I have gone to another ORDB.org Hackathon. See you Sunday.
I will be away for some R&R this weekend. See you Sunday.
I went and got a new bike! A mountainbike, to be exact. Blue. With wheels and brakes and lights and a lock. Very nifty. I should put pictures up soon. Some of you will recall how I had my previous, expensive bike stolen in Dublin. I doubt I could bear going through that again so this one is cheaper but still nice.
I have also decided I need a new laptop. None of the replacement drives I tried in priceless worked. I am looking at a ThinkPad X24 with on-board ethernet and wireless NICs and an optional external floppy. I would only need external media during installation of OpenBSD. The laptop is very light: 1.7kg and has the usual stuff like PIII-1Ghz CPU, 128MB RAM, 30GB disk, keyboard light, etc.
There is a program, Åndernes Magt (Power of the Spirits), being shown in its third season on Danish television. I have no reason to believe it to be a hoax. Consistently over the last three seasons, we have seen how a clairvoyant is brought in to talk to a family or an individual who has lost a loved one. Another format of the show is that the clairvoyant is taken to a location where the residents have experienced or sensed "something" was present when they were alone in the room. Sometimes, windows or doors would fly open after just having been shut, things would come flying off shelves, strange knocking or clicking noises. Sometimes there would be extreme temperature drops involved. House pets would react to the same senses, convincing the owners that they were not insane.
For the purposes of this show, the clairvoyants are never told where they are being taken, who they are going to see, nor who the individual has lost, or what is suppsedly happening to residents of the location. The clairvoyant then proceeds to explain, in vivid details, about the deceased or about the kind of experiences the residents of a haunted location has had. Imagine talking to a person you have never met in your life, and whom you are sure could not possibly know anything about you or the people around you. Yet this clairvoyant is able to tell you specific habits about a person you used to know, what happened to the person throughout their life, and what happened on the day they died. Sometimes the clairvoyant is able to describe exactly what experiences you have had in a haunted location. Someone is always watching, as it turns out.
The show tonight brought a clairvoyant to an old inn where the staff had noticed a peculiar being walking or standing around, and there had been a few cases of objects being moved or thrown. The clairvoyant was allowed to walk around the building, and without being told a single word about the type of problems or what part of the builing the problems occur, was able to describe to the staff what they had been seeing, and who the deceased person was. She claimed that the person had died a slow and painful death in the 1760's, the person was male and had leased the building. The person kept drawning the letter A, which made the clairvoyant belive his name started with that letter. She also claimed there had been three women living in the house, one being the deceased persons wife. The person had become upset over all the changes that had taken place in the inn, as it was his place.
As with all these cases of haunted locations, the TV crew attempts to verify the claims of the clairvoyant by pouring through old archives of who lived where, what had happened to them, etc., and tonight was no exception. Using local historical records, they were able to determine that a person named August had leased the house in the middle 1700's as part of his job, that he died at age 21 in 1763, not from an illness but from some form of accident. The cause of death was not well documented. The records also showed 3 women as being the deceased persons sisters. No record of wife or children as the clairvoyant had claimed.
Last weeks show (I think it was) had a 20-something year old girl looking to speak to her slightly older brother who had passed away some months previously due to a drug overdose. As usual, the clairvoyant was not given any information what so ever, yet was able to describe the life of the deceased. In particular, the girl's (and the deceased's) younger brother (Martin?) had been in a car accident shortly after the older brother passed away. The clairvoyant suddenly asked if Martin had been surprised the he had been protected during the accident. The girl's jaw dropped. The first thing her younger brother had said after the accident was that his older brother had looked out for him.
While this is "only" a TV broadcast, the evidence is compelling. Time and time again, the same indisputable, hard facts of a stranger knowing a lot about a random individual or location has been proved. I believe, and have believed for some time now, that certain humans are able to communicate with the faithful departed, and I cannot help but wonder if this is going to be common knowledge at some point in the future. The police has sought the assistance of clairvoyants in a handful of unsolved murders from the 1970's and 1980's.
The consequences of this cannot be downplayed. If we are to believe what we are being told, our soul does live forever, or at least several hundred years after our body went out of warranty. It appears that spirits are constantly present, so someone is watching you when you are shopping groceries, crying, having sex, when you steal or lie or cheat. Perhaps we are going to pay for our sins. Oh dear! I am already fucked so I might as well carry on doing whatever I am doing.
Surely certain governments would be delighted to have control of a spirit. Who is going to stop spirits from sinking into deep vaults or crashing in on meetings and reporting back to their master.
Do you think I am insane?
Oh, and OpenBSD has gone into pre-order mode. After every release cycle, a ton of interesting commits happen when the code is unfrozen. This prepares new features for the full 6 month testing. For instance, the packet filter and load shaping support has been merged in 3.2-current.
HA! Check out the 3.2 logo. James Bond ripoffs!
We went to San Giovanni again; the food was lovely as always. On the walk home she started feeling ill and when we reached home, she tried to sleep. I was unable to.
I watched Hearts in Atlantis while she slept. I am sorry it took me so long. I almost wanted to cry. For some reason, this quote lingered with me:
Why do we always expect home to stay the same? Nothing else does.
Lately I have felt as if words, both Danish and English, fail me. Whenver I have tried to write anything in the diary or any of the documents on my todo list, my writing came out muddled and broken. Not surprisingly, I prefer my writing to be precise and eloquent. I wish I was a better writer. You might insist that I am doing all right. That may be, but good is not good where better is expected.
Some of you will recall Walking in the Air from The Snowman. I know the versions by Aled Jones and the Cambridgeshire Boys' Choir. I just learned that Nightwish, the Finnish metal band, did a cover of the tune in 1998. Unusual.
Oranges rock!
I just noticed that pictures from the last two metal gigs I went to have been put online. If you wonder what kind of people I hang out with, go see for yourself: 17 August and 28 September.
The Sun Will Explode In Less Than Six Years!
Excuse me while I go talk to my bank about that 40 million dollars I wanted to borrow.
