Next to Nowhere

Vanhoja mainoksia 5

2011-04-13T14:42:00.010+03:00

"Onko lietenne ylikuormitettu?" Oy Sytytin
Useiden yrityskauppojen jälkeen toimii nyt nimellä BMH Technology Oy, osa Hollming Oy:tä.

"Suunnittelemme ja suoritamme." Salaojitustyö Oy

Työpukimet / Ulkoilupukimet / Poikain pukimet. Turo Pukimia.
Yhä olemassa.

"Jokaisessa kodissa tarvitaan lääkekaappia." / "Miten sisustan lääkekaapin?" Instrumentarium
Liike ei ehkä nykyään ole tunnettu lääkevalikoimastaan.

"Se sanoo kaiken ompelusta." Minäpä ompelen itse.
Kirja meni taannoin Huuto.Netissä kolmella eurolla (helmikuu 2011).

"Kannattaa suorittaa kustannusvertailuja..." Myllykosken paperitehdas osakeyhtiö.
Nykyään Myllykoski Paper Oy.

Vanhoja mainoksia 4

2011-03-13T13:48:00.007+02:00

Seuraavat ovat Taitokirjasta (alaotsikko: "Kodin Taitosanakirjan uusittu laitos"). Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava, 1952. Toimittanut Vilho Setälä. Kirjassa on 1216 sivua ja käsittelee kaikkia taitoja mitä ihminen nyt voikaan tarvita jos sattuu elämään ydintuhon jälkeisessä maailmassa. Ohjeet löytyvät matkasäkin tai paidan ompelemiseen, putkivastaanottimen (radio) rakentamiseen, pergamentin tekemiseen, polkupyörän korjaamiseen, piirtämiseen (kirjassa näyttäisi nopealla selauksella olevan peruskoulun koko oppimäärä), metsän raivaamiseen, eläinten täyttämiseen tai ukuleen valmistamiseen. Loppua kohti kirjasta löytyy sisältöön sopivia mainoksia, ilmeisesti jotta hinta pysyisi kohtuullisena.

"Tehokkalta [sic] ja taloudellisia INKI-kaminoita valmistetaan eri tehoisia." Oy Inkimo Ab

"Maan vanhin ja uudenaikaisin alallaan." Nyblin.
Yhä toiminnassa. Historiikki Museoviraston sivulla.

"Näin rakennetaan lämmin koti!" Oy Perma Ab

"Kello käy... lisää käy." K.Kallio, Kulta ja Kello Oy

Vanhoja mainoksia 3

2011-02-15T14:55:00.000+02:00

Edelleen Hopeapeili 3/1957.

Oxygenolin tuotemerkin voi vielä tänäkin päivänä nähdä Hakaniemen torilla (ja tästä blogikirjauksesta). Aiemmin se oli kotimainen yritys, nykyään Bernerin suuhygieniatuotemerkki ainakin Suomessa (muumihammastahnaa, xylitol-suuvesiä).

Elanto (E-liike) koki vastoinkäymisiä alkaen 70-luvun omien tehtaiden kannattamattomuudesta, joka yhdessä 80/90-lukujen vaihteen pankkikriisiin ja 90-luvun laman jäljiltä yhdistyi vuonna 2003 Helsingin osuuskaupan kanssa HOK-Elannoksi (ja samalla siirtyi osaksi S-ryhmää). Tietää Suomen Wikipedia.

Rengas-Paidat ja Figura ovat ilmeisesti kadonneet historian hämärään. Vaasan kruunun jauhoja valmistetaan ilmeisesti yhä, mutta eivät ilmeisesti ole vaivautuneet perustamaan nettisivuja.

"En olisi uskonut, että se on niin helppoa." / Orient Henna shampoo. Elanto

Käsiol R. Oxygenol

Vartaloonne Figura varmuus. Kaksoistikattu Figura luo linjat.

Leipokaa kerran Ruotsalainen teerinkeli / Vaasan kruunusta voi tulla vain oikein onnistunut pulla.

* * *

Pusero piristää... / Rengas Pusero. Rengas-Paita Oy

Vanhoja mainoksia 2

2011-01-28T14:15:00.001+02:00

Edelleen Hopeapeili-lehden numerosta 3/1957. Tässä kohtaa olisi kenties hyvä kertoa miksi koen nämä mainokset mielenkiintoisiksi.

Mainokset kertovat aikansa arvoista. Ei ainoastaan siitä, millainen keho naisille oli tuolloin suotava (vaikka alla olevasta rintaliivimainoksesta sekin selviää), vaan myös siitä mitkä asiat olivat uusia ja mitkä itsestäänselviä (tarpeettomia mainita). Miten tuotetta pitää argumentoida, että se erottuisi edukseen kilpailijoista?

Nykyäänhän mainoksissa harvoin mainitaan mitään muuta kuin hinta, jos sitäkään. Kenties myös lause tai väite, jota on melkoisen vaikea, ellei jopa mahdoton, näyttää toteen. Tämä siis, jos sillä on minkäänlaista tieteellistä arvoa alkuunsakaan.

Jos yksikään näistä tuotteista olisi vielä myynnissä, niin olisi hienoa verrata uudempaan vastineeseen. D'OVO-saippuaa ei enää tehdä, sitä valmistanut yrityskin lienee konkurssissa (ei yhtään osumaa netissä, Kauppalehden haku tiesi nimen ja Oy Hornborg Ab'n yritystynnuksen (01408761), mutta asia jäi sitten siihen. Jos SOK (eli S-ryhmä) vielä valmistaa kahvia, minä en sitä tiedä. SSR'stäkään ei heti Googlella löytänyt mitään, en koe tarpeelliseksi etsiä pidempään.

Oletteko jo tutustuneet Mary-Anne kolmosiin / ...kolmeen askeleeseen kohti täydellisyyttä. SSR

-Nyt minunkin tukkani tulee kauniiksi! / Suomen suosituin munashampoo d'ovo. Oy Hornborg Ab

Hyvän tuulen kahvit / Johanna * Rosita * Katriina * Korona. SOK

Vanhoja mainoksia 1

2011-01-08T13:56:00.012+02:00

Kävin taannoin kirjamessuilla ja ostin vanhoja naistenlehtiä. Pitänyt nyt useamman kuukauden skannata näitä blogiin, mutta jäänyt tekemättä. Seuraavat mainokset ovat Hopeapeili-lehden numerosta 3/1957. Saatan myöhemmin skannata tästä myös artikkeleita ja kuvituskuvia. En usko, että julkaisija (tai mahdolliset muut oikeuden haltijat) hirveästi välittävät.

Itse Hopeapeili sulautettiin Anna-lehteen vuonna 1971, kertoo Suomen Wikipedia. Syynä laskenut levikki (mikäpäs muu).

Sans égal. Teidän ja muotimaailman huulipuna.

Kuningas Boston saapuu. Yes Sir, siirry Sinäkin BOSTONiin - puhtaampaan tupakkaan.

Hän vangitsee katseet... Dr. N. G. Payot.

Yritän aktivoida tätä blogia pitkän hiljaiselon jälkeen. Osana suunnitelmaa pistän muutaman ajastetun päivityksen, jotta mahdollinen tielle tuleva elämä ei vaikuta blogiin välittömästi.

Pecos Bill

2010-05-23T15:26:00.017+03:00

Kuusi vuotta kotoa muuton jälkeen äiti päätti viimein että tavarat pitäisi kantaa omiin nurkkiin. Ajoi luokseni monta pahvilaatikollista tavaraa, ja nimenomaan sellaista, jota ilman olen tullut hyvin toimeen maailmalle lähdettyäni.

Yhdessä pahvilaatikossa oli isän ja äidin vanhoja sarjakuvia, oletettavasti sillä logiikalla että kaikki talosta löytyneet ovat varmasti siellä minun jäljiltäni (ja jos ei ole, niin roskiin menee).

Yksi mielenkiintoisemmista on Pecos Bill. Muistan isän puhuneen tästä monta kertaa lapsuuteni aikana. Oli ilmeisesti hänen suosikkisankarinsa. Hänellä oli ainakin Pecos Bill-pelikortit, ja saatan muistaa nähneeni myös joitain oikeita leluja, mutta ei ole oikein mielikuvaa millaisia ne olisivat olleet.

Kansi. Pecos Bill - Texasin tarumainen sankari. 12/1958 (kesäkuu). Irtonumero 60 mk. Vasemmassa yläkulmassa lukee PB-sarjat, leimassa THE STATE OF TEXAS. Kuvassa vasemmalla Pecos Bill, oikealla Davy Crockett.

Sisäkansi. Yllä mainos Lännensarja n:o 6:een, alla tiivistelmä edellisestä numerosta ja "Il Lavoro Illustrato"n arvostelusta kopioidut kehusanat. Viime numerossa Pecos Bill, Jane Calamity ja Davy Crockett ovat paenneet purjealuksella Alaskan intiaaneja, joiden laivasto on kovaa vauhtia perässä.

Etusivu. Painatus ja värit ovat todella kaunista katseltavaa. Aku Ankassa värit olivat (ja ovat pitkälti vieläkin) tiukasti punainen-keltainen-sininen, eikä liukuvärejä juuri harrasteta. Pecos Billin ja Jane Calamityn vaatetus tuo helposti mieleen Paluu Tulevaisuuteen, Osa 3:n kohtauksen jossa Doc Brown antaa Martylle "aidot cowboy-vaatteet", joille kuitenkin nauretaan pelleilynä, kun hän pääsee saluunaan 1800-luvulla.

Painatuksen hinnan pitämiseksi kohtuullisena oli joka toinen aukeama mustavalkoinen. "Valkonaamat kuolevat uhripaalussa!"

Vene, lehmä.. what's the difference?

"Irrotan sinulta korvan, jotta ymmärrät, että Pecos Billiä on pelättävä!" Huomatkaa intiaanien raivo päällikön menetettyä korvansa.

Jane Calamity ratsastaa. "Yippeee!!!" Lehden juonenkuljetus on hyvin "avattua" ja helppolukuista. Tulee Brian Michael Bendis mieleen, osoittaen hyvin ettei mitään uutta auringon alla.

Toisaalta; on helppo ymmärtää miten Aku Ankkaa kyettiin tämän rinnalla mainostamaan opettavaisena.

Tarina päättyy lähes siihen mistä alkoikin; Jane vain onnistui hukuttamaan itsensä, intiaanipäällikkö menetti korvan ja pari tämän punapaitaista alaista henkensä. DC-lehdessä tämä kaikki olisi tapahtunut ensimmäisellä sivulla.

Tilauskuponki loppuvuodelle.

Pecos Bill -57:n (maailman suurimman sarjakuvakirjan) ja Lassie - Intiaanipäällikkö-kirjojen tilauslomakkeet.

Takakansi.

Miksi Led-lamppuja ei saa laittaa sekajätteisiin hehkulamppujen tavoin?

2010-03-31T12:11:00.003+03:00

Tämä tuli tänään postissa. Se on hienoa, kun Tietokapulan ("Kiertokapula Oy:n asiakaslehden") toimitus osaa näin auttaa asiakkaitaan kierrätykseen liittyvissä kysymyksissä. Toimitus ei myöskään ollut varma LED-lampun kirjoitusasusta.

Motorola's marketing and empty promises

2010-03-15T22:13:00.008+02:00

As you remember, I wrote about how great my phone was. True, it has great components, it's well designed and the OS isn't crappy either. As such, it's a big improvement over some of my earlier cells, and as such, I'm happy.

I am not, however, completely satisfied.

Backstory first. Motorola is a company that has a history of building one great phone, and then releasing new versions with some cosmetic changes and ignoring R&D till the phone is hopelessly outdated and they're bleeding money. Latest example; Motorola Razr, which even at the start had a bad OS, but sold because it looked sleek. For this and related reasons, Motorola has lost markets during recent years. When I was buying my phone, I heard that no company (either electrics stores or phone operators) imports Motorola's models to Finland because the tech is hopelessly outdated.

Now, enter Milestone. As I said before, the phone is really cool. It runs Google's Android, a fact that defines it. It's marketed (in the States, under the name DROID) as "a phone without compromise". It has keyboard, great components, up-and-coming operating system and you can give yourself root (administrator) access to the phone, even load your own operating system (making sure the phone will never be outdated, and helping writing software for the phone).

I bought my cell only to find that unlike the American version, the bootloader is signed, meaning that you can't do any of your own upgrading. Motorola marketing has gone back on its word that Droid and Milestone are the same model, and shouldn't be expected to be treated the same (even though they share the same components and software). [1]

This wouldn't be much of a hazzle if Motorola could be trusted to update the phone with the latest version of Android as they come out. However, the version 2.1 (the latest version as I write) hasn't been released yet for Milestone, two months after the release. This may have something to do with the fact that not only did Motorola (apparently) divide the coding of the Droid and the Milestone, but EVERY SINGLE REGION OF MILESTONE AS WELL. The European, Canadian, Mexican and and Asian version of the "same phone" actually contain just enough different code that you have to write them separately.

Which leads to questions, when does Motorola upgrade the phone? After promising the upgrade originally in January, they finally published the revised schedule.

"Under evaluation" is marketing talk and means "will not be released". DEXT, CLIQ and DEVOUR are other Motorola's Android models.

Would help if the roms weren't signed. So, Motorola has made their flagship phone - the one developers and bleeding-edgers will buy- into one they can't use. Which gives us hilarious discussions like this one in MotoDev's Facebook-page;

I've started to really hate the American marketing talk, where the company asks you to "wait for announcements" or "follow our twitter-account" etc, while no announcements will be forthcoming. Nearly every message at the Facebook-page is like that; apparently it has been going like that for several months now, and the storm isn't coming down.

However, the PR-person is one to be admired; probably intern or underpaid marketer, with no ability to affect the company policy, she/he tries to make everything look sunny, while the mob is at the door.

This is what happens when Marketing does their own thing without consulting the technicians. There would never have been any problems if they would have from the start told that DROID and Milestone have different standards, instead of pushing for maximum sales while forgetting honestly.

Also understand; my phone is serving me wonderfully currently. No problems. I'm just afraid that if Motorola is cutting support from the second world now, it probably has no qualms for dropping Europe when the sales dry out (probably inside a year). But I'm sure someone has found a way to circumvent the bootloader by then. Here's hoping.

Emerging spring!

2010-03-07T14:07:00.010+02:00

I love pictures taken in bright light. Everything looks somewhat unreal and fake; like they're props for expensive TV-programme.

From window (Kruunuhaka).

In any other light, this building would look horrible, instead of just tasteless (from Kallio, I suppose).

Hakaniemi

Observe the shadow (Kallio on background).

Siltasaari

Winter 2009/2010: Snow and Ice

2010-03-07T13:49:00.009+02:00

Follows pictures of winter.

If this place looks similar, it may be because I may have recorded it before.

I usually take walks after dark. Not that there were alternatives, mind you.

I have tons of similar ones.

Tons of these as well.

The storms covered the railways switches and the melting attempts froze them. This was taken in 20:45, from the Pasila Railway Station (the busiest in the country). I was quite safe standing on the tracks, with trains cancelled and running as much as seven hours late..

Bonuskortin käyttö

2010-02-28T10:55:00.003+02:00

Muuttaessani viisi vuotta sitten omilleni hankin S-ryhmän etukortin. Tai "ryhdyin HOK-Elannon asiakasomistajaksi" - HOK-Elanto kun on osuuskunta, jossa etukortti toimittaa myös osakkeen virkaa (ja täten etukortti on hinnakkaampi kuin K-ryhmän vastaava; 35 vastaan 5 euroa). Opiskeluaikana en paljoa bonuksista välittänyt. En itseasiassa ole varma, miksi kortin hankin. Osittain varmasti alennusten vuoksi (vaikka S-ryhmä sitä harvemmin harrastaakin), osittain varmaankin aikuistumisriittinä. Entuudestaan oli jo äidin rinnakkaiskortti, joten sen vaihtaminen henkilökohtaiseen tuntui luontevalta. Korttia myös kysyttiin aina kassalla, joten kai kyseessä oli myös ympäristön paine.

En maksanut etukortista käteistä, vaan saadut bonukset lyhensivät (korotonta) lainaa. Olin pitkään epävarma siitä, tuottiko kortin sahaaminen minulle mitään erikoista etua. Vihani paperipostia johti myös siihen, että kun kertymää alkoi lopulta ilmetä, en saanut siitä mitään tietoa.

Joitain kuukausia takaperin liitin etukorttiin myös Visa-ominaisuuden. Se oli ilmainen säästöpankkini veloittaessa palvelusta useamman kymmentä euroa vuodessa. Samalla selvisi myös paljonko olin vuosien aikana kerryttänyt korttia sahaamalla; hieman päälle sata euroa.

Toisin kuin K-ryhmä, joka tarjoaa uskollisesta asiakkuudesta lahjakortteja pistekertymää vastaan (pistekertymän säännöt ollessa minulle täysin tuntemattomia), S-ryhmä jakaa bonuksen prosentteina käytetystä rahamäärästä. Prosenttiosuus kasvaa progressiivisesti suhteessa rahankäyttöön, ja on näin epäilemättä verotettavaa tuloa. Kun olen nyt muutaman kuukauden välein kirjautunut verkkopankkiin, on minua poikkeuksetta tervehtinyt allaolevan kaltainen näky;

Noin neljä euroa bonusta, ja päälle euro siitä, että olen maksanut S-Pankin kortilla. Syy jälkimmäiseen liittyy varmasti Luottokuntaan; kauppa kun joutuu maksamaan siitä ilosta, että hyväksyy maksun korttina. Uusien sääntöjen mukaan hinta voi olla useita kymmeniä senttejä, joten pankin kannattaa suosia oman järjestelmän käyttöä.

Etukorteilla on kuitenkin muukin ominaisuus kuin pelkästään "ostosten keskittäminen" yhteen ketjuun. Korttien kautta niitä jakava yritys kykenee paremmin seuraamaan asiakkaidensa käyttäytymistä. Mitä tuotteita ostetaan minkä tuotteiden kanssa. Kyse on tästä ilmiöstä;

Kyse on yksityisyydestä, mutta ehkä siitä joskus myöhemmin lisää. Mutta yhteenvetona; mitä hyötyä on etukortin käyttämisestä? Noin 5 euroa kuukaudessa, 60 euroa vuodessa, mutta kaikki on tietenkin suhteutettu ruokaan (et al) käyttämään rahamäärään.

My new phone

2010-02-25T23:05:00.001+02:00

I bought a new phone (pictured), a Motorola Milestone. It's really neat, though the battery lasts about two days with my habits. But this was predictable, and I'm ok with that; there was no way I was going to find a phone with these features and still get a long uptime!

The phone is quite similar to Nokia N900. It's a bit slimmer, a bit better designed and the battery lasts a bit longer. Otherwise they are quite similar. The phone runs Google's Android 2.0 (a Linux-derivative), which has an impressive number of free software up for installation. Such as the program I'm writing this on, Blogaway. Indeed, I've heard the operating system is to be used on netbooks as well, though I'm unsure how well it scales. Wouldn't people be happier with a true Linux-distro, like Ubuntu? Or just go with WinXP? But I digress.

The main point is, that after two weeks of use, I'm extremly happy. No regrets.

(The picture is lifted from The Independent, a quality newspaper if there ever was one. Used without permission. Please don't sue.)

Elokuvalippujen hinnat

2010-02-16T12:55:00.002+02:00

Tämä on taas "elokuvaliput ovat hirveän kalliita", mutta;

Liisa Ihmemaassa boikottiin Hollannissa

Hollannissa elokuvateatterit aikovat boikotoida tulevaa Disneyn Liisa Ihmemaassa -elokuvaa. Protestin syynä on se, että elokuvan DVD-versio julkaistaan vain noin kolme kuukautta ensi-illan jälkeen. [...] Elokuvateatteriketjujen mukaan päätöksen [kolme kuukautta ensi-illan jälkeen] myötä he menettävät rahaa, sillä ihmiset odottavat halvemmaksi tulevan DVD:n julkaisua.

Kävin viikonloppuna elokuvassa. Oli alennuslippuja, mutta ilman niitä olisin maksanut kahdesta istumapaikasta 24 euroon (11,90 € / kpl) ja karkit/limut päälle. Samaan aikaan DVD't maksavat kaupassa 10-20 euroa (joista Disneyn elokuvat lähempänä 20 €). Uutisen mukaan boikotti Hollannissa on mahdollista, sillä neljä ketjua pitää 80% elokuvateattereista ja heillä on keskenään tätä käsittelevä herrasmiessopimus. Suomessa Finnkino yksin pitää vastaavia lukuja. Wikipedian mukaan se on Suomen ainoa suurten paikkakuntien elokuvateattereiden omistaja yksityisessä omistuksessa olevien elokuvateattereiden lisäksi, tarkoittaen että kilpailijoiden markkinaosuus on murto-osia Finnkinon vastaavasta.

Tiedän että tekniikka maksaa ja varsinkin Finnkino on voimakkaasti sijoittanut digitaaliseen ääneen ja kuvaan sekä 3D-kapasiteettiin. Investoinnit on kuitenkin tehty joko säästämismielessä (filmiin verrattuna digitaalinen kopio on murto-osia digitaalisen valmistushinnoista) tai kilpailumielessä; uusi tekniikka tuo asiakkaita kilpailijoilta. Kuitenkin, kymmenen vuotta sitten lipun hinta oli 40 markkaa (5,5 €). Samaan aikaan kuluttajahintaindeksin mukaan lipun hinnan olisi pitänyt nousta n. 6,5 euroon*. Tallenteen hinta on vastaavana ajanjaksona tullut alaspäin - Disney'n VHS:t maksoivat vuonna 2000 keskimäärin 139-149 markkaa (n. 23-25 €) ja DVD't hieman enemmän, jotakuinkin saman verran kuin BluRay tänäpäivänä**. Videovuokraamojen hinnat ovat taassen pysyneet jotakuinkin samoissa - käsittääkseni noin 2-5 €/lainaus (vrk).

Suomen kansallisen audiovisuaalisen arkiston pyörittämän Elokuvateatteri Orionin liput ovat pysyneet samassa hintaluokassa noin 5 eurossa nyt kymmenen vuotta (liput maksoivat ennen 4,50 euroa, mutta vaativat jäsenkortin, joka maksoi 2,5 euroa***). Liput vaikuttavat nyt halvoilta, mutta kymmenen vuotta sitten olivat samanhintaisia kaupallisten toimijoiden kanssa.

__________________________________________
*Vuoden 2010 tammikuun indeksi verrattuna tammikuuhun 2000 on 115 Tilastokeskuksen mukaan.

**Tosin on huomattava, että kymmenen vuotta sitten DVD'n valmistus oli vaikeampaa kuin tänään, ja hävikkiä syntyi mm. painoprosessissa, jossa joka viides levy hajosi. Tästä ollaan ilmeisesti päästy eroon, mutta valistuneena arvauksena olettaisin, että BluRay kärsii nykyään samasta ongelmasta.

***Väite perustuu muistikuviin, ja voi olla väärä.

Picture of the Day

2010-01-14T22:48:00.004+02:00

From National Library.

Pictures of January

2010-01-12T18:57:00.008+02:00

Yesterday. The pictures have been taking starting from around 17:00 and the last around midnight.

Replacing Ipod Touch

2010-01-01T14:33:00.010+02:00

Few weeks ago I was careless and put my Ipod Touch (Gen 1) into the washing machine. It's now really clean. Also - really dead.

My Ipod Touch - sleeping with the fishes.

Well, things could be worse. My insurance paid most of the money back (they were surprisingly generous), so I'm not weeping myself to death. This does leave me with a problem - how should I replace the machine? Please understand; Touch wasn't just mp3-player for me (as such, it might even have been inferior to the Gen 5 Ipod Video I had ordered in 2006). However, the machine had several redeeming qualities. First and foremost, a big screen that was suitable browsing the Internet with WLAN, watching Youtube and pre-downloaded video-files while on a train. It was also shockingly thin, and as such, I loved it.

I however didn't have much love for the way Apple ran the game behind the curtains. Mainly, that I couldn't install programs freely, but had to use the App Store. Sure, you could jailbreak it (and I frequently did ), but the hazzle to keep the thing both up-to-date AND usable was getting on my nerves.

