Did a quick test of Opera 7 Bork Edition. Funny for about five minutes. Authentic quotes:

• 21 deee-a in Cheecegu cloob stempede-a
• Sydney & Fooghn tu Sem & Deeune-a: keesses thet rucked zee toobe-a; ploos TF’s vurst cuooples
• MSN 8: It’s iesy tu sveetch & free-a fur 2 mus. Bork Bork Bork!
• ©2003 Meecrusufft Curpureshun. Ell reeghts reserfed.

…but I don’t use Opera. Why? Because it irrevocably crashes if I use Privoxy as a proxy. If I have to choose between Opera 7 and banners/popups or Mozilla and no banners/popups, the choice is easy.

Writing with Textile is so damn smooth. Just thought you needed to know.

A first beta of Textpattern has been released. If MovableType 2.6 and Brad Choate’s MT-Textile hadn’t been released already, I’d be more eager to try it, but I think I’ll stick to MT yet for a while.

I will give Textpattern a spin, though. Apart from Textile, it generates dynamic content, which has been my biggest gripe with MT. It’s not fun to rebuild pages every time you change a small detail.

But now I think I’ll vacuum instead of using Textpattern as an excuse for more slacking off in front of the ‘puter.

(Later) Well, couldn’t resist a quick peek at Textpattern. It’s huge. And not much I can do with it without some documentation, of which there is none at the moment. And MT-Textile still has that extremely annoying bug where the regexps miss items if they begin or end a paragraph.

(Ten minutes later) OK, MT-Textile 1.1 is out. Now I can stop whining.

And now, the daily dose of bashing American politics. Topic of today: the news fed to the American citizens. k5 is reporting that CNN has a transcript of Hans Blix’ report concerning Iraq. Comparing the CNN version to others, like the one from BBC, you quickly see that CNN omitted a bunch of quite important words. About 860 of them, to be specific. To be even more specific, the words where Hans Blix refutes the evidence provided by Colin Powell, and also the bit where Blix says that Iraq is complying with the UN resolution.

Back in school (those were the days) we were taught to always be critical to sources. Since I was critical to begin with, I got even more critical. When looking further into something, I always check several sources and compare what they give me.

And then we have this pearl of wisdom. Guess the headline of the CNN article covering the worldwide anti-war demonstrations? “World antiwar rallies delight Iraq!” It even features a picture of supposedly Iraqi men with the text “Iraqi men participate Saturday in a rally of support for Saddam,” thus implying that if you protest against war, you’re Saddam’s buddy.

Excuse me while I go vomit.

Why is it that media always paint a picture containing only two teams on the field? On one side we have Bush and his warmongering ilk, on the other side we have Saddam and his ilk, whatever they’re up to at the moment. Here we have two clearly defined sides: Bush, who wants war, and Saddam, who doesn’t.

The average media creature thus draw the conclusion that if you don’t want a war, you’re beer buddies with Saddam.

Stuff is definitely starting to move in the Swedish part of the blog jungle. If you’re a Swedish blogger (definition: live in Sweden, the blog doesn’t have to be in Swedish), there’s now an address you can ping from MovableType (or any other blog system that supports XML-RPC pings) and have your blog automatically listed at Blogs Unmade.

And then we have Sweblogs.com, but there’s nothing available there yet. Some beta code is running from a different address at the moment and will move to the live site when it’s fully operational.

I’ll be helping out with the blog helpdesk as well.

So, if you live in Sweden, add http://ping.unmade.com/ to the list of sites to ping in your MovableType configuration. It can be found under “Blog config” -> “Preferences,” about halfway down the page.

Pardon my Swedish.

14:58 @<sleepy_> Jag måste visst byta föreläsningssal.
14:58 @<sleepy_> Eller... fuck it. Jag åker hem istället.
14:58 @<sleepy_> Jo, så gör jag. *gör*
14:58 :: Quit: sleepy_ (+sleepy@193.10.38.207) [*p00p*]

Download the PDF and use as you see fit. Don’t know where it comes from; found it on the desktop of a computer at school.

Update: Oh, here is where it’s from. Available in a whole bunch of formats.

A discussion between Gustave Gilbert and Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg trial.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war,” Göring shrugged. “Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

“There is one difference,” I pointed out. “In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

“Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

k5 post: “As a Brit we spend all our time criticising our country and monarchy, right up until we enter a different country whereupon we will fight the locals in order to further the glory of our country. Especially if they’re football fans. And we are armed with traditional Crusade weaponry, such as café chairs and beer bottles.”

Same topic: “Mindless patriotism is fun to mess with. I recall with fondness my HS principle explaining to me that ‘Sieg heil!’ was not the proper way to salute the American flag. My history teacher wasn’t happy when I wrote a paper explaining that once every 20 years or so America feels the urge to go bomb some brown folks (fuck him, I still say I’m right on that).”

Slipknot guide. Now I can do a decent half-Windsor without choking myself. Now I’ll see if I can repeat the feat and get both ends of the tie about the same length…