I'm sitting in my room when I hear that a house on my block is on fire. The neighbor's 3 houses down is aflame. I can see it perfectly from my balcony, it's less than 100m away. 2 minutes after I start watching I see a fire truck pull up. In 30 minutes they calm much of the flames but it's still not over. The house is a fairly large dual unit, with a firewall separating the two units. The far side is on fire, the opposite has smoke coming out of every crack in the roof, but nothing happening upstairs or downstairs. It looks like the house is empty. I wonder will it be saved. Back on the other side there's less flames now but still some visible. A second fire truck now, water being poured, tons of steam rising up. The cloud of smoke spreads across the valley and covers some part of the town sky.

I could have taken some incredible pictures of the smoke rising up but I wasn't in the mood. I don't even know if these people are home, last thing I saw they were fixing up the house. Maybe I'll have a look tomorrow morning on my way to work. I think I'll feel guilty for taking pictures of someone's tragedy though.

Ok, whoever came up with this idea deserves to be hurt. I don't mean java in general and I don't mean the idea of an ultra-portable gui, but the way it is implemented, it simply has to be the most painful way to code a gui known to man (or coders, whatever). Period.

They're just a huge waste of paper, aren't they? When I get a letter, the first thing I do is open it and trash the envelope, then I start on the letter. Or rather, I put it in the paper recycling stack. Only a lot of them have that plastic window so you're really supposed to tear that off and put the plastic in the plastic container and not mix it with paper, but who the hell would do that on a regular basis? Point made.

Just think about how much less paper we would be throwing away if there were no envelopes.. I'm not saying it's necessarily practical though..

Have you ever seen a funny female comedian? Have you even seen a female comedian to begin with? There aren't many, are there? I haven't seen one that was funny. And I wonder why. How is comedy gender specific? What, women don't have wit, don't have attitude, don't have charm? Sure they do. So why aren't they funny? I wanna know because this is a serious anomaly, I'm a total comedy addict and I'm cheated out of 50% of potential killer material.

Actually, the only funny woman I can remember is Anne Kat. Hærland. And that's on tv, it's not material, she's spontaneously funny. She has great language skills, she's bright, she's witty, bold, everything you need. There should be more women like her!

Whenever one of these high profile immigration-naturalization cases come up in the media, I love to see people with no idea having their blood boil. Quite often it's about athletes having to choose which nation to represent, and that's a fun scenario because most athletes are just regular people who say stupid things sometimes. Even though they will get crucified for what they say, it's much more interesting to hear what people have to say about them. And by people, I, of course, mean people who have no idea. Case in point, the Zidane case. "He should represent Algeria, that's where his roots are!" Well gee, you didn't grow up in France to Algerian parents so much, did you? I'm not saying you have to be an immigrant to get it, but at least use your imagination a little. Talk to some immigrants, understand where they're coming from. Of course, every case is different, but for someone who has spent his entire life in the country his parents immigrated to, it is completely natural to feel "at home" in this adopted country. Why would he want to represent some strange country he has no idea about, just because his parents are from there? Parents and children are separate entities, just because his parents experienced something doesn't mean the child has. And vice versa, mind you, there are a lot of immigrant parents who would like nothing else than to go back, meanwhile the child has a perfectly good life right here.

This comes to me at a time when there is no big story in the press, but I'm sure that before long there will be one, so just you wait.