tasuki’s blog

I recently found a website called crime library. The stories there are very very disturbing. They are in fact so disturbing that I suggest you not to read it before going to sleep (or not to read it at all if you just don’t feel like it).

I will list a few stories that are particularly frightening… like Dennis Rader aka BTK, meaning bind torture kill; Ted Bundy, a well-educated and seemingly normal guy; Albert Fish, elderly man who was fascinated by eating humans; Christopher Wilder, beauty queen killer; or Pedro Lopez, who killed hundreds of young girls. There were also couples that tortured and murdered together, like Fred & Rose West or Paul Bernardo & Karla Homolka. Then there is a particularly disgusting story about necrophiles (if they don’t kill anyone I don’t think there’s anything ethically bad their actions, it’s just disgusting, but the ones mentioned usually killed).

One particularly weird story is about Issei Sagawa, who has killed and eaten a woman and is proud of it. Oh yeah, and wasn’t imprisoned… he still walks freely and enjoys a celebrity status in Japan…

Also, I never knew that there was a 10 year old girl, who killed other kids because she enjoyed it. That’s probably the scariest of all the articles. The violence in this one is relatively low, but the fact that it was all done by a 10 year old makes it particularly horrifying.

How? How is it possible that human mind can get twisted like that? Can they even be considered humans?

The poem on the left side was written by Christian Morgenstern. This version is the “German” original. The right side version is the “Czech” translation.

Well, anyone who writes poems only with words that have no sense probably suffers from serious brain damage. But maybe he was just making fun of people actually publishing and buying this crap…

But anyone who translates such a poem to another language must be a total moron. Yeah, go ahead and write your own bullshit poem, but please don’t call it a translation to sell better…

The participation at the Czech go championship used to be almost for free, sometimes we even got money for each won game (not much, but still).

This year, everything has changed – almost 100€ for entry fee + accommodation. I don’t want to spend that much money for something that should be free (I already placed third in the qualification tournament series and earned my right to play at the championship, why pay for it?).

When I complained about the price, I was told that: today it is not much money, and my go club could pay that for me. Well, I’m not going to ask my go club for any money, because I barely ever go there and don’t even pay the annual club fee… that would be just plain unfair.

The other day I learned that one guy (who wasn’t even qualified in top ten and but placed 18th in the qualification) got around 90% discount (because he was a student – but hey, I’m a student too).

If they think, that after this I’m going to help with transmitting the games on KGS… well… bwahahahahaha…

Saying that something will happen nexet weekend can be very confusing. What exactly does “next weekend” mean?

Say it’s thursday (it actually is, but that doesn’t matter). Now read this: “It will happen this weekend.” and “It will happen next weekend.” Is there any difference between those sentences at all? This weekend is obviously the closest one, but what about the next weekend? For me personally it’s the same, but some people perceive it as the weekend after this one. It’s similar with the last weekend: “It happened last weekend.” and “It happened this weekend.” Well actually I think that there’s no argument there, the last weekend just has to be the last one, or do you think that the last weekend is the weekend before the last weekend?

I don’t know how this works in various languages, but at least in czech it’s very unclear. I experienced several misunderstandings because of that. What’s your point of view? (and please don’t pretend that you are not here, it’s getting tiring..)

PS: When I write that I’ll post something tomorrow, it means that I’ll maybe post something during the next week (whatever “next week” means).

Next time you get stuck in a traffic jam, please realize that it could have been much worse.

Yeah, I know that this is what most of blogs look like: “hey look I found a link”, but I promise you are going to get a full post tomorrow (no promises about its quality though).

My hair started turning (I wouldn’t exactly call it curly). Let me describe it more accurately – the hair (especially on my forehead) first go more or less straight down and then, suddenly, it turns… left? right? no… it turns outwards… it’s totally the most stupid direction and it makes me look even more like a total freak (I’m not sure if that’s even possible, but it annoys me nevertheless, and whenever there are people around and I think of my stupid hair I feel like hiding my head in the sand (luckily for me there is usually no sand around)).

I tried persuading my hair not to turn or to at least turn in another (any other) direction. I’ve even threatened it with violence (scissors)… to no avail…

I’m desperate: are scissors the only solution?

