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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