Absurd!

Ok, a really absurd situation has just arisen here at my floor at the University of Copenhagen in the H.C.Ørsted building. We have a HP LaserJet 4700 printer here on the floor and yesterday a coworker of mine was printing out his Ph.D. thesis and the printer ran out of the magenta toner. Well, we just replace it today he thought and went home yesterday content on continuing the day after.

Ok, today arrives and he contacts the computer people that handle the printers and they tell him that they don't have that color on stock and whats more they don't have the money to buy more cartridges!!!!

WHAT! They don't have the money to buy toners for our printer? What kind of an operation are people running here? :-)

Here is a well respected institute in physics (and physicists print a lot of stuff, we need our printers) and they can't hold our printers running!

Fortunately there are other printers in the building but this is just so typical somehow and demeaning for the institute. I just don't have a word for this.

Happy new year

2008 has come and 2007 has gone!

A little late new years greatings, but better late then never right?

I spent my holidays in Iceland, flew to Iceland on the 18th of December and came back to Copenhagen on the 7th of January. It was nice visiting Iceland once again, seeing old friends and some realllly old friends. You see, I went to visit my brother and sister who live in Hnífsdalur (which is a small village just outside of Ísafjörður) and there I met an old friend who I had not seen in ten, twenty years or so. That was really fun. Now I have him on MSN so I won't loose track of him again.

It is always fun wisiting Hnífsdalur, there is allways stuff going on there if you look for it (or it comes to you). Like bad weathers that you have to fight through (or just wait out, inside with some hot chocolate and other nice things), this time I was lucky enough to get to a blitz tournament in chess (I came in nr. 9 of 14) and see a concert with Dúndurfréttir which is an Icelandic band that plays cover songs by Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Uriah Heap mainly. Me and my brother went to hear/see them, it was fantastic! I think that The Rolling Stones magazine has said that this was the best Pink Floyd cover band on earth at the moment (completely unsourced statement, just by hearsay).

As for school, well, things are the same there. I am not satisfied with turning in the paper like it is but I don't know what else I can put in it except a few details that I have been meaning to put in it for quite some time but just never had the energy (or whatever one is supposed to call it) to do it. That has to change now.

Enough for now

Two dead directors.

This week two great cinema directors died and one I had never heard of before. These were Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, the latter is the one I had never heard of before. I have not seen many of Bergmans movies, perhaps only 1 or 2 but I have seen many movies that have been inspired by him and I am sure many movies I have seen have been inspired by Antonioni also, just didn't know it. I allow myself to call them great even though I don't know their work is because they have been inspiration to great directors like Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick and others that I think are good directors, so their inspiration must be good also doesn't it?

The reason I like these kind of movies much more then movies like Die Hard 4 or The Simpsons is the same reason I like the lyrics of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Nick Cave more then the latest R'n'B/Hip Hop lyrics (beside the fact that most R'n'B/Hip Hop music is just plain boring) and that is that one takes on the hardship of life, tries to categorize it and find some kind of resolution to life and does it in an intellectual manner, the other perhaps tries but fails in a miserable way. Don't get me wrong, entertainment is ok, but that is all it is, just entertainment, doesn't have any substance but the former artists are good at combining entertainment with social issues and a little philosophy, that is good art in my opinion.

Anyway, solong and thanks for all the fish (ehh .. movies), Bergman and Antonioni.

24 hours

Why are there only 24 hours in a day? Why do we need to sleep?

I cant do everything I want to do in a day in only 16-17 hours!!!! The day is to short!

Today I went to school, sat in front of the computer and tried to write (nothing came out), came home and watched a little TV (the good old Die Hard movie, the original) then want to read a bit on the web but there is just too much to read! This damn web! It takes too much time away from me!

Roskilde festival

It is raining a lot today here in Copenhagen. And I am sitting at home doing my thesis and being quite satisfied about not being at Roskilde festival :-)

I phoned a friend of mine yesterday who is over there to warn him about this rain, he said his campsite was still dry but more rain would flood them ... I think they are flooded by now ... poor bastards.