I stumbled upon a typing test. I chose “Fishing in Finland” and measuring in CPM (characters per minute, as opposed to WPM – words per minute, which is pretty useless). And my first result was 250 – hazah. That makes slightly more than 4 keystrokes per second, which is not bad, considering the fact that I spent quite a lot of the time looking at the screen and reading (when I want to type as fast as possible I have to look at the keyboard), also the word “eutrophication” took several seconds for me to grasp. On next rounds I achieved higher score, but I guess that doesn’t really count when you know the text already.

Then I tried just writing something from my mind (eg. I didn’t look at the screen at all) and I wrote 90 characters in 15 seconds (tried it several times with similar results), which makes cca 6 keystrokes per second (if I understand it correctly, that is roughly equal to 60 wpm).

According to wikipedia, there’s a woman who is about three times faster than me. Twice faster would be still at least imaginable, but three times faster than me? Come on… I am not that slow… or am I?

As much as I praised the beta of Edgy Eft (betas are usually horrible and this one was simply great without any flaws), the final release sucks. It replaced  [working] orinoco drivers for my wifi with [not working] prism2_pci drivers. Took me a while to figure it all out (merely a day or so, because I messed it up). The cool login/logout sounds from gnome were replaced with not so cool ones, The textbox of firefox’s google toolbar looks awfully. Uh, not sure what else they managed to mess up… but I think I will find more things…

As a side note, the bloody gaim still doesn’t write “user logged out”/”user logged in” to the chat windows, I dunno where the mistake could be… I was told that it works but it doesn’t work for me with gaim2.0.0beta3.1 (nor under my settings nor under default settings (which I tried, as my settings could have been borken)). Any ideas/experiences?

And ubuntuforums suck. Seriously. They just ignore my posts (only sometimes someone writes “I have the same problem too”).

I only very recently discovered Nightwish (their official site is also worth visiting). The trick is that they have a real singer – Tarja Turunen (well, she’s not their singer anymore, but the past albums are sung by her). I’m not going to just copy wikipedia here (go read it yourself) so I’ll add my subjective opinions about the albums:

• Angels Fall First – their first album, I really like it, the best songs are Elvenpath, Beauty and the Beast, Astral Romance, Angels Fall First, Eramaajarvi
• Oceanborn – most the songs are a bit too fast but good nevertheless, particularly good are Gethsemane and Moondance (czesc kotasz); Sleeping Sun is one of the best Nightwish songs that can be found on new releases of this album or as a single
• Wishmaster – nothing except the Wishmaster caught my attention on this album
• Over the Hills And Far Away – only few songs, the good ones are Over the Hills And Far Away and the cover version of Astral Romance
• Century Child – there are some good songs: End of All Hope, The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty of the Beast; and there is one excellent song: Feel For You (I can listen to this one on repeat over and over again)
• Once – this album was a complete hit and contains many great songs: Dark Chest of Wonders, Wish I had an Angel, Nemo, Planet Hell, Creek Mary’s Blood, The Siren, Dead Gardens, Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan

Now they are getting a new singer instead of Tarja… I don’t want to say they can’t find anyone this good, but at least it will be very difficult.

While my spelling is generally good (it was always easier for me to remember how words are written than how they are pronounced) I always had troubles distinguishing vowels. I mean, I usually do know which vowel there should be, but I just sometimes make the mistake of writing a different one instead. I always realize it immediately when I see the word on screen, but somehow I don’t realize it when writing. So yeah, recently I’ve written ‘rondamly’ instead of ‘randomly’ in a chat and they thought it was a good joke… well, it actually wasn’t…

Sometimes I write a whole word differently, like writing ‘hojo’ instead of ‘toho’ (happened to me the other day). I don’t know the cause, and it’s not particularly annoying, it’s just strange and surprising.

I vaguely remember experiencing something a bit similar in some high school classes — I was very tired and trying to write what the teacher was saying, and as I was falling asleep, my hand somehow continued writing, although it didn’t write letters anymore, just random something that looked a bit like letters (and of course it had nothing to do what the teacher was saying as I was asleep by that time).

So it might actually be the same… you are still writing because of momentum while your brain already has a holiday…

Has anything similar ever happened to you?