Feckless in Finland

Moved!

2007-01-31T17:52:00.000+02:00

Extra! Extra!

Feckless in Finland now to be found at

fecklessinfinland.blogspot.com

No more phonetic greek character weirdness, same old host character weirdness.

Winter Finally Here

2007-01-28T22:39:00.000+02:00

I was getting worried when the Texan Blogmeister was reporting icy conditions in The Lone Star State while kids here were trying to convert their sleds into paddle boats, but in the last few days the temperatures finally fell, like they should. Darn global warming.

We celebrated, as dignified, grown-up twenty-somethings do, by flinging ourselves down local hills on "bum-sleighs", hooting. Image above is manly bum sleigh with kitty motif.

Uni has had it's ups and downs. I elected not to sit an exam in a subject that won't come around again until August 2008 - was totally unprepared, tired and fatalistic. Even so, if I get graded "passed" on a paper I've to hand up by Wednesday, and get through another exam in March, I should have 19 credits from last semester - not bad factoring in the full-time work. I'm hoping to rack up 20-25 from this semester - there's a 3 credit book exam available in computer law - all the DRM and Open Source stuff I like to rant about - marvellous.

I'm down to working 3 days a week, which should give me more time, and lead to less all-nighters.

Merry Christmas

2006-12-25T23:45:00.000+02:00

Merry [insert seasonal/solar festival here],

I feel far from my books and study here (even though they're only just upstairs) so I'm slacking off... to blog!

Home is no longer the internetless wilderness it once was (huzzah!). There's a complicated and arcane phone system culminating in broadband and a wireless phone upstairs, but in series with a plain old phone downstairs, a phone that is not to be lifted under pain of death. It came from the electronics shop the video from The Ring originated; the very act of lifting the receiver and hearing its dial-tone kills the internets.

To this newly, wired home I brought the gift of wirelessness. Previously I'd get told off a lot for hogging the connection over the holidays, and the familiar perception (especially with the matriarch) is that sitting at the computer is anti-social, whereas sitting in front of the tv is acceptable. Now, I can do (and am doing) both, praise be the wifi internet fairies, ferrying my packets to a fro. Flit! Fly!

Righty, back to work. New Year's is coming, and this year it brings not only abstracts like *Promise* and *Hope*, but certainties like *Exams*, *Deadlines* and *Grades*.

A special "Merry Christmas" to everyone I can't say that to in person.

Helsinki needs this

2006-11-19T17:42:00.000+02:00

Down under they seem to have the same nocturnal urnitation problems as we do here up above. The proposed solution is magical nocturnal street urinals

that disappear below street level during the day.

As we were walking home last night, a guy under a lamp started to paw at his belt. I just assumed he was going to undo his fly and let loose right below the street-light, and found I wasn't a bit shocked (he didn't).

Friends have seen much, much worse. We speculate it's the closeness to nature engendered by summers in unplumbed summer cottages that lowers the threshold for street, er, performance.

Actually the only flaw with respect to Hki is it's focus on male drinkers.

technorati tags:Helsinki, Finland, Feckless, urination

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Helsingin Sanomat "Now" Ad

2006-11-17T17:33:00.000+02:00

What Now - What Next - video powered by Metacafe

Looks from the late 80s or early 90s.

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San Francisco

2006-11-08T19:15:00.000+02:00

It needs the excersice
Originally uploaded by delta_avi_delta.

I was over in Palo Alto last week for work - my first trip stateside and it was a blast - many cultural learnings.

I'm not a fan of the ingress process though. You have to give details of your stay before they let you on the plane, and you get photographed, fingerprinted, and mildly questioned when you get off. *Fingerprinted*. I may be old fashioned but I consider all of that a privacy violation. Oh and you have to put your potentially explosive deodorant in a little plastic baggy so at least it'll be neat before it goes off. Who comes up with this stuff?

I had thought that staying in San Francisco might mean I'd see some of it, unfortunately work was intense, so I mostly saw the inside of Caltrains and a couple of interesting restaurants, but hey, good food and I'm happy. Uniformly fantastic coffee too and I'm ecstatic.

