Do natives of Hamburg know the history of the hamburger? Are they proud that it's more popular than the frankfurter and the wiener?

This is a gray'ish thought I think (hope he doesn't get offended by that comparison)..

You suck. Kafka, Camus, Sartre, I tried all of them. For the most part it's exactly the same. No passion, no conviction, just a bloody boring story about something completely insignificant. Completely useless stories about life that don't say anything. Not to me anyway and believe me I was focused, I tried to read between the lines, there's just nothing there. The last one I couldn't finish, couldn't stomache it. Dull wrapped in a thick coating of boring.

If you want my views on life and existance, I'll tell you without putting you to sleep.

This is actually an observation I had in Oslo two weeks ago, just slipped my mind at the time. Sorta like a file stuck in the cache, not flushed to disk. Anywho, here we go..

So I see these cops on bikes, in shorts and all, Pacific Blue. Two of them. They were accosting a drunk in the park, dude had lots more cans stashed away in a plastic bag, they were interviewing him. The following day I see two bike cops again. No wait, those are the same ones. 3 days in a row, in 3 different places. And that got me thinking, is the Oslo police on a tight budget and couldn't afford more than 2 officers for this roaming service? Is it a trial run? (Even then you would expect more than 2 people for a city of 500.000+ inhabitants, right?) In fact, I never found out. I even suspected it was just a married couple who dressed up in phony cop uniforms and pretended to be cops. Pacific Blue fans probably.

Java may be doom and gloom much of the time, but there are moments when we see the light. One such moment is ant. Where the standard java build system sucks, ant is the light. Ant is elegant, easy and efficient. Shockingly, ant is yet another open source project, to java's commercial patronage.

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.