nickchanger's blog - Archive: September 2009

Some months ago I watched the documentary Zeitgiest. It is a film released for free online, and can be seen at Google Video. The author is kind of paranoid but nevertheless the documentary is interesting, artistic special and worth a look. It is split into three parts: Religion, 9/11 and The National Bank.

The 9/11 part is about how the author believes that George W. Bush and the government was behind the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon. He shows several "proves" of this and it does make you think. Back in 2001 George W. Bush had just won a controversial election (the missing ballots of Florida and the Supreme Court ruling stuff) and his popularity was decreasing. After the attack he got much more popular, or at least the people started to support their leader. Back then I did get the idea that maybe George W. Bush had been behind the attacks just to gain popularity, but I must say it seems very drastic and way to risky to do in the world we live in today - it might have worked some hundred years ago (of course if he was behind it, it did work and I got fooled :P ).

The National Bank part is about how the National Bank creates the money (the paper) and loan it to the state with interest. The state then needs money to pay the National Bank back which they get by loaning more money. This is the cause of inflation as the more money is created the less value they have. It is an endless spiral that only benefits the National Bank. The author attacks this pretty hard explaining how the system got into place and that it is created by big businessmen who only wants more money. It seems like a stupid system but so does many others.

Even though these two parts are interesting the first part is the most interesting. It basically explains how religion is used to control the masses. According to the author both the 9/11 attacks and the National Bank system are their to have the same purpose. He also explains how the character Jesus Christ is a big fat metaphor for the Sun which civilisations have worshipped for centuries. He explain the astrology behind it and how many other religions follow the exact same pattern. It also explains how much of the Christian religion is a copy of the Egyptian religion. I find this very interesting and I looked a bit more into it. One of the books used as a reference in the film, which is also mentioned several other places as an interesting book in this area, is The Hero With A Thousand Faces written by Joseph Campbell in 1949. This book explains how mythologies, religions, folk tales, etc. all follow the same pattern - the human life cycle. It focuses on the hero of the story and what he must go through. It has been used by many of today's authors for when they created their hero and his/her journey. One everybody know is George Lucas who have used the book when he created the Star Wars films. Several Disney films, and maybe even The Matrix, should also have been based on the book!

That was a long way just to tell you that I have bought a new book! :o

A third edition of "The Hero With A Thousand Faces" were released in 2008 and I started to search the web for places to buy it. First thing I noticed was that it seems to be only available in English, so guess I could go international when looking for it. I found it on Amazon for $14.93 (~75 dkr), but Amazon have a ridicules high shipping rate for books (~65 dkr) which almost doubles the price. Then I found it on the Danish site Saxo.com for 129 dkr, where I had ordered both Dan Brown's Angels and Daemons and the complete Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson. Together with the much lower shipping rate it was almost the same price as Amazon, so I rather buy it from a Danish company if anything should happen :P .

I received it last week, but so far I've only read two chapters - I have a shitload of other stuff to read, you know :P . It is not the easiest English I've read but it is still quite interesting. Looking forward to finish reading it and maybe learn something o.0 .

In the future I will try to add at least one image to my blog entries. Of course only if it is possible to find an image that fits the content. I have also changed it so that each line will try to fill the whole page by stretching, also known as justified margins or something like that.

The 1st of September the Norwegian Opera Software released their 10th major version of their prime product, the Opera Browser. According to their website it have been downloaded 10 million times during one week! And of course I have contributed to that statistic.

The main new features added to Opera 10 is Turbo, thumbnail tabs, new theme and integration between the mail client and webmails. So what can I use of this... well almost nothing :) .

Turbo uses compression to increase the speed when using a slow connection. I am constantly on a 100/100 mbit connection so it is always the server that sets the limit and not me. So this feature is not as useful for me and since this compression can, in some cases, lower the quality of images I have it turned off.

Opera have for a long time had a feature where a thumbnail of the website would show up when hovering the tabs. The first browser to use tabs have now expanded them even more by adding this thumbnail to the tab it self. This requires the tabs to be quite large in height which is something I really hate - I used to use a theme which made all toolbars as slim as possible. Therefore I do not use this feature. The changes to the tabs have made the theme I used to use break, meaning it does not look so pretty any more :P . So I have started to use the new default theme, and it is much better than the old themes. Pretty, simple colours and fairly slim.

The only webmail I use is Hotmail and I only have that to use with my Messenger and as a junk mail - where all not-important registration mails etc. are send. So integrating that with the mail client in Opera is useless to me.

Several of the "old" features have also been updated. The most important here is the great improvement in performance of the engine. JavaScript have lacked a bit on sites such as Facebook but were improved to acceptable levels in the last major release - now it is even better. It probably wont beat Googles V8 engine speed-wise but it is not far behind.

Opera have always had a spellchecking feature but it required the installation of an external spellchecking software, aspell. Now this feature is more integrated into Opera which makes writing this blog entry without spelling errors a lot easier! (if you find spelling errors just shut the fork up :P )

And finally Opera beats the Acid3 test!

So in short: The best internet experience just got better!

Yesterday I finished reading the book "Män som hatar kvinnor". Since I had already seen the film the ending did not come as a big surprise - or did it. Because when I reached what I remember as the big ending in the film there were still around 1/5 of the book left. The few short clips the film ends with is a very quick summary of some of the elements that takes place in the last part of the book.

Before I saw the film I heard it followed the book very well. After reading the book I can say that it is not entirely true. The overall story is there but many elements, even some crucial to the plot, have changed. To avoid spoilers I will not start mention everything here, but I will talk about the relationship between Mikael and his business partner and long time friend Erika. In the film I got the feeling that Erika were interested in Mikael but Mikael were to busy thinking of something else to notice it - but in the book they have a really weird relationship where they get "close" to each other on a regular basis even though she is married, the husband even knows about this arrangement. Mikael is sentenced to prison and in the book he serve his time in the middle of the story. In the film however he does it at the end. Quite a plot change but it works in the film giving an acceptable ending.

Other parts of the film illustrates elements of the book but they are interpreted, at least by me, completely different from what is actually happens. A common mistake made by someone who have read the book and starts to cut in the screenplay without remembering that people who watch it might not know the book.

So how was the book? Extremely detailed! Stieg Larsson uses several pages to describe a flower which is seen a couple of seconds in the film. This trend continues through out the whole book where items and situations are described in extreme details. The characters are not that interesting. Only Lisbeth is "special" meaning that the rest are basically just regular people with different jobs. Other than that it was a good book with a good story and worth a look if you like crimes that contains more than just a body.