I don’t know what brought it about.

I was sitting at the office, thinking about those little “I Heart” messages that you see from time to time. “I {heart} New York” would probably be the most famous slogan, supposedly. And then I thought, why not make an I-Heart-Generator?

With a gasp and a choke, I realized that the domain name “iheart.se” was still available. And being the administrator of a web hotel, I quickly leaped into action and registered it for myself.

And thus it was born, the I Heart generator.

Mitt webbhotell det rullar på
Och ingen downtime vill jag få
För servrarna tickar lugnt och skönt
Kontrollpanelen lyser grönt.

  Yeah, yeah, ingen kan bli vrång,
  När jag sjunger min webbhotellssång.

På webben kan man surfa runt
Även om det mesta liknar strunt
Men vem bryr sig när allt är fritt
Som delas ut från webbhotellet mitt.

  Yeah, yeah, natten kan bli lång,
  När jag sjunger min webbhotellssång.

När strömmen ryker och allt blir svart
Och ingen annan dator kommer någonvart
Jag njuter då fullt av en vacker sonat
Från mitt fina reservkraftsaggregat.

  Yeah, yeah, alla servrar är igång
  När jag sjunger min webbhotellssång.

(Jag erkänner att jag skrev den här sången för att bli den enda i världen som har en sökträff på ordet “webbhotellssång”.)

• Color film
• Gunpowder
• Trains
• Mowed grass
• Newly baked bread
• Coffee

What else?

I suppose it was inevitable. Still, very strange.

Today I’ve read a book by Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) and listened to Arvo Pärt’s Fratres.

Who says you don’t get influenced by other people?

Off to a good start, hmm?

Invoicing can be a pain
When it’s just a thing
That you’ve been told to do
And all the numbing mindlessness
Of daily chores done nonetheless
Exciting as the flu
I wish instead for meadows green
And things that I have never seen
And happiness and bluer skies to come
To my computer screen…

Think Simon and Garfunkel and a simple guitar to accompany it. Beautiful. :)

My CEO recently described me as “something as unusual as a technician with a sense for design”.

It flattered me; because I’ve never seen myself as a technician. Although I am a software developer and build computer systems for a living, sort of, there’s a hidden quality that rests within me that perhaps is not immediately obvious to everyone:

Passion!

As calm as I am outside, inside I am a very passionate person. Sometimes I feel like my emotions are so intense, my whole nervous system so sensitive, that I can literally pick apart an orchestral work and step right into it, disassembling the sound as I listen to it and placing the woodwinds, brass and strings around me.

I guess that’s why I like music so much: The strings of my heart quiver when I hear music, like the strings of a violin guided by the touch of a skilled violinist. My soul can soar to unknown heights when it’s in sync with music that’s playing (which is a very good reason why I shouldn’t listen to opera at work, because I won’t get any work done) — and likewise, when trying to concentrate on work and someone else turns on the radio with some mindless beat music, I plunge to the very depths of despair.

Because I’m like that… Passionate.

It becomes a problem when I have to do administration at work. I should have sent out invoices this week; I remind myself every day to do it. (I’m going to do it tomorrow. Really. No, really!) And yet… it’s infinitely more fun to work on the new server; plunging into the depths of system configuration, reading books and FAQ’s, searching for clues and answers. Like a painter, with every stroke of the brush building towards the final picture, I add scripts, config files, download yum packages, step by step ever so carefully completing the server. It’s something I can pour all of my heart into, focusing all my energy upon it and storming this challenge with every intellectual capacity I have.

Yeah, the invoices. Right. Doing administration chores is … about as much fun as assembling parts at a factory. Like telling an artist who just created a beautiful painting, “okay, good, now make fifty of these and we should be about set”. And it’s not that I think less of that type of work (after all, it needs being done!) – it’s just that it’s not how I function.

So I have to motivate myself, find tricks to get things done, and focus, focus. Once I get into it, it usually works out okay, but I squirm and agonize over it for days. Because there’s no passion in it. And that’s why I sometimes pull off great and wonderful feats at work, and in between those moments my productivity can drop to … well, below everyone elses for sure. I usually manage to save the day by being kind of fast at doing things, once I get around to it, but…

I guess that’s why I write poetry about people I fall in love with – because I have to get those stormy feelings out somehow. I pity the woman that one day might fall in love with me… :)

So it’s back to work tomorrow – moving domains, sending out invoices, answering the phone and handling support calls. Chores, administration. Blech. But it needs being done.

But, my, that new server sure looks interesting…

I’m not really tired, I tell myself. And I don’t feel like I want to go to sleep. Although I notice that I’m making a lot of speling errors. Gosh, it’s more difficult to write than I thought.

Filed my taxes tomorrow. Can you say that? Mixing imperfect and future tense in the same sentence is always fun. It evokes a feeling of timelessness. If it hasn’t happened yet, can I still know that it is going to happen? And can I use the imperfect in that case to denote an action which already has been completed, just not carried out yet? I mean, it’s not like it will not have been done, one day.

Vocative is cool, by the way. Read up on it today again. (The letters don’t seem to come out as I want them to.) Locative, however, is more trouble than it’s worth, and can be readily replaced by prepositions. I had written town “temporal” on a preposition in my word list, but I’m not sure why, or if it’s a temporal locative declension (?) or not. It should be, given that time is merely a dimension in space-time and can easily be mapped to something ridiculously conventional, probably using (gah! spelling) c, i, or possibly both.

I think I’ve written before about i. Or c. Or possibly e, i and pi. (Pie is good.) But c wasn’t in it. I think that’s how Einstein wrote it: t*c, or something. Time multiplied by c equals a distance somewhere. On an axis. The fourth axis. It could be imaginary. An imaginary axis, but that’s ok, because God sees everything, even imaginary axes. (The plural of axis is axes, isn’t it? Hebrew has singular, plural, and dual. Jerusalem – Yerushalam – somewhere became dual, Yerushalayim. Kind of like that error message in php when they expect a class namespace qualifier, which is two semicolons.)

Past midnight. Whohoo! I wonder what declension really means.

Okay, I’m tired. Time to fall alspeell. apseell. asleep. Yep.

PS. Noticed the time zone is wrong. Need to fixe that. Fix that.

PPS. Couldn’t fix the timezone. I wonder why. Must be something with WordPress, or the web serber. web server. Anyway.

PPPS. Cabbage? Who eats cabbage on a burrito?

Going through the archives, and I found a couple of oddities that I think I might save…

The above is a design I made for a remoting layer in our switchboard application. It provided the means to transparently switch search facilities from a local, threaded approach to a remoting approach, each using the same database backend. (Having no threads means that the executable is less difficult to code.) Blue is the front-end GUI, green the application logic, and pink server-side stuff. I love that I painted a little shining sun in it.

(It’s not my real handwriting, it’s my hand-on-mouse-in-PaintShopPro-writing.)

In stark contrast, I guess, the picture I won the “aggressive” competition in our little photo contest with. It turned out so beautifully. The black and white effect is really nice – I probably used conventional CN-41 black and white film. The “blood” is actually ketjap manis, a soy-like liquid used in cooking. At first I placed drops of it on an old linen sheet – which quite didn’t produce the effect I hoped for. But when I suddenly smeared it out, I saw the picture unfold in front of me.

And with this one, I won the “odd locations” competition. Nuff said. :)