I'll fucking kill the motherfuckers. Twice. And then I'll kill them again.

These times, and especially here in Finland, I'll probably get into less trouble for that than for piracy. Also, I'll   show the judge how to buy Kindle books on Amazon.fr, and after utterly failing to do so he or she will be merciful.

I just wanted to buy a book, for fuck's sake! A bunch of plays by Jean Giraudoux. I already have one, and it was kind of heavy (in the purely physical sense), and I wanted to buy a Kindle edition, which is not a fucking unreasonable desire. And Amazon.com did not have a Kindle edition, so I went to Amazon.fr, which did.

I logged into the damn site, and it recognized me, like it always did when I bought something from there, which I do every once in a while. And the I tried to buy the damn book, and it said "this title is unavailable in your country".

Why, for fuck's sake, why? Does Giraudoux object to Kindle editions from the grave? Do those plays contain some French secrets that make it necessary to sell them to foreigners only as paperbacks? Do huge crowds of Americans stampede to buy the French version instead of buying their own, more expensive version? Oops, I forgot: there is no Kindle version available in the US.

Yeah, I have a shitload of devices with Kindle, and I have considered setting up another account where I claim to be a Frenchwoman who just happens to have a Finnish credit card. Maybe I will, yes. But then again, murder is a lot more satisfying, and piracy is both faster and cheaper.

Ei oo helppoa

The list of people whom I will order publicly flogged as soon as I become the queen of the world is growing. I have added to it:

- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware, and believe that the same manual suits all of them, when it clearly doesn't,
- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware and never tell you which one of them you are holding in your hands (as in "this motherboard comes with either 10/100 Mb LAN or with gigabyte LAN. We are not gonna write it on the box, so take a wild guess."),
- the people who say "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series", meaning "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series manufactured up until now, and we are not gonna bother listing them",
- the people who make modems that appear to work in a routed mode with a static IP, and let you put that IP in the confs, but have no place in the confs for the netmask and the gateway. At least not anywhere findable.

Do I sound a bit stressed?

Saw some weird nightmares lately. One on them involved a small airplane, a huge dick with balls, and a number of palm trees.

Went karting with coworkers, stressed a bit about that in advance. It was even worse than I imagined but nothing acutely evil happened. I could never understand the fun of driving little carlike things when you can drive actual cars, and I feel uncomfortable in the open vehicles in general (note to my army of admirers: you won't impress me with a ride in a convertible, so don't even try). In addition to that the karts had small seats that heat up under you until you become seriously concerned about your ass becoming a smoked ham, horrible smell, weird steering wheel, and the helmets, while obviously necessary, were very unpleasant to wear. On the positive side: the thing constitutes a very efficient ass massage.

My modem croaked yesterday morning. It died on me and needed a reboot and sometimes a reset several times before, but yesterday neither reboot nor reset helped. The amount of stress and rage with which I reacted to it surprised even myself. Anyway, the modem went back to the store. Instead of giving me my money back or a new one, they decided to fix this one (why? why? it never works! every time some company takes some piece of hadware back to "fix it", it ends with them giving me a new one back), and let me borrow another one in the meanwhile. Of course theirs did not support Annex M. Worse, it didn't have a manual. "You just stick it into the wall and into the computer and it will work." - "I have a static IP and it needs to be configured." - "It's work anyway, just wait and see."

Well, did it work? Right... Luckily I had a manual of a similar modem, but even that wasn't of much help.

On top of that, gynecological unpleasantness. No, nothing dramatic or dangerous, just routine maintenance. The routine maintenance in this case involves removing a metal object from the cervix and sticking a new one up there. No fun.

On the brighter side of life:

A nice dinner with coworkers in a Greek place called Minos in Kamppi, and some beer afterwards.

Saw the new Rambo. Very violent, very therapeutic for a person who just had a major fight with her modem, and went for a beer with a friend afterwards, which was also fun.

The motherboard and video card that my parents sent me finally arrived, so can perform unnatural acts on my computer.

Nebula customer support rocks! They really helped me with the evil modem, so now I have the Net connection again.

Friday! Hurrah!

I want resolution!

Why do all the monitor listings tend to list them by size, and I have to click every damn monitor to find out its resolution? Can't they list the damn things by resolution too?

I've been also wondering how come so many people managed to switch from CRT to LCD already. I am only consideing switching now, and probably not gonna do it till the fall, because decent resolutions are becoming affordable only now. How could one switch from 1600x1200 to a 1280x1024?

Also: is there anything particularly good about widescreen monitors, except that they fit widescreen movies?