jill/txt

In Norway there’s a tradition that the weather on your birthday is like a report card on how good you’ve been over the past year. Today the weather is a mixture of everything: strong winds, sun for a few minutes, a little drizzle, some grey clouds, sudden blue sky and sun again. I’m taking that as a sign that I’ve been really interesting over the past year.

Tonight some friends are coming round to help me drink up champagne left over from my defence party last year. Maybe I’ll mix some drinks too - look, The Webtender lets you tell it what’s in your bar, and it tells you what you can make! If I can get strawberries I might make some virgin strawberry daiquiris, too. The drivers and kids would appreciate that, I know. Oh, and little umbrellas for the drinks: my eight-year-old will adore that.

After a few cool years of pretending birthdays are for kids, I’ve definitely decided that I like getting attention on my birthday. I love cards in the mail, emails from friends I hardly ever see and the phone call from my sister with promises that the pressie’ll turn up, uh, soon. I’m thrilled that on barely any notice, many of my friends are happy to pop round and help me drink champagne!

There are spelling mistakes and grammatical errors in the latest Norwegian and Swedish versions of Windows XP, as, it must be said, there are in most translated software. Interestingly, the Swedish translator has actually blogged a post wondering how this might have happened.

Ooh. This is the sort of thing I enjoy doing in daydreams :)

I signed up for an excursion the Alliance Française is hosting this Saturday. It’s a guided tour of the roses out at the Arboretum - in French of course - and to be followed by a picnic. The website seems welcoming and the point does seem to be to provide an environment for people who aren’t French to speak French in, but I’m terrified. I mean, sure, I can speak French, I spoke nothing but French for two weeks earlier this month, I was happy. I can read Le Monde and even understand most announcements at train stations, but I make so many mistakes, and I can never remember le subjonctif, and they’ll all laugh at me and they’ll be annoyed that I came because my French is so far from perfect and I don’t know anyone there and I suppose if it’s terrible I can just sort of be quiet and go home early.

And if I don’t go I will regret it forever and my French won’t get any better. I’m going.

I’m home and it’s dark and loneliness is seeping in. My daughter’s going on holidays with her dad and my sweetheart’s on a plane and won’t be here for weeks. My neighbour died last night, cracking jokes, her sister told me, and minutes after she died her family watched fireworks from her hospital window, can you imagine, fireworks were being fired off from the top of the mountain she saw every day for years and walked on every day as a younger woman. She lived in this house for decades, treading the floor above my ceiling, and this unfamiliar emptiness mingles with the loneliness I’d feel anyhow at the end of weeks of travelling and talking and playing and loving and parenting. Tomorrow I’ll ring my friends and hope they remember me after all my travelling and absence. Tomorrow I’ll work. This weekend I’ll visit my sister.

Right now I think I’ll crawl under my doona and turn the TV on for company.

It’s dawn. I guess that’s a gentle suggestion that perhaps, given I’m on this continent and not on that, I might consider sleep.

Confused by different standards I bought jeans in the States two sizes below what I thought my size was and returned home to find the jeans are big enough I could be five months pregnant and perfectly comfortable in them. What a waste of money.

I wonder how all these different size conventions around the world actually originated. 38 or M in Northern Europe, 75B in Scandinavia, 95B in France, 10 in Australia, something less than 8 in the US, XXL in Asia. Did everyone just start their own systems completely independently? Then why do the sizes always skip two - from 10 to 12, from 38 to 40?

Maybe I’ll try and boil the jeans. Aren’t jeans supposed to shrink, anyway?

We not only had fun following the players around and laughing at their antics, they reminded us, in the most amusing manner, of how rich with history Bergen is. It’s easy to forget all the stories here - like the stories of the Hanseatic League, whose Northernmost post was in Bergen. The Hansa merchants’ houses still line the harbour, and stepping into the labyrinthine passages between them is still bewitching. Of course, 500 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to walk through those passages. Women weren’t permitted in the area at all. Nor could women own property, sign contracts or trade - except for their bodies. I like living now. It was great seeing my seven-year-old daughter soak up the history, too, especially with such enjoyment.

Bergen Byspill will be playing Hansaspill for another month.

