MeMag - Me Magazine

At night, illuminated by a streetlight.

Since I’m not especially fond of cold weather, it has been a month since I last went outside with my camera. Finally, armed with no less than seven layers of clothing, I did set out on a new expedition. Naturally I missed my bus and ended up walking around the neighborhood for a while instead. Which was nice.

Some time ago I tried to shoot a picture of this factory building. The fence on the lawn in front of it formed a nice shiny S which pointed up towards the building. At the time I tried folding my cap into an iris around the lens to block out some distracting lights in the upper corners. It didn’t work well. A weird woman with a dog was staring intensely at me all the time I was trying to do this. Let’s blame her.

So I went back the next day and ended up getting there too late. The sky was too dark and you couldn’t see anything but a dense black background with lights on it. Sometime between these two nights, someone or some thing with superhuman strength had been there and bent the entire cast iron fence so that the light no longer caught it. There was no more glowing S-shapes in the dark. Another even weirder woman, this one with several dogs, sat down on the ground next to me and stared at me.

Third attempt, this time bringing homemade iris-shaped paper cut-outs in different sizes, I shot this. I’m a bit unhappy with the exposure, but I know that I could have gone back ten million times and never gotten it right. Natural light is very different from day to day. A scene will often look a certain way only once and then never again. A third weird woman with dogs circled me while I was shooting but didn’t approach me. I bet it was one of those insane women who bent the fence out of shape.

Second shot is a closer look at the fence. Wish the lights at the top weren’t there, but I can’t bring myself to “cheat” and clone things out in photoshop or do any cropping.

This was shot a while back outside the building where the Buick Club of Norway hold their meetings. I had never been there before, but I recognized the building from having seen their website earlier. There was chrome everywhere and I had a hard time trying to single out some nice shiny piece of brightwork before the last light disappeared. Needless to say, I badly screwed everything up. I really want to go back and reshoot something… anything, but they hold their meetings at 7pm, at which time it is pitch black outside this time of year. So I guess I have to wait until next year.

Anyway… what I like about this one shot is that I can almost imagine it being the parking space outside some barn dance somewhere. Music coming from inside. It should have had a couple making out in the foreground. Maybe there will be next year.

This is something I have heard references to before. It has always fascinated me, although it has never occured to me that I could use the internet to learn more about it:

Polyphasic Sleep is a technique for changing your sleep pattern into a series of short snoozes every 4 hours, instead of the normal continuous sleep of 8 hours or so every night. The benefits are supposedly a compressed sleep cycle of only 2-5 hours a day, as well as a feeling of higher alertness. According to the followers of this technique, the brain will, after a difficult adjustment period, use these short naps for pure REM sleep, which does the brain a world of good. And just think of how much longer your life will be if every waking day is a couple of hours longer.

The technique has apparently been used by several inventors and brainy people such as Tesla, Edison and daVinci. I’m sure it has been used by a few idiots as well. My problem with this is that I think life is basically a long boring wait until you die and your worries are finally over. Who wants to be awake more than necessary? Not me.

Should you however be in the lucky position of working with something that actually makes your career seem worthwhile, this may be worth looking into. Also see the 28 hour day.

More info: Kuro5hin, UberSleep.com and Polyphasic Sleep.

Discovered through Cynical-C Blog

Seems that it is impossible to track down a portable MAC in Oslo. There is a shiny new Apple Center downtown where the actual prizes seem to be much higher than the ones they advertize in their catalogue. I tried calling them, but the automated answer spoke of a different store than the one I called. A misprint in the phonebook? The voice said “Our opening hours are… bla bla… to 4:30 on weekdays. Have a nice day”. It then disconnected me. I looked at the clock. It was 4:10. Is there a logic here that I’m missing?

The other options are various photo stores that don’t actually have any MACs in stock. They just take orders and add a fat percentage. They are unable to even give you the specifications for each model. One of these stores had some specs on their web site, but either these are several years old or they take out some parts like the extra memory Apple includes in the newer models. It is also uncertain if they are able to get you anything at all. You might end up on a waiting list that binds you to one particular store that won’t actually be able to procure you the computer in the end.

I suppose the logical choice about now would be to look at PCs instead. But I know that it’s still the same world of gum-chewing tanned young salesmen with blank stares. And disfunctional phone support. You may end up talking to someone in India as opposed to in Ireland, but that is the only difference. One isn’t better than the other. The good deals are still only found in online stores that don’t actually carry anything. It’s a mail-order world. Nothing works. It’s just hollow advertizing. Spam. It’s sickening. At least my old MAC has lasted for years with no problems, whereas I have gone through 4 PCs in the same time-frame. A lifespan of 5 years plus in the world of computers is fairly close to eternity. No wonder these affordable lightweight portable MAC things are impossible to find. They are mythical, like unicorns or erections that last forever. Everyone wants them. But in the end, they probably don’t even exist.

It turns out that behind the shiny white luster of Apple’s web shop, lurks the usual web of broken links, confusing information and the completely useless telephone support system one has come to associate with modern day electronics shopping.