But, that's all water under the bridge. My point, however, is that I'm not running to buy a new Touch (Gen 2), no matter how much I loved the previous version. This brings me back to the stated question; how to replace it? I could get a mp3-player fairly cheap, but the thing I find I'm mostly missing about is the ability to look up facts on the go (and amuse myself with videos, ebooks etc.).

My phone is also getting up there with the years, and I was thinking that maybe I would do a coup and buy a new machine that takes care of both of the problems at one go. The thing is, I dream of a device with;

a long battery life
thin (easy to pocket)
big screen for internet browsing and video
mp3-player
hazzle-free
easy to use
maybe QWERTY
compatibility with Mac and Linux

You don't really have to be a technology-adept to see that the thing I'm descripting is actually two phones. Of course, there's available multiSIM-service from several operators, but let's save this option for later, and not only because it would cost me about 4 euros more per month.

About some of the phones I've been considering;

The pinnacle of human civilization.

The Iphone. Yes, I'm a hypocrite. But as it is the standard for the moment, I suppose I have to consider this before I can objectively look at the rest of the alternatives. Otherwise, the whole post would be just a knee-jerk reaction of "I don't want to be like everybody else! And in any case, this phone doesn't do [something I will never use]!"

So, I hear the battery life is getting better. There's a new model coming in few months, and it might actually be something to see; however, I feel that as a phone, it has been really standing still ever since it came out in 2007. Sure, back then it had a big headstart to every other phone out there, but the competition has been gaining, and Apple has been essentially standing still. After everything is said and done, however, it's a solid phone. It synchs with a Mac and should be "hazzle-free".

And it has all the same problems that the Touch had; I'm not sure how comfortable I would be with this alternative. And that's to forget the two year contract I would have to sign (this being the only contract-only phone in Finland).

+I know how this works.
+Compatibility with Macs (if not Linux)
-The two year contract
-No QWERTY
-I would feel like I'd be buying a three-year old phone
-The amount of features isn't really dazzling.

Three options for easier colour-coordination.

The N97 Mini. It has the QWERTY-keyboard and I love how it slightly pops up when in use. And the phone comes with a year's contract of "Comes With Music". It's being marketed as "Buy a Nokia Comes With Music handset and get millions of tracks for free, yours to keep". The thing is, the tracks are in WMA and tied to only one Windows-computer. And I don't own a Windows-operated computer. And of course; keep till I switch the computer or the authorization server goes offline.

Plus this is Symbian-operated phone. Symbian is solid enough, I suppose, but if Iphone is 2007, this is 1995. And I've never really liked it, though I understand it has been getting better lately. So this is a bit knee-jerk reaction, I suppose. I also hear that the processor isn't quite up there.

+QWERTY
+the music
-symbian
-the processor
-compatibility

The thing is more powerful than some home computers.

Nokia N900. Well, this is hard to look at objectively. It's the heir to the Nokia's Internet Tablet-line, and as such isn't really a phone-that-can-get-to-internet as it is an Internet-Tablet-that-allows-you-to-phone. Nokia has also been very frank that this isn't for the average user; that it doesn't quite get there as a phone. It has about every technology they could try to fit into a handheld device, such as an infrared-port (last seen in a phone around 2004). In short; it's a high-tech Swiss army knife. One of the more expensive ones, with fifty functions. And that's why it's 6 mm thicker than Iphone and 50 grams heavier (181 g as opposed to 133). But you can do almost anything with it.

And it runs Maemo 5 Linux. So, compatibility should be excellent.

All this is to say, of course, that the battery life is threatful. One reviewer wrote that with nightly charging, you can make it through a day (all that pretty tech consumes a lot of energy). Not to mention, that Internet Tablets aren't actually meant to be on 24/7, unlike phones.

+has everything and the kitchen-sink
+compatibility!
+Maemo is future
-battery
-thickness

Even as a clamp, the phone is thinner than some of my pens.

Nokia 6600 Fold. Well, the screen is about fourth of the size N900 has, there's no QWERTY and the compatibility is reduced to moving the microSD card to computer and back. But it's small, the operating system (S40) works well and battery should last well over a week. And it has an mp3-player (and FM-tuner). Design-wise it's the best of the lot. Can connect to 'Net, but the experience should be rather modest.

On a plus, this one is so cheap, that I can afford to buy a netbook to go with it. Or buy a new Touch.

+battery
+size
+solid operating system
-Internet-experience nothing to write home about.

Well, let us see how the wind blows. The engineers promised a new and improved version of N900 even before the original model was out (showing once again how Nokia is ran) and Iphone should be updated before Summer is here. And even if updates are coming, should I lock my answer now and then faithfully expect for the new generation to fix the problems of the current one?

Swimming across the Atlantic

2009-10-31T20:02:00.007+02:00

Google Maps celebrated Benoît Lecomte's success, back on the day.

Direct copypaste from Wikipedia;

Benoît Lecomte (born 1967) is a French long distance swimmer who was the first man to swim across the Atlantic Ocean without a kick board in 1998. He did this to raise money for cancer research as a tribute to his father. During his 3,716 mile journey in 73 days, he was followed by a support boat that had an electromagnetic field for 25 feet to ward off sharks. He did, however, still encounter sea turtles, dolphins, and jellyfish.

The feat took him 72 days, with 6–8 hours spent swimming each day in sessions of about two hours' length. He was accompanied by associates in a boat, where he could rest and eat between each swimming period. The swim extended from Hyannis, Massachusetts to Quiberon, Brittany, France. He stopped for 1 week in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean.

Which is nothing compared to Guy Delage;

Guy Delage claims he is the first person to swim solo across the Atlantic Ocean (with the help of a kick board, from the Cape Verde Islands to Barbados). 16 December 1994. Logging six to eight hours a day behind a 15-foot raft that carried his communications gear and food supply, Delage ate and slept on the craft when not in the water. After 55 days he had covered 2,100 nautical miles.

Which Wikipedia considers the easier trip as he had a raft with a propulsion system; however, he did it alone and without any "electromagnetic fields", which marks him as the better guy in my books.

Paintings

2009-09-05T23:52:00.009+03:00

I've been thinking about desktops. Everybody needs a good one, be it a cuddly kitten or Metallica album cover. I've have had some good ones in the past, but lately I've been trying to find paintings I've liked in suitable high resolution. I dunno, maybe I'm getting snobbish. Wikia Commons was a great place to get started, but the search engine was not exactly sophisticated and it has proved to be impossible to cull out the smaller images. On the other hand, Google Image has gotten a lot better since sometime in the recent past they added the possibly to eliminate pictures of less than certain amount of megapixels (as opposed to "less than big", which was too vague or "less than 1024x800" which in turn was too strict).

Today I hit the mother load - so to say - with the flickr-stream of Freeparking. 19th century art is one of my favourite things, and I was thus happy to find such an amount in good resolution. What joy!

Some of my favourites follow. Alas, blogger makes them so small and insignifant; clicking helps but they are still not on the resolution to be found on my hard dirsk. Maybe you are able to locate them somewhere else again (or you can always hit me with an email, I suppose!).

Andrew Wyeth - Christina's World

Frank Dicksee - The Confession

Jeffrey Jones - Blind Narcissus (detail)

Mary McKenzie - A Nude Study

Viktor Vasnetsov - The Flying Carpet

Romaine Brooks - The Cross of France

Next I probably have to hit the library. I'd really like to find a good high quality scan of Gallen-Kallela's At The River of Tuonela or of Henri Gervex' Rolla. Apparently none exist in the Internet today. I suppose I wish to give something back and produce one.. Gallen-Kallela's work is easy enough to find, I think.

American in Scandinavia

2009-08-21T21:58:00.003+03:00

Got the following email from a friend living abroad;

Here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/08/denmark_and_swe_1.html

Thought I'd share this with you to get your input.

In short, the writer critiques Scandinavian (and Danish and Swedish in particular) living standards from those portrayed in the popular media. He claims that Scandinavian people are poorer, less happy and have blinds concerning their surroundings and taxation general.

My first reaction was amazed disbelief: surely this is a text from The Onion? After thinking about it a moment, I can see he has some good points, but ultimately they are all drowned by his inability to see the achievements and advantages of the Nordic model from its failures and differences to the American model.

Before going further into his points, I'd like to talk about his text as a whole. The important part of mr. Caplan's argumentation stems from the question of values. To understand his text, we must see that he is comparing what's good in America into how Scandinavia rates in comparison - but not vice versa. This of course is fair, if we are talking about certain singular datapoints - which has the fastest cars, for example? Cheaper gasoline? I'm sure you have seen this to be used in marketing texts: our product compared to competitor's mark X! Seeing the technique used in a text written by a professor into something I assume to be prestigious website with a high-brow reputation.. well, it is to be seen!

Of course, there are some things we simply can't argue with; how Scandinavia looks compared to Swizerland or New Jersey, for example. Apparently Caplan travelled the countries extensively and can make such arguments. I've never been to Denmark or New Jersey; I remember very little of my trip to Switzerland. Obviously Caplan has been to all these places, and feels that he can, with authority, say that this is indeed so.

What I find particularly amusing is his claims about the things that make life worth living; living space, car ownership, and meat consumption (instead of time spent with family/friends). He writes with sneer about people biking to work in rain, apparently ignoring several observations that you can make from this;

First, that a person who has stable income can surely afford a car of some condition.
Second, that biking to work is possible in the first place.
Third, that the biker assumes he is still in presentable condition once he gets to the workplace.
Fourth, that a people who regularly exercise tend to be healthier and thus, happier (that I'm actually linking to Fox should tell you how well-known fact this is!).
Fifth, the biker calculates that he can still fill all his social obligations even though his commutation time increases. In other words; even though he has less time to spend with friends after work, he will find a way to make up to it in other ways. Maybe he works shorter days or his friends are available at weekends

Meat usage seems somewhat strange on the list; surely this is a question of taste, values and history rather of money?

And so on. Caplan makes lots of assumptions that are understandable as personal opinions from a private individual (after all, we seldom form our views from "fairly balanced" pool of information) but rather less so from a professional blogger, who, I assume, was hired for his interesting and in-depth vision. This blog-post is a collection of knee-jerk reactions - mostly ones he had even before he left the States. He would have been interested in confirming these solely based on his earlier journal entries. There was no initiative to actually deny any of them...that is to say, contradict himself. Even though he might have walked in with an idea to go where the wind would take him, his hypotheses would have fast blinded him to any advantages to American system he may have seen, maybe even presenting them to him in negative light.

After all, few of us work very hard to make ourselves look like idiots.

A hint into his psyche can be found in this quote;

[About Human Development Index];

I can see giving equal weights to GDP per capita and life expectancy. But education? [...][I]n terms of the actual if not professed values of normal human beings, televisions and cars are a lot more important than books.

All

Political views

2009-08-09T11:53:00.005+03:00

Just did a test of my political views, with the results on the left.
The nice thing about the test was the ability to check how certain groups, divided by age, nation and/or self-announced political groups answered the same questions. I note that I'm a bit farther away from the centre than my age group or the generation of my parents.

I was interested in the views of my own age group from natural reasons.. and of my parents' generation as these are the views from which the newspapers are edited, laws are made and from which moral arguments that the youths challenge usually stem from.

I wonder though - am I on the left (and down) of my generation and my parents' generation because of my views.. or because the control group, the other people who answered the quiz happen not to represent a good average Finn of that age (and to admit, 11 people in the older group does seem a rather small sample)? This would have to do with where the link has spread, and who have thought to click on it, or do the test (which was fairly long). Also would have been interested to see the views of people in larger towns compared to countryside, but this was apparently not possible.

But I have long suspected that the people that write opinions to news stories on the Internet ("niggers go home! finland is to white people! pure race!") may be closer to "average citizen" than those well-phrased texts in the daily paper's Letters-section. I am not entirely comfortable with this idea.

Political Spectrum Quiz

My trip in Sweden

2009-08-02T00:37:00.015+03:00

Two weeks ago I left for a biking trip. I took the ferry for Stockholm and two weeks later I was in Rostock looking a way home. Attached is the route as mapped by my GPS and the markings I did to my notebook. The text will go from present to imperfect, hopefully it's easy enough to follow.

15.7.2009 - Wednesday
Backed the last of my stuff, took the train to the harbour, bought a ticket and left for Sweden. Planning to bike to Helsingborg, take a ferry to Denmark's main island, cross it and from there take a ferry to Rostock.

16.7.2009 - Thursday
distance covered 122,5 km/ av. speed 15,4 km / in 7:55 hours

Got out of the ferry around ten, biked to the motorway to Helsingborg. Found out that the road is - despite publicity - not good for biking. Have to backtrack and start using older roads.

Traveled quite the distance. I decide to not go for a camping site because it would have meant sidetracking at least 7 kilometres, instead went forward for another 20 and slept on an untended farmland, behind some trees.

17.7.2009 - Friday
99,6/16,3/6:04
After biking four kilometres there is the county beach. I spent there few hours washing my hair, eating food etc.

Because of the wind direction, traveling seemed slow and I had to keep breaks quite often during the first 40 kilometres. After reaching Katrineholm, I went for the south, with wind somewhat on my back. I see a map with a camping site marked inside the city borders of Norrköping. Travelled thru beautiful Åby and reached Norrköping around 21; trouble finding the camping site and had to ask directions from a cop, who decided to drive the patrol vehicle to the camping ground, so I could follow him.

Reception closed, but I'm assured I can just build the tent, use the showers et al and pay in the morning.

18.7.2009 - Saturday
91,1/14,1/6:25
Payment in the morning was successful. The price was 120 crowns (around 10 euros) for the night and 130 crowns for purchasing Scandinavian Camping Card, which is apparently required for most camp sites. I also get a a magazine with all the Swedish camping sites marked on a map. Looking at the map, I feel overwhelmed by the distance I have yet to cover.

Spent the better part of the day walking about Norrköping. Left for South around 14, but again against opposite wind. Decide to follow unpaved roads toward West, in hope of getting the wind of my back. Somewhat success, but the roads are not straight and inadvertently circle back toward itself. High point was following a road that slowly dwindled into nothing and I had to carry the bike over a hill to reach another road - only to find hundred metres later it blocked by barbed wire, to make it part of a cow pasture. While carrying the bike and the bags one at a time over the fenced area (and crawling under the wire myself), it started raining, which thankfully lasted only for an hour.

Found out that not all the smaller places marked on the map actually have a store or other places where refreshments could be found. Started to travel toward Kisa, but found a pleasant camping site on route, by a lake, and decided to build the tent there.

19.7.2009 - Sunday
47,5/16/???
Woke up to the sound of water hitting the canvas. Decided to stay in the tent till the rain would end. It continued till 16, with feeling that this would be temporal break. Calculated that I didn't have enough cold food till tomorrow (couldn't very well use the cooking equipment in the rain) and decided to push forward. I did have some canned beans, but for some reason didn't have a can opener.

Got to Kisa after biking most of the day in rain. Found a camping site, where the land owner said I could pay when I was leaving, at which time I would know the total of my bill.

20.7.2009 - Monday
71,1/15,8/4:38
The rain continued till 16. I settled my account and went forward. Only after few kilometres the rain continued, but thankfully didn't last long. It returned frequently for short bursts thru the evening.

Found a kebab-restaurant, the first I had seen after leaving Stockholm. The owner was from Macedonia, and observed that while business was good in the village where the restaurant was located, it had no social life and the only entertainment was the frequent fist fights the farmers started on pub nights.

Continued toward Eksjö through some beautiful scenery, which didn't easily copy itself to a film. Did try, though. Reached Eksjö quite late at night, but for lack of sleeping place pushed forward. After about ten kilometres, found a good spot in the forest.

Heard some loud, strange voices from the forest that didn't seem to belong to a human. While loud and seemingly coming from a large body, didn't see anything and slowly the voices faded away.

21.7.2009 - Tuesday
73,9/14,4/5:06
The opposite wind became even worse. I had to walk for kilometres at a time because the wind changed direction every other minute, making the bike difficult to drive. Sometimes the wind pushed me to the gutter, sometimes in front of the cars. Thankfully nothing happened, but I chose to walk for kilometres instead of risking it.

The weather continues to be bad otherwise as well. Rain keeps falling sporadically.

The battery of the camera seems to be running low. I have been taking too many pictures; over 200, though it felt like less.

It is hard to push forward. I don't really get to talk to people with whom I have history, and the lack of human contact depresses me. The road ahead seems far, and while I'm certain I can do it, it seems long and thankless journey. I was hoping for more effortless journey; the wind robs 5 to 10 kilometres per hour from my speed. At one point of the day I was going downhill, pushing for more speed and still had trouble passing 15 km/h.

22.7.2009 - Wednesday
86,0/19,4/4:23
Before going to sleep last night I called my mother. The call must be somewhat expensive, but it lifted my spirits. I also decided to go for Malmö and Trelleborg instead of Helsingborg and Denmark (the route would have taken me farther north). This allowed me more space on which to plan my journey.

The day was exellent in other ways as well. For most of the day the wind was behind me and went speeds of 25km/h even uphill. While the pace slowed down as the dark neared, I still covered most of the distance that day in less than four hours.

I stopped to visit county museum, which was mainly centred around nostalgia toward bygone Sweden. I also saw huts on which military used to live on the area.

Slept on camping site. I'm nearing Malmö, only about 150 kilometres as bird flies. As I still have two weeks before I have to get back to work, I'll take some sidetracks to see some of the bigger towns.

23.7.2009 - Thursday
76,4/16,8/4:31
I woke up in the rain, which lasted till 13, when I started biking. The trip to Kristianstad on smaller roads was was rather uneventful, though I did get to photograph a (Swedish) mile-stone, which I had seen through the whole week. This was the one in the best condition thus far, and I'm happy to finally gotten one. The stones for full miles (and one fourths, two fourths and three fourths) have followed me the whole trip. Apparently the miles (which equal ten kilometres) are still used for longer distances, as I few times heard people referencing to living "ten miles north" or traveling "180 miles to Lapland". With the milestones being so common, I would well see why this habit would continue when all the modern signs are in kilometres...

I reached Kristianstad soon enough, but found the outskirts disappointing. This was the first time in Sweden that I saw things being run-down. Thus far, no matter the construction costs, the houses (if not abandoned) were always in good condition and the people living in the houses seemed to have pride in them.

I had forgotten one my bikelocks at the camp site, and was advised to seek a new one from Biltema. Had troubles finding the place, and when I did, the store had already closed, at 19 o'clock. Thankfully, there was a camping site not half a kilometre away. The place was in the middle of the industrial area, which apparently had grown around the old vandrarhem. The price for a tent place and shower was the cheapest on the whole trip - 75 crowns, which included everything.

The staff was quite helpful and likeable, but when asked about the condition of Kristianstad, they reinforced my view of the place as run-down town with no future.

I started feeling regrets for doing the detour for Kristianstad, instead of heading straight to Malmö.

24.7.2009 - Friday
70,7/14,9/4:44
Bought the lock from Biltema and headed for the town centre, which ended up being a lovely old town. Spent time in town museum and then wrote some postcards.

Left toward Malmö around 16, when it promptly started raining again - while I stayed put, it had been all sun. Again I drove against wind, and for some unknown reason there was no way to reach Malmö directly by bike, thanks to the road being part of the European road network, on which biking is forbidden. I had to use old tractor roads, and the (very poor) road went like letter "S" on both sides of the motorway. I didn't do much distance that day, but I did tire myself to the largest extend during my trip.

Reached a camping site, where I met friendly people. Decided to rest for a whole day, the first since I got to Stockholm.

25.7.2009 - Saturday
Stayed put. The camping site was rather expensive (180 crowns for a tent place), but as the weather stayed abysmal I had no rush to get back on the road. Spent time with the campers and surfed the internet on my ipod.

26.7.2009 - Sunday
108,1/15,6/6:55
Today I biked to Malmö through Lund. The trip was, again, against wind. This is apparently a common occurrence as the trip saw me crossing several wind power plants that were busy grinding energy.

Lund had a beautiful old town, and soon after I left it I came to the outskirts of Malmö, which was, again, a bit of a disappointment; it was very similar to Kristianstad. Only the very centre with its houses from middle ages were worth seeing. After touring a while, I left for Trelleborg, from where I hoped to catch a ferry to Germany.

After getting only ten kilometres away from Trelleborg, the biking road ended and E-road started. While it had a sign forbidding bikers, there was a good paved 2 metre distance on the other side of the outer white line, on which I could travel far safer than on some other parts of Sweden. Reached Trelleborg and found that the ferry to Rostock would leave in four hours - at 23:00. Got tickets to it. Slept very badly on board.

27.7.2009 - Monday
69,5/13,2/5:13
I set my wheels on German ground at five in the morning. Was surprised to notice that there was a nuclear power plant right next door to the harbour.

I biked a while and slept in the forest waiting for the TallinkSilja's offices to open. When they did, I found out that the next boat to Finland would only leave at Wednesday and it would be full.

I tried to find alternatives on the city library's computer, but alas, the computers were from the 90s and still ran Windows 2000 with Internet Explorer 5.5. Most of the webpages I were depending on didn't open. In the end I called my mother who was able to secure me a place in the ship.

She also urged me to go get the ticket from the office as fast as possible, and to sleep "at least one night" in a proper bed.

Thus far I have probably not mentioned that the roads in Rostock were abysmal for biking. While the car roads were in good condition, the biking/walking roads were rised and seldom were the needs of bikes observed. Also, these roads were not paved but plated with cement squares, which were not even. This made travelling quite uncomfortable. The roads were also filled with unused tram-lines, which made it important to look down in order for the wheel to not get stuck. When we also add that on certain crossing there was only one pedestrian light, which had been situated thus as biker's eye would not reach it, it became understandable that I didn't see a car gaining speed from a crossing (apparenty the driver figured that green light was enough of a moral high ground to drive a biker to the ground). Thankfully he was turning and not going ahead, or I would probably not be here writing this.

Long story short, he hit me (apparently thinking that a bike could easily avoid a car if properly motivated, not counting on the quite tired driver or the additional weight of travelling gear). The car's bumber got some scratches. The driver insisted on calling the police, which after some problems (nobody understood English) ended with me fined (for 120 euros) and my insurance details being written down.

I got the ticket, and went on to try to find a sleeping place. Alas, all the hotels were full, and even the local camping site had only one spot left, of which they asked 43 euros. I didn't accept, and instead slept in the woods.

28.7.2009 - Tuesday
20/???/???
Woke up and went to long and beautiful beach which was the whole seafront of the area. Spent there several hours. Lost my glasses in the sea, and found it rather tricky to bike back to TallinkSilja offices, at which the ship would be boarded on midnight for departure in 5 in the morning on the following day.

29.5.2009 - Wednesday
Spent sleeping at the ship.

30.5.2009 - Thursday
Mother fetched me from the harbour and drove home. Feeling pretty ok, but as the hours passed the trip starts to get me down, with my knees and hands aching in particular.
..

If I would have to do the trip again, I would perhaps more closely follow the seacoast, instead of so readily biking west. I have a feeling that the roads would have been better suited for bicycle travel there, but this theory will have to go untested. All in all the trip was quite satisfactory, though maybe a tad too long by myself. In the future, I would probably either find a friend to accompany myself, or limit the trip to 500 kilometres. Longer than that seem to cause depression for lack of human contact.

The people in Sweden were surprisingly friendly. In towns, the people readily and cheerfully helped me when I didn't understand how some machine worked (such as the card-readers in stores), and while on the road they gave me a good girth, so not once did I feel I was in danger, even when I was driving with the cars. Indeed, when I was driving late at night, the cars slowed down, honked and showed me a thumb in support, for having the stamina to continue after sun had set.

This all changed at Rostock. The people were, by and large, quite unpleasant. The cars seemed to try to intentionally make my life miserable and did not take me into consideration when plotting the courses. This went to such lengths that one hit me rather than tried to avoid me. But of that I have already told you enough!

All in all, the trip was quite satisfactory, and I will endeavour to do something similar next year.