Will Self’s imitation of Dorian Gray got a bit repetitive for me so I started on a murder mystery Mum lent me that’s written from the perspective of a boy with Asperger’s. It ’s so satisfying to sometimes read a book where you can race through 40 pages in half an hour. I think perhaps having a degree in literature adds a touch of guilt to the pleasure of voracious reading, you know, if it were Great Literature, you couldn’t read it that fast, and knowing how much Great Literature there is, shouldn’t the lit. grad. spend all her time reading Great Literature? Not to mention Great Electronic Literature. Instead I curl up with an airport paperback, the guilt, along with nostalgia for childhood reading abandon, sweetening the pleasure of the text. There are some unexpected pleasures in a story narrated like this, too. This, for instance, after a detailed (but not too detailed, you know, the narrator may not understand people but the author knows how much a reader can take) explanation of how simple it is to find prime numbers, except that it isn’t, not when the numbers get big.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Imagine if we knew the rules for life, for emotions, for people. Huge computers would spend years working out the immensely complicated details - it could be done, of course, with a powerful enough computer, just as you can work out whether a number with 100 digits is a prime number or not, it would just take time. I wonder whether immensely complicated emotions could be used for codes, as prime numbers are?

What a wonderful explanation of what Benjamin means by the aura of a work.

I was really disappointed when I realised that even after my PhD, neither Scandinavian Airlines or KLM would let me change my title from Ms to Dr Walker. However, British Airways would have been happy to oblige. I could have chosen Her Highness or President as my title with British Airways. I wonder whether people who choose titles like Crown Princess or Contessa are still allowed to fly economy? (via Boing Boing)

So a student at NYU slept in the always-open library because his $15,000 scholarship and his part-time jobs couldn’t cover the $10,000 a year dormitory costs as well as books and food. And he blogged it: just look at the cover page of his blog, he’s revelling in his story and boy has he found a hook for his blog! The library threw him out after the press got the story (here the NY Times story, subscription-free in a syndicated newspaper) but NYU have put him up in dorms for free for the rest of the semester. As you would, given the press.

Free tuition, student loans for everyone that actually more or less cover living expenses and practically no homelessness ROCKS! I *heart* Norway.

This definitely belongs to the “I Choose And Personalise My Self-Representations Therefore I Am” category. Can anyone translate that to Latin for me so it sounds more philosophical, please?

Yesterday Scott suggested I’d have done well as one of those colonial ladies a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago who travelled the world in white hats and long skirts, drank gin and tonics in Arabia, India and Kuala Lumpur (I’ve done the latter) and wrote elegant books about their adventures. I’m surprised the idea never occurred to me, actually, because wow, that sounds like a wonderful life.

I want to go to California. And Cuba. And Moscow. And back to Uluru and Tokyo and Rome.

I live in a housing corporation, a borettslag, with about a hundred households and a board and a caretaker and concerned neighbours who once I got past thinking them busybodies turn out to be caring, helpful and supportive. The general assembly’s next week and today the petitions arrived. One is from a family down the road who last summer tried their hands at bee-keeping. I’m several houses away and merely noted this with amusement, but their closest neighbours complained, pointing out that the rules only allow cats and dogs, and so the bees had to be sent out to the country somewhere. The petition is masterful. They suggest extending the permitted pets to include “small animals” that are kept in cages indoors or outdoors, such as hamsters, guinea pigs, birds, oh, and bees. Pets are good for children, they argued. Fewer allergies. More love. Bees.

I, uh, ended up photoshopping away at that mockup last night instead of grading papers or finishing the essay that’s due today. I think I quite like it. I especially like the very formal “Dr Jill Walker, Dept of Humanistic Informatics” etc along the top and the nice pink boxes with just my latest publication or talk featured, with links explaining what the rest’ll be. When I haven’t given a talk for a while I could just remove the talks box, too. If I wanted.

What’s NOT in there yet is recent comments and trackbacks, which I do want to keep prominent - a blog is never a blog unto itself, it’s part of a network and I want to show that. But where can I put them? Up to the right and the publications and so on will be pushed down below “the fold” (the part of the page that’s visible before you scroll).

I also need to figure out how to show archives by date and category. I think I’ll put in another pink box which might have direct links to two or three of my favourite categories and then has a link to a page with a complete index to category and monthly archives.

And where to put the blogroll? Ghani has replaced the classic blogroll by picking out a random blog she reads for every time the page is loaded, with a “Ghani is probably reading /such and such a weblog/ right now”. That’s cool, but I use my blogroll as kind of a startpage for surfing the web. I suppose I could put that on a separate page, too, but…
Any ideas?