skongshoj's New Writeups

Poser (idea)

2004-01-25T02:11:57Z

Poserdom and the behaviour that surrounds it is an interesting phenomenon of social behaviour of modern subcultures. "Poser" is the common term for someone who regards himself or herself as part of a particular subculture (punk rockers, hackerdom, metalheads, Star Trek fandom, whatever), but for whatever reason isn't deemed worthy by his or her peers within said subculture. This usually results in a vicious circle, where the poser keeps trying harder, and the established members of the crowd will reinforce their views that he or she is a lowly maggot, not worthy of their esteem. It usually ends with the newcomer either leaving in frustration with a smashed self-esteem, or the in crowd changing their opinion for whatever reason.

While people regarded as posers are sometimes quite annoying, there's a simple behaviour pattern behind this: When you've just found yourself a brand-new identity, you need some time to adjust, to fit yourself into the new mold you've just decided…

The New Shadow (thing)

2004-01-22T13:37:01Z

"The New Shadow" was the working title of J.R.R. Tolkien's ill-fated sequel to his masterpiece The Lord of the Rings. He made several attempts at writing this sequel, but never got very far with it, quite simply because the world of Arda in the Fourth Age didn't make for a good setting for high fantasy writing. Remember that after the end of the Third Age of Middle-Earth, there are no longer any elves, dwarves, orcs, dragons or other fantastic creatures left, each of them either having gone extinct or left for The Undying Lands.

The attempted and abandoned sequel takes place in Gondor, approximately 100 years after the fall of Sauron and the destruction of the One Ring. The idea behind the sequel was to bring out the darkness in the hearts of humans, showing that while Sauron was dead and Morgoth banished from the world, evil could still find ways to take hold. Unfortunately, Tolkien was never satisfied with it, partially because the evil of humanity…

Good %GREETING_TIME, %FULL_NAME (thing)

2004-01-13T06:03:37Z

I like to have my computer write greetings and the like to me, like sentient supercomputers in bad sci-fi flicks (and computers running Novell Netware -- not that I'd associate Netware with sentience....) do. While I guess in these bleak times of rationalization and productivity maximization a stupid little toy like this seems trivial and unnecessary, I find that I'm in a much better mood to code if my computer helps me feel like a mad scientist tinkering with strange contraptions in the darkness of night, accompanied only by his trusty electric brain.

Here is the little piece of shell scripture I use to get it to do that (works in all Bourne shell derivates -- I use ksh, but you new-school bash users should find that it works with no modification). Put this in your .profile:

HOUR=`/bin/date +%H`
USER=`whoami`
if [ $HOUR -lt 5 ] ; then
    GREETING_TIME="night"
elif [ $HOUR -lt 12 ] ; then
    GREETING_TIME="morning"

…

INTP (person)

2004-01-05T16:00:47Z

I can tell you a bit about INTPs. The INTP is one of sixteen Myers-Briggs / MBTI personality types, and is sometimes also called either the "Architect", "Thinker" or "Wizard" type. I guess it's the MBTI personality type I belong to; lame online personality tests are pretty consistent in claiming it is, and it's the one I find I have most traits in common with. I'll be the first to admit I don't take Myers-Briggs typing all that seriously, though. The INTP is one of the rarest of the types.

So, what about these INTP characters? As all Myers-Briggs types, the letters are defined from a type's functional preferences (a concept derived from C.G. Jung's psychology). In the INTP's case, these preferences are:

Introversion
INtuition
Thinking
Perception

So the INTP is a perceptive, introverted, intuitive thinker type fellow, right? Well, yes, but since…

The yellow face, it burns us! (thing)

2003-10-25T11:52:53Z

Going to a heavy metal festival is a fun way to spend a few otherwise boring, searing hot summer days, and while popular opinion holds that copious amounts of alcohol, cannabis or hard drugs are necessary to survive such an ordeal, I nevertheless decided to stay completely straight throughout all of Wacken Open Air 2003. I figured that three days of being entertained by such acts as Slayer, Testament, Twisted Sister, Vader, Nile, Soilwork and others too numerous to list, I wouldn't need chemical assistance to alter my mood and senses into that state of delightful delirium that makes music festivals fun. What I'd forgotten to take into consideration was that the sun can have a profound effect on the human brain, at least when said human brain is mounted in the skull of a troglodyte-like programmer who usually sees the light of day once a week, and then only in controlled doses.

For three days in August, the sleepy 2000-soul town of Wacken is the Mecca of…

Henrik Pontoppidan (person)

2003-10-23T20:08:27Z

Henrik Pontoppidan (1857-1943) was a Danish novelist who received the 1917 Nobel Prize in Literature, which he shared with his fellow Danish writer Karl Gjellerup.

He was born on the 24th of July 1857 as the son of theologist and minister Dines Pontoppidan. Henrik was one of the middle children in a flock of sixteen, and spent his early childhood in the Jutland, Denmark town of Fredericia. When he was six years old, his father was transferred to Randers (another Jutland town), just one year before Denmark suffered an invasion of Prussian and Austrian armies. Randers was briefly occupied and sacked by Prussian troops, and his brief exposure to the horrors of war as a young boy left a deep impression on him. Indeed, he would sometimes return to write about the invasion in his literary works.

As a young man he caught an interest in engineering, and when he was seventeen years old, he moved to Copenhagen to study his chosen field at the Institute of Polytechnics.…