Mitä löydän kun tulen kotiin viikon pyöräretkeltä:

2009-07-13T17:26:00.005+03:00

"Ohhoh, miksi tuo kirja on lattialla? No heitänpä hyllyyn.."

No.. se siitä sit.

Tutkimusretki Pornaisiin II

2009-06-17T01:16:00.028+03:00

Jatkoa edelliselle viestille.

Hylättyjä pikkutaloja nyt löytyy vähän jokapuolelta;

Hylätty parin huoneen talo lähellä Keravaa.

Mutta isompia yksiköitä ei niinkään. Siksipä yllätyin kun törmäsin kokonaiseen hylättyyn maatilaan Järvenpään itäpuolella;

Päärakennus oli rakennettu kivestä ja näyttää vanhemmalta ja huolellisemmin rakennetulta kuin varusmies-talot yleensä. 1900-luvun alkuvuosilta?

Sisältä talo oli epäsiisti, mutta suurin osa ikkunoista oli yhä ehjiä ja talossa oli vain kaksi grafiittia.

Pitkin rakennusta löytyi oppikirjoja. Ne oli sijoitettu kuvan osoittamalla tavalla, aivan kuin joku olisi vain laskenut ne hetkeksi.

Pari esimerkkiä. Varsinkin saksankirja oli melkein priimakunnosta. Vanhin kirjoista oli vuodelta 1958 ja viimeiset 1970-luvun alusta.

Hellan päällä on useita tyhjiä lasisia säilytyspurkkeja. Niitä löytyy myös muualta asunnosta.

Osa hylätyistä tavaroista tuntui todella oudoilta, kuten nämä 80-luvulta peräisin olevat sukset (ruokahuoneessa).

Pitkin taloa näkyi merkkejä siitä kuin siellä olisi aloitettu remontti juuri ennen talon hylkäämistä.

Kalenteri joka näyttää elokuuta 1990 on tuorein talosta löytyvä esine; valtaosa on 60-luvulta ja 70-luvun lopulta. Lisäksi muutama esine 80-luvulta.

Talo sijaitsee aivan tien vieressä ja siitä on näköyhteys puiden läpi naapurustoon. Se lienee alueen vanhin talo; muut ovat paljon myöhempää, ehkä 80-90-luvulta.

Yläkerrassa osa lattialaudoista on irroitettu. Arvelen että se on tapahtunut jo ennen rakennuksen hylkäämistä. Nurkassa on toinen talon televisioista.

Yläkerrassa oli ilmeisesti talon pään työhuone.

Pöydällä kahden atache-salkun vieressä.

Vaatehuonetta ei ole täysin tyhjennetty.

Talon kummatkin hellat toimivat puulla. Talossa oli kuitenkin sähköt.

Ulkoa talo on todella massiivinen.
Kuva ei täysin kohdistettu, sillä kamerasta alkoi loppua akku.

Maatilan työhuoneet ja mylly(?)

Kenties jonkinlainen autotalli? Rakennus ei koskaan valmistunut; toiselta puolelta puuttuu seinä ja katosta on pystytetty vain runko. Tukirunko on hyvässä kunnossa ja rakennus ei näytä siltä kuin olisi hylättyä hajonnut.

Jonkinlainen autotalli? Kuvittelin että rakennus oli vielä käytössä - maali ei ollut halkeillut. Ovet oli kuitenkin murrettu auki. Vasemmanpuoleinen johti kapeaan varastotilaan ja oikeanpuoleinen autotalliin.

Klappikone(?) on ison varastohallin ainoa esine.
Kuvan ottamisen jälkeen kameran akku tyhjeni.

Uskomattoman suuren, mutta tyhjän autotallin perällä oli puuhaketta. Klappikone oli ainoa huoneen esine.
Kuva otettu puhelimella.

* * *

Miksi maatila oli hylätty? Kummatkin talon hellat toimivat puulla, vaikka talossa oli sähköt asennettu jo (kytkimistä päätellen) 60-luvulla tai aikaisemmin. Siellä täällä oli merkkejä siitä, että kaminaa olisi oltu irrottamassa ja lattiaa vaihtamassa; en näe syytä miksi vandaalit haluaisivat hajoittaa yläkerran lattian, kun kaikki muu on jätetty ehjäksi!

Kenties talo oli toiminut kesä-asuntona, mökkinä? Mutta miksi sitten rakentaa uusia rakennuksia, jotka on hylätty lähes käyttämättömänä? Missä talon viljelymaat olivat? Pihapiiri rajoittuu metsään ja omakotialueeseen, joista jälkimmäinen samalta ajanjaksolta kuin miltä uusi moottoritalli.

Tutkimusretki Pornaisiin I

2009-06-17T00:25:00.012+03:00

Yksi Keravalla asumisen parhaista puolista on sen sijainti YTV-alueen reunalla; toisaalta pääsen Helsingin keskustaan 20 minuutissa, toisaalta maaseutu alkaa kymmenen minuutin kävelymatkan päässä itään.

Ostin taannoin itselleni maastopyörän. Tarkoitus olisi päästä tänä kesänä tekemään kunnon lenkki, jonka aikana nukkuisin teltassa tai hostellissa useamman yön.Tämä retki oli 65,4 kilometriä (kiitos Google!) ja ensimmäinen kerta elämässäni kun kävin Pornaisissa ja Mäntsälässä.

Yksi maaseudun parhaista puolista on siellä oleva tila. Käytöstä poistuneelle rakennukselle ei ole samanlaista purkutarvetta kuin pääkaupunkiseudulla, minkä ansiosta välillä vastaan tulee isojakin rakennuskokonaisuuksia, jotka on vain hylätty paremman idean puutteessa (klikkaa kuvaa suurentaaksesi);

Vanha huoltoasema

Irti revittyjen bensapumppujen luona kasvaa jo puita.

Rakennuksen takana on vanha rekka 60-luvulta (?) täydessä puulastissa. Sitä ympyröivästä romusta päätellen autoa ei ole liikutettu lähivuosina.

Vanha laituri. En tiedä mikä sen käyttötarkoitus oli, mutta se oli tarpeeksi tärkeä että yksityiselle pihalle johtavalle tielle kannatti rakentaa liikennevalo. Laituri kuuluu ilmeisesti vieressä olevan omakotitalon alueeseen.

Tämä siis menomatkalla, kuvat Pornaistentieltä. Takastulomatkalla törmäsin suureen hylättyyn maatilaan, jota tutkin lähemminkin. Kuvia seuraavassa viestissä.

Health care

2008-04-22T13:11:00.004+03:00

Sometimes I find it amusing (and sometimes disgraceful) that the Americans don't have "free" health care. Of course, health care isn't free -- in 2006 it cost little under 2600 euros per citize n of Finland (how much people actually paid depends on their income, of course). The newspiece portraits this as expensive, maybe it is. How much do Americans pay for ther for their health plans (how much companies have to pay to cover their employees)?

On top of the above mentioned government safety web I have health insurance that costs me about 30 euros per year.

But all in all, what do you think of the safety web? Is it a great thing, or a bad thing?

Leningrad Cowboys

2008-04-02T00:10:00.003+03:00

I never saw the original movies, but the concerts at Helsinki were something people will talk to their kids about. I didn't know they had so many music videos, though!

Where's the moon?

Thru the wire

Those were the days

I quite love all three of them.

Firefox in Europe, at the start of February 2008

2008-04-01T22:47:00.007+03:00

I think I wrote about this few years back in the old Gulag-blog (I can't seem to find the url). I thought to take a fresh look;The average is said to be 28% (IE has 66%), which is quite high; +5% in one year, and I think closer to +10% since I last posted this graph..

I've noted the trend in my own family. One of my brothers decided to run with Firefox few weeks back after heroically defending IE6 since it came out (I never used the browser, I'm proud to say). My mother avoids IE like disease and I think that even my sister (age 12) is preferring this to IE.

The last 50%, I expect, are company computers and few hold-outs that just don't care. I think, apart of some system admins getting the whole company into converting, this would be it.

(Source)

Finnish political system

2008-04-01T12:04:00.006+03:00

Based on my previous post and ifireball's answer, an (long waited) explanation on certain curiosities regarding the Finnish political system.

Parties
Finland has eight political parties with enough popularity to reach parliament seats. The biggest three have a popularity of about 20-25% (Social Democrats (slightly left), Centre and National Coalition (slightly right)), two midsized (Green League, Left Alliance (a bit farther to left)) and another three with popularity around 5% (Christian Democrats, True Finns (a bit farther right) and Swedish party).

This means that one party can't form a cabinet by themselves. The votes have also spread so generally over the field (with leftish tendencies) that the "winner" of the elections can't form a coalition with the smaller parties (greens, reds, swedes etc). The biggest party always needs the second biggest to gain Prime Minister's seat. To buy the competitor's co-operation, they are bribed with Foreign Minister's and/or Finance Minister's seats (the most powerful specialisation seats).

Exambles
Before I go any farther, I should note that Prime Minister is the person in charge of the state affairs. President stays out of the daily events.

In 2003 the then-Prime Minister (Social Democrat, who had ruled for eight years with the help of National Coalition, to the point that Coalition wasn't even pushing for their own pm-seat but supported Social Democrat) tried to make the elections about who will be the next Prime minister. As Coalition was only aiming for Finance Minister's seat, they lost votes, ensuring that "the bloody enemies" formed the cabinet together, leaving the trusted younger partner into opposition.
To make it even more fun; thanks to a political scandal the Prime Minister was a person nearly nobody had voted for.

Anyway, to go on: the system means that the cabinet has to be a constant consensus between two parties who are ideologically quite far from each other. To make this even more fun, neither of the big parties usually have enough steam to form cabinet by themselves, so they need smaller parties to bring up the count. Thus, who-gets-to-be-in-the-cabinet-game is very like Musical Chairs, with the expection that of the eight players about five get to be in the cabinet..

And to make things even more fun, you can't even poke fun at the main opposition party, because in less than four years they might be the leading party and trying to make a judgement call for which of the two big parties they want for the Finance Minister's seat.

What this means
The advantage of this system is that nobody gets to do any big moves without considering how it affects the whole population; people (and opposition) will accept changes to taxation, for examble, because that is what the party is about (and they can always change it back, and this is good ammunition for the next election). This means, of course, that one representative can't push agenda of special interest groups. Alas, this doesn't work on areas where the main body doesn't have any experience on - usually these fuck-ups have something to do with technology. See; Lex Karpela and the current Child-porn/Freedom of speech-scandal.

The side-effect of all this is that Finnish politics is very boring; nobody dares to argue against anything if they can't be sure of that the vast body of the parliament (and the citizens) isn't behind them. While they might be able to keep their seat in the cabinet (even over the elections) the feedback from the other parties would make ruling and forming consensus more difficult.

Similar system is in in use in all Nordic countries as well as in Germany (AFAIK). Depending on the opinions of the citizens and the power-balance (what is the normal support of parties from election to election, how many parties there are in all and what do they stand for) the "holy cows" may differ. Because in Germany it is nearly impossible to form a coalition without the Greens, the cabinet's views on many subjects may differ but nuclear powerplants are always going down..

Blogs and Internet

2008-03-18T23:23:00.004+02:00

Follows a fast, free (as in "done in haste") extended quotation from one of my favourite reporters.

In my opinion we can well call the communication and cross-linking between bloggers as citizen journalism. Especially if this conversation gains critical mass and explodes into the public conciousness. This is one of the results of phenomeon known as "the wisdom of crowds".
[...]
Even in Finland we have had occurrences where blogs have affected public conversation.
[...]
The new copyright law which has gotten the name "Lex Karpela" is [an] examble of this. The feedback on the law and its preparation process was so massive, so clearly cut out of the same cloth -or, in other words, based on past conversations- that the minister Karpela took it to be "astroturfing"*.

The child porn-filtering conversation hasn't even been worth following on the official level. The "experts" and all other politicians, with the expection of Jyrki Kasvi and Kimmo Sasi have been -so to say- "lost in the field".

Much smarter conversation has been had in the blogs. Essensial is that from blogs these opinions have made their way thru editing process and into the [traditional] mass media.

The quotation serves two agendas; first, it shows that traditional media doesn't always know best (several magazines happily spread the minister's view in the child porn/censorship-scandal even thought the previous day 500 people had been rallying in front of the parliament house -- in the middle of workday!) and that traditional media tries to use the blogs as sources when the crosslinking reaches certain stage.

Second, it brings worth once again the sad fact of reality that the people in power are not always the best suited for it - and for some reason in Finland the same people usually have a pet project which involves limiting or making use of Internet difficult.

I know some of the references might be hard for foreigners, but they are pretty easy to google -- or just ask in the comments. It's not like they are in use.

*in this context, from few individuals, and not from the people as a whole.

Success with Ubuntu!

2008-02-12T19:46:00.000+02:00

After the previous post, I just had to show the Ubuntu (in it's half-installed state) to a friend of mine. Even not working properly, it looked so damn cool!

So, while I was sitting on his couch and he was tinkering with something I idly started doing some google-searches and found a document that solved my WLAN-troubles.

I also had problems with the BEEB-sound the computer did once in a while. A person on irc referred to his blog.

The sound-problem -- my last big problem -- was solved by finding this forum thread and the post by m94mni.

Now the computer works 100%. I wrote this post in case I ever screw this up again and end up doing the same drill again.. I know what I did wrong and where to find the help.

Trying to install Linux, 2nd documented case

2008-02-10T11:51:00.000+02:00

The following post is pretty much written one person in mind. Bear with me.

I tried to install Ubuntu to my laptop (last try was three versions ago, when nothing seemed to work properly). I still had the CD from my last try (a month or so ago), and figured the reason it didn't work on that computer was because of my uncommon configuration of parts, and not to blame on the operating system itself. Heck, as I think about it, even Windows had some trouble with the drivers of the graphic card!

Anyway, installation itself went dandily. Year ago, when I tried this on the then most recent version, the installation process screwed up my Windows XP partition as well, and I had to reinstall that as well.
Not this time.

Everything loaded perfectly (last time even the resolution was wrong).
I did experience some troubles;

For some reason Firefox threw up some errors everytime I tried anything even little more complicated with that. but I found them pretty easy to fix with some Google-searches [REINSTALL].
I couldn't get the WLAN working. When I did some googling I noticed that I wasn't the only person with this problem. nVidia had some drivers that Linux (very grudgingly, I hesitate to add) gave me, but they were no good. I tried few solutions, but they didn't do it.
My sounds didn't work. Again, Ubuntu got me some drivers and recognized the integrated card but it didn't work. After literally hours of working, I found a solution, which included about 15 sudo-commands in the terminal.
I tried to follow them, but I noticed that even with a map it was too much for me (how do I get past PAGE BREAK or something in terminal, for examble?). I think I screwed up the blacklist thing, and couldn't figure how to destroy the dublicates (how do I get root-access on Nautilus?).
The end-result was that afterwards Ubuntu didn't even THINK it had found my soundcard. On hindsight, I think there might have been an easy solution, but I don't think I can backtrack my way to it.
Someone who is as experienced with Linux as I am with Windows would probably do it, but I don't know anyone like that.

Excluding these two problems that were outside my skill-level, I really loved the GUI and the solutions. The graphical user-interface really blasted my eyes wide open; it looked better than Windows Vista or Mac OS X!
The ability to make virtual screens finally worked in an impressive way (thus far I had always found it a bit gimmicky) and the ability to skin the OS and mod the taskbars really blew my mind. [ Yes, things like this really matter to me ]
The fact that I could add my favourite folders to the "what folder would you like to use"-list (which isn't possible after 15 years in Windows) made me feel all farm inside.
The login-screen just radiated friendliness and professionalism; the same screen in Windows just looked fake and teenagery.

And the biggest surprise of them all; I downloaded a video with Bittorrent (just to check if I could) and was amazed to found that it went about eight times faster (2200 kb/s) than it ever did under Windows (I have 24 Mb cable, but Bittorrent has never gone over 500kb/s, usually not over 400 kb/s).

Should somebody solve my two big problems (eg. help me play youtube-video without any cables going to my laptop) in a way that I don't have to write sudo comments for one and half hours to terminal, I would not only thank him kindly, but ask him to destroy my Windows partition and -against promise to help me in the future- throw money at him. Like, 50€.

And that's what I think of Ubuntu today. It was very impressive, and the two final big problems I had with it seemed like they might be fixed (finally) in the next Ubuntu version, which is due in.... three months? This is the first time I have gotten so close to making everything work out-of-box that the fact that I failed really hurts me heart.

*sigh*

A fast comment on piracy

2008-01-29T22:08:00.000+02:00

Lately several people have mentioned that the failing music industry/artists should get slice of the monthly fee of Internet subscription, in a similar way that the industry gets money from empty VHS- and C-tapes and CD- and DVD-ROMs.
I had some troubles with this - particularly with the last one - I know I downloaded lots of questionable material on CD's back on the day, but today most CD-R's and DVD-R's of mine are full of photos, game-saves and other things I wouldn't hesitate to show to police. Mostly because the actual questionable material can safely be stored on hard drives and deleted after use. And then downloaded again, if need be.

Yeah, I'm not really making much of a case against, now aren't I? Well, this is the punchline;

When people talk of Internet, piracy and monthly compensation, how do we divide the money between the right parties? I mean, the number one legal way of using Internet is to browse web pages - why don't they get a share? What about porn? I have a feeling that porn is at least as big part of the traffic as Hollywood-movies or music from the big cartels.

Instead of trying to keep their stuff illegal, they could try to develop ways to get money out of Internet legally - for the U2 manager even iTunes was piracy against artist*. Radio seems to have worked well for the industry for decades. Over the past ten years, the music industry has done everything it could to shoot net radios down with fees that far outweight their income.

I'm not saying I'm opposed to subscrition system (I would be happy to get the whole copyright question sorted out, so we could concentrate on some real questions) - I just think that paying one group of people who claim their property is shared illegally isn't very good while people who provide their stuff for free on Internet get nothing - nor does game, film, porn or software industry. In the worst case scenario, each of them will be knocking at the door for their own $5. And in the best case scenario -- well, that's just fucking lazy, innit? If I were to forget a keg of beer at busy junction and then notice it empty afterward, I can't really ask the police to take $5 from every person in the neighbourhood who has alcohol on his breath. Or everyone else (he might have just hidden it for later consumption!).

Advertisements work as a model for webpages, for flash, blogs, even amateurish doodles - the Swedish procecutor is claiming that the owners of Piracy Bay are raking millions (YouTube certainly does) and Last.fm is doing fairly well as far as I know.

And the music industry is saying that they, armed with the best artists in the world can't do as well as a 14 year old kid with a pen and a scanner?

And if not advertisements, then maybe subscription -capitalistically chosen between competing alternatives, mind you... or just a dollar per song. I understand it's working very well. 2007 was -again- a record year for digital music transactions.

*and I bet he doesn't mean the fact that the artist gets 5 cents of the dollar, because the rest goes to printing and spreading the CDs. And of course manager will take his 20% out of that 5 cents as well. Plus taxes.

References; U2 manager blames Microsoft et al, Canadian songwriters propose legal music sharing, Music-industry tries carrot after years of stick, Internet radio may face crippling fees, Digital sales up worldwide.

Average IQ of nations

2008-01-28T23:15:00.000+02:00

Found this map somewhere, didn't believe it and found it uploaded at Wikipedia. However, I have not been able to find the source for this map. I understand it's based on some tests or something.

I find it quite interesting that the IQ seems to change by zones - would think there would be difference between Israel and surrounding nations, or some difference between North and South America.

Why should this be so? I don't really think about correlations between race and nation (heck, aren't Australians and Canadians mostly mostly from Britain, with some Chinese and Japanese thrown in for spiciness?) but something sure looks wacky.

What I bought and did I like it and what next?

2008-01-19T23:50:00.000+02:00

I wrote this one and half years ago. Go on, take a look, I'll wait.

Done? OK. I have pretty much done ("bought) everything in that list. Here's what I think of them today.

1. I bought a Gen5 iPod just before the price dropped over 100 euros. Depressed me a bit, but on the other hand, the product itself has worked for me like a charm. There are some problems with DRM and pulling music out of the instrument. I also wish for mini-USB port to replace the current non-standard one (makes charging the gadget or transferring files easier while visiting). Both of those needs are fairly small problems though, and seldom occur me. Maybe I have grown to live with them.
Since then, Apple has pushed new iPod nano's and iPod touches to market, but they don't really do anything to me. I hear the DRM has gone up and not down, even on the level of hardware. When the time leaves my player, I wonder with what I'm going to replace it with. All the competitors look so very plastic, and I feel a product should be both stylish and able. Most of the competitive things on the market are either/or.

2. Eyeglasses. Bought them, you can probably see them on the right. Heavier than my old frames (which date back to year 2001 or so) the new ones are more angular and look less "geekish". I wanted glasses that didn't seem to be shamed of themselves; my last glasses were almost round and seemed to say; "I need glasses, these should do". Now I wanted (and still want) glasses that say "even if my eyesight were perfect, I might still wear these". The glasses cost over 400 euros, as I recall. Partly because my eyesight is far from perfect, partly because glasses made from titanium alloy are not cheap.
I would really wish to own a second good-looking pair. As the EU has brought new competitors to the field, the price of optics has started to fall. I should be able to get glasses for little over 200 now. But this is really on the backburner. Not because of money, but because stores don't really carry a good collection of titanium frames.

3. I bought a laptop, a HP Pavilion. This was a difficult one, the technology was again going through a new paragrim shift, from 1024x800 to 1280x800, and from one core to dual core. The laptops had also started to move from necessary business tools and toys for geeks to "my personal, only computer" class. There was also a pressure to bring the prices down plus get the hardware ready for Vista. Back when I finally did the selection (October 2006) Vista was already late (and brought out four months later). The maker of the laptop was HP, but I notice myself thinking Sony (I seem to connect non-working pieces of shit with the company thanks to the MiniDisc).
To be fair, the computer doesn't really have one big fault that makes it unusable. More like a big selection of small problems that pile up and make the gadget annoying to use.

The cover is plastic and looks good. However, it's not sturdy and doesn't protect the screen components on the inside. Thus my screen now has some colouring faults, particularly on the right side of the screen.
The screen and keyboard don't open up to 180 degrees, but only to 140 or so. Perfectly OK if you use the computer on a table, but if support the PC on your legs, you can't get your eyes to the optimum angle.
The volume, playback options and media buttons are touch-operated (and only work when the OS is running). This means that if you are booting your computer at a library or in some other HUSH-place, you can only turn the sounds off only after Windows has executed the quite loud TADAA!-sound.
The loudspeakers seem to have interface, and sometimes emit metallic SCREECH-sound on the background. The maximum volume is barely over the "I can't hear you"-level.
MovieDVD's etc. seem to have problems running. Also the (quite standard with all drives, I hear) regional coding with only five switches is quite annoying particularly as DVD's of other regions seem to wander in libraries etc. quite freely.
Integrated graphics card seems to mean that all 3D-animation (as in games) comes with a half-second lag.
Of the 80 GB hard drive, 15 GB is taken by the quite useless restore-partition.
Naturally, HP is so cheap as not to ship the computer with DVD's, but makes you burn them yourself.

If you HAVE to reinstall windows using the DVD, there is no chance of saving files on self-made other partitions, but the windows-installation starts with custom-made "wiping and redoing all partitions" function. Also quite common, I hear.

I would wish to buy a new one, but the current one isn't "that bad", only annoying. I can't justify using about 1000€ for something I don't currently even much need. Incidentally, HP is still using the upgraded Pavilion-design as it's flagship for consumer-laptops. Don't buy it.

4. 23" flat monitor. It was 22", it cost 300€ (because I didn't choose the cheapest model) and I'm very happy with it. I think I shouldn't have gone with plasma, but that's mostly because of the energy consumption, not because of the product itself.

5. I repaired the old electric grill my dad gave me (he got it as a wedding gift, and it was ready to garbage when I got it). After that it looked almost new and is good for another 25 years or so. It makes quite excellent toasts.

