Ragnchild


Archive for March, 2007

Taking a break

Category: My life, Philosophical, Thoughts

Mar 30

So, the Easter break is finally here. In addition to making me realize how close my exams are, I hope that this break will give me some time to relax. Now, when I think about relaxing, I don’t just mean the part where you lie on the couch. A part of what I value with holidays is to have some time alone with yourself. It’s not that I don’t enjoy company, I usually like being active and seeing and learning new things. However, I have experienced that it’s often during the moments when I’m alone that I manage to see things from a new perspective, get new ideas and grasp concepts I didn’t understand before. Continue reading Taking a break

A definition of art and a salad please

Category: Philosophical, Thoughts

Mar 28

Lots of times, I have wondered about the concept of art. The thing is, when we start talking about it, it turns out that people have very different understanding of what art really is. Some would say that everything created by a human is art, since it is a form of expressing ourselves. A table falls under this definition, but I wouldn’t call it art.

For me, art has to involve something with feelings, or at least expressing the side of our self that we don’t usually express, something more personal than the fact that you know how to make a rectangle and put four sticks under it. However, many things involve feelings, some people argue that a dot on a canvas expresses something for the person who made it. Well, maybe it does, but I still wouldn’t call it art. When I was thinking about it, I realized that art for me involves some kind of skill, a five year old hammering away at a piano isn’t creating art, no matter how much emotion there is to it. Continue reading A definition of art and a salad please

Turning the clocks

Category: Current issues, My life

Mar 25

After becoming thoroughly irritated by loosing an hour after turning the clocks today, I decided to write a post about this particular topic. You see, it’s not the loss of an hour, but the whole concept that irritates me. Simply because in my opinion, daylight saving time is the wrong way around.

You see, by nature, the winter has short days and the summer long days, and what daylight saving time does is increase this difference. This means that in Norway, at the most extreme, we get about 20 hours of darkness in the winter and 20 hours of light in the summer. In my opinion, they should change the system so that it minimized the difference, not the other way around. Yes, I know that it saves us a lot of energy, but you have to remember that lots of people here get winter depressions from the lack of light, which must surely cost a lot. Of course I’m looking forward to the summer, but I don’t need that long days if it means a winter where the only time of day you can glimpse the sun is during school hours.

A slightly new perspective on things

Category: Philosophical, Thoughts

Mar 22

No, really, I’m not writing this to convince you that you can change your whole life just by learning 3, 7 or x (where x lies in R) ways of positive thought. This is just something I’ve been thinking about lately. In my opinion, your life might already be changed without you knowing it. Try this experiment: think of a bad thing that might happen to you. Then think about what you would wish for in that situation. Probably just the life you’re living now. I know, that might sound a bit weird, but think about it.

Many people who have had their life changed drastically for the worse, wish for nothing else than a normal life again. They think along the lines of “If that car had just come a little later, if I had lived a bit different, if I just hadn’t said that …”. Well, you are that case. You probably walked past 30 cars today, and none of them hit you. You may have talked to your friends or family without getting into a bad argument, and your lungs have consumed about 11.000 liters (fact) of air without malfunctioning. Continue reading A slightly new perspective on things

Intuitive computerism

Category: Technology

Mar 21

Yes, I admit it. I seem to have some sort of natural ability when it comes to getting around computers. Not that I’m a genius or something, I just don’t find it particularly difficult to learn how to handle new programs, fix unexpected issues or find a missing file. Now, I realize that many people are not like this, but lately, I’ve noticed that there seems to be two general ways of handling your computer.

When I do something on the computer, be it in Photoshop or on the net, many people ask me: “how on earth did you do that?”. And then I’ll say, “well, I don’t remember quite, something like this, or this”, and then I show them, and they usually say somthing like “what?”. My point here is not that they are unintelligent, just that they have another way of dealing with things. I don’t remember every detailed step in how to do something. I just play around with it until I find a solution, in an intuitive way. Continue reading Intuitive computerism

Hello world!

Category: This and that

Mar 21

Well, I’ve finally done it, this is my very first post, ever. Let’s just see how it goes from here, shall we?