…could easily be my last day as a projectionist, as my theatre, the Draken, has its last scheduled commercial screening. It’s at 7 p.m., and it’s a Swedish classic by Bo Widerberg; it’s old, it’s black-and-white, and it’s boring, and for the life or me, I can’t recall its title.

See, the Swedish Film Institute is moving its Cinemateket film classics screenings to the Capitol theatre after eleven years with me and Draken doing their dirty work, and there’s very little I can say about the whole affair without losing the PG rating of this blog.

All of this has come about on a very short notice; a day or two before my theatre’s 50th birthday on April 26, I was still confident that the Draken still had many years left in public service. It was only on the day before the anniversary that I first heard about their plans, and this was an accident. I wasn’t meant to know. Nobody was.

Anyway, if you want to complain, the contact information is easily found at the Swedish Film Institute’s home on the Internet. There are laws against me publishing phone numbers here, apparently.

I suppose all this gives me more time to write.

I mentioned below that I haven’t been able to blog due to technical problems at Blogger. This is not entirely true. Yes, Blogger had problems, but I also have discovered that changing my router’s MTU from 1492 bytes to 1500 bytes makes all of my Blogger-related problems go away, including the intermittent connectivity problems…

Makes me wonder, now. Can my wine problems (also outlined below) be at least partly caused by the router problem? Watch this space.

wine is behaving more and more strangely. The timeouts have continued, and Internet Explorer won’t work properly. It starts, but crashes when it connects to anything outside my LAN.

There are a couple of possibilities here. First of all, I’ve switched to an older ADSL modem/router combo because my D-Link G604T keeps on losing DSL sync every few hours and behaves erratically in between, and so I suspect that this new (well, old) hardware doesn’t like IE on Debian, for some strange reason. (I mean, what’s there not to like?) Second, I’ve upgraded Xorg to 7.something, and the something might interfere with wine. Or it could be any random C library I’ve upgraded recently. I’m a dist-upgrade junkie and I need my fix practically every day.

In any case, I got tired of the whole mess today and removed wine and every Windows application I’ve installed. Yes, folks, that includes XMetaL.

Blogger has been experiencing some problems lately, which is why I haven’t posted anything for awhile. Or maybe they’ve read my blog.

I’ve had some weird wine timeouots lately. My Windows apps take up to two minutes to start. It could be my recently upgraded Xorg but I’m not sure… Stay tuned.

Göteborg Film Festival just added a third E.T. screening to celebrate the Draken theatre’s 50th anniversary on April 26, at 7 p.m. Stay tuned; I’ll update with further details when I have them.

I had an interesting conversation about blogging a while ago. A friend of mine who also blogs suggested that I’d get more readers if I’d focus on a select few topics instead of, well, writing whatever crosses my mind. I’ve thought about it, and it’s probably true.

I’d probably get the Linux/XML geeks interested if I focused on Debian and getting my favourite XML tools to run on wine. I’d get the movie buffs if I wrote regularly on the classics I screen at the Draken every week, and I might even get some of the Aspies out there if I gossiped on Wrong Planet more. And there are dozens of other subjects I could focus on, stuff that I know enough about to write blogs.

But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t write this to satisfy any particular group out there. I write because it’s a great way to let out steam while honing my writing skills. If a post can help someone to set up XMetaL on Linux, well, good for you, but that’s not why I write. I write because I like to write, and blogging is better than hiding the results in drawers.

Those of you who speak Swedish, on the other hand, can jump to my Swedish-language blog, where I actually try to stay on topic. It’s my commentary on local stuff, the kind that only matters to the Swedish-speaking population.

As for the rest of you, well, WYSIWYG!

I rather like “Fanny & Alexander”, director Ingmar Bergman’s final theatrical epic. It’s a classic story of evil, with great actors and stunning, Academy Award-winning photography by Sven Nykvist. However, once is quite enough, and I’m painfully aware of this since I still have 4 reels to go. I love being a movie projectionist but I’d pick Arnold Schwarzenegger any day if I got to choose when doing my time in the booth.

The daytime soap that is Wrong Planet continues. I heard that other members have been banned from the site as well, and in the mean time, again a thread was deleted, this time the one that got me banned. The “owner” is cleaning house, blindly following advice from The Admin Zone, a forum for forum owners and such.

Obviously, I no longer wish to link to WP from my blog, and so removed the link.

Wrong Planet, the AS/autism forum I’ve been reading, is heading for disaster. Today, I became a persona non grata there after daring to compare the latest developments on the forum with a bad daytime soap. Now, this in itself is hardly a disaster; most people there won’t probably even notice that I’m gone. However, it also seems that Alex Plank, the site’s owner, today fired every moderator and every admin in sight. With more than 4000 members, this is certainly a recipe for disaster.

WP is therefore now more of a soap opera than ever before. And it’s still a bad one.