Wow, the food. I'll put it like this - I rarely, very rarely, oh so rarely leave food behind me, but was defeated two meals straight, dinner and breakfast, and I'm a big fan of Irish breakfasts so you can imagine what kind of monster the Big Breakfast Burrito was.

People seem super-friendly if you're straight over from Finland. Strangers and wait-staff will initiate conversation at will or over trivialities, and assume a level of friendliness that's initially slightly disconcerting if you're used to how things work over here. Of course, I'm pretty certain this is how I come across in Finland. There's a massive dose of spoken formality too - "sir" and "ma'am" you don't get here either, nor in Dublin for that matter.

The usual self-evidents:
1) Everyone drives everywhere. It's at most a 15 minute walk from the train-station to work. I was considered crazy for walking, and kind people went out of their way to drop me off despite my protests.
2) Many people are terrifically fat - you can guess this when you see defibrillators lining the arrival terminal walls.
3) This ain't no social society - I hadn't seen anyone eat from a bin in a long time. Fish in a bin for empties to return for coins for booze yes, fish for dinner, no.
4) A certain sense of paranoia abounds. At every train station, and at the airports you get "if you notice suspicious activity..." messages, and you're constantly reminded "we're at Homeland Security Threat Level Orange".

No other clichés for now :)

Down with DRM

2006-10-03T19:07:00.000+03:00

Today is international Day Against DRM. If you're not sure what DRM is, follow the link. There's too much apathy surrounding digital rights - and far too many clueless politicians are allowing themselves to be lobbied into position by large corporations with vested interests.

"So what," you say, "so I can only listen to my iTunes how Apple lets me, big whoop - 'it prevents piracy'." I say letting The Man decide and then enforce exactly how artists can distribute and how I can appreciate their rock just doesn't roll.

It prevents piracy, true, but it also precludes a host of legitimate uses that goes well above and beyond the copyright restrictions it aims to uphold. Copyright is a rather flexible thing - copyright law grants a "fair use" license to students of the media content, or satirists for example - try explaining that to a DRM algorithm. Want to sell the records you don't like to buy new ones you do? Totally permitted under copyright (it's called "first sale"), not recognized by DRM. It fails completely to recognise next-generation copyright schemes such as Creative Commons.

Also, wise up people. You, the one who bought music on iTunes there - fancy buying a not-an-iPod any time soon? No? Your music will only play on Apple devices? So your next shiny mp3 player will be? Apple. The one after that? Right. This is called "vendor lock in". The reason everyone from Microsoft to our dear Nokia has tried to start a music store in recent years is they see Apple's DRM driven lock in and they can't believe they missed their chance.

You like mashups? I sure do. Mashups have been one of the revelations of the last few years - that dumb "users" could take media, and cut and paste it together to a professional standard to make something more than the sum of its parts was something of a shock to the media vendors. Sadly, not permitted under DRM schemes.

Finally, you know that box of records you found in your parents attic - the ones they bought before they were "Mom" and "Dad"? They were strange and mysterious, and when the popped and crackled to life you discovered a whole world of music you didn't know existed. Forget that with DRM schemes. Your children will not be able to inherit the digital equivalent of your dusty vinyls, because the license you purchased it under doesn't include them, or their devices. Of all the reasons to oppose DRM, that's the one I find the most sad and compelling.

Reaquaintance

2006-10-01T00:32:00.000+03:00

Great to see you! Yeah! So... Hmm... Er... Right. What's new with me? Well, the moving is over. What moving? In the interval between informative posts, I have:

* moved out of old flat and into apartment of a certain good friend (many, many thanks)
* moved onwards to apartment of another certain good friend (many, many thanks)
* moved into hotel when gf moved over here to Santaland (how much?!)
* officially entered studentdom (wohoo!)
* used studentdom to wangle temporary accommodation
* moved out of hotel promptly and into temporary accommodation
* moved into even more temporary accommodation
* started Uni proper (gulp)
* moved into the beautiful apartment of friends of friends (phew)

We're now firmly installed in said aparment, and shouldn't have to shift anywhere for 8 month or so, huzzah!

