Slushy

Nearly compacted my coccyx on a stroll to the supermarket thanks to wimpy summer trainers and melty sleet.  Strangers assumed the girlish scream came from Niamh, so it was more embarrassing for her really. Time to switch to boots and winter-tyres. 

The dollar-euro rates have really taken the pain out of replacing my nicked bike-bits - a saddle is in the post, and I'm planning to replace my wimpy lights with some seriously bright numbers so I can continue to take the forest trails to uni even in the dark.

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WE THE ROBOTS

WE THE ROBOTS » Archive » Birdwatching

Marvellous new webcomic - love the art and the humour.  This isn't the funniest of strips, but I love the third panel so much I had to share.

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Study recommences

Back into study mode with a bang. I've signed on for an intensive week long course starting Monday. What was I thinking. The preparatory reading comes to a hundred pages at the minimum. Eep.

I've noticed one remembers better and gets a deeper understanding of the material by explaining it to someone else. If the other person actually requires the explanation, it's all good and karmic. If it's just me ranting at Niamh, then the arrangement isn't so great. I'm tempted to start a lecture blog somewhere else, and see what happens.

Finally, best wishes and a speedy recovery to Ma' Taarzaan. I hope get-well-soons from strangers half a globe away aren't too creepy.

Cycling

There's something a bit zen about cycling alone.  There's no competition, but it's always a race against self.  Setting the pace, then having to deal with it.  Accepting the discomfort because it brings pleasures.  Reigning in when the going is easy, and pushing hard when things get tough.

Feeding in enough power to maintain, nicely ticking over, it feels like maybe, just maybe there might be a way to do this in life too.

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The times they are a changing

There's a characterful little café located on prime tourist-trap real estate - Cafe Engel - that makes fabulous use of it's inner courtyard in summer by screening old movies there late night.  We went to see Kiss Me Deadly last night, and while throughly enjoyable, there are so many disconnects with the modern world it's a bit alien.  (Interestingly it was banned in Finland upon release in 1955).


Everyone smoking constantly, knocking back bourbon insouciantly whenever they happen to pass by a decanter (whomsoever it might belong to) - culminating in the protagonist ordering "a double bourbon and leave the bottle" at a bar, drinking till he passes out, before being roused from his stupor by the barman to stumble to his car and drive home - a scene that caused more horror amongst the modern crowd than any of the tame by modern standards violence.  Not a single woman was able to resist kissing the leading man at any meeting (but it was a noir, so of course the femme fatale fixes the men good in the end).  Massive bits of archaic technology built into walls like it wasn't going to be obsolete in 12 months (like a 3'x3' answering machine running off tape reels). 

There were moving men with burden-belts lifting objects no single professional would be permitted to lift by health and safety regulations.  There was uncomfortable looking furniture, and cars with no outside door handles because you reached in through the window.  Men wore suits period.  Best of all (at the risk of giving too much away), there was mysterious Nuclear Radiation - similar to Stephen Spielberg's imagining of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders Of the Lost Ark -  both in appearance and effect, elliciting giggles from the crowd.  Even the actors seemed jarringly out of step with modern counterparts - crooked teeth, imperfections - natural! 

Even though the movie industry was thriving then, and there's a wealth of recorded history from TV and radio too - the era is a bit strange and mysterious (at least to me) today - mostly because we don't get to see any of that lovely old material any more - either because the works are orphaned, or it's just not worth the cost of showing them for curiosity's sake.  That's a pity, but the silver lining is it makes sitting in a damp courtyard watching a black and white reel movie feel that bit more special.

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Wedding Season

'Tis the Season to get Married (fa-la-la-la-la?) - normally this is a fairly academic issue where the author is concerned. However, it seems recently I've unwittingly crossed over into the dreaded "That Age" - friends and cousins seem to be getting hitched at an alarming rate. Thus far the friend/family matrimony rate (ffmr) corresponds to the Fibonacci numbers - if current trends persist, in ten years the ffmr will hit 377! Clearly I'm to meet a lot of new people between now and then.

Dreadfully sorry, there was supposed to be more, but I've to find proof of travel and make it to work soon so we can go sofa shopping tonight. The two plastic chairs covered in a duvet just aren't cutting it any more.

Summer

Hola!

It's been a while, I'm short on time and misery, so both my writing and musicianship is suffering terribly.

News: The project I was hired for, almost 3 years ago now (where did that time go?), finally died after 6 months on life support. It's been fun, it got me to the US on the company dime, and even got a bit of exposure, but now it's over.

Now, at least for this month, I'm a web-developer, fixing up some pretty shoddy PHP a sub-contractor knocked up that has to go live at the end of the month. This would be easier if I'd had any PHP experience to speak of, but learning is fun. [If the previous sentence was too nerdy skip to the next paragraph now] Plus, since the whole setup is LAMP, I get to develop on a linux box, running my favourite disto (Fedora), and I got root, baby - aww yeah. [No sympathy, you were warned]

We moved again - this was my fifth move in 3 years, I think I'll try to stay put a bit longer. We're now in the south west of the city, right beside where I work, in a modern 2 room apartment with a balcony and... a sauna! Well, a tiny hotpress in the bathroom with some electrically heated rocks, but it does the job. We're sofa shopping at the minute, which is tricky business.