What then?
Like one and half years ago, I'm still wondering about TV's. I notice that the price of 42" Full HD has dropped to around 1200-1500€ (when year ago it was over 2500€ for HD Ready 40"). I can afford one now, but don't really have the space (or need) for one. Apart of television (and maybe console of some sort) there isn't really any consumer goods I would wish to have (I don't judge clothes, glasses or books/comics to be "consumer goods" as used in this post).
It does depress me a bit that after years of living comfortably with "after necessities, I have 50€ left for fun!" , I can safely ponder buying TVs without feeling too guilty about it... only to realize that TVs, like so many other consumer goods, aren't really for me. Half of the fun of thinking about these things was that they were so far outside your comfort-range. Like computer games that become boring after you learn how to use money-cheats or after defeating the Big Boss but still having option to wander the world.

I suppose that I'm not the only person in the world with this problem. Money doesn't get you happiness, and I never thought it would.. but I always thought that by the time I would get to this point (somehow I thought it would be later in life) I would have found something else to funnel time, interest and money to. Alas, this hasn't happened.

Q.E.D. I need a drug habit.

Aaand another sunset

2008-01-16T00:17:00.001+02:00

I should really stop posting these. They start to get pretty predictable. The sun sets and there's lots of red.

Lauttasaari last Monday (14.1.2008)

Finnish race, ethnology

2008-01-12T21:16:00.001+02:00

Originally nomads (hunters and fishers), all the Finnic people except the Lapps and Ostyaks have long yielded to the influence of civilization, and now everywhere lead settled lives as herdsmen, agriculturists, traders, &c. Physically the Finns (here to be distinguished from the Swedish-speaking population, who retain their Scandinavian qualities) are a strong, hardy race, of low stature, with almost round head, low forehead, flat features, prominent cheek bones, eyes mostly grey and oblique (inclining inwards), short and flat nose, protruding mouth, thick lips, neck very full and strong, so that the occiput seems flat and almost in a straight line with the nape; beard weak and sparse, hair no doubt originally black, but, owing to mixture with other races, now brown, red and even fair; complexion also somewhat brown. The Finns are morally upright, hospitable, faithful and submissive, with a keen sense of personal freedom and independence, but also somewhat stolid, revengeful and indolent. Many of these physical and moral characteristics they have in common with the so-called "Mongolian" race, to which they are no doubt ethnically, if not also linguistically, related.
-Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, 1911
Article on "Finland", p. 387.

The article on Finland can be found here, here and here.

EDIT: As people seem to think this holds water, let me paste here the text I wrote in the comments;

This theory was popular hundred years ago - if it was researched, I can't tell how. The "theory" served the same purpose as those written of Africans - that due to "submissive" nature, the Finns should be ruled by a a more dominative race. Namely, by Swedes and Russians.

The view of Finns as Mongolians was well spread, however, and till around World War 2 foreign reporters writing about Finns could be expected to remark how that particular specimen under observation - were it a politician, athletic or a businessman - was "uncommonly European for his race".

This all changed starting in the 40s. First Winter War, then Continuation War fought along Adolf "Pure Race" Hitler followed by Olympics in 1952 buried this theory well into the rubbish bin to which it deservedly belongs.

It is, however, good to remember stereotypes like this and how absurd they are, as most likely some of the ones we hold today are as idiotic as the one above.

Trying to install Linux, 1st documented case

2008-01-09T21:32:00.000+02:00

I have gone into record saying that I have troubles getting Linux working for me. I have tried Ubuntu (twice), Mandrake and MEPIS, over the course of four years.

Well, I tried Ubuntu (7.10, x64) again. The files loaded from the LiveCD splendidly, but this is how the desktop looked;

[Sorry for the messy table.]

Well, that's "installing linux"for few months. Say what you want about Windows, but at least you can get the desktop to show up after given time.

The past year in pictures, first part

2008-01-09T00:16:00.000+02:00

During the past year, I took over thousand photographs. Without inspecting them in any detail, I had just nonchalantly dumped them to /random/photos/. Last weekend, I browsed them through in an effort to find the pictures I loved enough to want developed.

During the following weeks, I'm going to some select pictures of that stash - most of it buildings and places I found especially charming, sad or moving. Here's the first;

This picture was taken at graveyard in Stirling. Build on a hill between the town castle and a Victorian prison, the centuries old (and still used) graveyard had beautiful statues erected by rich corpses as well as modest graves. Many of them were covered in moss, and some were just broken, presumably by vandals.

I don't know how they did things at Scotland, but in Finland the church decides 20 odd years back that "resting place for all eternity" meant actually "about 50 years"*. If after 50 years no relatives would be found (and ready to pay rent), the gravestone would be removed and the land given to someone recently passed away.

Seeing as how many of the gravestones were over 100, 150 years old, in bad condition and covered by plants, it should be safe tosay this is not so in Scotland. One has to wonder, though, how do they find places for new graves? Land is an expensive commodity, particularly near population centres.

*You could probably write something sarcastic about this.

Sunshine at Helsinki

2008-01-05T01:35:00.000+02:00

Helsingin Sanomat International Edition reports:

December in Helsinki was unusually dark
As anyone who lives here will confirm with alacrity, it was grim up north in December. During the 31 days of December 2007 the sun shone for a total of just 20 hours in the Greater Helsinki area.

I don't really have anything insightful to add to this. Lets us just conclude that it is all very depressing and cold as well (but not apparently cold enough for snow). If I had money, I would flee Finland every late September only to return with the birds around mid-March.

Buying a camera

2007-12-29T23:54:00.000+02:00

As you may have gathered, I bought a new camera. It works splendidly.

However, when I started pondering about buying one, it occured to me that I know very little about what's important in a good camera, about how to read the statistics, what to look for or even how much do the cameras cost. Here's a short list of things I found useful.

The digicameras can be roughly divided into three categories; the very cheap ones (from €50 to €120 or so) the small pocket-cameras (from €150 to €400 or so) and more professional models, with changeable lenses and so on (from €400 upward).
This is not very clearcut. Imporant factor in the size-question is how the camera is powered; rechargeable batteries or a lithium cell. The latter are smaller. This is a question of preference; smaller cameras fit easier to pockets but on the other hand, bigger cameras are easier to take a good grip of and have more space for buttons.

The things you should know about the camera are;

how well does it photograph in less than optimum lightning conditions

how easy it is to switch the settings for these
how sensitive the lenses are to light (apparently most even little more expensive cameras claim to go from ISO 64 to all the way to ISO 3000 or more, but in essence, in the two first categories anything over ISO 400 looked bad and pixely)

how well does it replicate the colours
how fast does it power up and how long does it take to save the picture after taking one (before you can take the next)
how long does it take between pushing the shutter and the shutter actually opening (my mobile reaches whopping 2 seconds!)
what's the exposition-time (too long causes blurry pictures as hand shakes) and

does the camera compensate for shakiness, and if so, how

I used web reviews to compensate for my lack of knowledge. If you are pondering between two particular models, make sure you use the same website for both models. Otherwise there's a distinct possibility that the reviewers are writing for different audiences.

My favourite website is C|net. My impression of the site has been (with cameras as well as with mobiles) that they aren't happy with anything. Long reviews that seem to be - so I feel - written with the mentality that the product is crappy and the reviewer's mission is to find exactly how. I failed to find a camera that got a grade higher than 8 out of 10. Of course, I'm under the impression that reaching 7,5 grades for "very good". You can see how such attitude would be welcome.
I used some less critical websites to balance C|net. If you just read the site in question, you will easily forget that you aren't buying the camera to go shooting in the Mariana Trench.

I myself settled on Fujifilm FinePix F50fd. C|net says; "the camera is sluggish between shots, shows minor noise even at its lowest ISO, and doesn't include a full-manual exposure mode".
C|net recommended different cameras, but that happened to be most along the lines of my budget, needs and the store's inventory. As you may have gathered from the picture I posted earlier, I'm very happy with it.

Netscape is finally dead

2007-12-29T21:25:00.000+02:00

The unquestioned king of browsers in the 90s has finally come to it's end; AOL is announcing that it shall no longer support the browser.

In mid90s, Netscape had nearly 80% marketshare and it was bundled with Windows till version 98.

After Windows 98 (when Microsoft only packaged Internet Explorer with the OS) the market share started to fall. People didn't really care what browser they used, just as long as it worked.
It didn't help that Internet Explorer wasn't standards compliant, and as soon as it's market share got to around 50% they announced their own modifications to the HTML-template, which Netscape for understandable reasons didn't support.
The end-result was that Netscape's browser showed some of the pages incorrectly. Thus we got those "Designed for Internet Explorer" buttons of the late 90s, and to the steady drop of userbase (in the diagram on the right, taken from Wikipedia).

In -99 Netscape was bought by AOL, after which the development of the browser was given to the newly-created Mozilla Foundation. Netscape still published a new browser more or less every other year, but it was just reskinned, skimmed Mozilla (without popup-killers etc.).

I used Netscape products loyally to around early 2002 or so, when a friend of mine introduced me to Opera. At that point, I was really disgusted with Netscape, and only the fact that I wanted to have total control over my surfing experience (I didn't have my own computer andthe rest of my family used IE) stopped me from jumping the ship.

I was kind of surprised to learn that after Netscape 6 (which was the last version I used) they still produced new numbers, going as far as to release Netscape 9 last October (being actually just Mozilla Firefox 2 with a new skin and few extensions).

But all in all, it used to be a king, and a king needs a proper burial.

Rest in peace.

Maps of Europe

2007-12-28T22:07:00.000+02:00

Here's a link to several maps of Europe. It's coloured accoarding to interesting tidbits of information, such as the hair colour, eye colour, legal drinking age or when it's legal to have abortion.

Tells something about the differences between the European states.

Doctor Who Christmas-story

2007-12-25T21:27:00.002+02:00

Daily Telegraph has a three-page long Doctor Who Christmas-story, which you can read even if you know absolutely nothing about Doctor Who.

A man's head was sticking out of the chimney, looking at him upside-down. The man's face was covered in soot, he didn't have a beard, and his hair was very untidy. His glasses had nearly slipped off his nose. "Ah," he said, "Now. This is not what it looks like."

Tom went over and peered at him. "Are you a burglar?" he said.
"Okay. Right. This is not either of the two things it looks like. I'm -"
He looked suddenly horrified, then with a great blast of soot he fell out into the fireplace, and rolled to his feet. He was in what might have been a very fashionable suit if you were what Mum called a bit of a waster.

It's very good. Do read it. Link.

The new camera just paid itself

2007-12-20T20:18:00.000+02:00

One of the best pics I have ever taken. Helsinki around 16:00, but I'm sure the JPG itself has more detailed numbers. I haven't edited the colours. At all.

Isn't this depressing.

2007-12-19T22:59:00.000+02:00

This is from Deus Ex, a computer game about dystopian future, made in 2000;And this is from Chicago Police Department, about seven years later;

Depressing, isn't it? If I just saw those texts without logos, I couldn't tell which was a game and which was reality.

Neuros OSD Media Center

2007-12-19T09:23:00.001+02:00

Entry in the company wiki.

I'm going to buy this. As soon as I'll get a telly (which I'm going to do inside the next two months).

It records, plays, understands and browses everything, starting from USB-sticks with no DRM. It's basically a small computer made to be used with a TV.

It costs in ThinkGeek store (with shipping from USA) about €160. Plus tax.

[ this is my first "wishlist" tag, which will probably see some heavy use in the near future]

EDIT: no HDTV support, so it seems I have to wait for the next model.

Some random photos

2007-12-18T23:42:00.000+02:00

I bought a new camera. It's smaller and capable of bigger images (up to 12 Megapixels (or 4000x3000) with sharper lines. Here are some photos I took in the train and metro this morning (around 8:00-8:30). As well as few photos from the metrostation during evening. I hope to get some photos of the long stairs to the metro - they are fairly impressive..

Also: hoping to get better handle of the camera yet. As much as I liked the photos, I think I could do better - I got some fairly sharp ones at home but the ones I took outside (albeit quite fast as I didn't want to disturb people) got a bit blurry.

Reviews.

2007-12-18T22:55:00.000+02:00

Published something at kvaak.fi. Check if you can read Finnish.

Also: I finally get to write something to Sarja-info, something I have been hoping and treading for two years now!

Walking away from church

2007-12-15T18:02:00.001+02:00

Today, I finally did something I had been pondering for five years or so.

I filed my resignation papers from church today (handily done via online-form. Thanks modern age!) and started thinking about the repercussions. Nothing too serious, but let me walk you through;

The things that have mostly kept me in this long were (1.) the idea that I believed in something, (2.) that church did Samaritan work both in Finland and abroad and (3.) that I wanted to upkeep the church buildings themselves as historical artefacts.

In turn, the biggest reason why I filed the papers was the (1.) sobering realization that I don't need outside-confirmation for my beliefs. I can read comics without belonging to Comics Society (but I belong anyway, because I enjoy the company and the perks); similarly I can choose to believe in things without belonging to Believing Society. I'm not using the perks and services that come with the membership, so why should I pay for them? Particularly as the membership is something 15 times more than in Comics Society.
Other reasons (less important) include the fact that (2.) while church does Samaritan work, this work consists of only 10,6% of the yearly budget. For every ten euros I pour in, only one goes to help other people. I could better use my money to give it to some other organisation(s), that only have one objective instead of several dozen.
I'm also not comfortable with the fact that (3.) while some of the the priests are very comfortable with the society we live in (as I have doubtlessly mentioned in the past) some are not. This particularly goes for the higher hierarchies and the northern provinces of the country.
Every time I hear about a priest refusing to work in the same church as another priest - because the another priest happens to be a she - I get a bit uneasy.
The final reason was missionary work. Thinking that I pay for something that sends people to Amazon, Africa etc. to talk about God and thus is a direct reason for vanishing nature religions tens of thousands of years old is just wrong. Even though I know it isn't what it was a century or or (perish the thought) millenium ago.

But here I am. Now I have to think where to give money - Red Cross? Some organisation that works against mental illnesses? It used to be so easy, just giving church money.. of course, explaining my belonging to church just because of its convenient nature (and with 90% of my money going to somewhere else) is not morally right either.

Shame about the buildings thought.

The picture is taken from Wikipedia, attributed to Creative Commons and can be found here.

Linux, here I come!

2007-12-13T10:32:00.000+02:00

One of the biggest reasons why my laptop isn't running linux is that I use it to make video calls. Linux has notoriously bad trackrecord for video (or audio)-conversations. Even commercial applications with Linux-ports usually lack video-support.

Well, no longer.

Thank you Skype!

Well... just great...

2007-12-06T21:47:00.000+02:00

I wanted to comment on a MSN blog, so I had to enter my Live id (there was no Anon or non-certified alternatives) and a minute after posting, this appeared on my mailbox.

1. "Windows Live Spaces" - horrible name, isn't it? For one thing, the branding thing - this really doesn't have anything to do with the operating system, now does it? At least I hope it doesn't. Vista is such a clusterfuck (beg your pardon) that I wouldn't wager either way.
"Live" - what?
"Spaces" - seeing as how they keep saying "my space", "your space" etc, "my page" was probably copyrighted or something. Anyway, this seems artificial way of trying to create a new word.

2. "Now it's time to have fun with you space" -- what?!

3. "Express yourself". How about with a finger? Stop sending me spam everytime I comment on someone's blog... I'm sorry, space.

4. "Connect and share anywhere.." - is this even grammatically correct?

Journeyman

2007-12-02T00:47:00.000+02:00

This show must have one of the best themes ever.

I love the way the guitar seems to be trying to break away from a loop, eventually successing.
The visuals are also great; they really bring out San Fransisco as a mythical place, where everything is possible. I really love stuff like that; a right picture taken at a right time is greater than life itself, and more real than the original ever were.

That's why I love photography; it's from around us, but magically when you take the picture, it becomes an artefact of more magical reality.

Another sunset

2007-12-02T00:37:00.000+02:00

Hey, remember this? It was taken at 23 -- this is around 1530 at Lauttasaari. I didn't have anything to hold the camera on, and the exposure rate is terrible (around two seconds) for pictures in bad lightning. Also, it doesn't capture the light that well, so I have to adjust them afterward on the computer.

Sigh.

I hope to buy a new one sometime in the very near future. I just have very little knowledge what's important in a great camera. Obviously the amount of pixels is not the only important thing.. ability to take damage would also be important, as I carry it in my backpack. As is the ability to capture light in different conditions. But can somebody help put this up in numbers? Maybe recommend a good camera?

Lauttasaari about 23 hours earlier.

News not broadcasted

2007-10-27T23:58:00.000+03:00

One of the more annoying things about our times is that interesting and important are not the same thing, in news.

Which brings me to the list of most important stories of the past year or so gone unreported. I choose to believe this is not because of some conspiracy, they have just fallen through the cracks. The page doesn't really have any nutshell-versions (maybe they think everything is important?), so I thought to write them and give some comments if I can - those would be in italics.
The stories are really American centric, and I can't help but feel that there are more important stories untold in the old world. I don't even understand why some of them are important. Writing this took several hours and afterwards it occurs to me that I could have just concentrated on the ones important to *me*.

#1 No Habeas Corpus for “Any Person”
Anyone judged to be an enemy of the state - even US Citizen - may be hold infinitely without questioning or chance to prove innocence, thanks to new law by Bush. Apparently the media at large has been reporting this as "even though this is possible, it will never be applied on USA citizens".
I know I should probably be more interested and/or outraged, but I can't help but think what makes US citizens "better" or less dangerous than one having a passport from Finland, Britai or Egypt. Dangerous people - or one viewed as such - is dangerous no matter where he hails. That being said, I think this law should never have been passed in the first place. It invites abuse.

#2 Bush Moves Toward Martial Law
Bush has the right to station military anywhere in USA without say from local authorities or governor.
Again, I should be interested but all I can see is material for the eventual "I told you so!" when the coup d'etat happens. And I'm not really sure it will.

# 3 AFRICOM: US Military Control of Africa’s Resources
"...Oil companies and the Pentagon are attempting to link these resistance groups to international terror networks in order to legitimize the use of the US military to “stabilize” these areas and secure the energy flow. No evidence has been found however to link the Niger Delta resistance groups to international terror networks or jihadists...."
I don't really see the bad thing here. Sure, it's not exactly moral, but nobody wins if the regions stay unstable and lots of people lose their lifes. In the past countries trying to do good there have given up quite easily. Long term agenda might be just what the doctor ordered. USA trying to push their own forces in the area long term might stabilize and democratize.
It seems that far too often the African liberation movements are just new dictators and one-party systems waiting to happen. But maybe this is just me and "white man's burden" talking.

# 4 Frenzy of Increasingly Destructive Trade Agreements
USA and EU are making trade agreements with developing countries which leave the partner in very bad position financially, leading all the way to slave labour.
Can't really say anything to this. I suppose that as a citizen of EU I'm part of the problem here, but... well... It would be nice if things were a bit more fair. These things are written and signed in cabinets and situations that don't really have that much to do with democracy..

#5 Human Traffic Builds US Embassy in Iraq
The US Embassy in Iraq was built with slave labour.
No comment. This would be like shooting fish in the barrel.

#6 Operation FALCON Raids
I don't really understand anything about this. I think it has something to do with USA becoming a police state.

#7 Behind Blackwater Inc.
This was largely old news. Blackwater is led by a right wing Christian-supremacist, it's the largest mercenary organisation in the world and makes big campaign contributions to Republics. It's also expanding its operations inside USA itself, and has lots of support from people in places of power.
I'm not sure if all this was in the article, but I find the topic interesting and have done some of my own reading.

#8 KIA: The US Neoliberal Invasion of India
In a pact between USA and India, India has given its whole farm sector insecure for American take-overs.

#9 Privatization of America’s Infrastructure
The states sell roads to private companies, who then make profit with tolls and lobby the states not to build any new roads that might be in competition.

# 10 Vulture Funds Threaten Poor Nations’ Debt Relief
Apparently loans taken by poor nations that would otherwise be forgiven are bought by vulture funds, which then go on rob the little money the states have left.
In other words, taking even the ash from the fireplace, after everything else has gone. Thus far, this is the story that shocked me the most.

# 11 The Scam of “Reconstruction” in Afghanistan
Most of the money sent to Afghanistan never gets to it's destination. Of all the aid from USA, maybe 14 cents of every dollar end up where it's supposed to, other circling back to corrupt politicians or corporations in America.
These help-projects never seem to work. They always crash and burn, for one reason or another. Doesn't mean we shouldn't keep on pushing.

# 12 Another Massacre in Haiti by UN Troops
"Eyewitness testimony confirms indiscriminate killings by UN forces in Haiti’s Cité Soleil community on December 22, 2006, reportedly as collective punishment against the community for a massive demonstration of Lavalas supporters in which about ten thousand people rallied for the return of President Aristide in clear condemnation of the foreign military occupation of their country. According to residents, UN forces attacked their neighborhood in the early morning, killing more than thirty people, including women and children. Footage taken by Haiti Information Project (HIP) videographers shows unarmed civilians dying as they tell of extensive gunfire from UN peacekeeping forces (MINUSTAH)..."
That was the gist of it. Doesn't really have anything as far as punishments go. It's just hanging there. Unbelievable.

Journalism and Civil Society in Haiti: The Acceptable and The Unacceptable
Lots of corruption, scandals etc. In Haiti, this time from the rulers, and nobody in USA or EU is giving a damn.
This story could have used a nutshell. Apparently they are just quoting news-pieces that aren't repeated otherwise.

# 13 Immigrant Roundups to Gain Cheap Labor for US Corporate Giants
NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) flooded Mexico full of subsided American food products, leaving the Mexican farmers who can't compete seeking badly paying and dangerous jobs in other industries (at USA), rolling the clock back hundred years in the factories. The visas on which they arrive make sure they stay second-class citizens.

I'm pretty sure similar things happen with EU and Africa (with the difference that Africans aren't in fact employed somewhere else). I don't really understand why it's so important to grow sugar in Finland (apparently the farmers in Finland are earning in general €5 (NOT a good wage) per hour thanks to subsidies, of which €3 is government money). Same thing goes, of course, for France. Who cares where the wheat comes, as long as it's baked near? It's important to keep us somewhat non-dependant of foreign nations, but some of the subsidies are just vanity, and a money hole, besides.

# 14 Impunity for US War Criminals
Thanks to last-minute change in the language of one particular law in USA, torturers and their bosses are now safe from law if the deed was done after November 1997. So long as they stay at USA, they don't have to concern themselves with war crime-charges.
Meanwhile, some human rights groups brought these charges against Rumsfield while he visited Paris recently. The France law makes it mandatory to research the charges, but chances are that nothing will happen because it would sour the relationships to USA.

# 15 Toxic Exposure Can Be Transmitted to Future Generations on a “Second Genetic Code”
This is just what it sounds like. You are not just endangering your own health, but possibly the health of your descendants to Nth generation. This is not just about living next door to nuclear power plant, but also about all those untested chemicals we have ingested or lived with (or our parents, grandparents lived with).

#16 No Hard Evidence Connecting Bin Laden to 9/11
The guy is still wanted by FBI et al, but not because of WTC. Apparently they never found anything to connect him there, expect, obviously, the tapes he made.

# 17 Drinking Water Contaminated by Military and Corporations
While there are laws against this sort of things, apparently they aren't enforced and the waters are in awful condition. 40% of American water is unsafe for fishing or swimming.

# 18 Mexico’s Stolen Election
In short; American government and companies broke repeatedly Mexican laws about presidentian elections to get the "right man" to the big seat. When the research on the elections was finished, most Mexican TV-stations refused to broadcast the findings.
Apparently this has all to do with the fact that in Mexico the president is in control of energy resources, such as oil fields.

# 19 People’s Movement Challenges Neoliberal Agenda
Apparently countries in Central and South America are walking out of World Bank and IMF who try to rule the way the countries do business (and are very powerful tools of influence). The World Bank is traditionally led by an American, and IMF by an European, even though in theory the whole world has a say in the subject.
I'm a bit unsure about this topic. Every time I read "agenda", my tinfoil-sense starts tingling. That being said, World Bank has done some really poor moves lately, and I can't fault the nations wanting more independence in these areas. I do wonder can they do better on their own, under populist politicians than under trained economists?