Also, now that I have study to avoid, you should see a general increase in posting - you may recall that it was the wonderful womb of study-avoidance that birthed this very blog all that time ago. Why, even as I type I'm "taking a break" from catching up on lectures I skipped, owing to their distinct non-Englishness. I used to begrudge myself this non-study time, but I've come to appreciate the creative energy it can engender. Earlier today I baked a pie, something I am not normally known to do.

His excuse, but I'm sticking to it

2006-09-29T15:48:00.000+03:00

I love writing but I hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says. " You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy, I'm a white piece of paper, you wanna dance with me?" and I really, really don't. I don't want any trouble. I'll go peaceable-like.

-Aaron Sorkin

Changed my worldview

2006-08-30T23:50:00.000+03:00

Watch Online

Thanks to the Bunny Blogger for turning me on to TED and their talks. You can explore them yourself if you have time (ok, I'll sell it a little more, there's a talk by Ze Frank from 2004 there too), but whatever you do, please click the linky thing at the start of this, and watch the short video. It'll probaby change how you think about the world.

Our post viewing talk, we being... well... us, turned to open data, and the amount of knowledge lying around within organisations and corporations that just needs to be made available and then visualized skillfully for a more accurate picture of the world, people, and everything else we've paid attention to as a species to emerge.

If you're tickled by the idea of open data, here's an AULA talk on the subject. The internet was heralded as starting the Information Age - but all that's happened so far is we've digitized information we mostly had already, for accessibility - wikipedia for instance. Now we need to provide all the data we have, on all sorts of topics, so we can mix and mash them into new perspectives and understandings.

Make it so.

technorati tags:AULA, TED, open data, ze frank, Helsinki, Finland, Feckless, talks

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Cars

2006-08-26T16:54:00.000+03:00

Google-kuvahaun tulos kohteessa http://www.numberonestars.com/movies/images2/cars.jpg

Pixar now are like Disney were back in the middle of last century - they're just churning out the classics left right and centre. I went to see Cars last night, and everything was just so. Ok, maybe not the songs, but then I guess they're aimed at kids... thought I never remember liking them as a child, they felt like pandering.

Anyhoo. Everything else - perfect. The story is good, the characters are well drawn (pun intended), the voice acting is fantastic, the humour is laugh-out-loud funny. There's also an insane attention to detail that's mostly absent nowadays - one of the characters is a Porsche for instance, but she's not just a Porsche, she's a 2002 model 911 (the headlights tell all). There are little flourishes everywhere that show just how much passion everyone involved had for the project. These people really believe in what they do, and it shows. I can only hope it stays that way under Disney, and they don't try to milk all their work to date dry in a series of increasingly unoriginal franchises.

Best movie I've seen all year, go see.

Drugs

2006-08-25T22:28:00.000+03:00

I'm suffering withdrawal - I miss my media. It's all locked up in boxes. I'm getting by ok with Last.fm, it's got me pigeon-holed well enough at this stage that plays me music I dig - which is especially good when the artists are new to me. As for video, I've found succour at the ample twin bosoms of youtube and google video. Whilst on the latter I found this:

If Drugs Were Legal - Google Video

It's a BBC production, so as you'd anticipate, the production standards are sky high. Also, I'm beginning to think this kind of reasoned, calm, logical discussion just wouldn't be possible on US tv. I'm purely going to what I see of US programming on said video sites, but I was particularly disgusted by the "count-down to cease-fire" concerning the Lebannon conflict - splicing the countdown over footage of new-year's in Time Square was hideous, and this was from CNN!

Anyway, my political and moral views seems to straddle Liberal and Libertarian, so it was really interesting to see (qualified) people debate over arguements I've tried to unknot many's a late night with friends.

technorati tags:drugs, feckless, finland, helsinki, BBC

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Designer Tea?

2006-08-24T15:21:00.000+03:00

Wallpaper.com - International Design Interiors Fashion Travel - Design

Hype knows no bounds, it seems. Who would have thought the humble cup of tea could have been reinvented as it has been over recent years?

As a reminder that Wallpaper* is just as much about the preservation of time-honoured and quality brands as it is about pushing the product envelope, our award for the best brew goes to the wholly reliable Irish tea company, Barry’s. Why?

