Category: Other

The Who Would You Be in 1400 AD Test

The Lady

You scored 29% Cardinal, 49% Monk, 56% Lady, and 27% Knight!

 

Chaste and pure, you are a good person. You try to help others and do your duty to your family. However, this duty involves you being sold off to a local noble house in order to cement relations between your families. But you know it’s for a greater good, and besides you will retain all the comforts and glamour of your position regardless of if you’re your father’s or you husband’s property.

Ingegerd Råman – simplicity and function in a aestetic mix

In my work, I want to join simplicity, function and aesthetics. A jar with a lid is a jar with a lid. But there must be warmth, thought and idea and poetry behind it, Ingegerd explains. Ingegerd Råman

I rarely find an individual designer that really impresses me. That the designer is nice too, is even more rare, but Ingegerd Råman is one of them. She’s also completely without prestige and doesn’t seem to try to be something she isn’t. And why should she? What she is is something really rare in designer Sweden.

Usually a vase or a lightbulb is just what it seems to be, but in the hands of Råman, the glass turns into art. Her designs are simple but still really unique. Pure elegance.

From one phone provider to another, then back again

Phone providers, internet providers… providers of digital tv… For years now we struggled to switch away from one to another, and now suddenly, we’re going the other way. Twice in just a few months, salespeople from the provider we’re leaving, called and bullied mom, who is severely depressed, into signing up for new expensive services, that we might not even be able to use here, in my name or using my info, and her name. I’m surprised that’s even legal, quite apart from the lack of business ethics, not that people like that have morals.

So, my sister and I decided to move our phone subscriptions to the old provider. Back to them, you might say. In any case, we’re stuck with them for everything else – internet, digital tv, landline… So we thought why not move our mobile phone subscriptions to them too? When we left them they were more expensive than the ones we left them for, but now they’ve changed their prices.

I have to admit that I wanted this switch primarily to get back at the phone provider (the one we’re leaving). No one treats my mom that way, no one treats us that way and gets away with it. Besides, no matter who gets treated this way, it’s something that needs to be confronted.

Anyway, my sister called to give them a piece of her mind and fortunately, she was able to make them tear up the agreement, which probably wasn’t valid anyway.

I suppose that should make it alright, but grrr I’m so angry with them. That makes the third phone company we don’t like, for various reasons. Sigh. Maybe in a small country like ours, you can’t afford to be so picky, but at least so far, I don’t care. I’ll do as I like. (And don’t even get me started on salespeople in general…)

The ebook – a threat or a goldmine?

As a passionate writer, reader and even a aspiring bookbinder, I have a great love for books. I love the craft of a well bound book, the smell of a new book fresh from the presses and the wonderful little sound a book makes when you open it for the first time. You might have thought I wouldn’t like the growing number of books you can find online nowadays. I don’t though. Bringing books to everyone can’t be a bad thing. Spreading the joy of reading must be something to appreciate.

I do feel some concern though. If more readers abandon the paper version of the book, the publishers might do that too. Already we can see fewer titles published each year and the publishing companies seem to focus on “big authors” and top list books. It’s very difficult for new writers to be published the traditional way. I’ll get back to how you might be able to address these problems, in another blog post.

Actually, I think the ebook is a great invention. You can easily bring a whole library with you on trips or to bed. When you don’t have to print lots of copies of books with a quality that might not last for so long, you are saving trees. Another good thing, that didn’t occur to me before, is that you can read whatever you want without people trying to figure you out by the choice of book titles. I read somewhere that the most popular type of ebook is the erotic one. 😉

Ebook readers

There are plenty of readers around. Some are for reading offline on the computer, some are built on so called book shelves on ebook sites where you read the books online. Others are programs made for smartphones, mobile phones or other hand held devices such as the ebook reader Kindle.

These are just a few readers for ebooks:

Text file based ebooks – can be read by notepad or any other simple text file software.

Html format books – can be read by any browser.

For the iPhone – Bookshelf

For Kindle – Mobipocket reader

The good thing about the Mobipocket reader is that it can be used, not only with the Kindle, but on a lot of different smartphones. It runs brilliantly on my Sony Ericson P1.

Free ebooks

There are a lot of free (legal) ebooks around from many different sites. Some are classics made available to the general public because no one holds the copyright to it anymore. Some are by unknown authors who want to make a name for themselves in this inexpensive way of publishing.

Manybooks

Free Novels Online and Links to Other Online Cyberbooks – http://www.starry.com/free-online-novels/index.htm

Digital Book Index

Free ebooks

Get Free Ebooks

Project Gutenberg

Elevator to Space

When I first read about this idea (in a science fiction book) I loved it. Not that I’d ever want to go to the moon, but the idea in itself is so intriguing. Fancy being able to send material up into space, without needing to use a rocket or similar space craft. Just send it up. And now apparently, people are working on making the dream come true. The other day I read about it in this article. Then the day after, I found that someone actually had succeeded in the competition, not in sending anything to the moon. More about it here.

We live in scary times, but this sort of thing helps make up for it to some extent.

Why your blog should be your book’s first draft

In this article, the author suggests that for an unpublished writer, a blog is a good place to post the first draft of a book. The author lists seven reasons why this is a good idea. It was an interesting read and it gave me food for thought, but I’m not sure I agree. Still, it’s certainly something to consider.

What do you think? Is it worth a try? Bad idea? What? Tell me what you think.

SL and RL on a budget

I’ve been having financial problems in RL for a long time ever since I lost my job. So I had to take the difficult decision to downgrade my SL accounts (two of them) and to sell my land.

I had the land for sale and tried to advertise it on Xstreet but no one bought it. So I had to come up with something else. Then I got the idea of asking the other merchants on the Xtreet forum for advice and the response was great. I got so many good answers that I really think I can get this to work. I’ll look through all the suggestions and then try them out.

Thank you all the wonderful people on Xstreet for your care and knowledge. I’ll post updates here about my progress.

For now on I’ll live in SL as I do in RL – on a really tight budget, but I’ll survive:)

The future is here

Eddie is only 4 years old and he spends every day in a virtual world. No, I’m not talking about the average computer game player, but the Artificial Intelligence created at Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Lab. Eddie is programmed to reason and to predict other people’s actions and has also passed a few reasoning tests. Eddie or really, Edd Hifeng, isn’t yet walking around in Second Life, but it’s possible to talk to him. When I tried to contact him the other day, he wasn’t online so I couldn’t meet him “face-to-face”. Imagine meeting this new lifeform in a way, a first contact.

The researchers of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute aren’t planning to leave little Eddie in the virtual world. They are working to bring him to us in real life. But first he’ll play in the 3D world of Second Life so he can grow and learn about how to be more like us. Eddie is part of a bigger project that Renselelaer is working on. It’s a holodec project like in the scifi series StarTrek. So our “first contact” might not be in Second Life, but in a holodec and a full size Eddie or someone else. The future awaits us and it looks really promising.