1. Candlemass - Death Magic Doom
2. Spiritus Mortis - The God Behind the God
3. Hypocrisy - A Taste of Extreme Divinity
4. Forsaken - After the Fall
5. Ajattara - Noitumaa
6. Swallow the sun - New Moon
7. My Dying Bride - The Lies I Sire
8. Behemoth - Evangelion
9. Katatonia - Night is the new day
10. Nile - Those Whom the Gods Detest

This blog started out as a personal public diary to motivate me to record potentially significant moments of my life. I was always a fan of diaries, yet I suffered the typical lack of consistency in updating them after the initial furore of buying a new diary. Keeping a blog on the web was meant to keep me motivated to write more, as friend read and indirectly pushed me to write.

The motivation worked for a couple of years, especially after moving to Dublin, when I used the blog as an excuse not to call home and force its readership. I also tried to create a professional spin-off the blog in the tech section, and a special interests section in the travel section. Readership of these sections was quite poor and all attempts at resurrecting these section with new content and layouts were squashed to bits. Granted the attempts here were half baked but they still don't warrant having 0 subscribes to the RSS feed for months.

Now, after a couple of years updating this blog, motivation is withering. There are a couple of reasons for it. Primarily it's the obvious reason of being busy and distracted with other things, but there's more than this. If you're motivated in doing something then you'll find time to do it no matter how busy. The problem with the blog is that this motivation is getting lost.

I think the main reason for this is the lack of success of the blog. This is reflected in the lack of comments and the low number of RSS subscribers. Personally, comments are the most important indication of readership because they turn passive readership into interactive discussion. In this blog comments are practically non existent.

This is where facebook comes in. On facebook you interact with your friends. It's all about interaction. Also on facebook the audience, or at least the audience that matters, is much bigger. The battle between the 'personal' blog and facebook presence is a head to head battle. The two things serve for the exact same purpose. Why spend an hour writing a post on the blog which no one reads, when you can spend 2 minutes updating your status for everyone to read and get comments on. It's easier, faster and has a better outcome.

The same thing applies to twitter. Twitter takes on the blog when it comes to posting links of interest, main trains of thought, and replying to people. Publishing and consuming little snippets of information in this hyper fast environment seems to be the way forward. I was a religious blog reader till a few months ago, but now my twitter feed is enough and probably more than enough. If I want to keep in touch with friends I can check them out on facebook as they all have pages there, unlike blogs which weren't all that popular with the word-unfriendly people.

So what's happening to the blog? Frankly I don't know, but the motivation to write is vanishing like money in my pocket. If you're interested in my personal pursuits then my facebook profile is the way to go. If you like the links then join my twitter feed. Otherwise the blog will still be here but probably updates will be sparse.

This is one of the best articles I read on the web this year. Via

Some snippets:

Salon.com has an interesting article on what constitutes “visiting” a country? If you go to the Iguazu Falls and move from one side to the other, does that mean that you've been to both Brazil and Argentina? If you land in Frankfurt in transit to Malaysia, does that mean that you've been to Germany? The article (found via Vagablogging) by Patrick Smith, gives some similar examples and asks what does it mean to visit a country, and should it really matter which countries you’ve visited.

I'm all in favour of making lists of the places I’ve visited. I consider travelling as a hobby and most people keep lists of their collections. Birdwatchers have their birding records, beer fanatics have their beer logs, probably even stamp collectors have their stamp lists, so why shouldn’t a traveler have a places list? Travelling is like collecting experiences in different areas, so it’s no different from any other hobby in this regard. (I’m also a bit of a sucker for lists, and lists will be really handy when the good old Alzheimer’s starts settling in.)

Now to the main point of the question, what does it mean to visit a country? Well, for starters if you never venture beyond the airport’s perimeter that doesn’t mean you visited anywhere except the airport. By certain airport naming conventions, you might end up in a different country than the airport name. For example, Ryanair’s idea of Vienna’s airport is in Bratislava, which isn’t even in Austria.

Probably the commonest way of attributing a visit to a place is to attribute the visit to being physically in the place, and maybe visit some of the most representative sights of the place. For example a visit to Paris would mean seeing the Eiffel Tower, Louvre etc. On a deeper level, one can immerse himself in the ambience of the place, try to interact with the locals, eat their food, and learn about the culture. There are many different levels you can visit a place, but there needn’t be a clear cut judgment on what a visit should mean.

Any country is living organism, always evolving and changing. In some countries the change is more visible than others. In places where there has been war, poverty, oppressive political institutions, the change tends to be more drastic and more visible than the more gradual change happening in more stable countries. This added time attribute to a visit makes each visit unique.

As for what you’re going to write down on the list. I list cities in my “have-been-to” list. I find cities more manageable in terms of size and more representative in what you have really seen. If I visit Moscow that doesn’t mean that I’ve visited the whole 6.5million sq miles of Russia, but I can still say that I’ve been to Moscow.

I probably didn't get my gossip fix for the week so tonight I was checking out some profiles on facebook. My facebook profile browsing soon turned into picking out some ridicioulous profiles.

