I occasionally feel a little stupid about the choice of name for my blog. Adultward. It sounds childish, sometimes, but sometimes it sounds just exactly right. Like now.

I went back to school, and today was the first day of the first (out of two) semesters that I need to take. The first day of my repairing the mistakes of my youth. I woke up at 7.30 this morning (10 minutes before my alarm went off) and watched the sun for awhile, thinking about the fact I was now doing what I should have done a whole decade ago. Yes, ten years ago I went from high school into secondary school (a.k.a. gymnasium) and when I was done, four years later, my grades were a swiss-cheese-style hole-riddled mess, perfectly reflecting my at that time destructive viewpoint, both upon myself and upon the world as a whole. I was overconfident, egotistic, and lacking anything worth calling discipline. I was a child, with illusions of my abilities to conquer the world as I were. I realize this now, that I have so many things to recover and repair before I can be sincerely proud of who and what I am.

It was a surreal feeling, truly. Everything felt sort of out of place, like I was revisiting my childhood. It began at home, as I got ready to go to school. I think it was the fact I was now supposed to re-study those very same subjects that I failed to care about back then. Or maybe it was just the mood I was in. Or my excitement about finally fixing this mess. It’s been like a dark cloud over me, except that I haven’t realized that it was there until now. I can’t wait for these ten months to pass so I can get rid of that dark cloud forever, as it has affected me during these several years.

And it kept being more and more surreal. The first classroom I was in made me literally twitch. I kept seeing things that I recognized from when I was six years old — such as the calendar on the wall. That same calendar hung on the wall in my classroom the very first day I stepped into school when I was six. And that same calendar hung on the wall when I entered school today. (Of course the difference being that, when I was six years old, the calendar read “1986″, and the calendar now reads “2006″.) For a moment, I felt physically ill seeing these “signs” but it was a perversely nice feeling as well. I can’t help regret somewhat the fact I need to do these things now, but at the same time I know that they didn’t interest me back then, and they do interest me now, so in a way, it is good.

Today I had “Society”, “History”, and then “Religion”. Each class was 1.5 hour long, and mostly consisted of “this is what this subject will be about for the next 4 months; this is what we expect from you for each of the individual grades” and similar. But the pace is fairly high. I won’t get away as easy now as I would have back when I took these subjects the first time, but that suits me fine in a way. I’m honestly interested right now, and while that may go up and down, I will pull through and get good grades too. I have decided to go into it with the attitude of “doing my best until the end”, without aiming for a particular grade in any one subject. The teachers meanwhile suggest that we state which grades we’re after, so the teacher can tell us if we’re lagging behind in the quality/quantity of our participation.

I am grateful to my country for its generosity, and its beliefs in second chances. Without it I would have never been able to do this.

When I signed up for my new ISP, I received 3 movie tickets as a thanks. That’s pretty nice. However, the movie tickets turned out to be movie tickets for “viewing movies online.” I.e. a movie industry move to tackle those pesky downloaders.

Unfortunately I don’t have Windows.

Unfortunately for them.

If they expect a consumer to support their business (i.e. not download stuff from the ‘net) and purchase their products, they had better try harder than this. The movie site which provides the movies (sf-anytime.com) dismisses its linux users indifferently, saying DRM technology is unsupported on the platform and thus, the linux users can go fuck themselves. Using their hard earned movie tickets, perhaps. The same, by the way, goes for the Mac users. Yessir, you wanna be legal and watch movies from home, you better be using Microsoft Windows. “With all the doubts of crystal clear,” as Peter Murphy puts it.
So I contacted my ISP, saying I would like reimbursement for the 3 tickets I got. They did reimburse me, a whooping $2 US or similar. (Though in their defense, those tickets are still valid — I just have to go to some funny friend who’s dumb enough to run Windows.) Gotta give it to them, though. I definitely didn’t expect them to give me anything at all.

Conclusively, the message from the Music and Movie Industry is clear. Download stuff online, as you have no other option. “Buy the DVD,” you say? Well, sure, but that, too is borderline illegal. The encryption algorithm for DVD playback has already visited court on one occasion, and who knows when that whale resurfaces. “Buy Windows,” you say, and I shall steeple my fingers and snicker.

Update (2006-08-20): I emailed my ISP telling them that my mother is in the exact same situation, and she, too, got the $2. Cute. (But to be honest, it’s actually not $2. It’s $1.39 according to the current exc. rates.)

When I switched to Debian those years ago, X apps done from a su’d user didn’t work. I in fact decided that they don’t work, period, and for a good reason, so I stopped using them.