# 20 Terror Act Against Animal Activists
In gist; they apply terror-laws on areas where they were not planned to be used, because they are more convenient to the law-enforcers. Another example of USA turning into a police state.
In addition to animal right activists, similar strategy has been used against street gangs in NYC, at least.

# 21 US Seeks WTO Immunity for Illegal Farm Payments
Basically, against problems rised by #13. The WTO agreement is going really badly, mostly because all negation-sides are blaming each other of illegal subsidies. Because each nation/federation/conferedation (or whatever EU is) handles these things differently, they can try to forbid them from the other sides while keeping them themselves. Of course this doesn't really fly with the others, causing the negotiations crash and burn time after time.
Which arguably is a good thing.

# 22 North Invades Mexico
After all the anti-immigration speeches in USA, it is Americans who plan to retire to Mexico to spend their pensions. In warmer climate, where dollar streches farther. The article is mostly about double-standards.

# 23 Feinstein’s Conflict of Interest in Iraq
Some American congress-woman voted for billion-dollar contracts to company owned by her husband.

# 24 Media Misquotes Threat From Iran’s President
Apparently the president of Iran didn't say “Israel must be wiped off the map", but "regime occupying Jerusalem must come down”, apparently meaning the Israeli government policies, not the nation as a whole. The whole thing was a translation error, which hasn't stopped the wrong translation being circulated in the media and hostilities from the side of USA government.
The piece also talks about the Iran president's open letter from May 2006, where he asked for open talks from clean table, without past history. The letter was disregarded because Bush was still doing pretty well in Irak and thought he might be able to attack Iran sometime soon.

# 25 Who Will Profit from Native Energy?
Many Indian reserves in America are situated so that they can be harvested for wind, natural gas, oil energy. Lots of talk about what aspects should be developed and companies finding convenient loops in laws to exploit. I didn't really understand this story.

Facebook

2007-10-20T22:34:00.000+03:00

Little over month ago I promised I might write about this.

Beginnings
I have been an Facebook user for six, eight weeks now. I don't really remember why I originally joined; probably it was just a moment's fancy. I did comment on MySpace. And, in case you happen to have forgotten, I disliked it immensely. So maybe I wanted to do similar piece on Facebook; this is entirely inside the realm of possibility.

I did get an invite months ago, but as it ended up being one of those accidentally sent ones - Facebook asks if it can sent an invite to everyone on your address book - I didn't join and even complained to the sender that you shouldn't allow companies to endorse their products on your name. And if you believe in a product, you should believe in the product enough to write your own endorsement, invitation... and not just use the default one.
Never trust an default invite. It's probably fake or accidentally sent. If you ever find one from me, I didn't send it voluntarily. But I digress.

Background
The first thing I learned about Facebook, nearly a year ago was this; in Iraq, the privates use MySpace... and the officers Facebook. In civilian life, MySpace is used by the young, the alternative crowd.. in other words, people who value experimentation, "their own terms" over standards or "the way found best". I don't particularly like this definition, as it leaves me in the non-alternative crowd - a demographic I'd rather not belong to.
Where MySpace is known for its individuality, customization - with very poor tools, as mentioned - Facebook in turn believes in standards. MySpace has flashy colours; Facebook has some blue on white. MySpace handles the whole page as a single entity; Facebook uses java to arrange the information and layout (inside assigned grid, with limitations) so whatever you do with your profile, it looks at least semi-professional. And while Facebook doesn't allow you to change your background colour, add music or bling.. what it does allow to do is far easier to do than anything on MySpace. All in all, I would say the difference is that of the personal homepages of last century to a profile on a company page - this is not a perfect analogue, but gets pretty close.

What is it good for?
There are several ways to handle your profile, I suppose. I hear that many IT-professionals use it to create contact networks for viral advertising and job prospects, some use it to play some sort of minigames with each other (I saw rock-paper-scissors in one profile).. I mainly use it to stay in contact with my friends, keep track of interesting events and so on.
On longer term, it's also excellent for contact information. You can enter your contact names, phone numbers, home addresses.. and then limit who will see it. Therefore, I can allow my "true friends" to see all the above information, but my "friendsters" only one email and instant messenger-id. The rest will have to be satisfied to my name, mugshot and location.
It's very handy if you happen to need to send a postcard, lose your phone or format your computer... or need a reminder when the birthdays are coming up (I, at least, can never remember those). But daily? I see what my friends are up to, share photos I have taken and paste recommended pages to other profiles. Small things that say that I remember you, you are still my friend even if we haven't met lately due to distance or time constraints.

In the end
But all in all, I find Facebook to answer a need I didn't know I had (aren't the best innovations like that, really?). I have used several networking sites (starting with IRC-Galleria and MySpace) and they often work only vanity-pages - look at my face! Look where I am! Facebook (while nodding to the mentioned things) has the focus on actually contacting other people and keeping touch.

It does what MySpace does, in the same way as business suits and jogging clothes are both basically there to keep you from being naked - but there is a difference, now isn't there?

Photos from Espoonlahti

2007-10-20T22:24:00.000+03:00

Went with mum and sis to Espoonlahti to walk today. In case you don't know, it's at south-Espoo, next to sea. When we came, sun was still up, by the end the sun was setting. I tweaked the photos a bit to give them the colours that didn't properly copy themselves to the film [memory card?].

Click on the photo to view them all (six, this one included).

The Sea During Winter

2007-10-08T00:31:00.001+03:00

This photo is four years old. I was working as "research assistant" in Tapiola, a district in Espoo. From there it was about five kilometres to Lauttasaari [Ferry Island] where my grandmother lived. I walked there few times after work, and once took the photo while crossing the bridge.

It is quite amusing that now, nearly half decade later I find this on my hard drive, when I'm nearly on the same situation again; pondering about future. Then I had just graduated from High School and was weighting the options where to continue my studies (just stopping there didn't really occur to me) and what army would be like (next summer).

As far as I can recall, that is Espoo on the right and Sea on the left. Hundred years ago, you could just walk to Tallinn from here; now the Ice Breakers that keep the waterways open make this impossible.

Buffy Season 8: Long Way Home

2007-09-28T21:00:00.000+03:00

Buffy Season 8: Long Way Home (#1-#4)
Script: Josh Whedon
Pencils: Georges Jeanty
Inks: Andy Owens
Colors: Dave Stewart
Letters: Richard Starkings & Comicraft's Jimmy

I just finished this. And I have only one thing to say; wow.

Before I start to talk about the comic, a brief monologue on the background should be in order; Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired seven seasons from 1997 to 2003, created a spin-off Angel which ran five seasons till 2004. Apparently TV-film about yet another character would be currently in production and come out sometime next year.
The show was ground-breaking in many ways; and to this day many of the more popular shows use plot-points and characters created here; Veronica Mars and Chloe Sullivan (Smallville) come readily to mind.

Background
The premise is pretty simple; the world is full of evil things, and vampires are pretty much the low end as far as the threats go. Slayer - always a female - who is armed with super strength, damage resistance and combat skills was created to keep humanity safe. When she falls (usually only after few years), a new Slayer awakens somewhere to continue the mission.

The TV-Show
Buffy is the Slayer. During the TV-series she and her friends went thru the education system (high school, university), had few relationships, tried to find their place in the world,, grew to be adults and finally got things working pretty well for them; at least as well as things can go when people around you die more or less frequently.
The thing that made the series great was in showing how mundane supernatural is when you are forced to live in the middle of it year after year. Even the demons have bars and have to sleep and get money somehow. And it might not be very good idea to go to the graveyard during night-time. Oh, and a looming apocalypse more or less annually, usually around May. Better leave the calendar open.

The Comic
It has been few years since the season seven ended. And as Buffy notes, the problem with changing the world is that once you do it... the world is all different. You have more responsibility, and there is nobody to tell you how things should be done. Because everything is new. The book has a nice balance between returning to the characters of the TV-show and telling how they are doing after we last saw them. And even as we follow combat training and assault to military installation, there is still time to catch on how the characters personal lifes have been going, why Lando Calrissian's outfit bode bad for the future (Ewoks!) and wonder who in the cast was harbouring true, unrequired love towards Buffy..

The goodness
If you didn't guess, I'm a huge fan of Buffy (and I don't use that word lightly), so I was a bit unsure how to aproach the comic. On the other hand, it doesn't have the facial expressions, background music or other techniques available in television, and on the other there also aren't any budget limitations for what you can and can't show.
And then there's the one limitation I was most worried off; 40 minutes of TV every week isn't the same as 22 pages of paper once a month. On top of it all I was quite worried about the deconstruction; the style of the later years to tell as little though text as possible to give more space for the art. The books look amazing, but you also read them in five minutes. This isn't the case here; text fills the space, confident that it's needed. And when a truly shocking sight comes up, it is given the space necessary. But all in all, the pages are used very economically, with only few boxes carrying minutes of conversation.
And speaking of the art; there's a certain amount of talent required to make the characters look like the actors that once did the roles, without making the art look stiff and unnatural. Save few panels with Andrew (above), the artist has avoided this in an excellent manner. Good old-school art with realistic yet simple style; no photorealism and no manga, both of which would probably ill-suit the series.

All in all; Buffy is back. With new direction and without the limitations that seemed to strangle the show sometimes during the later seasons. I confidentially wait for the new issues and the TPB's; the first one should come out in just few days.

I'll be waiting for it at the door.

I had forgotten I had taken this...

2007-09-21T17:55:00.000+03:00

"Happiness"

Taken at Loch Lommond, during late May. I'm so satisfied with it that I actually gave it a name.

I wish that will be me in 40 odd years.

About religion

2007-09-20T00:28:00.000+03:00

Boing Boing-post that shows the unbelievable stupidity of humanity. On the comments there is this line, the reason I wrote this post;

But why is it so hard for people to accept that maybe, just maybe, the people who compiled the Bible and told stories over six thousand years ago were possibly trying to just figure it out, just like we are today?

It is attributed to AndrewJC, who is the author of post #19. This pretty much sums my views on religion, and thus deserves a post of its own. It's far better said than anything I did in the Jehova's Witnesses-post a while back.

Buzzing in my mind

2007-09-18T22:11:00.000+03:00

I have so many things I would like to write about, but can't seem to get anything together! I'm going to throw them up here, and if I ever develop them further, change them into links. How does that sound?

Comics Festival.
It's great to meet new people and old ones, but it's so hard to make people stay in contact afterwards (because of the whole "your a girl and I'm a guy and I kind of like you.."-factor). Which is a bugger, because not all the girls I like talking to I would like to bed.
Also; the hectic timetable and not sleeping enough.

Instant messaging etiquette.
1.) When you start talking to someone the first time ever, after greeting establish where you know each other from or where did you get the address. There's lots of idiots out there and you can't expect the other to do research to identify you.
Also: the person to start the conversation also has to establish the topic.
2.) If you are going to leave the computer, you are doing something else and can't answer - let the other party know. It's not nice to wait five to fifteen minutes for answer to a question or to carry on the conversation - IM's are not just about keeping boredom at bay. It's also legitimate way of conversation, and you have to take precautions for the fact that the other person is giving you his undivided attention.
3.) When the conversation ends, let the other one know - don't just leave it hanging.
4.) Remember, when you IM, you are talking to another person and not to a computer with limitless patience.

The connection between personality and the work the personality creates.
You love somebody's art, stories or jokes, and then find that your political views are almost opposite. Does it make the creations any less likeable? Many people seem to think so..

Facebook.
Unlike MySpace, it rocks.

Graduation paper
My "maturity sample", what I'm going to create to graduate from my "University of Applied Sciences". I was mostly thinking logistics, software, piracy and how copy protection is a see-saw between limiting too much and too little.

How organizations survive
Thinking about comics festival. None of the original founders are around anymore, but somehow it's still the same event. Why? Because of the same name? The feeling? Or just that it has been "passed on", like set of dinner plates, from one one generation to another?

11th of September 2001

2007-09-11T23:19:00.000+03:00

It was about 15:30 when my mother called me away from computer to tell that WTC had been hit in New York. At the time I was only vaguely clear of the whole existence of the Twin Towers. Even so, after watching the news broadcast only few minutes, I got tired of it and returned to computer.
Not long after, my mother called me back - another tower had been hit.

I don't think I understood then what that meant.

I didn't understand it well the next day either. A friend of mine - who made a point of being anti-American - said something about them asking for it.

Now, six years later, it leaves me wondering. I wasn't terribly taken by USA myself. I had learned of the contras and the toppling of democracies not long before, and couldn't quite grasp the difference between nation as an entity, the person at the helm of the state ship and the people who voted him to power. It all blurred together, into a fairy tale creature called America who didn't care about the rest of the countries and was on pollution spree (Bush had not long before announced of not taking part in Kyoto).

During the following months and years, USA launched two wars, openly ridiculed Europe and threw away all the credits they had gotten in the tradegy. Carrying stuff thru airports became more difficult - they still didn't find the Swiss army knife forgotten in the backpack, but now you couldn't carry any water and I had to remove shoes before getting to the tax free zone. I read about USA abusing records of EU citizens when they entered on American soil and stories of a reporter who got jailed at JFK for a week and then turned back because ten years earlier she had overstayed her visa by a day.

I begin to realize the difference administration does to a country, and how well Clinton arranged his foreign policy.

I feel like something is happening, now. Something monumentous, something with a solid date that starts a new era. It is often so that every decade has an event that characterizes the following decade; WTC, Berlin Wall, invasion of Czechoslovakia and Apollo 11...

I feel something like that is coming. I don't know what, and I might be wrong, but somehow it all seems so very omnious. And, as so often these days, it has something to do with USA. And I don't think it's anything joyous, like Apollo 11 and Berlin Wall was. I think it's still becoming worse.

I'm scared. At some point future changed from something that one looks forward to to something you are vaguely scared of.

And back in September 2001 they had a moment for silence for the people who died, at 10 o'clock, in the beginning of the history period. I was late for the class and while sitting down I wondered why everyone was silent and what the hell was going on. In a way, I'm still wondering.

You take things for granted and..

2007-09-11T01:02:00.001+03:00

I was quite happy just a hour ago, surfing net, reading comics. Then I checked my Inbox and found mail from my dad, who is currently vacationing in Mexico and living with a friend of his;

Hi,
I was the weekend, till Saturday, at San Antonio, where the heat was 40 degrees. Then we drove to Durango through Piedras Negras. We had to change our course, when we found a burning lorry in front of us (100m). We waited a while, but when the driver came by and told that he was shipping 22 tons of dynamite.
They springled water over the lorry and the fire seemed to be under control. We still decided to leave for safety's sake, and while we were eating 5 km's away we heard a loud explosion; 30something died and 70 got hurt. The group included firemen, police, reporters and inhabitants of nearby houses.

The crater was 4m deep and 10m wide.

We drove the motorway through the night to get here. Tomorrow we are going to Mazatlan to beach vacation, where I'm going to teach Jaime to fish.

I was quite disoriented after reading this, but decided to check if maybe there was something about this in Google News. This was the first entry with the searchword "dynamite";

Mexico Dynamite Truck Explosion Kills 34

By JUAN MONTANO – 3 hours ago

PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico (AP) — A dynamite-laden truck exploded after colliding with another vehicle on a busy highway in northern Mexico's coal country, killing at least 34 people, including three reporters at the scene, state and federal officials said.
[...]
Shortly after the crowd arrived, the wreckage caught fire, and the dynamite exploded, sending a ball of fire into the sky that consumed nearby cars and left a 10-by-40 foot crater in the concrete, said Maximo Alberto Neri Lopez, a federal police official.
He said more than 150 people were injured.

My dad was there. He could easily have been one of the 150 people, if he wouldn't have wandered off (mostly out of boredom, I would say, more than from safety.. but I may judge him too harshly). It doesn't make it much better that the email starts with a nice tidbit about weather and ends in the plan to teach fishing. Like this incident was nothing..

I might be in shock. It's 1:15 and I should be sleeping, but my heart is racing. I wonder how the other people in my family will react, when they check their Inboxes.

I sent dad a reply and told how happy I was that I still had him. You take these things for granted. And I can't think that last Wednesday, the last time I had proper time to spend with him, I dismissed him to go watch telly...

Some songs I've been listening to

2007-09-05T21:51:00.000+03:00

Three songs that I have played quite often on my iPod recently.

The first one is from a free concert in Helsinki in -92, and that is the genuine choir, and not some pretenders. This is the version of the song I most like;

Leningrad Cowboys and the Red Army Choir - Knocking on Heaven's Door

Juice was a groundstone of Finnish pop/rock for decades till he died a year or two ago. He had (among other things) very bad diabetes, and his living habits left much to be wanted. It's a surprise he lasted as long as he did.

Juice Leskinen - Musta Aurinko Nousee

Some Swedish band that was the representative of the previously mentioned country in Eurovision Song Contest this year. I heard this song at local music TV while idly waiting for something to happen.

The Ark - Prayer for Weekend

Listen if you care to.

Glasgow

2007-09-04T22:23:00.000+03:00

I spent little over four months in Paisley, about 30 kilometres from Glasgow. It was great time, not only because I made new friends and (I think) learned something new about life and institutions..

While I was there, I felt myself somewhat caged in how everything possible was barred off, making many streets into labyrinths, where you could only move to one direction hundreds of metres without chance to turn left or right. When streets went like that to every direction, you started to get a bit claustrophobic. Even though the civilization-free hills were always on sight, in practice Paisley - and by extension, Glasgow - were like maps in first person shooters, the hills being unreachable background decoration.

The food was expensive even by Finnish standards. I disliked the crowds, the social injustice, and some aspects (such as the glorification of past military victories and the fact that sometimes the city looked more like a giant gravestone) quite disturbed me ...

..but I notice that, even after all those things, I miss it.
I miss the small alternative cafes where I felt like in a friend's living room.
I miss those small speciality stores in the very centre of the city.
I miss how people dressed more sharply than in here.
I miss those abandoned spaces in the middle of the city which everyone has forgotten.
I miss gardens that were built hundreds of years ago and relentlessly tended ever since.
I miss the fact that it was always chilly enough to wear a nice warm coat, but never so freezing that you wouldn't go outside without it.
I miss the feeling that Glasgow mattered, that it was worth of special notice compared to Helsinki or (ha ha) Kerava.
I miss the freedom to choose between many quality papers and some really trashy yellow ones.
I miss the donuts in grocery stores.
I miss the friends I left behind.

I miss Glasgow.

I think I might very well be homesick. Only four months there and I'm homesick. Will it ever rub off?

What I watch now

2007-09-01T11:40:00.001+03:00

I wrote this last October. Since then I have discovered new shows and abandoned old ones. Lets see where we are, maybe you will find this interesting or not. If you are hooked on good shows like I am, it might be interesting to drop names and recommendations.

OLD SHOWS
Shows that have been cancelled, ended or otherwise will not be returning, but I will always keep close in my heart
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER - You know the drill. Beautiful blonde girl in the graveyard during night time. Vampire attacks. But the girl had a stake ready. Nice mix of comedy, horror, soap opera (I like my shows with soap) and good plot and acting. I tried to watch this years ago but left with impression of cheap morning action for teenagers. I couldn't have been more wrong. The show is about vampires in the same way as, say, police is about issuing speeding tickets. The hostile list goes from military to nerds and from witches to cafeteria workers.
Seven seasons long, it's a coming-of-age story where the main characters personalities develop and plots run their courses over years. I would maybe say this is very similar to X-Men/Spider-Man circa 1985, with added humour and no masks. Surprisingly, the series was very good (and sometimes amazing) from beginning to end. The worst parts were, imho, large chunks of the first and some of the fifth. But even at it's worst, it's still very interesting.

ANGEL - Buffy spin-off. Where Buffy is about building your own life, Angel is about getting your life back together. When Buffy lives in a world where everything is black and white, Angel is about shades of grey. About group of people who try to do good when they don't really have a reference point where to belong to - be it a goody vampire, failed demon researcher, street thug or former cheerleader-turned-office manager. Rather grim, the main characters betray, cheat and kill each other without much warning.. And still succeed in being likeable people.
Detective-series which morphed into heroic fantasy series and again into corporate politics series. The first two seasons were very good, the third season good, the fourth...well..watchable.. and the fifth is amazing.

FARSCAPE - When experimenting a new type of shuttle for inter-solar system flights, astronaut John Crichton flies through a wormhole to another part of the universe, where he is stuck on a living cargo ship with three escaped criminals. The show is very original Star Wars without epic "let's destroy the Empire"-plot. Most of the series is (at least in the beginning, I'm still in the middle of this show) about travelling from planet to planet and the developing relationships between the main characters, with the main characters trying to find a way home.. but without having any maps.

FATHER TED - Three Catholic priests are exiled to Craggy Island near the coast of Ireland. One for being demented, hostile and alcoholic, another for being unbelievably dumb ("He-Man is a fictional character?") and Father Ted for embezzling church-funds. The show is half-an-hour comedy about interaction with other priests, with their parish - most of who seem to be insane - and their personal differences.

HARVEY BIRDMAN - ATTORNEY AT LAW - Birdman was a hero of Hanna Barbera-animation in the sixties. D-class at best, he is now an attorney in a law firm which represents Jetsons, Flintstones and other Hanna Barbera-characters in lawsuits. Very funny in crazy "WTF is wrong here?!"-way.

JUSTICE LEAGUE [UNLIMITED] - Superman, Batman and other powerful heroes of the DC-Universe band together to fight battles that they wouldn't win alone. Exellent animation, this show had nice humour and the feeling of epic things going on.

VERONICA MARS - in Neptune High, the student body are the children of millionaires and their servants. Veronica Mars is the daughter of the town's former sheriff-come-detective, and focal point and go-to girl when things go wrong and you need someone to put things straight, even if that something involves hidden mics, video, stalking, scamming etc. Good plot, good acting and a sense that things are going somewhere. I once dismissed this as uninteresting. I am happy to be wrong. This would probably have been coming-of-age story, but it was cancelled after three seasons.

Shows I have dropped during the past year
HOUSE - Unlikeable, but genius doctor solves medical problems too complicated to anyone else. He is the guy to whom specialists turn to. The first two seasons were excellent, and I quite liked it. The third and most recent one were quite disappointing. Apparently the network moved off many of the writers of the shows and replaced them with new ones, maybe figuring that once established, show doesn't need as much talent as to launch it. The end result was that the mysteries didn't make any sense and that the character of House himself turned from sarcastic and unfriendly to hateful and unpleasant.
The show is retooled for fourth season, but I guess I will not be watching it. I might take a look at the first episode to find out how they changed it.

SMALLVILLE - Superman as a teenager in a small town. This is basically dumbed down Buffy without the character development, good plot or direction. I stop watching this every year, and then check the few episodes that are relevant to my interests. Every season is about 70% crap, the sixth less than the earlier five.

Shows that I will continue watching once the season starts
AVATAR - THE LAST AIRBENDER - Aang is the Avatar, who is tasked to keep peace in the world with his elemental powers. He is also 12 years old and can't take the responsibility. He escapes and is stuck in ice for hundred years. When he wakes up, one of the nations has taken over the world and is fighting against the remnants of the others. He has to set things straight.
This show has an epic plot, good characters and the third season should tie most of the plot points. It amazes me how this children's animation (look, I have no illusions) really encompasses the term "for all ages" in the original meaning, and not in the "suitable for kids"-way.

DOCTOR WHO - The third season was AWESOME. The first season was very good, and the second was almost as good as the first, but the third one? Awesome. I had a vision how the Doctor should act, which often came short in the second season... I mean, we are talking about character who -given time- can do almost anything, but chooses to limit himself to make things more interesting. The third season really nailed this side of the character, and I can't wait till the show returns.

EUREKA - In a secret government think-tank town, where everybody is a genius and holoprojectors, robots and virtual reality is part of the everyday life, the new average-IQ sheriff has to solve town problems and regular doomsdays due to careless research and button pushing.
TORCHWOOD - Immortal man heads a task force of specialists to stop alien/supernatural things from affecting daily life too much. Spin-off of Doctor Who, for adults. The first season disappointed me repeatedly, but I'm still hoping that the creators will push the concept through next season. It has much potential.