First, the packaging promises nothing more than a straight-talking cup of tea, but most importantly, the tea itself hails from the best plantations throughout Kenya and India’s Assam Valley. Just leave the builder’s bum to the professionals.

And thanks to Sean's recent delivery it's still what you'll get in a cup if you wander over to mine of an evening.

technorati tags:tea, helsinki, feckless, finland, wallpaper*

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Bad ping times

2006-08-21T16:55:00.000+03:00

I live. I'm kinda homeless, relying on the kindness and trying the patience of friends, and my home computer is in a box. Thanks you Ann-Christin, Andreea, and Rosalinde, especially since your hospitality extended to cover my visiting friend Sean. Yes, I'm the sort of organised person who can't even secure a fixed abode for the duration of a friend's visit. Still, it's giving us interrailing flashbacks so it's not all bad.

Things have been hectic in the best possible way, the weather has been fabulous and we've taken advantage of and exploited it like heartless con-artists with a naive moneyed mark.

There's been surreality too, and regular readers will know that's the icing on my existential cake. There were lots of slowly moving tiny white blobs in the sky (for all our arguing they turned out to be the kites of one TimoNoko), and right now it's like some kind of surreal warzone - the smoke from massive forrest fires in Russia is blowing across Finland and blanketing Helsinki for a couple of minutes at a time before clearing off, like mischevious doorbell ringing kids.

Bits & pieces

2006-07-13T23:47:00.000+03:00

Brussels is quite a nice city. I'd love to tell you all about it's turbulent history, inspiring architecture, etc, but I'm afraid most of my attention went to it's more comestible attractions. I can tell you the french for "waffle" is "gauffre" and that'll have to do for "culture".

While there, my girlfriend and I found out that we've passed the Helsinki University of Technology entrance exams, and will be returning to the smelly, noodle-sucking, student lifestyle once more. We're in good company, Martin Sheen is also returning to college this autumn, he'll be studying English lit, philosophy and theology as an undergrad at the National University of Ireland, Galway. I'm serious.

I'm very delighted by the idea, I hope to be sufficiently solvent and lucid as a sextagenarian to go study all the things I was curious about, had to ignore because they didn't impinge on my main studies.

I'm also just back from watching my home-town team draw with the local Helsinki football team HJK. The experience of walking down familiar Helsinki streets aurally bathed in the accent and expressions of home was exquisitely surreal.

Audiofile #2

2006-06-29T14:32:00.000+03:00

I'll try giving this a whirl again. In keeping with the last post, here's a track mandating easy-goingness - about getting away from the city to take it easy and find yourself. The lyrics are in Irish, but a translations is available from the band's website.

Tóg é go bóg é - [take it softly/easy]
by Kíla.

The file is in the .ogg format, which Winamp should play no problem - a comprehensive list of .ogg playing software is over at Vorbis.com

*Edit*
Um, yeah, there should actually be tracks at the end of the links now...

Juhannus

2006-06-28T17:09:00.000+03:00

06242006133
Originally uploaded by delta_avi_delta.

In Finland "the dream" is a nice house in Espoo, and a nice summer cottage by the sea, or by a lake to disappear to, and perhaps a boat. Once you have this, you have life licked. More is considered gross excess.

This weekend was "Juhannus" or "Midsummer's" - when there's a mass exodus to these cottages. I hadn't understood the appeal before. I'm a country boy, the countryside is kind of "normal" to me, and cities are exciting. Swimming at 2am in the calm quiet sea, under a dark blue sky with one winking star bright enough to be visible, between bouts of sauna, it became very, very self evident.

Swimming

2006-06-14T00:54:00.000+03:00

I was realtively ancient when I first learned to swim. A certain german friend seems to have deduced from polling that a large percentage of Irish adults don't know how to swim. I attribute this to ball shrinking sea temperatures, equally reductive dangerous lakes, and a pitiful lack of public swimming pools, or school-initiated classes.