Today, I installed FF 2.0, and really wanted it to not use (read: mess up) my default profile. Despite this, I didn’t want it to ask me which profile to use whenever I started it. I know, I’m lazy that way. So the “su doesn’t do graphical” issue reoccured. And this time I decided that I have a good enough reason to look into it.

Update: gksu basically fixes the issue. A launcher with ‘gksu -u testy /usr/local/lib/firefox-2.0b1/firefox’ is enough. gksu is a GNOME application, but has equivalents for KDE, at least.

Stop clicking on links to viagra, porn, etc. that you receive in your email. Stop responding to lottery emails, or nigeria emails or inherit emails. Stop being so god damned mother fucking stupid that you think anyone would tell you, via email, that you’ve won millions of dollars.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

This message was brought to you by the “Anti-Dumbfuck Organization”, whose primary purpose in this world is to weep daily for the morons who’re dumb enough to make email spam lucrative.

Update: This was just all kinds of timed — http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/08/16/you-cksckn-spammers/

Using IP-based telephony isn’t exactly new to me. I used my ISP-provided IP telephony for over a year before I moved to my new apartment.

And with my new apartment I switched ISP, and by switching ISP I couldn’t use that ISP’s phone service any longer. I first meant to use my new ISP’s phone, but they suddenly threw a $100 expense at me, expecting me to swallow which I didn’t. Instead I canceled my order to use their phone service, and bet all my cards on Skype.

Because see, I have an internal sound card on my computer’s motherboard, which Skype hates with a passion. Hiss snort. And then I have my old SB Live card from my old computer. To get Skype working, I had to use my old SB Live card, so I disabled the internal one. The fact I have two sound cards in my machine becomes important later on.
So, I got SkypeIn firstly. People need to be able to call me. I got a number in Sweden, in Stockholm. Yay and all that.

So then I got 100 SEK (Swedish crowns, ~$15 or something) worth of SkypeOut. So I can call regular phones using my Skype (and it’s actually really cheap).

That was a few weeks ago. All worked well, except for one little issue. Whenever someone calls me — or I decide to call someone — I have to tweak cables. Namely, I had to put my headset “in” into the logitech Z4 control’s “headphones”, and then move the control over to the computer, because the headset’s “mic” out was “tied” to the “in” cable, and then put the “mic” into the computer’s “mic in” port. And then I could finally “pick up the phone.” Shucks.

Then I realized what many others have already realized. Use one sound card for Skype and one for “everything else.” That effectively puts your Skype input/output in its own separate location. Which means I can sit and listen to music, and when someone calls, I just put the headset on, click “answer”, and start talking. The two sound cards worked together without any configuration aside from setting Skype to specifically use the SB Live card instead of the internal one. I can play music and talk on Skype without a single problem.

In celebration, I bought another SkypeIn number, this time a USA-based one (510 area code). If you wanna give me a call, lemme know and I’ll give you my number.

Lately, I’ve thought a lot about the making of promises. It seems we all have very widely differing opinions on exactly what a promise is, and I felt the need to express the increasing frustrations I feel about this difference of opinion.

People frequently make promises to me, about mundane or important matters. The issue at hand, though, is this: What exactly constitutes as making a promise? Deep, huh?

- “I’ll be back in a few.”

Is this a promise? If no, why is it not a promise? Do promises have to include the fragment “I promise” for them to be promises?
- “I will send you the results tomorrow.”

What about this one?

Moving on, we run into this: What constitutes breaking a promise?

Presuming that “I’ll be back in a few minutes” is a promise at all, what would be breaking that promise? Returning 10 minutes later, or 60 minutes later, or not returning at all? I think it’s fairly obvious that, presuming “I will send you the results tomorrow” is a promise, by not sending those results the following day would be breaking that promise.

It is obvious that most people have different opinions on which is which. Someone once said, “They [my friends] believe in me, because they know I do not lie,” and this mundane statement stuck to me and has stuck ever since. I want my friends to believe in me, and I want them to believe because I want them to know that every single thing that comes out of my mouth is the truth, as I know it.

Similarly, I want everyone to consider a promise that I make, small as large, as if I have already done what it is I am promising. I am beginning to realize the faultiness of this stance.
Because by striving toward these two goals — not lying and never breaking a promise — I am placing expectations about those around me that I might not have placed otherwise. I expect people to do what they promise to do, and I get very, very sad when they don’t.

I get sad when they don’t even apologize about breaking a promise.

I get sad when they even forget about said promise.

It’s as if promising something bears as much weight as saying it’s sunny outside. It’s just something you say to fill in the gaps in your sentences. Screw actually going through with the promised matter. Saying it is a conversational and polite thing to do, and will put a smile on someone’s face, and that’s all that matters. But I digress.