THE IT-CROWD - A very succesful company where the toilets are unisex, clean and well decorated, the view from the windows is amazing -- and it's all owed to the unapriciated tech-support, which works from the basement, answering repeated calls that go along the lines of "Your computer doesn't work? Have you tried turning it off and on again? Are you sure you have it plugged in? It works now? Great." From the creator of Father Ted. This is an UK-show, currently broadcasting it's second season. US-version is in the works for January.

HEROES - People find they have super powers - what happens? The characters are more or less international, and on background there runs premonitions of hellish futures, mass deaths and goverment conspiracies. The first season was good, it would have been amazing if not for the fact that some of the plot-points were spinned to spin-off comics series you could download from the show website. The comics were regularly pretty amateurish and contradicted the show itself, leaving a bit skitsofrenic feeling.

FUTURAMA - This should be pretty self-explanatory. The show gets 13 new episodes/four tv-movies next year.

NEW SHOWS
That I will quite possibly love..I hope
BIONIC WOMAN - After very bad accident that left her without legs and right arm, eye and ear, Jaime Sommers is given new military, top secret prostethics that let her run 60 miles an hour and other very nifty things. What will life be like now? A reworking of a 70s series, with promised new plot-direction, this should be interesting at least.

CHUCK - A nerd who works in a department store's tech help. Then he unwillingly absorbs (in a MacGuffin-way) all the information of NSA and CIA databanks, just before the databanks and their backups have been destroyed. Suddenly he's very important, and he notices that his customers often have guns hidden under jackets and earpieces on ears... Basically James Bond/Mission Impossible action on nerd-habitat. Should be interesting.

TERMINATOR: SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES - Name says it all. Takes place after T2, and I quite think that T3 is no longer in continuity. Good riddance. This can't help but be awesome, no matter what.

PUSHING DAISIES - A fairy tale like show about very introverted piemaker who can bring dead back to live, but only for a minute or somebody else has to die. Suppliments his income by giving hints on murder cases. Think the film Series of Unfortunate Events, but less grim.

REAPER - A 20something slacker finds out that his parents have sold his soul to the Devil. If he wants to keep it from being collected, he has to work as a bounty hunter for souls that have escaped hell. The gick gomes with mental powers, insight about supernatural and regular chatting sessions with very charming and pleasant (but ruthless) Lucifer himself. A Kevin Smith series.

Shows I will not be watching
FLASH GORDON - A reworking of a concept from 30s (50s, 70s and 80s) this very low-budget scifi-series lacks everything that makes it Flash Gordon.

Living extraordinary lives

2007-08-18T21:41:00.001+03:00

During the past few days I watched (again) The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain and continued reading One Palestine, Complete, among other things. While doing this I again thought about how interesting and almost magical life was in the movie, or as descripted in the book (not talking about the violence). This led me back to my old thoughts about what interesting - or special - life essentially is. And while it should have been always readily apparent to me, it only now really hit home; life is [almost] never extraordinary; it's either normal or miserable. And I'm talking about judging your own life, here and now, and not someone else's.

Let me explain.

What makes life extraordinary, special or otherwise noteworthy? How someone lives, what he does or who he meets. This means riches, achievements or relations. The problem is, that in the first case we judge someone's living conditions compared to those of someone else; we are always ourselves the standard. Rich people see poor people living extraordinarily, if miserably. And poor people in turn see rich people living...well..extraordinarily happy.
The problem with the second is that while things sound glorious while told as a story or anecdote (for example, living abroad due to father's work), the experience of going through with it is actually quite tedious and mundane. The long flights, living in a country with high language barrier, no friends etc. The extraordinary parts get buried under the pile of daily problems.
And the third? Well, knowing great people does bring some light into your life, but I feel that it also lights the misery of your own life in comparison.

Now, after saying all this I admit that there are people who feel like they live extraordinarily; I expect most of them are people who's living conditions changed dramatically (and suddenly) after childhood, usually due to some singular feat (like winning in Olympics after years of practice) or because someone else did something big (distant relative died and left his considerable fortune to your disposal). But in normal life? There was a person in my classroom few years ago who had used two years to hitch hike around the world. I remember overhearing him talking about dancers in Brazil, about holy places in Jerusalem and the rush hours of Japan. I'm sure he felt he had done something nice and cool, but while telling you have been to all these places (and visualizing to others how you did it) seems grand, in practice I bet the grandiose is lost in his mind under the nights in flea-ridden hostels and days walking in rain.

The only people who in practice ever think that their life isn't normal are those who are chronically depressed and want to get better or find a way out.

And Amélie? She walks in Paris where nuns cross the streets in flocks, a man with glass bones and artistic tendencies lives under the same roof and everyone you meet is a strong personality, worth a book by themselves. And she never realizes it, or wonders about it; I'm sure she thought about it briefly when she moved to that area, but in practice; this was her life, right? And life is normal, no matter how extraordinary it actually is.

Friends and emotional attachments

2007-08-06T01:08:00.001+03:00

How do we define people around us? Unknown, people we know by name, people we spend time with (but don't actually know), friends? Particularly the last two categories fascinate me. You get from category #1 to category #2 just by introducing and maybe sitting in the same class room. To number #3 by going for a beer together. But to #4?
Is there an universal definition? Some people say that once you let people into your home you are friends. Or that you can spend time together without actually doing anything. Are mutual interests expected? Trust? Love? Respect? Something else?

I'm asking this because while there are many people I happily declare my friends in all the above definitions of the word, there are some that I don't. Or, to put it less bluntly, don't think if it's proper to call them friends. I'll get back to this shortly. Bear with me.

I remember that at the age of 12 an adult asked me who my friends (ystävät) are. I responded by listing my few mates (kaverit). After that, the adult in question was careful to call them as such. The distinction was that "mate" is a #3 while "friend" is a #4. I notice that some people are more relaxed with these terms. I have often wondered do they do so just out of courtesy, or are they so quick to forge the emotional bonds that friends have between each other? Or imagine that such bonds exist? Or maybe they just have a definition that allows #3's to be called #4's.

I wonder.

To go on; is there a proper way to make a friend? I have never been very good at this. A person is an occasional distraction at school... and few years later you notice its four in the morning and you have spent forty-odd hours in the "distraction's" apartment watching television, telling poor jokes and talking about life. Obviously, at some part between these two scenes the relationship changed.

Back to the definition. I hear that people who use MySpace and MSN to forge social contacts make a distinction between "friend" and "friendster". By definition, the latter are not real friends, but #3's. It comes to me, can one forge real, lasting relationships through the Internet, without actually ever meeting the other face-to-face.
I remember reading last year in newspaper about a Finnish guy who had entered exchange of letters with American girl in the 1950s (when both of them were still in middle school) and only met the week the newspaper came out. They had written each other letters for over 50 years, diligently and without fail. And while the Finnish guy had been to America - indeed, only few score kilometres from the girl, he hadn't had the opportunity to see her. And she had travelled Europe but had likewise been unable to visit Finland.
Were they friends? I imagine they wrote on paper everything that happened in their lives. I imagine, that over the years they told each other secrets they didn't tell anyone else, not even their spouses. But they had never met. They didn't know how the other laughed, how the other smiled. Didn't know how the other liked to form sentences or what syllables they give weight when talking. Or how the other has curious way of bending head when checking the time.

Are such things important for friendship? Is it strange, pathetic or otherwise improper to call people you have talked daily for years friends? Even if you have never met, even if it's only through IRC or instant messenger?

Where do you draw the line? What's the definition?

Learning about Israel

2007-08-03T11:19:00.000+03:00

Ponte Corvo sent me One Palestine, Complete, a book about Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate. Heavy book, it seems to equal in page count with one of the later Harry Potter-books.

As I don't have that much knowledge about Israel (beyond that which was teached on the ninth grade of compulsory school (age 15), in high school (age 17) and newspapers thereafter) this is bound to be interesting read. If nothing else, it will afford a new perspective not mentioned in Finnish history books and media obsessed with the current events.

As I was thinking of my education, I remembered that my mother asked me to take my old school books with me when I left after the last visit. I therefore had my 9th grade book easily at hand, and decided to see what it said about Israel. I was somewhat surprised by the clunkiness of the text, but I should probably understand that not all people of that age were really comfortable with books. I decided to translate the chapter to show Finnish view on Israeli history looks like.
I have tried to make the translation easy to myself by keeping many Finnish turns of phrase that might not be entirely at home with the English language - I'm in a bit of a hurry with this text, as I'm leaving home for the weekend and I want this out of the way first.

My history book was called Horisontti - Napoleonista nykypäivään (Horisont - from Napoleon to modern day) and was written by Lappalainen et al, published by Otava in 1995.

The political situation of Middle-East in the mid1980s. The map shows the political areas of influence and local crisis points. A constant threat was that the small clashes on the area might develop into wars between the superpowers. Full fledged war was on between Iraq and Iran. There had been islamic revolution in Iran, where ajatollah Khomeini had ceased power from shaah [?] Riza Pehlevin. Iran was left in discord, which Iraq leader Saddam Hussein tried to take advantage of. The countries had arguments over borders and waterways. Hussein failed, but the war lasted nearly the whole 1980s.

Chapter 73: Middle-East in world politics
Area and its problems
The area shown in the map is called Middle-East. The area's belonging to it range from Egypt to Iran and also include Kypros and Turkey. Middle-East is a political, not geographical term. It is one of the focal points of world politics, and local skirmishes tend to unfold into international matters. The background of the problems is a mixed bag of religious, economical and geographical factors. Middle-East is the cradle of three world religions - judaism, Christianity and Islam. Of the 200 million people on the area the majority are muslims, who have divided into Sunni and Shiia-factions. Of Christians, there are also many factions. The different religious groups have often tried to force their own views with violence. The steepest differences are between the Jews and and arab-muslims.
[About the different nations on the area. ]

The Palestine Question
At the beginning of our recounting of time, Palestine was Judea-named province of Rome, where the majority of people were Jewish. When the Jews rose into rebellion, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in the year 77. The name of Judea was switched into Palestine, and for Jews diaspora began, the scattering to different parts of the world.
After Romans Palestine has been under the control of Arabs, European crusaders and- after 16th century- Turks. When the Turkish realm started to weaken in the 19th century, a powerful Arab kinship was born, which was first targeted against Turkish control but also against European nations. They too started to be interested of the lands in control of the ebbing Empire. England and France took Egypt under their control when the Suez Channel was built. The First World War meant the final strike to Turkish control, and vast arab-areas were thrown under European control under mandates granted by League of Nations. Great Britain got Palestine, which it hand occupied during the war from Turkey.
During the World War Great Britain promised Jews national home in Palestine and assured that this move would not stamp the rights of Arabs. The promise was the beginning of Jews' exodus to Palestine. It was hastened in Europe - specially in Hitler's Germany - by persecution. On the year of 1918 84 000 of the people in Palestine were Jews - 11%, but by 1948 they were a third of population of two million. This led into clash of interests and violent incidents with Arabs and proceeded to situation where the Brits could no longer contain the situation. On the year 1947 Great Britain decided to subject the future of Palestine to UN to solve.

The birth of Israel and enlargement
The UN had two suggestions. The Arab states suggested proclaiming Palestine as independent nation, where both Arabs and Jews would live. The other suggestion maintained that the area should be divided into Arab and Jewish nations. The second suggestion got the favour of majority vote, and so the Brits left the country and Israel declared itself independent nation in May 1948. Immediately after Israel's neighbours attacked the young nation with the help of Iraqi and Saudi Arabian battalions from every side.
Israel won the war and expanded its area. This happened three times later, as the maps of the next page shows. In 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Channel, which led to Israel attacking with France and England against Egypt. In 1967 the president of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser closed Israel's access through Akaba Bay to Harbour of Eilat. This led to so-called Six Day war, during which Israel invaded the whole Siinai, strip of Gaza, West Bank and Golan's Heights as well as Arab East-Jerusalem. In 1973 Egypt tried again. Its forces crossed the Suez and dug into defensive lines. At the same time Syria attacked Golan. Israel got weaponry assistance from the United States and blocked the attack. UN tried to instill cease fire and sent to the area peacekeepers, which Middle-East already had had.
In addition to peace negotations UN insisted Israel to leave the occupied areas, but for no effect. On the other hand, peace offering from Egypt led to President of Egypt signing a peace treaty with Israeli Prime Minister Menahem Begin at Camp David in United States. Accoarding to the pact Israel forfeited in 1982 Siinai to Egypt and evacuated the settlements. Egypt in turn recognized the Israeli state and stopped making demands for the independence of Palestine. Arabs declared the Egypt president a traitor.

Refugees and terrorism
When Israel became independent in 1948, most of the Arabs on the area fled to neighbouring states, where they were relocated on camps designed as short-term solution. The amount of refugees was then 700 000-800 000. Similarly over half million Jews moved to Israel. When Israel in 1967 invaded West Bank, the amount of refugees rose to 1,5 million. Today there are over two million on Israeli occupied areas, and the same amount as refugees on Arab countries. All of them have dreamed of founding their own nation.
On the refugee camps people are uneasy, and on them many terrorism using Palestinian resistance organisations have gained support. The operation of these organisations was centred specially in Lebanon, when other border neighbours of Israel had extorted the guerilla fighters from their area in fear of revenge strikes. In 1982 Israel attacked Lebanon, invaded its capital Beirut and finally forces Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) to leave Lebanon.

Surprising pact
In 1987 started on Israeli occupied areas Palestinian uprising, intifada, to which Israel answered with force. The uprising seriously disturbed peace negotiations, which United States as middleman had been able to be initialized between Israel and and the Arabs. In the negotiations Arabs demanded Israel to leave the occupied areas, which Israel saw as important for its security. In September 1993 these negotiations surprisingly led into a pact which has been thought as historical: Israel and PLO recognized each other. At the same time Israeli cabinet agreed on pact which gave Gaza and the town of Jericho autonomy. This pact happened in 1994, when Israeli occupiers left Gaza and Jericho. The pact opened a door for the continued peace progress in the Middle East. In October 1994 Jordan as well did a peace treaty with Israel and in November of the same year Jordan and Syria tied peace between each other as well.

Jewish elder stepping to "promised land". Arabs feared Jews would gain majority in Palestine. They got the Brits to limit immigration as early as 1939. After Germany's surrender the limit was pushed down to 1 500 per month. This led to rampant illegal immigration, that Brits tried to stop even by shooting illegal crossers.

My final text about Harry Potter

2007-07-30T14:37:00.000+03:00

The past weekend I finished the last Harry Potter. Don't worry, there are no spoilers in this text.. there is some background information about Voldemort, which should not be hugely important for the plot. However, if you want to stay spoiler-free, please don't continue.

After reading the books I started thinking what set this one apart from other fantasy-series. I'm not a huge fan (I don't think I'm a fan at all, though they were good books), but I did see something worth noticing in how Voldemort was characterized in the books, as opposed to many other Big Evils in other stories (starting from Lord of the Rings and going all the way to other books of the genre from Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (of which, I dare say, I am a fan of).

The Thing that really touched me was the origin and characterization of Voldemort. He was not a god, he hadn't done anything extraordinary to get where he was. Even though he was expectationally powerful wizard - and some of it was probably thanks to good genes - he still didn't do anything that anyone else couldn't have. The spells he cast, the reputation he got and the minions he had -- hard work and sacrifice, all of it! He stayed awake during classes in Hogswarts (studied there from his 10th year to his 17th), "networked" with other individuals and secured connections thru his friendships. Of course Voldemort was a psycho, but basically, anyone could have done it.

And this is what I find great. During the series, Voldemort (a name he took himself because his own name was basically very mundane) is seen searching for objects, studying, making traps, trusting people, giving responsibility, punishing failures, manipulating, suffering information deprivation... he's not just sitting on his throne and gloating as his master scheme unfolds. He keeps busy. He delegates. Many times we see him acting and thinking like your normal company CEO. Of course, instead of running international company he's leading a crusade against society... but basically, isn't that pretty much the same thing?

And this is what I love about the books. Voldemort had the same education as everyone else. There was no secret knowledge or selling souls or such like. The whole Harry Potter-story could easily have been told in slashdot-posts; evil CEO, bad program (Sony rootkit, maybe?), department heads and PR, young hackers noticing and exploiting a weakness in the code (HD-DVDs); trying to silence them with lawsuits, pushing forward with the program (DRM in legal mp3-substitutes). Punishments. Some company figureheads get sacrificed, but most don't. Life goes on.

Sliders - creating alternative realities

2007-07-24T17:42:00.000+03:00

Few days ago I had the opportunity to see the pilot to scif-series Sliders, from 1995. In the show punch of people "slide" from world to world trying to find a way back home. The plot of the pilot was - to make long story short - about four people who are stranded on an alternative timeline, where Soviet Union had won the Cold War.

For the record, I happen to like alternative timelines, the "what if"-scenarios. But I didn't like this one. A fast plot summary;

The sliders arrive to the new world, thinking they are home and separate. The first is in hurry and shouts a taxi; the second one decides to call home and the rest two (the inventor and his teacher) start to talk about physics in the park where they landed. Then each notices that something is wrong;

The telephone box doesn't have a coin slot and the operator wants to know if the slider has calling privileges, and thus wants to know her id-number. The operator further mentions that the box is operated by PT&T (People's Telephone & Telegraph).
The taxi driver speaks Russian and not English.
There's a statue of Lenin in the park, instead of Lincoln.

The plot starts to develop as the taxi drives through a toll booth, and the slider pays his trip with a dollar he had in his wallet. This promptly gets him to jail.

Meanwhile the three sliders walk around seeing police beating, arresting and even shooting citizens. They stop to buy a sausage from a stand and pay with a dollar. The sausage seller mistakes the sliders into revolutionaries and reminds them not to waive the dollars around; apparently they are used by the resistance as a code. The official new dollars are printed with red ink and have Khrushchev's picture in the middle.
At this point police takes interest in the three sliders and the sausage seller helps them away into revolutionaries hide-out. Once there they see a broadcast from People's Court; apparently the show is entertaining in nature and has a smiling host. During the case witnesses are sworn in with the traditional oath, which ends in "...and help me God". One of the cases handled is that of the fourth slider, who is sentenced to Alaskan gulag for 15 years.

The revolutionaries explain how the world has come to this; how losing the Korean War started a set of events which spread communism to the rest of the world, leaving USA economically separated from the other countries. In the end even USA fell, and thus they are now living in the The Socialist States of America.

The revolutionaries help to free the fourth slider. After farewells the sliders depart the world.

* * *

I found the episode to be fairly painful to watch. The changes were for shock value and not at all consistent; the telephone box wasn't operated by coins but the city (San Fransisco) had toll booths; the court used vows that mentioned God; the difference between streets were the police acted like thugs and the devoted people who saluted voluntarily when the national anthem played and so on.

I have noticed similar problems with several stories; the writers often just replace some things (such as statues) and names (AT&T => PT&T) without considering how the changes affect the larger dynamic of the world. Writing a story is not just about character interaction (while that was pretty painful as well) but about surroundings, particularly in a show that is devoted to alternative timelines.

I don't know why I'm so disappointed. Maybe because the articles I read promised a show with large following and it had nine stars out of ten; maybe because once you see a story that has done it RIGHT you can't help but compare the rest to that one (for example some episodes of Stargate SG-1, Star Trek DS9, X-Men, Buffy.. the comicbook Exiles is all about alternative outcomes of other comics...) .

Changes in the blog

2007-07-23T20:26:00.000+03:00

§1. The writer of Town of Ponte Corvo noted how my blog would need some colour. I started looking into the possibility and was surprised how much Google had developed the Blogger-template engine since I had last looked at it (about year ago, when I tried to make The Gulag-blog (now in deep hibernation, with all the illustrations broken links) all pretty. It used to be hard work and involved reading through the Blogger-template code and making alternations.
Now it was much easier; the only thing I had to modify in the template were the header-wilth, which didn't click with the new at all well. Even the sidebar - which had to be modified by editing template - can now be worked with using Java(?)-tools. Very easy, very simple.

§2. I checked the tags I have been making the past few weeks. I had been adding new tags like they were last day on sale, which is not very smart - too detailed tags will never get more than two entries in them, and are therefore useless. They are now sorted by categories (TV, Internet, philosophy) that are so wide they should get several entries. "Guest of the Third Reich" is exemption I made in hope that if ever finish it, readers that are solely interested in that should find it easier to check out. In the following weeks I hope to go through my posts from the last two years and tag them as well (only about 70 to go!), hopefully giving them some more value.

§3. I also added links to few (very good) blogs by my associates in the sidepanel. They are all worth looking, provided you are interested of my blog, which might be too strong of an assumption.

What do you think?

Sunset

2007-07-23T14:16:00.000+03:00

Taken around 23:00 at my balcony about a week ago. You can't stay up too late - after 2:00 the sun starts to rise up again..

On another topic: Picasa, a service by Google seems to have a rather embarrassing bug; while Blogger and Picasa are both owned by the same company, I can't actually add pictures I have loaded to Picasa to Blogger -- but pictures I load to Blogger are shown as folders in Picasa, and can therefore be shown. To get this picture to you, I had to load it to Picasa here and to Blogger separately here.
Maybe I'm just doing something wrong, but I doubt it.

Kari Suomalainen

2007-07-21T11:24:00.000+03:00

-Kuinka toiset jaksaa ja viitsii?
-Why do they bother? Where do they find the energy?
[The paper reads: "Massacre At Algeria" and "Indonesia Mobilizes"]

Kari Suomalainen (1920-1999) was a political cartoonist for the prestigious Helsingin Sanomat 1950-1991. He affected very strongly on the way different political parties were seen in Finland, and was an important opinion former.
Soviet Union tried to silence him several times as he poked on politically raw things.

His humour was based in stereotypes and making what seemed high and mighty into something small and ordinary; showing president Kekkonen (usually deciphered as a demi-god) as a normal (if demanding) man, the parties as avatars instead of people who got changed every four years and observing news through a small and old-fashioned village somewhere far from everywhere. Local news from Helsinki were often observed by two "men of the streets", who had been unable to fit back into civilian life after Continuation War, and had so become urban tramps. Sometimes he inserted himself into the commentary, as a small black wearing man wearing a ridiculous hat.

He continued on the paper long after his retirement age, and quit only after being forced to do so after several pictures that were too far out of line with paper's policy.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, when Finland was starting a new era in it's history without pressure from East, Kari critized very strongly on the decision to open doors to immigrants and war refugees, Somalis in particular (he drew them in a fashion that left little doubt of his opinions concerning blacks in general and Somalis in particular).

Kari continued publishing his pictures in local papers, but he was getting old which showed in his hand and in the jokes; the pictures weren't as funny as they used to. His views on subjects got more old-fashioned, to the point of bigotry. The avatars to which he based his humour on started to look old-fashioned, even antic (the tramps, the village stuck in the rural -40s). Those he tried to update ended up looking cluttered and forced (the political parties).

Kari's moral stance was firmly set on the early 50s, which shows ever more unfavorably as the decades went by. From there, he saw the country chance from a war-wrecked nation with GDP of average Third World country into one of the richest in the world.

-More important than riches is the quality of life, clean air, unpolluted water and beautiful scenery.
-If it's all right, I'll take that in money.

-You can no longer travel safely in this city.

-Hey guys, who was the one who first proposed consumer-protection law which says that bad promises are punishable by law?
[From left: Vennamo [?] who proposed the law and then the parties; Social Democrats, Rural Party (later Centre-Party, later Finnish Centre), Communists (later Left Alliance), Liberal Democrats (later dead), Swedish Party, Coalition (moderate right) and a cop carrying a box marked "Election promises". The size of the parties is relative to their (historical, exgenerated) power in the parliament. ]

I own several collections of Kari's work. Half the fun in them is seeing how the seeds of today (like the Green Party) slowly enter into the picture and how Kari tries to make fun of them, sometimes good naturedly, but often grumpily. And then the retrospect fun on his argument about "modern music" on 60s; Bach is still as popular now as he was centuries ago, but who will remember Beatles in the 1990s?

But after all is said and done, Kari was a person who was a master of his craft. After him, Helsingin Sanomat has been unable to secure a person to fill his place whose work is worth reading.

What is real?