Violence begets violence

Once again some people take up the completely wrong reaction to an incident. After the Virginia Tech Massacre there are actually people in the US that still say that more guns are better.

When will those people learn? I hope for the US sake that they are a minority and that the rest are levelheaded enough to outvote them.

perspective

It is funny to be a physicist and work with atoms. There you have to think in the nanometers scale. This sort of got me off balance when I was looking for bed linen. I measured the cover of my cover to be 2 m long and 1.2 m wide and went looking for that but found only 2 m long and 1.4 m wide! That is a 20 cm difference! That is huge I thought, the linen will be hanging around my cover and it wont be comfortable. I searched in many places but all had the same sizes. I started to get suspicious of my doubts and decided to contact my sister who is a professional seamstress. She just laughed at me and told me that this was normal and that I should go get a reality check (ok, you didn't say it in those words sys but close enough :-) ).

Yeh, mixing work with every day life is difficult, work makes sense, life doesn't!

Interesting

Here is a site that shows how people can help in "saving the world" just from the leisure of their homes in front of their computers. But then again doing that costs electricity which is energy and that is most certainly pollution (unless you have hydro power or something like that), what a predicament! :-)

No phone

Like Cake sang at one time then I have no phone at the moment :-(
I lost it yesterday and am not expecting to get it back. There is no great loss in the phone itself, just the content in it, a lot of numbers of friends and family. So I guess I have to either be without phone for a while or gather together some money to buy a cheap phone. I think I will try to be without phone for a while, see how it goes :-)

Disapointing!

Yesterday was a big disappointment to me, I was watching the handball game between Iceland and Denmark (I just had to watch it since I am an Icelander living in Denmark) and Iceland lost. Ok, we lost, but the way we lost was simply amazing! It had gotten into overtime and when there were 5 seconds left of the overtime the score was tied! More exciting it cant be but when there were 2 seconds left the bloody Danes scored and won the game. Talk about luck!
Well, better luck next time to Iceland.

Weather

When I left the lab this evening the wind had picked up a little bit (was up to 15-20 m/s) and when I came home I discovered that it was a bit difficult getting into my room because I had left the window open. When I leave my window open the wind seems to over pressurise my room and it gets difficult to open the door to the corridor. But this day I discovered something "funny".

After I had eaten in the kitchen (which is not in my room, we are 12 that share a kitchen in this dorm) I went back to my room to do some work and discovered a strange smell in my room, couldn't quite place it but I knew this smell. At the moment it is a bit like I have a cold, small headache and a sniffling nostril so I discarded it as something to do with that but the smell was still there, maybe the wind blew something into my room that smelled like that. Then I had to go again to the kitchen so I passed my bathroom and the smell was strongest in there. Ohhh myyy ... what has happened???

I open the toilet and voila! No water in the bowl and there is just sweet shitty smell coming out of my toilet because there is a dry path all the way to the sewer. Easy to fix, just flush the toilet once and the bowl fills up with water and stops the smell from coming up to my room and pleasing my nostrils.

What a strange design that this could actually happen when the wind blows outside and the window is open (this doesn't happen when the wind blows and the window is not open or when the wind is not blowing and the window is either open or closed, I don't think other factors count in this). Maybe I should close the door to my bathroom when I leave in the mornings? I would really like to be able to have my window open when I am not home because it cleans out the air in my room, I don't like stale air.

Snowing outside

Its snowing in Copenhagen! We havent had a shred of winter so far and this morning I wake up and lo and behold, outside white flakes tumble down to the ground. Life is full of surprises sometimes.

Which reminds me, I was reading a book by Haruki Murakami called Norwegian Wood (published in 1987), in it one of the characters has a grandparent that has this motto "Life is like a box of chocolates" ... hmm, I know this quote from somewhere. Forest Gump! Little research on wikipedia and voila, the book Forest Gump (published in 1985, movie in 1994) never had that quote, the book said "Being an idiot is no box of chocolates". So the movie borrowed that line from Norwegian Wood, just so you know :-)