School is out

I'm over my first year at Helsinki University of Technology. I'm going to have to modify my behaviour with respect to classes conducted in Finnish - forgetting about them until the deadlines loom is not very healthy, or conducive to good grades. While it's a special challenge to try to cram an entire course over a weekend, it kind of misses the point - one of the perks of the college system here is the flexibility - I usually end up regretful that I didn't put more time in, since the subjects are interesting.

I've enjoyed exams that ask essay style questions that allow you to explain what you've learned. I've been prone to swallowing books whole, and then regurgitation the tasty bits to others (usually unsolicited) since I was very tiny, so having courses that follow that pattern, rather than demanding explanation via abstract maths, has me wondering if I'm in the right field. Of course, in engineering, being able to string a couple of words together grammatically is considered impressive - I guess if I was doing something more bookish I'd be tinkering with scripting languages wondering if I shouldn't be programming. The greener grass.

Summer is here

Hello hello, it's been a while. I have excuses - I've been travelling, I've had exams, but mostly tools that encourage microblogging, like Twitter, and lately Jaiku have been slowly draining away my blogging mojo.

I'm going to plug Jaiku - it can assimilate your twitter stream, Borg like, but has threaded conversations, supports anything with RSS, and... oh just give it a whirl if you're so inclined.

Spring, St Patrick's Day

It's been officially Spring for 3 days, according to my esteemed Far Side Gallery. That's normally a bit of a cruel joke up here, but this winter has been terrificly mild, so there's a certain unWinterishness, even if there's not a speck of green anywhere yet.


St Patrick's day saw Helsinki's first ever parade - I half marched, half ran up and down snapping pictures like an eejit, with my camera wrapped in a bandana to keep it dry. Not only was it raining, it was sleeting - big, cold, wet clumps of ice. In spite of that the craic was good - everyone singing (not necessarily the same song, or in the same key), and there were a bunch of dancers there who must have been sodden, who not only danced their way around the route, but put on a show in front of the Cathedral afterwards. Fair play to them. The whole thing seemed to be rather confusing for the locals, who might have thought it had something to do with the parliamentary elections in progress at the time.

Now I'm off to take a nap or something - I stayed up really late, then got up really early to have some documents ready, and now it feels like someone is drying my eyes out from inside my head.

Out of synch

My heartfelt empathy to US residents (especially those with longhair and beards in Austin).  I know the rational behind daylight savings, it's sound, but that doesn't prevent me from getting caught out by it every year.  Twice every a year!

Appropriately I'm feeling out of synch myself - my body and mind are in totally different places.  My body has had a bit of a cycle, feels rested and fed, and demands to go to bed.  It's giving lots of hints - droopy eyelids, yawns, the whole repertoire.  The mind is trying to ignore all this baseness and work through a course that has to be passed this week.  Very interesting stuff.  It's got a couple of tricks too - it's bouncing away to  the lively electronica it tricked the hand into setting playing, and it's reading the lecture slides from the computer - it's had many the succesful defense against sleep demands in front of the screen, oh yes, this is it's home turf.

I'm trying to figure out why 12-2AM seems to be some kind of golden zone for me focus wise.  If I could mimic that throughout the day, I'd be set.

Anybody else experiencing this?

technorati tags:Feckless, Finland, time, focus

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It hurts

Feet extensions
Originally uploaded by delta_avi_delta.

Went for the first cross-country ski of the year today. Ow. I went to Paloheinä, a center about 40 minutes by foot and bus from the flat. I'd never been there before (I'd confused it with another center) - hired my skis and set forth.

There was an easy 3.9km route I decided would be a good break-in. I spent most of the first couple of km looking at my feet, trying to to fall over - and so missed the signposts. After what seemed like a good distance without turning around, after a grueling uphill bit I faceplanted on, there was a signpost. Pointing back along a straighter road the way I came. "Paloheinä: 3km". Hmm.

The straight road proved useless - not enough snow cover and too many pine needles, so I crossed back across to the windy route, and shuffled back. I'd only been going about an hour and twenty minutes by the time I handed my skis back in, and hobbled to the bus, but I was done, cooked, finished.

And after that jolly introduction, is anyone up for coming along next week?

Good coffee

Good coffee
Originally uploaded by delta_avi_delta.

My (short)list of (slight) greviences with this great land has shrunk by one: I've found some ground coffee roasted outside of the country.

There's a very distinctive bitterness to nationally roasted coffee - it is to other coffees as hops-y beer is to wheatbeer - it's got a tang. If you like it, I'm sure nothing else will do. I don't.

I tried this with low hopes, but it's great. Now if only some non-has-beens would come play a gig. My Chemical Romance does not count.