2007-07-18T11:01:00.001+03:00

Many TV-series (particularly scifi-series, which are very dear to me) have an episode where the hero has to question what's real and what's not. In the more extreme cases, the hero starts to have flashes where he or she is actually locked in a mental institution, and everything that has thus far happened in the show has been a figment of imagination. This is strengthened by people in the institution knowing about the series chronology, about vampires (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) or aliens (Smallville).

In Smallville Clark Kent finds himself in a such a situation. He is shocked to find that Jor-El is infact a brand of soap, and Oliver Queen (a.k.a. Green Arrow) is the name of the hospital worker administrating his medicine.
Buffy in turn finds out she has been in the mental institution for six years - since the series started - and both her mother and her father are expecting her to come out of it. All that has happened in Sunnydale is just dreams in a sick woman's mind. It makes it even worse that the series questions itself: "sick girl who's in mental ward or super-girl who battles vampires - which sounds more insane?" to paraphrase from memory.

This annoys me on three levels; first it ridicules fans who have invested time to the series chronology. It highlights the built-in ridiculousness of the more absurd parts of the series mythology (hero's super strength, origin story, being centre of the world). Also, for stories to work we have to believe in them, believe in the rules of the world; these is-the-hero-insane stories beg the question is that time well placed.

On second level, the stories don't end well. The mental ward is often thought to be in "our" reality, where there are no Kryptonians or vampires. It is inherently more "real" than anything in the series itself. After you introduce the ward, you also have to explain why the ward was just the figment of the hero's imagination. Otherwise we get to the "it was just all a dream" scenario, the most effect way to lose interest of the watcher.

In Smallville, Martian Manhunter explained how the ward was infact a psychic attack by hostile force, who tried to overtake Clark's mind by showing him that he was mad.
In Buffy, just the opposite is done; at the ward Buffy's mother explains how the friends in Sunnydale are not friends at all but traps that keep her comatose in the real world. The episode ends with Buffy asking forgiveness from her friends - and then cut to the ward where the doctor diagnoses Buffy comatose and we are shown parents weeping. It wasn't a trick, or an attack.

On third, and less popular culture-level these episodes beg the question about life itself. If we interpret the world solely by our senses, and our senses are processed trough our brain - how can a person decide if she or he is hallucinating? A person tells you that you are hallucinating - do you trust the person? Or if two different things claim that the other isn't real - how can you make an educated choice between the two?

This isn't just about me pondering TV-series. I have a friend who sees hallucinations. Doing pretty well with them too, as I gather. Takes medication for it. When my grandmother gets sick, she regresses one year at a time back to her childhood. Mother is going to get me soon. Who are you? Why are you here Uncle? Back from America? When her body gets better, her mind gets better as well, and again she knows who I am..
And while I don't have anything of that magnitude, I do get blackouts when I rise or make sudden moves, during which my ability to see or keep my balance greatly diminishes. They take up to 30 seconds and when my mind clears it always hits me how much on the mercy of few wirings I am. My whole world - literally - is hosted inside a lump of meat. And the distinction is so hard to make; am I living in the world or is the world living in me?

[ To talk about am-I-crazy scenarios, here is a good wiki-link about it taken to it's extreme; Tommy Westphall.

The mental ward or it's variation has also been used in Star Trek: TNG, Star Trek: DS9, Lost, Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis and Charmed. ]

Guest of the Third Reich: Mare nostrum: Villa am Meere

2007-07-11T21:21:00.000+03:00

Before I go any farther, I should probably note that back when the book was written German was teached for children at schools from the age of 9 (this was replaced by English in the seventies). Mr. Paavolainen doesn't therefore deem it necessary to translate everything into Finnish. I don't speak German - at all - and my Swedish could be much better, so if the reader of this blog understands what some of the non-translated words mean, please don't hesitate to write.

Review.
Foreword.
Mare Nostrum 1: New Horisons.

Dichterhaus was founded by Nordische Gesellschaft but taken over by Reichsschrifttumskammer, Reich's Chamber of Literature in 1935. This brought changes to the modus operandi; while it used to be just a summer camp to bring writers together from different parts of the world, it now has "official programs" led by "determined staff". While there is no outright propaganda, the German writers are card-carrying members of national socialists.

Of the other people living in Dichterhaus, Sweden's representative Sven Stolpe was known to have a brilliant mind and "radical swings". He had studied in Germany, married a German as well as speaking the language fluently. Trough the newspaper Young Sweden he was one of the most important opinion-leaders of his generation. Paavolainen himself was quite stricken by the author: Stolpe was the kind of man who only exists in fiction; world-traveller, modernist and liberal, honest to the causes he championed and a great sportsman even as one of his lungs was non-functional after medical operation. Of all the writers in the house, he was the only one who openly criticized the Third Reich.
From the text you get the impression that the German government hoped to convert Stolpe to the cause. After all, his background and ties made him a terrific candidate. Alas,

When reaching the Third Reich, Stolpe had a surprise to us: he had come directly from England, where he had gotten an oxfordian awakening. "It is the greatest moment of my life", he repeatedly says.

He didn't stay long. He soon after departed to show his oxford-book to an old friend in Norway, and while travelling there his lung started acting up again and he could not return.

The Norwegian in the house was Doctor Eyvind Mehle, who had gotten his degree in Germany.

He was both the most popular person in Dichterhaus and its enfant terrible. Nobody could believe that this man [...] was the oldest person in the house - 41 years. Mehle was as black fascist as they came and one of Norway's Nasjonalsamling's leading personalities. He was [...] a newspapersman, who had visited both Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, interviewed them all and forged strong ties to all European fascist-organisations. Wonderful and funny man who could not be taken seriously - for example when he lists who are going to be shot after the Norwegian fascists grab the power!

Paavolainen's room mate was Erik Bertelsen:

Bertelsen is so nice and good-hearted and un-revolutionary, that one has to wonder how one such as him can earn his living writing in our days.. he is not shocked by Nazism nor by Bolshevism. [...] He is only interested in his books [...] about old Danish memories.

About his fellow Finn, Göran Stenius.. the translation is hard and relies much on knowing the popular culture of the 30s (I don't). Apparently he had some interest toward Fascism, but because of language-movement (Stenius' native language was Swedish) was sidetracked and belonged to some fringe-group.

Stenius came to Germany well-versed in national socialism. Rising his hand up in greeting comes easily to him. Because of this I'm greatly interested to see how his moods swing.

But after everything is said and done, Paavolainen believes that he is level-headed, as is Mehle, and does not go all metaphysical and romantic as the Germans do.

Of the Germans..

My greatest interest was naturally toward the three national socialist authors - and how different they were!
[...] Rupert Rupp from Saars was only 28 years old. [...] Saars' suffering and humiliation during the French occupation were the main focus of Rupp's poetry. [...] Rupp has taken part in the fighting even as a youth in the ranks of Schlageter. This is why he has naïvely and with all his heart embraced the Nazi-ideology as only soldier-youth born in the south can. [...] No great originality could be found in Rupp's poems. The poems tended to become mystical [...], but the deeply felt pain and aching were very common to the young generation to whom Nazism meant salvation and the spring of new strength and innovation.

Another German, Friz Helke;

At the age of 30 Helke had gained his station by fighting. [...]During inflation he had worked as a businessman, started then studying at night [...] and at at the same time took part in political fights as a leader of youth-chapter in Stahlheim. [...]He quit [...] when he noticed that freemasonry had taken root in the chapter and joined national socialists in 1929 taking to Hitler all the 25 children in his care. Today Helke has a very influential position in the Hitler-Jugend [...] headquarters; he is the auditor for literature suitable for Hitler-Jugend(!), Referent im Kulturamt der Reichsjugendführung and his rank in Hitler-Jugend is Bannführer im Stabe! [...] According to Sven Stolpe his purpose is to "show millions of young Germans primitive pictures of national and military heroes and systemically force the youths to think that heroism is only possible in the military".
[...]Helke has written surprisingly many books for children during the past few years. [...] They only have one aim: to rise national socialists.

The third German, Ottfield von Finckenstein

I think it as a great personal victory that I was able to secure the friendship of this extraordinary man. [...]Sensitive, well-raised, good and wise man, who emits a strangely calming presence to all those near him. [...] Finckenstein is a marvellous example of what happens when old aristocrat has the ability to worship life and the straight-lined, non-compromising thinking of national socialistic ideology. [...] Stolpe's oxfordianism looks cold and calculating compared to Finckenstein's [...] radiating joy of life.
[...] When talking about Hitler, he has no reservations. "One must learn to believe, that even on our days can such genius be born." With Germans - even with Fincenstein - it is impossible to discuss... one just has to listen and wonder.

Paavolainen remarks how closed the German culture was. The national socialism was only interested in building its own view of the world, disregarding everything that happened abroad. He remarks that Doctor Domes didn't even know the name of Lawrence (of whose books at least two were banned in Germany). This made the German books so dry; Finckenstein was the only one who wrote lively books - and he had spent much time abroad.

Guest of the Third Reich: Mare nostrum: New horisons

2007-07-11T00:45:00.000+03:00

Review.
Foreword.

This chapter is a short introduction on the writer and how he came to be at Travelmünden at the 14th day of August. The German-Scandinavian Dichterhaus, writerhouse had been opened late that year, and thus Finland's Writer-Alliance [?] had had troubles to find someone to go; the vacations were already over. Because of troubles, the writer arrived day late and missed the Olympics at Berlin.

I'm tired. I sit on my luggage on a dark and empty terrace. Silent longing everywhere. Again I ponder the question that has been troubling me the whole sea voyage, on railway thru Denmark, on train ferry over windy sea between Gjedser and Warnemünden: why this trip? What do you think you'll find?

The writer hopes to find something new. Too many years he has been trying to write about his trip to London four year previous, to write down the many projects that had haunted him for years. But he had never succeeded. The Finnish political landscape was in heavy movement; the failed coup d'etat of the fascists in 1932 had depressed him and he no longer felt like writing.

And still I knew that in the world something was happening, something that people back home understood completely wrong. We saw the world like thru an old window; greenish, blurry and distorted. Revolutions right and revolutions left.. but back home everybody was shouting: old, tried traditions are the way to go! The most descriptive thing: the clergy changed from defenders to attackers! Confusion over terms. Ignorance, pathetic good-will, [...?], doing small movements in the middle of steely, determined, bi-polarizing world...

In the end the writer is let in to the house. Everybody else is in Berlin, watching the Olympics. The next day he met them; the director (Doctor Fred Domes) and hostess (Madam Lisa Hayn) of Dichterhaus, two German writers (Rubert Rupp and Count Ottfried von Finckenstein), a Norwegian (Doctor Eyvind Mehle), a Swede (Doctor Sven Stolpe) and another Finn (Master Göran Stenius). Each of them was important to the writer, opening to him new horizons.

The weeks at Dicherhaus gave the writer new strength. Again he felt like he knew where he was, and how to to hold the pen.

Guest of the Third Reich, foreword

2007-07-10T23:26:00.000+03:00

After doing the review here, the fancy to write about the book itself came over me. I'll go one chapter at a time, doing a short summary/shortened translation as I find interesting. You may try to affect my work by cheering on or shouting critique.
Anyway, it seems to me that no one has done similar thing in the Internet previously, neither in Finnish nor English, so I have the honour of being the first. University students will be reading these texts for the Easy Street for years to come!

LEGEND. As usual, the text in italics is from the book. If not otherwise marked, it is direct translation.
[...] means that I have cut something I deem unnecessary off.
Text inside [bracelets] means that I have summarized longer text into the hard core.
[?] means that I am somewhat unsure of the translation, as the writer refers to words or cultural things that have in the passing 70 years gone out of use. I'm not so dedicated to this project to start hunting for meaning of names of old popular culture etc, even if I do try to translate the words to the proper English equivalents.

THE FOREWORD OF THE FIRST EDITION
To all the readers of my book and criticizers I would like to quote André Gide's words: don't try to understand me too fast.

I know fully well how daring it is to write a book of this sort. I know I'm poking a beehive of conflicting opinions. In Finland they have only discussed national socialism in newspapers and magazines. At one side it has been admired without being understood what it's actually about. On the other it has been beaten as far as the journalists sticks carry. At third it has been tried to be silenced to death.

[The book is not an extensive nor even narrow view into national socialism. The writer has tried to avoid using sources. Nearly all quotes the writer has seen himself or heard on the street. Everything in the book is based on the writer's opinions and are therefore subjective.]

I have tried to collect a picture what is the national socialistic Welterlebniss, world view. Therefore I think my book is foremost an extensive raport, and that's why the subtitle of the book is "rhapsody"[?].

[Many will wonder why this book has been written. I can only answer that I have always been solely interested by present, and national socialism is just that. ]

I would not wonder if the people on political right would take the book as a commercial for anti-Christian values and the people on left as Nazi propaganda. In a way both would be right. [Both would also be wrong. [?]] I just want to prove that it would be as grave mistake to take the Third Reich as a caretaker of the values of forefathers as it would be to call it cradle of new barbarism.
[The book is one-sided, as I was a guest and saw only what they let me to see.] I will not judge concentration camps nor the persecution of Jews as neither were shown to me. But I can say that the German culture is not dead even if Lion Feuchtwanger has been exiled.
To keep it short; you should not throw the baby with the bathwater, even if the water is dirty and possibly even bloody.

[Also I had been writing another book for the previous seven years, before the trip.] Because of this I have dedicated much space for the new vital [?] and simplified human type, anti-Christianity and the changes in gender-moral. [These three will be the guiding stars of my new book, and to research them the guesting at the Third Reich gave me valuable material.]

The book concentrates on the Nürnberg rally of 1936. I suppose that the one thing people will be most divided over will be if it was necessary to describe the event in such detail. Personally I feel it to be paramount. I often became desperate when reading Finnish papers in Germany. I often thought that people in Finland didn't realize what was happening in the world presently. We are closing fast on time that might very well be the most important event in European history. It would be deadly mistake to solve problems by playing them down [?]. We have to dare to think apocalyptically.
Currently Germany is guiding the destiny of Europe. Literally; Germany is the heart of Europe. It is completely irrelevant if these beats that shake the continent are because of new vitality or -as many claim- the effects of camphor injection. The important part is; the heart of Europe is beating strongly. Horribly strongly.

Tuusula, Onnela, 19.11.1936.

Meditating in car

2007-07-09T01:23:00.000+03:00

I have always loved the feeling of being on the road when midnight is drawing close. Getting back home from somewhere far away, after long day. There is something wonderful in the way you are going somewhere and still sitting; a friend is behind the wheel and you know that just by sitting, you are doing something. The lights appear and vanish and you can hear the sounds of the road under you.

And radio plays, and as the midnight closes, you hear less and less of Britney Spears and the Boy Band of the Week, and more and more of the classics and the songs with staying power. The songs you remember having heard previously, but of which names you can’t quite recall. Idly you think that maybe tomorrow you will do some research and find out the song... only to forget till the next time you are on the road.. The annoying hosts of day time have all gone, and the ones speaking are middle-aged and melancholy.

And you are on the road. Going somewhere. And you don’t even really ever want to get there, because as uncomfortable as the seats are during day, just at that instant there is nothing where you would rather be. All the worries, troubles and aspirations are somewhere far away. There is just you and the sounds of radio.. and a driver, somewhere far away..

[ These thoughts occupy my time just before I go to sleep ]

Guest of the Third Reich, translation of an original review

2007-07-04T22:39:00.000+03:00

In the blog Town of Ponte Corvo the writer asked me to write a summary of the book Guest of the Third Reich, written by Olavi Paavolainen in the mid-30s. I have not read the book, so the task would be impossible to do. However, I can translate an article on the subject, which hopefully does the same thing.

This was written for Helsingin Sanomat back when the book was originally published in 1936, by Lauri Viljanen. The newspaper has the review online. I shortened some parts where he starts talking too closely about Paavolainen's masterful use of words (he actually sometimes disregarded content in favour of style at parts) and on one occasion actually stops the review in middle to mention he has visited the place himself. Anyway, onwards;

OLAVI PAAVOLAINEN: GUEST OF THE THIRD REICH

”The distancing of youngsters, even children, from their parents and transforming them into crowds as well as the poor, even disrespectful status of women by Scandinavian standards are phenomenons to which the author's modern training in psychological observation fixates in warning.” - Lauri Viljanen, Helsingin Sanomat 13.12.1936

Olavi Paavolainen, that restless "seeker of the modern world" has just visited in the bygone Fall "the Third Reich". According the official language he was even "guest of the leader"on several occasions, for example during the Nürnberg Rally. [...] As earlier, he remarks on bowing to "the times and lives" and his travels on the soils of the "Third Reich" has strengthened his conviction that Today's Germany is part of the living present of Europe. As we know his prejudice-free, shyless [...] way of writing, we may be sure that "Guest of the Third Reich" is a book whose writer has something special to say.

[The trip starts from the] "German-Scandinavian writer-home" [...] in Travemünden. [...] In the first part of the book Paavolainen presents lively portraits [...] of this scening surrounding. [...] The name of this part's - named Mare nostrum, "our sea" - weightiest chapter is, however, the one that handles so-called "northern idea" in modern Germany's world-view. I think that Paavolainen has written in very trustworthy and critically apt way this "intentional myth" which has gotten its most famous airing in Alfred Rosenberg's world-view book. [...]

More passionate [...] changes the writer's wording in the strange part "Human god". I dare say that the glimpses into the soul of Hitler's realm are revelatory in a way. The description of the Nürnberg Rally wakes in a cool Scandinavian mind the image of ecstatic ritual, and Paavolainen will not hesitate saying; "national socialism is the first religion given birth by Europe". The new lifefeeling's self-confident, decidedly unchristian tendency did not go unsaid in the previous part's chapter "In Bachen Marienkirche" [...]. To this connects heavily the chapter "Blue temple", a portrait of the religious psyche of political leaders - a shocking painting of new Babylon in the middle of old civilized world.

The writing of Paavolainen is curiously so rich in this part that the reviewer has no chance of deep margin thoughts in this part. But I have become confident that he is closer to truth than our cool thought processes might initially lead us to believe. We shall wager that Hitler's best weapon against the dull grey of Weimar Republic was the mystically grand presentation which so touches the German heart.

On his best Paavolainen is in the last part, "Toward Germanic Sparta", where he analyses the new human type being born in Hitler's Germany. Paavolainen has a sharp, seeing eye towards everyday facts of life, which seems insignificant but end up being important. He emphasises the part that the young generation has had in the founding of "the Third Reich", [mentioning] youths who are very self-assured about the condition of their bodies. One of the few words of admiration without restriction he gives are for so-called "work-service", which has brought together social classes and has even made work into some sort of ceremony. The distancing of youngsters, even children, from their parents and transforming them into crowds as well as the poor, even disrespectful status of women by Scandinavian standards are phenomenons to which the author's modern training in psychological observation fixates in warning.

I will not hesitate to say that "Guest of the Third Reich" is a rather monumental accomplishment from the author [...]. I suppose Hitler's Germany opens to us as an actual physical place, which causes uneasiness and curiosity, only after reading this travelling report.

What blogs do you read?

2007-07-03T23:00:00.000+03:00

I promised myself that as I don't really have any other commitments I would at least practice my writing by writing five texts per week, either to Blogger or to some other thing.
Last week I did four; the previous three blog-entries plus a review for comics-page. I don't know if I have mentioned this earlier but I aim to improve myself to the point where people actually pay to publish my texts. Not because of the money but for the knowledge that I'm actually good enough in something that people pay to get it.

I know I don't have that many readers (two, three?) and only one person who actually comments without prompting (thanks Vlad, you're a true friend) but yeah, that's my goal.
Anyway, I know the entries about problems I have had have been rather boring, and I thank your patience if you have actually read them thru.

So, I have been using Google Reader. It's the first RSS-reader I have ever used, and without knowing anything of the alternative ways to home on the subject, it beats checking the webpages one by one hands down. If you read this and don't use RSS-reader, check this one. It will change your life. Trust me.

Anyway, what blogs do I have on the reader? Currently I have 16 blogs. Some of them update very slowly (ergo, I wouldn't bother to check the webpage because chances would be good that there wouldn't be anything new there) but that doesn't cause any problems with this piece of code.

Anyway, what I do have on my Reader are;

5G - a blog about technology. The bloggers are Helsingin Sanomat-newspaper's tech-journalists.

Beaucoup Kevin - a blog about comics. Honestly, there was a time I didn't like this blog at all. Too many photos of "me-with-my-friends-with-funny-texts" but those have gone. Also; new layout and amusing old comics-panels.

Blog@Newsarama - A blog about comics/nerd-news. Rather funny and sometimes very enlightening.

Boing Boing. Eh, you know Boing Boing. One of the most read blogs in the world. Tech, tech-politics, nifty things and other such stuff.

Dave in Suomi. Only added this little while ago. Don't really have anything to say about this one yet, expect it gives outsider's perspective to familiar things, which is always welcome.

Dave's Longbox - a guy reviews old comics with very hilarious phrases, which makes you remember why comics are awesome in other ways than just because of plot. This blog has made me appreciate "so bad it's good" comics and "radness" factors, which earlier escaped me entirely. Thanks Dave.

Finland for Thought - American talks about the Finnish system and Finnish news. Outsider perspective plus life philosophy which is quite far apart from mine. Again, helps keep perspective and keeps things on my radar that I wouldn't otherwise. You know about the thing about reading only things that please you? That's excellent way to round up in cocoon and miss some important things.

Jyrki Kasvi - My representative in the Parliament. Green but has brains. While this is off topic, I'm often annoyed by people who complain but don't offer solutions. This one has his feet on the ground and actually understands modern technology. Alas, this is so rare I have to mention it..

Katuoja - Finnish comics/meta-blog kept by my...associates.. and which is very well written. Wish I were half this good.

Life in Silico - Exellent when it (1) updates and (2) doesn't talk about coding. And I'm not saying this because I count Vlad as my friend, and not just of the internet-variety.

Paleo-Future -A blog about past visions of the future. Very charming. Like everything else made in the past decades, even futures age and grow old. It's amusing, charming and somehow so innocent.

Peter David - Book/comics/telly/what-else author. Has sometimes pieces of information on the site that fall under "good to know" category.

Rajatapauksia - a blog by culture reporter of Helsingin Sanomat. Fantasy and scifi as seen in comics, games, novels, music etc.

Retromania - a blog by reporter of Helsingin Sanomat. About past futures.

Teräsmies elää - a Finnish blog about Superman. Updates seldom, but when it does it is very good. The texts handle like engineer's blueprints, which is very amusing.

The Beat - Comics news site, which updates (1) too often and (2) with information I don't need. On feed because sometimes it hits gold.

Town of Ponte Corvo - blog about the politics of Israel, mainly. I disagree with the author regularly but he writes and argues well, which is something that's always welcome.

No links because writing this on laptop and adding them is a nuisance. Hope you can manage without. If I have readers, might they do similar listing? It's always nice to know what other people read..

Short comment on MySpace

2007-06-28T14:29:00.000+03:00

MySpace. The name itself conjures ideas of freedom, about liberty to customize, change and design your own place in the Internet. The freedom does not always work; many youths and even companies have badly designed pages.

Personally I don't have very high opinion on MySpace -- the few profiles I've seen (even professional ones) seem rather clunky and remind me of the web pages I did during the late 90s in the IT-lab. I thought the reason for the pages to look so clunky was because the tools given for customization were hard to use, people were not trained in layout-creating (and thus adding the most clashing of colours and images to their profiles) and finally; because the people Just Couldn't Do It Right.

I seem to owe them an apology.

Yesterday I was bored and thus registered to MySpace. I thought it would be interesting to create a page, maybe do a simple and refined design to show how to Do It Right. As soon as I had finished the registration progress, I started browsing the account-settings. But.. where is the "Layout Settings"? Where do I change the background, fonts, tables-colours, link-colours?

After brief Google-search the answer dawned to me; the reason MySpace-pages look so bad is not because the customization tools are hard to use; it's because there are no customization tools. The pages code has to be set --by hand-- to the ABOUT ME-box. The attached image should make things clear.