It’s a Utopian viewpoint I have, it’s a flawed viewpoint to have, but I think that if I can only come to terms with the fact some people don’t care about promises they make, and some do lie, then I may not be as upset about it as I become, right now.

So I got a package sent to me from Japan. My neighbour happens to be Chinese. The parcel itself has some Japanese written on it (which includes Chinese characters). The mail main, despite the fact the envelope says “Mr. Kalle Alm” and despite my door says “K. Alm”, decides to give the envelope to my neighbour.

Gotta love people who take their job seriously.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=6b3af6c9

Which other company would decide to not support newer hardware in this fashion? Adobe can go fuck themselves.

Stop using YouTube.

Stop using Google Video.

If you do that, I’ll give you $5. No seriously, I will.

So, gaim has started crashing several times an hour recently. It just decided to happen and it hasn’t stopped since. I’ve used it continuously for years, it’s crashed something like 2 times during all these years, and nowadays, it crashes 4-5 times/hour.

I keep thinking it must have something to do with my new AMD64 system, as a lot of other apps (e.g. Liferea) work flawlessly on a 32-bit machine, and barely start before they fall off their sticks on my AMD64 system. Oddly though, I’ve been using gaim since I got the machine back in June, and it’s only been acting up the last week or two.

What’s even more odd is that I upgraded temporarily to gaim 2 (the beta) and the problem remained. I’m now running on the SVN version of gaim 2, and hopefully things will be better now. I’m even considering finding alternatives, but I doubt anything out there beats gaim. :/

Update: *crash*

Renamed .gaim to .gay (I know, elementary school humor at its best) and re-entered all my account info. Running without all plugins, including OTR, so government nazi assholes of the world, here’s your chance to hear me speak really, really bad Japanese. A chance you mustn’t miss.

Update: *crash*

Testily compiled and started using gaim on the 32-bit environment instead. Man, it looks like shit, but if it stops crashing, who cares.

Update: *crash* (though I gotta give it to them, this time it stayed alive for over a day — trying again)

A few weeks later, I see this:

“Yesterday, Gaim started crashing for a bunch of people (most notably Windows users) when trying to connect a MSN account. This is due to a bug in Gaim which has been fixed in subversion (don’t use subversion), and we’re working on releasing a fix. We’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, feel free to commiserate with your fellow MSN-using Wingaim users. ” (from gaim.sf.net)
I am not a notable Windows user, admittedly, but it didn’t say exclusively — it said notably. Here’s to hoping…

A few months later, the gaim people claim to have fixed it. I am thrilled to hear that, and might actually give 64-bit a shot again. Gaim was the major reason why I gave up on it. Go Gaim peeps!

Both as a writer (well, as a wannabe writer) and as a learner of a language, I find myself thinking about what exactly a word is, and what it does, and how it affects things. It struck me very recently that oftentimes when I learn a new word in Japanese, it opens up an entire new world for me. I keep hearing the word everywhere, and suddenly I’ve attained another level of understanding. Out of a single word. Words can be used for a lot of things, and this mundane fact seems as fresh and new as today’s news.

I think it’s part of what makes learning a second (or in my case third) language possible at all. If it was just a matter of munching up words into your brain without them actually being connected as intimately as they are, it would be impossible.

If learning new words was all I did, I’m assured that I’d forget the words over and over because they weren’t reinforced. Speaking and listening reinforces — cements — the words I’ve heard, over and over and over and over again, to where I can hear a mere fraction of the word, or I can hear a part of the word, and instantly recognize it for what it is. How long did it take you to read this sentence? A second? Two? It had ten separate words in it. Ten words whose meaning a complete stranger to English would have to learn, individually, and memorize. How many words does the English language have again?

This isn’t very revolutionary, really. It’s just that I decided very early on to write about how my view on these things changes. Learning Japanese is extremely hard in the beginning, but gets easier the further you go. Right now I’m at a stage where I’m comfortably absorbing new stuff every day. I still have a lot to do, though. I’m more or less illiterate in terms of writing in Japanese, but I am getting rather good at reading it (relatively speaking).

This is also the point in time when I’ve been at it for a year. Last August I started on this journey and so far I’m not regretting it one bit. In fact, I’m filled with inspiration about what is to come on this particular venture. As I am going to Japan in a few years to study “for real”, I’ve been slacking lately. I’ve had times when I studied for 5-6 hours a day, and times, like now, when I just learn stuff because I stumble over it without actually looking, and times when I’ve been ignoring it for days at a time. A person who’s dedicated to Japanese would have most likely gotten a lot farther in 12 months than I have, but hey, I’ve got a game to run, a job to keep, and a life to live. Balance in everything, right?