Lighthouse

I just discovered that I can see a lighthouse from a window of my place. It's really working: blinking and all the stuff. I wander where have my eyes been all this time.

Otherwise, this beautiful snowy morning, that I wrote about some time ago, was the only beautiful snowy morning until now. It has been just miserable winter this far: rain, fog, mud, no snow. Perhaps that's why I didn't see the lighthouse because lately it has not been enjoyable to look out of the window at all.

Who is who

One evening, quite late as usually, I was browsing through Latvian online networking community draugiem, which is pretty similar to orkut, for example. I know that there are other networking community sites names of which I don't recall, where some of them I have refused to participate because, to be honest, I have not got very much benefit. Sometimes it's just interesting to discover people whom I know but have not seen for ages, however, this is very it ends: do not feel further necessity to meet them. But I'm terribly bad in networking in general.
The story is actually about pictures. At one moment I just started to browse around to look at pictures what people have used to characterize themselves. At least that's the objective of the picture in my opinion: to give some idea about a person. I find several groups, for example: (i) classic - a portrait with no special "extras" used by people who simply want to show that this is me how I look; (ii) beautiful-sexy (or handsome-sexy) - in majority used by female, but not only, exposing different parts of body whatever they think they have got nice-looking, of course, depending on taste; (iii) random - used by people who do not really care what picture there is and, I guess, used the first one to be found somewhere on hard disc; (iv) artistic - unusual, often digitally processed pictures used by artistic (as already name suggests) and marketing people; (v) hobby picture - showing a person in action with (arguably favourite) hobby, where having this hobby is used to characterise themselves, and being easily to find by others with the same hobby. And so on and so on.
Many more groups could be found, but I will stop on one which I find particularly unusual for me: a wedding picture. It is used exclusively by female. With a long white dress as a must. I understand that getting married is an important event in one's life, but I find it strange that this event is used to characterize themselves. "Getting-married" is even not a trait of character and also not a hobby, I guess :))). I somehow think that this is the same issue covered in the movie 'Mona Lisa Smile' (which I actually have not seen, but I have heard what it is about).
It can be argued that it might be included in beautiful-sexy group as brides are beautiful. I tend to think that this is a different thing.

...

Oh, sorry, I forgot that one should be logged in to read the previous article in NY Times. However it's free: so decide yourself whether you want to sign up to read it.

Slightly nationalistic thing

I think that this is nothing surprising that on average Americans do not appear to be the smartest nation, but nevertheless interesting article. I wonder where Latvians and Estonians would stand? It seems they were not tested. Estonians for sure would like to beat Finnish, but that might turn out to be complicated task :)))

Jar with Jam

I have noticed one phenomenon about people that occurred today again. When I buy a single thing from foodstuff, for instance, today I bought a small jar of jam, then I do not need a plastic bag, or any sort of bag. I take the thing in my hand and go home. Actually, it doesn’t need to be jam; I have tried it also with loaf of bread, packet of juice, 1kg package of potatoes, it doesn’t make any difference. The phenomenon is that people on the street stare at me, and it kind of feels that they do it not in very positive way. They watch so like I’m carrying something very impolite or disgusting, for example, a dead rat. But it’s just a jar of jam! If I would put it into plastic bag, everything would be ok, even if the bag would be totally transparent and they could anyway see that I have bought jam. Strange…
Interesting, whether they would notice if I carry a dead rat in transparent plastic bag? I’m not going to carry out this experiment because I cannot stand dead rats myself, and I have no idea where I could get one either. Any volunteers, perhaps :))) I do not put too much hope on this, but if there is any, I am interested in results of the experiment.
There was one more phenomenon today: for a moment I saw peace of clear blue sky! That has not happened at least for last 2 weeks. It made me happy, as simple as that.

Three colours / Kolm värvi

To fight with nasty-weather-mood here are some autumn pictures.

...

...

So, where was I?
It's unbelievable that a week has passed, and I have not noticed it. I had some bunch of things popping up into my mind what I wanted to post here, but for whatever reasons I did not post them right a way, and now they're gone. During the same time, where I have not written a thing, Siim has written so much that I had to spend almost an hour this morning to read it and catch up.
One of the activities that took quite a bit of my free time last week was home IT. Since my home IT support has temporarily emigrated to USA, I have to deal with it myself. This part I actually like because so far I did not know very much what he is doing and why. In fact, I find it interesting to know.
So, what I did was: making back-ups, installing Windows SP2, downloading and trying Mozilla Firefox (works ok), getting e-mail software up-date, as well as new anti-virus software: uff, that’s quite a lot for me to be done all together. When it was finished, it turned out that, surprise-surprise!, e-mails do not want to leave anywhere. It took quite a bit of time to find out what’s the matter. It came out that anti-virus was so smart and so safe that it had changed e-mailing software settings so, that outgoing e-mails wouldn’t like to leave anywhere. Very safe, indeed :)) In general, I find it annoying that whatever settings are changed without asking me. In the end it takes more time to search and change them back, than to answer a bit more questions during installation process.
And one more observation is that mozilla site is too technical for a user, advanced user, as I would regard myself to be. It was not easy for me to understand what and how I should download and install to get Mozilla Thunderbird up-date. And all this new folder stuff… It’s frustrating a bit. Then again any education is a bit frustrating from time to time, right?
In the end, the process was quite educating and the result satisfying. :))