I kid you not. All the MySpace design is entered into this box, titled "About Me". Those people with bad profiles? Those are the fucking gurus who fought a horde of dragons to get where they are. It's a miracle they get anything out of this at all. You can customize school property with axe easier - while your teacher is watching.

I have not seen such a bad design in ten years. Actually, not even then. I registered at Angelfire around early -98 (at least that's when my oldest file in the space was dated). It gave 15 megabytes of space, url and all it wanted was a banner on top. It had some limited custom tools; you could set the colours of the background and the text without knowing html. When I was 14, that was a really great thing. If you did know html, you could use that as well.
Of course, I didn't have anything to put on page - though I did try to create content few times (the front page I did back then, can be found here as well - made for 640x480 resolution).

It is miserable to note that as far as MySpace goes, it gives less chance to custom than a ten year old hosting site (which even by that time's standard was pretty basic).

So, what does MySpace offer then, if not your own space? Instant Messaging services; I suppose sending a message thru MySpace can be deemed to be less important, less direct, than sending email or contacting someone in MSN. Marketing products and networking. Exellent service for people who don't irc with a shell or know how to use forums.

I see no reason why there shouldn't be a custom-page in the settings. People seem to custom them anyway, and the lack of tools makes the end-results ghastly. Companies and groups that use the page for networking could easily make their page easily more attractive. This is the page of US Presidential Candinate. If this were a normal web page, I would laugh the designer all the way to the sea. I could do better. Infact, I have*. As things stand, I have to conclude that the writer was probably elite. And the guy who designed the Marine Corps-page? He must be some sort MySpace-Messiah.

But the fact still stands, that if the user interface were easier to use, you should not need sacrifice goats to dark gods to get to Barack Obama-class.

In conclusion, I have hard time understanding how this could be the sixth most popular page in the whole damn world. I can understand how the service the page offers could be needed.. but it's hard to believe that no other site has been able offer the networking and Instant Messaging with easy customization... or, have done so and made it popular. There is something really wrong with this world.

*I might add a link here once I get my web page back online.

Problems with establishment - Part 2: Nordea

2007-06-27T13:16:00.000+03:00

There are very few things in life one should be able to trust without any limits. On the top of this list there is the bank. If you start to think about it, your life goes through the bank. Using credit cards, ATM, paying bills.. we are dealing with our banks. Trusting our way of life to the bank; should the bank come short of our expectations, it would only take few days till we would be living on the streets.
I mean, how much cash do you have? If I would count together the amount in my wallet, pockets, small containers and so on, I might be able to rise as much as €20, and on any given day seldom more than €50. Why would I need to? There are five ATM's inside 50 metre radius, my bank is 100 metres from the front door and I have several cards if one should fail me. Having lots of currency in cash would be foolish; you can't very well walk around €1000 in your back pocket, and I would not feel very comfortable leaving that amount lying even in my apartment. Credit cards are a great invention; even if someone would get his hands on one, you should still know the PIN-number. And for added security, you can always kill your card if you find it missing.

But to the story;
I have been customer at Nordea since I was 13 years old. For many years I didn't have much contact with the bank; my mother would transfer money to my account over the Internet, which I would then withdraw from the nearest ATM. My needs were simple; I was living with my family, I didn't have rent or any other expenses that I would categorize as involuntary.
This all changed when I moved to my own. Suddenly I had a need for a debit card (instead of just an ATM card). I had bills to pay, clothes to buy, and so on. I went to my local branch and got Visa Electron and Netbank-account. The service wasn't excellent - I had to wait for my turn for a long while, and neither was the service excellent. But it would do; it wasn't like I would visit the branch every week.

As did my last story, this one properly starts after I started preparing my extended leave from the country, around October of last year. I went to the local branch after getting appointment two days previous, telling I wanted to discuss about getting MasterCard in-depth. Even as I had appointment, the service-lady came ten minutes late to the meeting - because she was in the middle of her lunch! As I had skipped mine to be there on timely manner, this didn't really start our conversation with the right foot.
Immediately she put the papers in front of me and started telling me how to fill them; she either didn't know or didn't care that I wanted answers to several questions I had. When I tried to ask questions, she kept repeating that I don't have to know those things. She didn't even know anything about the discounts I was eligible for. At one point she confessed she had actually specialized to home-loans. After several problems, where she disrespected and offended me quite strongly, I finally finished the papers, got answers to most of my questions (but on retrospect didn't find out about many important things that I should have), ordered the MasterCard and authorized the bank to remove the money directly from my account (instead of sending me a bill once a month). I left the bank angry, and told the extended version of this story several times to my friends and family.

It should be noted that when I started looking after insurance for my trip, I didn't even consider Nordea -- even though they were supposed to have the best offers.

Months went by. I left to Scotland, and the MasterCard served me excellently, till at 18th of April (Wednesday) when I got email from my father; apparently the card wasn't in the autopayment scheme as I had thought, and the bills had been sent to my home - where they had stayed unopened. My father had finally started to wonder why I had gotten so many letters from the bank and opened several -- and found the bills, of which some had graduated into reminder-bills, with additional late-fees.
The next day father called the bank and asked after my direct payment-authorization. Apparently I had made one, but they had never sent it forward to the Finance-department, which handled such things. But at least now the things were under control; the bills had been paid, everything was just dandy.

Then on the next Saturday (21st of April) I decided to withdraw some money from Lloyd's ATM. I put my card into the wall without realizing this would be the very last time I would see it. The machine ate it; apparently because of the bills (which I had paid three days earlier). To ad insult to injury, the bank had closed not 15 minutes earlier, and I would get my card back on Monday at the earliest.

Next Monday I went to the bank, where they courteously explained that as demanded by international banking agreements, my card had been destroyed. Swiftly I sent email to my bank, asking why this had happened and how they would take care of this, as I was now without money in a foreign land (I didn't mention that I had Visa Electron; I thought that this might increase the priority of my case, and help me find out how much they bothered to read about me).

24th I got the first email from the bank. It asks could I get the card back if Nordea would send guarantees? I explained that the card had been destroyed, but gave the contact information of Lloyd's Paisley-branch.

26th the representative of Nordea said I could get a new card but "that would mean the bill dated 7.5. should be paid immediately". I sent angry answer where I quote the amount of money on my bank account (several times larger than any bill I would have to pay) and mention that they still had the direct payment-authorization, and would you please use it?
After this they apparently actually checked my balance and other information, as the next (over courteous) email mentions that as I have Visa Electron and could I use that one instead, till I got home? After getting back, she would like to meet and discuss the problems. Very well.

Visa Electron didn't have much coverage in Scotland; shops regularly declined to accept it, which meant I had to use ATM's often (of which Nordea took €2+2,5%).

Back home, I found out that not only had the delightful service person mishandled my autopayment, she had also forgot to give me all the discounts (of which I had had to educate her on), so I had been paying €3,22 per month for the right to use MasterCard even from the months I didn't have the card. As a sugar frosting on the cake, they had also taken €4 from my account when my father had asked after the state of my account, after things had started going wrong. The bank even took money when you complained?!

Thankfully, after pointing out all these things to the person I had been in communication with, all the money were returned. But it did teach me not to trust banks (and Nordea in general) without limits.

Now that I have my money back, I have opened new account in Nooa Savingbank; unlike Nordea which is a publicly traded company (with the first priority of bringing money to its owners) Nooa's first priority is to increase the amount of money in the saving-accounts. This means that they don't issue ATM-cards, but they give up to five time more interest than Nordea ever did. And I can still get Visa Electron (which I get to design myself, oh fun).

Problems with establishment - Part 1: Elisa

2007-06-26T13:58:00.000+03:00

There's something magical in the border where company turns from an extension of a person into something that nobody quite claims as their own. Years back one of my brothers said this about a company that had turned from one-man enterprise into company employing hundreds, just in five years; "it used to be that the clerks felt like they were part of something bigger, doing something new and amazing -- now they are just working there". He was talking, of course, about the level of service.

When the people who deal with the customers get farther and farther from the people who make decisions, and decision-makers from the customers -- that's when the companies become evil. Or, if not evil, inept.. which, in a way, is even worse. I mean, you can trust evil. Evil always knows what it's doing, and it has manuals how to deal with different sort of complaints. Inept... well, it's hard to complain to the customer service that your broadband isn't working when the other end of the line doesn't acknowledge that anything is wrong. But I'm going too fast. Let's start from the beginning;

Elisa is a telecommunications company selling -- among other things -- broadband and mobile phone accounts, under several brands. Founded in 1882 as Helsingin Puhelinyhdistys (Helsinki's Phone Corporation), it used to be a co-operative where you had to own a share to get a phone installed. At some point they abandoned the you-need-to-own-a-share mentality, but otherwise it worked thus till the year 2000, when it incorporated into a public company, where each old share was worth about 20 new ones. The stock changed hands (and price) several times during the following years, and I believe that the majority of the stock is owned currently by some Icelandic millionaire.
After 2000, the company has grown aggressively in size by taking over smaller companies, not always kindly. They currently employ about 5 000 people.

I'm currently subscribing to their broadband because it was one of the two companies that at the time served my area (the other being TeliaSonera). I had some bad experiences on the other company (my mother had, and still has, their broadband). Long story short, the broadband worked at times really slowly, sometimes not at all, and the company never admitted any problems.

Now to my story. As you might or might not know, I was at student exchange from the late January to early June. Naturally, I contacted Elisa before-hand to let them know of the situation and to find out how I could avoid paying the bills - €25 per month - during the following months. They proposed to put my broadband on hold, which would have cost me €9 per month, but would have let me keep my homepage-space (where I hosted several avatars and a homepage I had made as a school project) and email-addresses (which I didn't use because I didn't want to be tied to a provider so strongly). I then said I would simply end my subscription on the last day of January and start a new one at June. For the credit of the person on the other side of the line, she was very courteous and innovative and arranged it so I didn't have to pay the fees of connecting the broadband (apparently about €50) and I even got a new ADSL2/WLAN-modem/router for free. At the time, I thought I would return home during late June, and so I asked the Internet to be connected on 18th day of that month.

On 5th day of June (when I was already back home) I got a call from Elisa; they were marketing a new broadband connection (25MB) and wondered if I would like one, for the additional price of €2 per month till the end of the year, with no commitment to stay with the plan. The person on the other end of the line didn't really seem to know what he was doing and several times I thought he was actually working for one of the competitors or tried to speak me into doubling my bills. After getting the gist of it, and after seeing that I was agreeable, he got better with his service (if not with his work) and even shared me few ways how to easily switch off the plan with minimum trouble when the year was up.

On 18th day I got a text message, proclaiming that my Internet was now connected, have a nice day. After trying different configurations for hours (new modem, old modem, switching the lines etc) without anything tangible to show of my efforts, I went to sleep. The next day I called the Customer Service again (finding out that (1.) I was supposed to have 1MB connection till they would separately upgrade my account on 4th of July and (2.) Elisa's definition of "line of eight minutes" meant the same as "wait forty minutes") trying to explain that the fucking Internet does not work.
After explaining that yes, I have some minor knowledge with technology and that I suppose I know how to connect the modem to both power and phone socket and yes, the Green Light indicating working ADSL-connection seems to be missing. The Customer Service says that perhaps he COULD send someone to check the wiring. But most probably the problem would be between the keyboard and the chair, and if so, you are the person who will pick up the bill (I find out that the bill is €70/hour). And somebody would probably come around during the next two days.

Two days later, there still wasn't any light in the modem. It was Wednesday and 21st of June. New call to the Customer Service (and forty minutes of elevator music later, thank God the line was only eight minutes long, I don't know how long I could have survived) I find out that "two days later" means 26th or 27th of June. Midsummer, you understand.

Today, on the 26th of June, I get call from my Father. Apparently the papers for my new 25M connection just arrived. To his apartment. New call to Elisa ("the line is over 20 minutes long, please hold the line, you can also go to our web page for service") and everything seems to be in order. Apparently the cable man is currently going trough the wiring, and yes, the upgrade should come to my address.
Two hours later call from the very friendly cable man explaining that the wiring had been set improperly and should now be fixed.

Now waiting for the 4th of July, when my Father might very well get a new, much better, broadband (though the Customer Service disagreed).

EDIT: The letter to my father indicated (and the Customer Service agreed and corrected) that while the new connection (which apparently is either 24M or 25M depending whom you ask) was coming to my address, the bills were going to be sent to my father.

What the hell is wrong with organized religions?

2007-05-23T22:45:00.000+03:00

I have been thinking of religions lately. Partly because of this entry (I was linked by my friend Vlad, who apparently has rather good grasp on things I like), partly because couple of Jehovah's Witnesses came to visit the Residence the other day. I was not around, but apparently they knocked on each flat door and asked from which countries the inhabitants are from. They then gave Watchtowers and Awake!-magazines in the languages of the countries mentioned. So now I have religious magazines in Finnish and English on the kitchen table.

I don't much base for organized religion. I trust the scientific approach as far as our normal life goes, and I quite agree with the idea of evolution and Newtonian physics (yes, I know they only apply as long as the objects travel slower than 10% of speed of light). When we step outside the area that can be observed and verified directly by our senses, I get a bit unsure. They say that it all started with a Big Bang, which seems like a sensible conclusion from the known facts. The same goes for post-Einstein physics. They say it allows pretty much everything from time travel to reaching distant stars in days. This may very well be so, and I do know that CD-players would be impossible to manufacture without Einstein's theories.

But when you start to think about it, REALLY think about it; the universe is so huge and big and infinite. There are no borders but it expands all the time. And every material is coming from the same spot and has just spread around. There may be evidence to support it - and I do want to believe - but it's too big. And the same goes for the religious alternatives.

But to be honest, I'm not very concerned. Some days I feel that there might be something out there, and on some days I don't. In general, I feel that it's more important to know what's inside than outside. And whatever you believe, they are your beliefs and don't really belong to anyone else. If I discover something that works to me, the last thing I want to hear is that I'm wrong. Incidentally, Lutheran church (at least in Finland) is pretty cool with the subject. Apparently they (we?) have priests who don't believe in Hell. And priests that only believe in God as a symbol for human goodness. And priests that don't believe that women can be priests, which pretty well shows the other side of the tolerance-argument, but I digress.

I do read about other religions; believes often tell something important about the culture and the person itself. And so I was reading Finnish Awake! at the kitchen table, while I was eating my breakfast müsli. I admit that I dont know much about Jehovahs Witnesses, other than they go from door to door and nobody seems to like them. It's all very vague.

There was a longish article in Young people ask-series titled Why is it wrong to date in secret?. It was basically the moral story of Jessica, with additional quotes and explanations from the Bible. Jessica's story goes as follows;

Jessica had to do a choice. Everything started when one of her classmates, Jeremy, told he was interested in her. Jessica says: "He was very good looking, and my friends said that you will never find a guy as honourable as him. Many girls were interested in him, but he only had eyes for me".

After a time, Jeremy asked Jessica out. She tells: "I explained to him that I am a Jehovah's Witness, and that I could not date anyone who was not a Witness. But then Jeremy got an idea; we could date without telling my parents.

[...] Surprisingly, Jessica accepts Jeremy's idea. "I was sure that if I dated him, I could make him love Jehovah", she says. [Then] Jessica [...] heard about another Christian girl in the same situation. "When I found out that she had ended her relationship, I knew what I had to do", Jessica says. Was ending the relationship easy? No! "He was the only boy who I had ever truly cared about", Jessica says. "I cried every day for weeks."

Jessica also knew something else: she loved Jehovah, and even if she had gotten sidetracked, she genuinely wanted to do what was right. In time, the pain went away. Jessica tells; "my relationship with Jehovah is now better than ever. I am really thankful that he gives to us at the right time the kind of guidance we need."

(From Herätkää!, June 2007)

The girl cried for weeks and imagine what the boy felt like. I don't really know what the teaching of the story was - other than "cults are bad for you, mmkay?" - But I'd like you to imagine what it would be like if there is no Witness community on the area. The article also mentions that dating is forbidden altogether if the people aren't old enough to marry and prepared to do so after relatively short dating.

Religion is what you make of it, what you believe in. You can try to convince others to believe in the same way, but it's rather inhuman to make people live in a way that makes them unhappy. Denying something purely because somebody says you should does sound a bit perverse for me, just because somebody may have probably said something against it, possibly, 3 000 years ago. As such I really like the relaxed attitude of the ground-level Lutheran church; the higher ups are not as much fun (few years ago they fired an employee for being gay).

I am, of course, a product of my society, and of my generation. People talk about traditions, values and history. Personally I think that for them to carry on, they should have some other things for going for them than just age. And not everything old is bad, but that story sends chills down my spine. Actually, I felt pretty bad for few days. The worst thing is that they didn't even think Jeremy's feelings were worth exploring. The only important thing is that Jessica had gotten closer to God!

Diary

2007-05-20T18:00:00.000+03:00

Memory is a terrible thing. It alters and simplifies our recollection, making us heroes of our own lives. We forget our failures. Different occasions merge together and sometimes the timeline of events goes all topsy-turvy as our brain tries to make stories out of singular events.

My first venture into keeping journal wasn't voluntary. I was seven years old and I had problems with learning to write Finnish. I had been out of the country for two years, studying and reading in English (as well as one aged six can). Coming back to homeland and learning to write in language with different grammar proved to be problematic. My mother bought me a calendar book and forced me to write an entry for every day, even though I had very little interest in doing so.

First time I tried writing one voluntarily was when I was ten. I was spending my summer in Nicaragua, and thought that it might be a good idea to record events from a time that would surely be unlike any other in my life. After the first two weeks, the entries started to get shorter. After three weeks, they were just a list of verbs. Soon I stopped completely.
I tried again four years later, for the same reasons as above. The entries were longer, but during the two and half months I only got twenty pages into A5-notebook. I spent weeks without writing anything - though to be fair, the summer was pretty uneventful.

During this time in my life, I was sure that I was already emotionally as adult as I would ever be, and that the memories of those days would never fade. Thus I didn’t keep a diary, a thing I can’t deem as good or bad. The memories did fade, but I suspect that they were nothing in particular I would want to remember. On the other hand, this was the time of my life when I created many of the quirks I now have. Would be nice to know why I originally avowed not to use alcohol or why I disliked a person whose company I three years later looked quite forward to.

I wrote my first long, emotional text when my first relationship crashed. I was feeling awful. For reasons I don’t remember I opened Notepad and started writing. I must have filled two or three pages, and I remember how it surprised me that I couldn’t lie to myself as I did in my head. Half-truths that made sense in my mind looked so thin on paper. I had to tell my feelings and situation as a story, which forced me to question things you normally brush over in your head, as you are more occupied with the present state of affairs.
I wrote for two hours, after which I password-protected the file. I probably have the file still somewhere on my hard drive, but I have not taken a look. While I was more truthful, I have no illusions that I would have been any less naïve.
Reading the file again would also surely hurt, if for different reasons than then. Written word always reflects the ways we think – never more than when we write about our personal problems. I am not sure I want to face the person I was then – even if it would be a moment of growth as a human being.

Last summer I got a book from my mother with hard red covers and full of blank A4-pages. Mum meant me to use it for drawing – I was just finishing my fourth book – but I found the paper was too glossy for that. The ink didn’t stick to the paper needing up to five minutes to dry.
The book rested on my shelf for few months till I found myself depressed by worries of the future, family and matters of heart. I could not separate the feelings in my head, leaving me unable to function. I was in sorry state for few weeks till it occurred for me to take the book down from the shelf and start writing.
This was over half a year ago, and to date I have finished 107 entries. Some of the entries are written very carefully, with every alphabet carefully placed precisely where intended. Some are written hurriedly, with big and half-formed words scrawling over the pages like fat snails. But I kept writing about my experiences, thoughts, worries and hopes, even when I was tired, sick, angry or feeling my heart would burst from grief.

It helps to write things down when you have a problem; just having it on paper changes it to something more akin to to-do list. Matters of heart become solid, making them easy to touch. Often writing it down even offered solutions that were earlier nowhere to be seen.
It helps to write things down even on a normal day; you never know when you want to know of some detail that would otherwise escape your memory, or remind yourself how you felt about different people.
And finally, it stops you from making stories out of your life. Going trough the pages you can see what was important to you then, and how you felt about different subjects. Seeing how things unfolded gives you a change to learn of them more effectively than by just recalling.
Alas, it also offers exellent list of mistakes you make. Where you trusted the wrong people and where you made a mistake that only manifested months later.

But, all in all, I love my diary with red covers. It has probably improved my life more than any other singular item ever in my possession.

What did I want to be when I grew up?

2007-05-17T14:50:00.000+03:00

This is a looking-back post. In a way, it's a decade report about where I was ten years ago and where I am now. I think it's very personal text about, basically, how I became me. You might wonder why I write it here, on a public blog (ha ha) where anybody (hah) might see it instead to the privacy of my own ~~diary~~ journal. I leave you with that question for now, and give answer at the end; after reading these things about me, it might make more sense.

I imagine all of you have seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The film has a part where, with flashbacks, we learn how Jones became archaeologist, how he started to fear snakes, how he got named Indiana and where he got his style.
And you could see all this from following him on one important day of his life. Somehow it was so easy. You are a kid with no plans of future, and then you experience something important and suddenly you know who you want to be in twenty years.
In real life, it all happens gradually and is - at least it was for me - full of pain.

Ten years ago I was doing my last days at lower compulsory school. Back home the summer between lower and upper compulsory school is pretty much the difference between child (12) and a teenager (13).

I was not well liked. My family had moved to the town a year earlier, and I only had two friends in the school; I suspect they might not have liked me very deeply, and only were in my company because you have to have something to do during the breaks. After the summer, I did not see them again.
There were over 38 people in our class; our home class was an old (and small) gymnasium, built in the fifties, which had fallen in disuse after they had built another school building next to ours to accommodate the growing student body. I could not name half the people in my class.

Imagine me then, in the early summer of 1997. I was often ridiculed for my choices in clothing (dictated by comfort), when the "cool guys" wore hip-hop jeans with wide enough trouser legs to get the whole waist in.

Upper compulsory school was not nice either. Around me everyone was reinventing themselves, becoming hiphoppers, beauty queens, rockers, jocks.
And I was lonely. The people I knew earlier had gone to other schools. I wasn't able to make any connections to new people during the first two years, and so I sat next to classroom door waiting for the teacher arrive. Sometimes I read novels, sometimes history or geography.
The lack of social contact had left me awkward and shy, and the fear that somebody would stop me in the middle of too long explanation had gotten me to the habit of talking fast.

Because I was not "in" in the popular culture of the time, I hated it. Backstreet Boys, radio hosts, programs in television. Media in general. If somebody asked, I was more than happy to share my feelings. I hated being me; disliked kid who was nervous of doing the wrong things in case it would be noticed and somebody would make jokes, or hit me on the back.

I got friends, and I got to upper secondary school. Most of the more brainless people were filtered to the ranks of the unemployed and the student body of vocational school. Life was better, but I was still very tightly wounded. I had started to define myself by what I was NOT, leaving me a bit hollow. I didn't drink, and I didn't smoke. I didn't go outside on Friday-evenings but stayed home. Perfect wallflower.
I got few friends, the first that I actually retained after I got out of school. Some of them smoked, some of them drunk heavily, one had interesting ideas about relationships.. But most of all they were happy to listen to me even if I didn't make much sense, and introduced me to things that they thought I would enjoy. I got much more relaxed and happy, and started thinking that maybe it wasn't important to be like everyone else or blend to the background. I started imaging what kind of person I would like to be.

Four years later I think I'm nearly there. I have forced myself into situations that I have wanted to do, but earlier felt were too rowdy, unfamiliar or just afraid of. I'm more open about things I like and seldom bother to hide my interest in things that take my fancy, were they cartoon shows for kids, graveyards or human body shapes. And I stopped making excuses to cover myself.

Maybe all this is a small thing for someone else.. maybe to others deciding these things is easy. It wasn't for me. I started thinking how much I had changed, and I wanted to have it on black and white. Words and printed text have more power than thoughts, even if you are only speaking to yourself. That's why diaries are such a powerful tools.

I always thought that when speakers came to the school talking about things being easier when you are older, that they were lying. That the feeling on the background would never change. I am happy to notice I was wrong.