Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Shopping

Sorry for repeating the last sentence of the previous post: people who say that shopping doesn't make you happy just don't shop in the right kind of places. It's easy to make it fun.

For example: buying extra memory just to cheer yourself up: good shopping. Dragging your ass to H&M to replace your favorite jeans, just to find out that they are sold out: bad shopping.

Anyway, bought some stuff lately:

- 8G of memory. Hurrah! Hurrah! Finally! Resulted in much hand-waving and replacing a 32-bit kernel with a 64-bit one.
- HTC Desire. Cannot be classified as fun shopping, because I had to replace the phone that was dying of old age, but a nice new (I bought it used but it's fairly new) toy nevertheless.
- Samsung Galaxy Tab, also used. Even more fun than I expected, and very convenient.
- A LED water tap. Took me 5 years to realize that a leaking tap can be replaced with a new one. Go me!
- A big collection of Cthulhu stories, Kindle edition (the Galaxy Tab caused me to start using Kindle),
- An air purifier (my current one is more ancient than Cthulhu).

Next one planned: an actual Kindle device.

And most of all: The Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in the Song of Ice and Fire. Only 4 weeks left!

Life

I have noticed that when I have plans to write something I don't usually write anything else until I do. Probably should fix that and try to write things in the order in which they come to mind, not in the order planned.

Not so much new in life, at least not the stuff that I can talk about without endangering other people privacy, or our NDA. (For the curious: if I were to talk about the stuff that I am leaving out, you would probably find it boring anyway.)

The summer has started, and it's short and not very snowy, as befits a Finnish summer. Had a weekend full of parties, beers, picnics, and the best bachelor party ever (Kikka's). The mood is sunny even though the weather is somewhat rainy.

Been shopping for fun, too. People who say that shopping doesn't make you happy just don't shop in the right kind of places.

Shooting women and children

Every time some news source writes something like "the soldiers were shooting women and children" it makes me suspicious. All kinds of questions arise:

- Are they talking about civilian women and children, or combatant women and children? Or both?
- If they are talking about civilian women and children, what has happened to the civilian men?

Yes, I do realize that sometimes the journalists just see soldiers (or whoever) shoot some women and children and simply don't know anything else about the situation, but in general the use of "women and children" in this context smells either of "well, some of the combatants of the other side were female and/or underage, why don't we call them women and children to create the impression that the soldiers were killing unarmed civilians" or "the soldiers had already killed the civilian men the day before, but who cares".