OK, so if you are a US customer of iTunes, then you are able to order Desperate Housewives on your iPod. Which I guess is good if you have a video iPod. But not so good if you don’t. So I ordered the DVDs and hopefully they will come when I return from Finland this week.

To be sure, iTunes was offering somewhat of a bargain…the complete season for US$35.00. However, I got the DVDs for US$55 and they are something that I can hold and then digitize for my own use. And I am not at all familiar with the protections that iTunes puts on videos, so it might even mean that I wouldn’t be able to see them elsewhere if I wanted to. DVDs are portable and I can make digitize them later on my archive for my own personal use (to stay within laws). Much more functionality for only US$20 more.

But on the flip side…the iPod video does look cool. I would just want to see one in person before thinking about it. And they still have to fix that goddamn search issue 🙂

In other news, I’ve been feeling achy lately in odd places…i took a few tylenol and i hope that fixes things right up…

I am closer than ever to getting EuroBonus Gold!

Tonight I go to Helsinki which will get my 1380 points, which means that I need only to find a way to get 70 points before my return flight on Thursday (I could get them on Thursday after I fly).

The reason I am kind of obsessing about the status before Thursday is that my return flight home on Thursday is in their “Snowflake” section, which is the worst of the worst areas of the plane. And SAS has 2 types of lounges…SAS Business Lounge and the SAS Scandinavian Lounge. The first lounge is for any passenger with a business class ticket. They have a very small selection of soft drink. Some strangely concocted bread and cheese combination, and beer and wine, both of which come from a spout. The SAS Scandinavian Lounges are much better. It is only for EuroBonus Gold people. They have better snacks and alcohol, but more importantly,just a better lounge environment where it is easier to relax. And many of my colleagues have EuroBonus Gold and I am tired of having to rely on their good graces to let me in.

So I need to come up with 70 points before Thursday.

At first I was going to just pay for a night for a hotel here in Stockholm, but I don’t wanna use my hard-earned money for that. I came up with another way last night. Tonight I will check into 1 Radisson SAS Hotel just for one night. I know that it gets me 300 points and takes about 3 days to post. Tomorrow morning I will move to the Radisson SAS Hotel that my colleagues are at (when most will arrive anyway), and then stay with them. By the time the hotel points and the flight points get credited to my account, it will be Thursday and I will be EuroBonus Gold. Just in time for my flight home in monkey class.

But before you think it is just the snack and the booze, the other benefits are the special check-in areas at the airport, priority waitlisting (and the flights to Copenhagen and Helsinki are always fully booked so it will be nice to get a better chance to get on the plane first), and when you have questions or complication with your journey, you get priority handling at the service centers. And that is good since with SAS, they dedicate their lives to having something go wrong. For example, the 3 times I have been to Helsinki, my return flight has been cancelled and I have down-prioritised so that I have had to wait in the airport for up to 2 hours extra.

So there is some logic to getting those 70 points sooner rather than later. Call it travel insurance.

God, I should really go shopping…man can’t live on booze, mixers, and cheese alone…time to go to the supermarket me thinks…uh huh….supermarket…but i am leaving for helsinki tomorrow so maybe one more day of fast food won’t exactly kill…

So I have finally put some more of new photos up, but at Fotki instead of LJ’s fotobilder because I pay for Fotki so I should have generally the same pictures everywhere…

My New Stockholm Apartment

Trondheim 2005

Copenhagen Pride 2005

Sydney 2005

Well….in good news today…the broadband is up and running, my great friend Steve is feeling better, and Markus is overall in a good condition.

On the bad side, I am exhausted all of the time due to bad sleep and early hours, and in general, it’s time for all of the quarterly tests and i am NOT looking forward to them at all!

Now I know that all of the iPod lovers out there are sharpening their claws to scratch my eyeballs out, but relax, I am an iPod owner as well. I am sold on iTunes and the easy unified experience. I even like the fact that I can easily type a song identifier in the search bar and generally get the song I want. Even though I had importing problems (for those who use who moved songs over being organised under the Real Player system and directories to the iPod system and directories) and my sometimes due to my general laziness.

But therein lies a feature I wish they would put into the iPod itself.

Searching capabilities suck within the iPod. All you are left with is the clickwheel and the selection of menus. It means I spend a lot of time trying to find music on my iPod instead of listening to music. It’s especially bothersome when I am not sure of a song’s complete name…for example, if I only know a couple of words in the song title or don’t know the artist’s full name…it would be nice if they just created a menu option called search, and you could select letters of the alphabet (in your local language of course) from the clickwheel and then it would return search results to you on your iPod. Let’s just start with that. And then, if they wanted to really impress us, allow us to save that list. I would give up 100MB for that feature to be in my iPod…I think most others would too.

Is that too much to ask?

Fuck it was cold in my apartment yesterday. The heat supposedly has come on today, but I don’t feel it coming in through the vents. The problem is not so much during the day, it is during the night when everything cools down. Last night it was the same temperature in my flat as it was outside. Without the blankets, I would have gotten hypothermia.

So I called the landlord today at 09.00 am and told him that no matter what else we have to talk about, the heat needs to work and it needs to work tonight. Santa called and asked if he could live with me on the weekends because he heard the temp in my apartment was the same as at the North pole.

In other news, I am supposed to get broadband “sometime this week”…and I am learning how the washing machine in the “laundry room” (which is really someone else’s apartment from what I can tell) is supposed to be working.

Overall, I accomplished things today, but nothing of what I wanted to do….

More about the weekend with the Danes in another post…

Or the better way to put that is that Markus has one of his legs broken by two very drunk and fat people at the club that we were at on saturday. they fell in him in such a manner that they broke his leg. which is really disappointing and upseting because he was actually sober and these two guys were go drunk that they weer falling over themselves. It is also a problem with sweden because in sweden people drink to get drunk always and without any consideration of the consequences of their drunkenness. and since these guys broke his leg and walked away, even that has no meaning because in sweden, there is no such thing as liability really. unless someone gets killed, there is no incentive on the part of the individuals who broke his leg to care. you really cannot sue individuals, even when their drunken behavior causes your leg to get broken.

so markus had to have surgery, will spend at least 3 months off of his feet, and the doctors are considering whether he needs a steel plate in his leg to be able to walk normally again…if that is even possible given the way that they have damaged his leg. He has an apartment to finish renovating in time for the winter, and his job required travel and mobility, which is not possible now.

i am so furious that a country that allows it’s citizens to get drunk without abandon has no penalty for their behaviour other than an “oops”.

Let me make this clear. I hope Markus finds them and extracts an appropriate price. Their drunkenness was inexcusable. and the consequences should be equally unforgivable.