Ystävänpäivä

Valentine's day, or Ystävänpäivä, is a minty fresh import to Finland, as recent as 5 years apparantly. Talking over lunch, there were complaints that recieving a card from someone was so awkward, because then you had to rush out and reciprocate. I guess the concepts of secret admirer, and anonymity will catch on a little later.

After seeing this first thing today, and after last year's chocolate fondue experience in Amsterdam, there was no question as to Ystävänpäivä dessert chez nous.

Luckily, chocolate fondue is foolproof, as certified by this certifiable fool.

The internets suggested

3x 100g Toblerones
half cup of cream
2xtablespoons kirsch

Personally that was too much cream, and not enough kirsch, but put them all in a pot, over very low heat, stir a bit, and voila! Rig a candle underneath the pot, pile some chopped fruit and cookies on a plate, keep a little bowl of chopped hazlenuts handy and there you have it - chocolate fondue.

Incidentally, isn't the "l" in Google missing? Guess cupid took it for an arrow.

***
Edited to correct spelling of Ystävänpäivä - yes, I'm an idiot :)
***

There's news and there's news

I could blog about how, after yesterday's word-of-the-day spookiness, I found myself engaging in omphalaskepsis - literally considering my over-protruding navel, when the word of the day happened to be equivalent to "chubby", but word-of-the-day posts are, like, sooo last century .

So, today we're talking about Eurovision - that thing that everyone pretends to disdain, that confuses American's because they've never heard of it, Europeans because there are some very non-EU contries in there (Russia?!), and that seemed poised to fade into obscurity as a cesspit of cheezy Eurodance and reality-tv voting mechanisms until Finnish hard rock act à la KISS blew the formulas away last year, for Finlands first win? With me?
***NEWSFLASH***

It seems the Irish, after nearly running the country into the ground winning, and then having to host the feckin' thing repeatedly in the (pre-boom) 90s, have decided to take a serious crack at it again, by poaching Finnish talent. Here at FiF we've discovered that one of the final four potential entries is written by one Matti Kallio, of Helsinki. Appropriately pictured here (second from left) in an Irish bar in Helsinki. Dun dun duuuuuun!

***RIVALRY***
Digging deeper (oh we dig right down into the dregs of the net for you), it seems one of the other entrants is written by a Swede, Stig Lindell. We'll keep you posted on this battle of the arch-rivals Sweden and Finland as it progresses - will it be like the Olympics Ice-Hockey, with the Swede eking out the Finn, or will it be like... erm... or will it be the other way around. More news when if happens.

Incidentally, if you're wondering why the Eurovision always sounds the feckin' same - old Stig has had entries for Norway and Iceland in years past. I wonder if it comes down to the same 25 songwriters year after year? Sure sounds that way.

I think I pledged here before to give the DRM thing a rest, so I'll just link to this, and this, and say nothing. I consider the promise bended but unbroken.

antiserendipitous

I've spent all morning poking around the inside of images. Jpegs. I've been begging, goading, threatening even, in an effort to make them relinquish their dark, embedded secrets - their innermost properties, that which describes them - yes! their metadata, yea even the little idea of themselves they carry inside, known to you as a thumbnail. I've just allocated myself five minutes to go check my mail, and get away from their evil bytes, and what do I see?



No escape.

On more sane footing, it's -20 C. It was +1 yesterday. Blue-skied and clear.

Teeth: skinless

My new year's resolution to be more organized didn't even last a month.

Scenario: hard deadline for a paper submission, enforced by a cold unfeeling electronic door, 15.45, Jan 31st. Submission is final action required for passing a 6 credit course. 6 credits is many.

Our hero idiot decides Jan 30th is a good time to start writing said paper; has realized he has once again cut things a bit too fine when, after 4 hours sleep, paper is the best paper it can be under the circumstances. With 40 minutes to go on deadline. 8 miles from cold unfeeling electronic door. In a snow storm. Quick calculation - never get there by bike in fresh snow. Public transport is round-about, takes ages. Bugger bugger bugger. Only one gamble available...

Final 40 exciting minutes spent thus:
*sprint to taxi stand ......................................... 3 minutes
*wait for taxi ..................................................... 5 minutes
*tense taxi ride, snowy roads, traffic............. 30 minutes
*toss taxi driver wallet, franticly .................. >1 minute
*sprint to cold unfeeling electronic door ....... >1 minute

By this stage it's all up in the air. I'm terrified to pull the door handle, but I do... and it gives. I love you, cold unfeeling electronic door.

I say it every time, but *never* again.

The Last Question

I read a lot of early science fiction, including Asimov starting when I was 10 - I was a serious kid, and his mix of real science, philosphy, and futurism appealed to me greatly. I burned out on SF pretty completely by the time I hit college, but this story reminds me why I loved him.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

It's also pretty interesting as a "computer [technician]" of sorts to see how near and far from the mark mid 20th century SF was regarding the little box of tricks you're using to read this.

Enjoy.