June 2020

2020-06-07, Sunday

Still in Oslo. Walked around Østensjøvannet.

2020-06-23, Tuesday

This entry consists of audio:

2020-06-26, Friday

Upgraded KUbuntu to 20.04 (Focal Fossa) on one of my machines today, only to find that two programs which I rely upon were no longer in the repository: WMII, jack-mixer and mididings.

Had to manually fetch the deb files for the previous version manually from packages.ubuntu.org. To make sure they are still around next time I need to install them, I’ve put them here:

• wmii
• jack-mixer
• python-mididings
• mididings

Then I ran:

dpkg -i wmii_3.10~20120413+hg2813-11_amd64.deb

In order to install jack-mixer and mididings one needs some dependencies:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nrbrtx/python2-stuff
sudo apt-get install python-gtk2
sudo apt install python-fpconst python-gobject python-gtk2 gconf2

2020-06-06, Saturday

In Oslo for the weekend, with my oldest. To the natural history museeum. Visited my sister. Good times.

No face online

Currently, I have no face online. At least, if you do an image search for my name, my face is not among the ones which show up. It is true that I know a lot of the people who do show up when you search for my name. Relatives, friends, collegues. But there is no picture of me.

I think there are images including my face you could find if you looked hard enough¹, but no search engine has connected them to my name. This can of course change. Either because some search engine connects the dots, or because some new picture is posted somewhere clearly connected to me.

There has been some close calls. One of the pictures which shows up when searching for me, shows the winners of the Stockholm Mathematics Center prizes for excellent doctorial dissatations in mathematics. I was given one of these prizes, but did not pay attention when they told me to go for a photo shoot, and went for the cakes in stead. Thus, Olof Bergvall’s picture will show up when you search for my name.

This situation has not really been my intention. I am not so shy that I would be upset if my face showed up online. But I think it is a consequence of my cautious approach to sharing on the Internet. I like sharing ideas, interests and even some personal stuff online. But I like to control the things I share (host it myself). There is also wish of making my own person – and certainly not my look – the center of attention.

How common is this? I guess some people have names so common that they drown out in all their name-siblings. But my father has a unique name, and the closest you get to seeing him when doing an image search for his name is a preset generated cartoon drawing. On the other hand, the first two images when searching for my mother is her along with collegues and an satelite photo of their house.

A lot of people are required to put their images on their employer’s website. Some people have been interviewed for something some time.

Faces are important in human communication. People like to look at faces, and using your face is a powerful tool – weather you are teaching or sellling. But your face is yours. It is not easily changed. It will identify you on surveillence cameras.

Of course, the government has access your face. You give it up in exchange for an identity card, a driver’s licence or a passport. This is a demonstration of the state power. If you enter the US, even for a holiday, your face – along with your fingerprint – is the first thing they take. “Look into the camera, please!”