and do business over the last couple of years. The big dinosaurs have shifted away from anything that might resemble nurturing new and interesting artists, something that smaller independent labels have taken over, at least when it comes to “my music”. At the same time, we've seen a massive paradigm shift in the way that a lot of people listen to music, from physical media to purely digital.

Of course this has led to a different situation for up and coming musicians. You can't release two CDs and hope to make it big by the third. You need to be an instant hit. At least when we're talking anything outside more narrow genres. Look at Nirvana. “Nevermind”, which has sold an estimated 26 million copies worldwide, was a follow-up to 1989's “Bleach”, which only sold 30,000 copies, previous to “Nevermind”'s release. The reason Nirvana made it big was really two-fold (not counting the appeal of songs like “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, of course). For one, they had friends in the industry that lobbied for them to get on a major label after “Bleach”, mainly Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth. Secondly, there was MTV. Ah yes, MTV, as I knew it when I was 16. When the main focus was still music, and shows like 120 Minutes, Most Wanted and Headbanger's Ball were still on, and defined my musical landscape.

So much has changed since then. MTV has become an empty shell of what it once was, file sharing has exploded, and record sales have plummeted.

And now we might be facing another paradigm shift. Streaming music, from sites like Spotify, is on the rise, while at the same time laws like Ipred might start to limit file sharing.

My own views remain the same. I will keep buying CDs. I will keep using MySpace and Spotify to find new artists as well as listen to albums I can't get my hands on. And I will try to keep myself updated about what goes on with Ipred and the file sharing debate and general. Though where I would find the time remains to be seen.