Back on track

I decided to register a domain since I will be hosting at least my own and probably at least one other car project in the future. This means that my alternate blog should be back online as soon as the domain registration has gone through, so have a look at http://nms.bilgalning.se/blog.txt to find out.

Murphy's law

I checked and double checked the URL before I started to write in the alternate blog, but for some odd reason the hostname nms.regerar.org was removed from DNS on thursday, five days after posting here about it. I can't seem to get in touch with the guy responsible for the domain and/or DNS in question, so I guess I'll have to register a new domain for myself. It feels a bit like a complete waste of time and money, but perhaps I can manage to arrange things so that I don't have to pay for it until after everything else has been settled.

Desperate readers will catch the blog on http://102b.skogsglantan.ac/nms/blog.txt for the time being.

Alternate blogs

I have decided to let my other identity make his voice heard in a Swedish "blog". This means that I will probably not post as often here as you are all used to, which is somewhere close to bi-weekly these days.

Those of you who understand swedish may or may not wish to take a look at http://nms.regerar.org/blog.txt to get better informed about what happens in the life of a currently not very lonely car mechanic. First post will be an update about my current situation in life, so both new and returning readers will get a couple of unasked questions answered.

I might return here some day, but I don't think it will be any time soon, and it probably won't be interesting.

Ashamed?

Yes, I most certainly am. I'm ashamed for all my unpaid debts, but feeling bad about owing people money does not make me any richer.

Don't worry, if I owe you money you will get it. I'm not in any way trying to run from my debts, I'm just hiding from them at the moment. When I constantly live with just enough money to pay my bills and feed me through a month I just don't give a shit about who I owe money and how much they nag about it. Last month I was forced to quit smoking - a vice I did not really want to give up - for financial reasons. This month I had to borrow my girlfriend's personal Jet gasoline billing card to get to and from work without spending all my food money on fuel.

No, I'm not the kind of guy who talks to people about postponing payments and similar. For some reason I was never raised with social skills as a goal, and some skills I would have been a lot better off if I had learned a long time ago are just now starting to develop. That's not some kind of excuse or cry for help, that's the simple fact and is not open for discussion or treatment.

I admit I'm really lousy with financial planning and I have never been really good at saving money. I can probably list about a hundred less thought trough financial decisions done by me in the last five years or so. This does not change the decisions made or the results thereof, and nothing I can do really will.

This month is my first with my new employer, and I'm having a great time compared to the place I worked before. Financially, this month is looking quite good; I might not be able to pay all my debts entirely, but I will make substantially debt reducing payments to a certain number of individuals.

Just calm down and leave me alone. Comments like "why [...]?", "when [...]?", "how [...]?" and variations of "put your money where your keyboard is" will not yield results interesting to either of us.

Evolution

This morning, while still in bed letting my mind associate its way through the world I started thinking about the 19th century war between Sweden and Russia, which took a lot of soldiers' lives in battles around these parts of the country. This got me thinking about how wars are waged and fought: Often there are two or more leaders sitting at a table discussing how to draw borders on a map or share mutual resources, and when these discussions run into a dead end they give orders for their armies to attack each other.

I slept a lot in school, and hence am not too familiar with world history, but I have a general grasp of what has happened through the ages. Allow me to try to recap a little:

• In pre-historic times - neanderthals, homo erectus and those guys - a handful of cavemen would toss rocks and beat wooden sticks at another handful of cavemen, probably with no better excuse than "nobody but me can piss on that tree" or similar.


• In ancient times - romans and greeks conquering the world - kings and emperors talked more or less peacefully about a piece of land or (as in the case of the greeks and the spartans) some woman and when they can't agree they let their armies fight it out.


• In medieval times - for some reason also known as "the dark ages" - the armies would fight blindly for years until one side got the bright idea to kill the other side's leader, and suddenly the war was over.


• In modern times - democratic world leaders teaching dictators how to run their countries - the size and number of mushroom clouds decides which country has the most power, and armies are used to defeat those countries who currently does not have nukes but could potentially show a bigger and better cloud in the near future.
  

I live in Sweden and haven't had any first hand experience of war, so I can only relate to it through what I have seen in news, Discovery documentaries and Hollywood movies. At my last job I had a trainee from Iraq, who (naturally) had real, first hand experience of war, and when I asked him about what he felt about a friend of mine who was born in Iran he said "I don't care where he's from - we did not fight that war, our leaders did."

Today, we can see this evolution of war in the actions of football "supporters":
The hooligans are going from rocks and sticks to firearms these days; how long before football is all about mushroom clouds?