Outsider’s Insights

Finally, there may come a smoking ban in Germany, too.
I would very much like that. Had a small discussion with some colleagues (all smokers) about me wanting a room for none-smokers some days ago. In this case the dressing room. Stupid enough one still has to talk about it. It should be obvious. On the other hand, when they wanted to smoke in there, I should have asked, whether I could paint their rooms with asbestos-colour.
Someone said: well, what about drinking?
When I said there is no such thing as passive-drinking, whereas passive-smoking kills about 6000 people each year, I got the stupidest answer EVER.
So stupid, I was left speechless: “Well, you get cancer by crossing the street.”
Yeah right, why not move next to a nuclear power plant, grow your food on a hazardous waste deposit and drinkt water from the sewers. Maybe she wouldn’t mind that either, because, I mean, you get cancer because of car fumes/exhaust emissions (what’s right here, native speakers?) on the street.
BTW, I prefer taking the train or the bicycle.

I hate computers.
Well, that’s not entirely correct. I hate computers when they are not functioning properly. Like mine for example which I bought about 15 months ago.
It started last week. I was listening to a nice song on i-tunes when suddenly the screen went black (after showing “Out of Range”) and that was it. The little light showing the power glowed, but no sound no nothing.
Took it back to the shop where I bought it. They said it’s the power supply and exchanged it.
Took it back home. Thought: good idea to save some important data. So I burned a CD with the most essential data (just the really very important ones).
Got the CD, tried to close the burn-software, tataaaaaaaa.
Another breakdown: this time, the pc/bios tells me there is no harddrive installed. Cannot boot.
Took it back to the shop. Explained the problem. They promised to check the harddrive. I called one or two days later, they said it’s a software problem with Windows. They advised a low-level format (whatever that is) So I said: alright, got the most important stuff, go ahead.
Took it back home. Tried to install Windows XP. Didn’t work of course. The installation process cancelled itself, because some data was missing, so it said.
Called the shop, explained the problem.
Took it back to the shop. The nice clerk said: I will look to it personally, call in five hours. Did that, went there. He said: we installed Windows, no problems whatsoever. But we wanted to check of course, this being my third visit in three days. So he showed me the computer. I said, yes, when I tried to re-start it, the harddrive was not found. So I clicked on restart and guess what: it didn’t restart. No nothing, just continued beeping.
The clerk and the little nerd-apprentices look at me nervously, explaining it never did that in the last hours. So he switches off power. Restarts. It works. Restarts again. Still works. I now wondered whether I should have tried to restart it again, but then again my superstition only goes so far.
So I took it back home this evening. Went to work, got back, installed Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, Trillian, Adobe Reader. When I was about to copy some files from a cd, guess what:
My monitor says - once again - “Out of Range”, computer tries to restart, but, big surprise, the harddrive is not found. (Add desperate laughter here). I switch off power. Restart. It works partially. (My profile cannot be loaded, contact the network administrator. Yeah. Right.)
WTF???
I hate it that I have no clue why this is happening.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

I guess, most teens are afraid of losing touch with their friends. You say things like: it will never happen to us, we won’t drift apart. But quite often, you change so much that your old friends don’t seem very close anymore. I have just one friend left from school.
The contrast programme: talking to a friend I have met seven years ago about 8000 km away. This distance - both spatial and temporal - seems to be so insignificant. I’m planning to visit her either in November or in January. (She’s not 8000 km away, so visiting is easier now.)