First of all, please, please try to be different. If your friend put up a picture of him drinking alcohol of some sort (something rather lame in the first place), you don't have to follow. All these profile photos where friends of the same person.

So you're looking for a relationship. Fair enough, nothing wrong with that. You've discovered facebook and think it's yet another means to get to your goal. You go through all the pain of setting up a profile, add some friends and then get to the real purpose of your facebook profile. Finding a date. (Don't deny that you use social networking sites to find dates if you're single. I know you do, better admit directly)

In facebook there's a field that helps you proclaim your aim, the looking for field. So you start with setting it to Dating. Then you try to mild it down a bit and add Friendship. Then you try not to be so fickle as aim only for dating, and add A relationship. Maybe stopping her is a good idea, but some people think they can stretch it a bit further. So they add Random Play, kinky. But the cherry on the cake is Whatever I can get. Now I know you're really desperate, and what you really deserve is a dirty midget infested camel.

The best relationship status list though was of this girl. The relationship status was In a relationship and at the same time, she was looking for: A relationship. Man, she sure was relying on the fact that her boyfriend is a total computer illiterate, and has no way to know what was happening behind his back. The cheeky bitch.

You've set your relationship status, and now want to give a sneak peek of what your potential conquest will get. You browse through your never-ending picture library, and painfully select the 3 photos that make you look like Jennifer Lopez better looking cousin. You laid your bait and now you're waiting for somebody to bite.

But hold on, your most considerate friends want to lend their hand in helping you find your prince. So what do they do. They add some pictures from their collection of you, and tag them so that people who browse your profile can see them. Problem is that these pictures aren't what you really call flattering. More likely they're the most embarrassing pictures of you getting drunk, looking horribly wasted, and weighing and extra 20 pound which you have lost by now.

Hint. It's time to change those bastard friends of yours.

Enough about relationship seeking. I actually managed to find a cool application for a change. It's catbook. A facebook for your cats. Think this will be better than my personal facebook page. It's more interesting that's for sure.

And, and, I found a nice picture on Karen's wall. It's called Six Degrees of Separation (Wiki article for explanation)

It's a nice warm day and the smell of fresh grass fills your nostrils as you walk towards the car to drive to work. Your neighbor's poodle dashes from across the street and starts rolling on the ground demanding attention. You start rubbing the dogs belly and playing with him until you realize that you're already 10 minutes late and better leave for work. You leave for work with a smile.

Outside it's cold and rainy. It's July and the sun seems to have taken a vacation and went to Madeira. You walk to the car and the poodle runs from across the street splashing in the puddle next to your feet. He rolls on the ground demanding attention but instead of feeling like patting it your first instinct is to kick it away and head straight to work.

Have you ever felt like the dog in this situation? One morning you're greeted with rubs and cuddles and the next morning you do exactly the same thing and get kicked? Why do we sometimes perceive things positively, and other times we perceive the same thing negatively?

I'm calling that undefined something that alters our perception of an event the bias visor. The bias visor can be mood, state of mind, level of stress, internal turmoil, internal peace, etc. I choose the visor analogy because this mental state works like a visor. It's like a screen (visor) that alters (biases) the perception of a neutral event to make it positive or negative. Neutral events are events that aren't logically positive like winning the lottery or logically negative like the death of someone.

Interactions between lovers are probably the best way to observe what I’m talking about. Have you ever been in an argument with your sweetheart and all of a sudden behaviour that she used to like starts annoying her? For example, say you've got a peculiar way to use vocabulary to describe situations. When the bias visor is in positive mode this is seen as funny and amusing, but when the visor is in negative mode it is seen as stupid and illiterate. The action, misusing words, is the same, but the reaction is positive or negative depending on the bias of the visor.

Knowing about the existence of the bias visor gives us a way of understanding people's reactions better. I think that when the presence of a bias visor is evident, identifying the real nature of the visor gives us insight on what the real problem is. Take the previous example of the vocabulary misuse. Imagine all of a sudden your better half starts complaining about your vocabulary. Then the habit of fitting the toilet paper roll the other way round starts annoying her. Then you're scolded because you placed the toothbrush mug on the left side of the sink instead of on the right. All these events are considered generally innocuous and relatively unimportant, but if all of a sudden they start seeming important and negative it's evident that a negative bias visor is affecting the judgment of the situation. The real cause of the problem is not the action itself but something deeper.

There are a million different reasons why somebody is affected by a bias visor. I believe that there are so many possible causes that it's best not to try and guess what they are. The best way to tackle the situation is to discuss it, and ask what the problem is. This way there's a greater chance of identifying the real reason behind one's interpretation of events consequently avoiding the risk of misinterpretations and misjudgments. Sometimes however the biased person might not know what the reason is, or else the person doesn't feel like talking about it. In this case I think the best option is to let it pass gradually and give the person space and time.

What do you think about this topic? Can you add some examples of the bias visor in action? I'm sure that what I'm talking about here is something that was discussed by psychologists at some time. If anybody knows the proper terminology for what I'm talking about then I'd be very grateful for a comment.