Ever since I was little, I have been a huge fan of the Finnish Donald Duck pocket books (”Aku Ankan taskukirja”). When I visited Finland last January I bought two full plastic bags of them and brought them back with me. I didn’t buy much else in terms of souvenirs. A few other Finnish books, but that’s about it. Finnish reading material is a rare treasure to have around here.

These pocket books have a very special meaning for me. I don’t just like reading them, I devour them. The language in them is so rich and alive. One day I hope to have them all.

I find it very difficult to get them here, and I miss these books terribly. I’d like to find some new ones. If you know of any online antiquariums that have good, cheap prices and which deliver abroad, please tell me.

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As for books I’ve been reading lately… I am still reading through a Star Trek novel called Millennium, it’s a compilation of three novels based on DS9. I’m not a fanatic Star Trek fan by any means, but I do enjoy these books. Although, after this one I might read a few regular novels for a change. I bought “Little Children” by …whoever (the book’s in the bedroom and I am too lazy to go fetch it) and I’ve seen the movie, so I hope the book is at least as good.

Amoena recently discussed her supposed nerdiness in a blog entry. I say supposed, because I dare not use that description of anyone but myself, so as not to offend anyone. But truth be told, I don’t find the title the least bit offensive, personally.

I’ve been interested in technology for a long time, and at one point I thought I would end up having a career in network administration or software engineering. This was before I realized that while I enjoyed technology, I enjoyed it mainly as a hobby, and making it a focal point of a career would not really suit me in the long run.

But as a hobby, technology has certainly remained a big part of my life. I’ve always had an interest in networking, in particular, ever since I got to mess around with Novell NetWare 3.11 back when I was in 9th grade. I have had several home networks myself, and always enjoy them. So long as they run smoothly. Windows server operating systems aren’t necessarily known for their stability.

Right now, I have no real network setup going on. I have an old Dell desktop which runs XP, and a new machine that runs Vista Ultimate 64-bit. They are configured to network peer-to-peer. There is no actual server at the moment. I’d like to set up a file server at some point, on which I can store media for easy access and storage purposes. But I don’t really have the time to work on that right now.

My most recent technological acquisition is the PDA I bought secondhand from a guy on campus. It is a Palm T|X and it works quite well. I had a very hard time getting it to synchronize with Vista 64-bit, though, seeing as apparently Palm doesn’t support Vista 64, nor does it intend to. PDAs are starting to slowly disappear, as a market, as smartphones are becoming more common. This, I feel, is a great shame. The Palm I have is pretty nice.

I managed to get around the sync problem by tinkering with it until I got the WiFi settings right. Now I can connect directly to my PC via wireless connection. I can take it with me on campus and browse the web or check my email, although the connection is fickle and not particularly fast - much of that is the fault of the university’s IT department, though, their logon procedure is anything but smooth.

I can also use the Palm as a GPS navigation device. I have a GPS module in my car, and I simply hook up the Palm to it whenever I need it. The Palm has TomTom Navigator 5 and maps installed, so I can just type in an address, and the Palm will show real-time map navigation and give voice instructions, just like a “real” TomTom unit. It has made all the difference for me, since I would always be getting hopelessly lost otherwise.

When Jon Stewart referred to Hillary Clinton’s face as being “where boners go to die” he was not far off the target, but clearly he hadn’t caught a glimpse of Sarah Palin. I am getting really sick and tired of seeing this woman in the news. Not because her face is unattractive, but because every other article on CNN is now about her, and none of them are newsworthy.

The rest of the world must be laughing their arses off at the thought of the American people judging Palin publicly because her underage daughter is pregnant. Oh, wow. A teenage daughter, pregnant, in the U.S.! We only have 750,000 of those here each year, 81% of which unmarried, and 8 out of every 10 unintentional pregnancies.

I was at least somewhat interested in the presidential election when Clinton was in the race. I’m no great fan of hers, but now the whole election race become completely retarded. For one thing, Hillary Clinton spent her whole campaign trying to make Barack Obama look as though he would be a completely worthless choice for president. Now that he won the candidacy, she has given her vote of confidence to him and is backing him for president! Now, that was to be expected, since they’re both from the same party, but isn’t that ridiculous? Since she’s no longer in the race, now he’s suddenly a good presidential candidate again? Oh, please; goodbye, credibility!

Then we have John McCain, another old, white, married, presumably straight, deeply religious and conservative asshole, who conveniently picks Sarah Palin, a nobody governor from Alaska to run for second chair. Why? To haul in the votes from the women who were voting for Clinton in the name of “girl power.”

My hunch is that despite his popularity, Obama’s not going to win the election. The people will vote for McCain, who’s just another Bush, another Republican. I think it’s going to be a close race, and race is certainly the keyword when it comes to this election, but I find it hard to believe Obama could really actually win.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Obama’s particularly qualified to be president, but I have a real problem with McCain’s anti-gay, pro-life beliefs.

Since my laptop decided to stop working, I was without a computer for a while, and found it quite unpleasant. Almost as unpleasant as knowing how much data I lost when that piece of crap Acer decided to slip from sleep mode into permanent coma mode. Purchasing a new computer, I decided to steer clear from laptops and buy something I can actually try and fix if something goes wrong.

I decided to go with a Gateway GT5692, which is a nice 64-bit AMD triple-core, with 4 gigs of RAM, a 500 GB SATA-II HDD, and integrated (bleh) Radeon HD3200. For my surprise, it even runs Vista, perfectly. Normally I’d wipe the hard drive clean and partition it myself and all that jazz, but it’s been running so smoothly from the get-go that I have not bothered to mess with it. I’ve installed a load of programs and it still has not shown any decrease in performance. Excellent.

The loss of data bugs me, though, althought it could be a lot worse - I take backups monthly, but it’s obviously insufficient, and once I get settled into this new beast of a machine I’ll plan some sort of automated backup system to protect me against further data loss.

I recently went through the quadannual reformat and reinstall routine on my laptop. Once again I entertained the notion of switching to Vista, and foolhardily did so. I was convinced that if I just turned off all the extra crap, that I could really see Vista fly and perform as well as some have claimed it can. Well, it didn’t for me. This laptop came with Vista installed, supposed be “Vista-ready”, but… Yes, it does run Vista. Just not well. Not anywhere near as fast as XP does. I don’t have the patience to wait 10-15 seconds for Word or Outlook or Firefox to launch. It’s all fine and well if all you do is use the same application throughout the day, but I multitask a lot, and I crave speed. I want blazing fast response times.

I have summer classes going on and was also doing some stuff with the domains so I needed the laptop up and going. So I switched back to XP. I left the secondary partition empty, though, and intend to install Vista on it and dual-boot the two OSs. I just want to have the Vista partition so I can tinker with it and try different tweaks and see if it can be turned into something that I can use.

Meanwhile, in other news, I’ve created an account on Second Life. The concept is really good, but my laptop just doesn’t have the juice to run it that well. Which is surprising… Not that my laptop is a massive gaming rig, far from it, but the SL client didn’t look like it should be demanding so much from PC resources. I guess looks really are deceiving. Since the account is free I’ll possibly check it out some more, for a while, but I honestly doubt it. The frame rate is just…not good in some areas. Well, in most of them.

It’s mostly due to Amoena’s influence that I decided to start a blog again. I’ve had online journals before, but haven’t properly “blogged,” as they say. The likelihood is that this site won’t be all that fascinating, but you never know. Perhaps blogging about this, that, and the other will slowly force me to be more fascinating myself, hence contributing to more entertaining content.