Yesterday I attempted to order a Powerbook from Apple’s semi-Norwegian web shop. Not easy. The first task was to find a browser willing to display the site properly. Apparently Apple’s online store is less than enthusiastic about MACs. This is may be because the Norwegian version of the store seems to be the international one, which some egghead has attempted to translate word-for-word into Norwegian.

The result is a buggy page, half in english, half in Norwegian, riddled with grammatically pointless sentences and things like address input fields that do not fit our local postal codes. You often end up on pages with missing headers so that you have use the browser’s back button to return. This leads to postdata warnings and more confusion. Some pages are just blank.

Eventually I thought I had it figured out well enough to place an order. I ignored the warnings that my address didn’t exist, after first having a good look around the apartment to confirm that it was indeed there. After twenty minutes or so, I finally managed to add a laptop to a shopping cart. This landed me on a page for custom configurations. There were drop down boxes for adding larger hard drives and more memory. Stuff like that. However, these did not contain any options. They were just dropdown boxes for the sake of having dropdown boxes.

One input option that did work was a field labelled (in Norwegian) “Add an additional keyboard and select OS”. Fair enough, but the dropdown choices seemed to indicate that the “additional keyboard” was in fact the choice to have the regular keyboard either with English characters or localized Norwegian ones. We have a few extra letters in our alphabet that largely serve to make anything written in Norwegian incompatible with the rest of the electronic world.

I placed the order, after which I got cold feet. What had I really ordered? And when would it arrive? The product info page said 3 days, the confirmation page said 4-6 days and the confirmation mail said 5-7 days. I called the support number. After ages of waiting on a bad connection, listening to a nice mix of support messages in Norwegian and English with an Irish accent, I finally reached one of the default support zombies. He listened to my question on keyboards. He didn’t answer. I said “hello?” “I’ll transfer you”, he said, sending me back into the menagerie of support messages and press-this-and-that choices.

This led me to a young seemingly lobotomized Swedish-speaking woman who didn’t understand a word I was saying. She asked me if I minded repeating everything in English. I did but she still had no idea what I was talking about. She tried to remedy this by speaking sloooow-lyyy and LOUDly in bad english. She still didn’t know anything about localized keyboard options. Even though I had all the codes for the various options. “Iiii doooon’t under-staaand”, she said. “Please cancel my order”, I said.

I’m not sure if I have touched upon this subject before, but the principal task of the press here in Norway is to rewrite history to show that anything good was actually invented by some Norwegian dude.

It has always puzzled me how people here can believe firmly in the idea that we are the envy of everyone worldwide. But that is what people generally think. And say. A childhood friend of mine for example… whenever some great invention is mentioned by someone, or an historic act of bravery, he pauses for a while… he thinks… then it comes: “A Norwegian guy invented that”. “What?”, I say… “The samurai sword?” “Absolutely”, he says. Then he delivers some ludicrous explanation that I cannot possibly puncture without a degree in medieval asian history.

That’s my buddy “S.” He has one of those explanations for anything worthwile… The discovery of a vaccine for sleeping sickness… the invention of the submarine… always things you cannot check there and then. And the papers do the same thing. Constantly.

On September 11th for instance, they started off with the usual shocking headline of hundreds, possibly thousands of Norwegians presumed dead in the WTC. Then, as it slowly became painfully clear that only unimportant foreigners had died, they searched frantically for a Norse news-angle until they came up with something like the brother-in-law of the wife of someone who had been there the day before and could have perished in the collapsing towers. But didn’t. This story then ran for days.

Hollywood is another favourite hunting ground when looking for Norwegian superstars. If you search people’s family trees close enough, you are almost certain to find some Hollywood actress who had a grandfather who was 1/8th Norwegian on his mother’s side. According to the local papers, there wouldn’t have been an entertainment industry anywhere, had it not been for our enormous contribution.

Today it is Lost making the headlines. You know… LOST. The tv series everyone watches thanks to the wonders of online filesharing. Today the newspapers proudly report that the father of some apparently famous soccer coach is seen in a video they are watching on the island. (They have video on that island now?) Yes… in a recently aired episode, there is a film segment where you can briefly see the silhouette of someone who resembles Ivar Normark, former city official on the municipality of the county of Narvik and the father of Ivar Morten Normark, who is the famous soccer coach person. Yes, news doesn’t get much hotter than this.

“There is no doubt that it could be him. The features, profile, the posture and the hair indicate that it may be him”, Ivar Morten Nordmark says to Dagbladet.no

“We think the video clip dates back to the ’80s, due to some scaffolding seen off to the side”, mayor Olav Sigurd Alstad (Labor Party) comments to the same newspaper.

The article then goes on to question where the production company has obtained the old footage. A local tv channel has already contacted Buena Vista television in order to learn the answer.

One could of course also question how the newspaper journalists have obtained an episode of Lost which hasn’t yet aired here in Norway.