The Internets is full of wondrous things, one of which is this tribute video to Oskar Werner I found on YouTube. While the fact that something like this exists on YouTube only slightly mystifies me, I do wonder though why the creator of this video chose to add a song which is not only dull, but also by a Christian singer? To my knowledge Werner drunk himself to death, more or less. Boring? Maybe. Christian? Not really.
Well, enjoy the clip. And by the way, commenting is not a crime. Yet.
Sometimes it takes you ages to find out things you actually should have noticed right away. Today I noticed the following about myself: When I put my cold hands into my cold gloves, neither of the two sets will warm up.
Now, this may seem like a negligible toe-nail clipping to you, but it’s an insight that will quite probably help me in keeping my hands warm from now on. And even though the current temperature drop is just a break in a wonderfully springlike wave, it’ll be nice to know about the “cold hands-cold gloves theorem” next winter.
We went to the laundromat yesterday, because sometimes you need a bigger washing machine than the ones they usually sell.
My original plan of having ice cream and sitting on the boardwalk in front of the laundromat while waiting for our laundry to finish was thwarted by a rather dusty storm that swept through the streets of our district yesterday noon.
We had slices of greasy pizza instead.
When we were young, my parents always made sure we had enough books to read. One of the most read authors back then was Astrid Lindgren, whose books always were a lot more than simple youth fiction. Her books brilliantly managed to capture what it’s like to be a kid, especially when all there is around you is a grown-up’s world. It didn’t matter whether they were stories about opposing robber’s bands, an orphan boy who finds out he’s actually a prince or two brothers who meet again in a magical afterlife.
The Brothers Lionheart, the one about the two brothers, was always a book I loved. Not least because I thought that with me being a lion sign-wise, the whole story was written for me in a way (well, I was a kid, what do you expect?). But not only the book, I was also fascinated by the movie that was created in 1977 (with a screenplay adapted by Astrid Lindgren herself). Back then, this blend of adventure, death, black clad evil knights and not least a dragon was perfect to draw me in. And to this day I’m searching for the soundtrack, which had such a sweet opening tune, I’m sometimes dreaming about hearing it again.
Well, and I will hear it again soon, because some kind soul in some Swedish production company, sometime in 2004, decided to not let this gem of childhood memories slide into oblivion, and so issued it on DVD, complete with German subtitles (because my Swedish is still rather basic, and they must have known). I ordered the DVD today (and who would have known that rekindling your favourite childhood moments is as cheap as 9,99 Euros).
And if you haven’t seen the movie yet, I advise you do the same (unless you are my girlfriend, then you’ll have to watch it in about four days anyway).
…but I didn’t think it would turn out to be that bad.
(Public service announcement: This entry is rather technical in nature, and may not be suitable for people who are not interested in Linux. It does contain human tragedy though.)
See, I really, really like my Linux. I spent hours, days, weeks tweaking my system to create the perfect working environment (the fact that work always came a bit short due to tweaking the system should not be of importance at this point). And while usually uptime is perfect, meaning I can put my computer through its paces for a whole day without having to restart anything, not even my browser, I know that this performance is based on a system that can crash with the blink of an eye. If it’s the wrong eye, and you’ve got root privileges.
Well, crashing it all is what I thought I had done today. After installing all the available updates, I spent the better part of today trying to get my system up and running again, because it always crapped out on me with a system freeze, meaning my mouse suddenly stopped moving, as did the rest of what was on my screen. The only way out was a hard reboot. I attributed that to the fancy things I had installed to make my desktop look pretty, and dug deep to find out where exactly it was going wrong. After a few hours I caved in and booted Windows, just so I’d be able to do a Google search on the problem - without having to fear the system would freeze up again. But lo and behold, Windows froze too.
So there you have it. The Linux upgrade didn’t botch my system, it’s actually my hardware that’s having a slight problem (I’m guessing it’s the CPU fan that just doesn’t do a very good job at keeping it all cool). So, in a weird way I’m glad it’s like that. Goes to show that upgrading Linux isn’t that bad after all.
In another way though, I’m devastated, because it means there’s something wrong with my computer I’m not able to fix. I will, with all probability, have to send in my computer. And that, dear readers, is breaking my heart (note to girlfriend: I’m not entirely serious).
PS: I was able to pen this whole thing without a single hard reboot! Hail to the gods of CPU cooling systems, who seem to be alright with me using my computer as long as it’s typing and not editing images or anything fancy like that.
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