In consequence, most haven't learned to swim by the time their natural instincts have been replaced by aquaphobia, myself included. I think I was 12 when I went to lessons for the first time, and freaked out entirely, ending up in the very shallow kiddy pool with a bunch of leaky toddlers. I moved soon after, to the classes of the indoubtable Mrs Smith, who lived in an old English country house close to my home, replete with indoor swimming pool. A 9ft deep swimming pool (around 3 metres). When you can't swim, 9ft goes down to Davey Jones' locker. Nessy could have lurked down there.

Her method was old school, and bullshit-free: swim over once or twice with water-wings to get some confidence, then - on the first lesson mind - she forceably removed the floats, and commanded you to swim a width of the pool, then screamed at you till you got across. Many didn't survive the abject terror of the first lesson.

I'll never forget that feeling the first time, letting go of the rope, letting go of solidity, and pushing out into "the void" - it felt dizzying, like falling, looking down from what seemed to be on high. It was all brought back to me with astounding clarity this Sunday, when I took my first tandem parachute jump - from 4000m. I've been trying to describe the experience ever since, from the shocking sight of people exiting the door and just *plummeting*, to the mind-warping experience of following them, to the bizarre relative calm after the shute opens.

And that metaphor is the best I can do. It's like the first time you venture out into deep water, before you know how to swim. Except, y'know, wow.

2.5 kilometres in 50 seconds' freefall.
50 metres per second.
180 kilometres per hour.
I highly recommend it

www.laskuvarjokerho.com

technorati tags: Helsinki, skydive, parachute, Finland

Bubble

2006-06-08T18:03:00.000+03:00

I've had to work from home recently, on something that turned out (as usual) to be slightly more tricky than I'd anticipated, so what I'd estimated would take one afternoon took two. And the morning in between.

It was great fun, there's something about analysing network packets I find very entertaining. Computers are awfully polite things, they let everyone around them know if they have something useful, other computers who shout out questions generally get an appropriate answer, and then there's "handshaking":

"are you well?"
"quite well thank you, and you?"
"marvellous, marvellous, let's proceed!"*

*may not be representative of actual TCP/IP handshaking

Marvellously gentlemanly. However, they can be a little unaccommodating - you have to be damn sure to ask *exactly* the right question, or they'll just shake their heads in complete confusion.

So I've pretty much been in my room for the last 48 hours, with occassional, furtive sorties into The Out to for the essentials - food, bathroom breaks, cappucinos from that wonderful café down the road. Yes, it's essential.

Now I'm leaving my little bubble to go climbing, and re-learn how to interact with people.

Examined

2006-05-31T19:55:00.000+03:00

That's it, exams over. Six days of cramming and note-taking and exam sitting finished with. Now there's nothing to do but wait for the results. Well, that and catch up on four day's work. Bugger.

Audiofile #1

2006-05-24T15:18:00.000+03:00

I love Mariana's blog-series (especially the "Thank you, sir" series (scroll down) delicious and complex, like a good cup of coffee... mmm coffee... where was I?

Right. So, since I did promise you a music file last post round, and since I have quite a large collection of those, I thought, maybe I could try a little series of my own.

Without further waffle:

Rodrigo y Gabriella - Tamacun

Just two guitars, one take, pure.

www.rodgab.com

*edit*
Right, file is now being hosted properly, just click...

Real Music

2006-05-23T02:37:00.000+03:00

05222006026
Originally uploaded by delta_avi_delta.

I try to keep up with the "little" artists I used to follow around Dublin (until the barring orders were enacted - and you thought I came here for work, hah!). Of all the groups, Rodrigo y Gabriela were the most special, the most talented, the least appreciated - so when I noticed they had a new studio album the credit card number leapt from my fingers.

They hate that their music gets mis-labeled "flamenco", so I'll say it sounds "latin", with a strong shot of thrash metal, driven with a rhythm technique that's all their own. Imagine if techno had been invented by banging on acoustic guitars and you're halfway there. Almost all of the album is made with only two nylon-strung guitars, and two pairs of blessed hands.

The music has spontaniety, playfulness, fluency, flow, energy excitement... oh, here - words aren't going to do it justice - wait while I agonise of which track to give you...

From Zero to Hero

2006-05-21T02:52:00.000+03:00

So Finland, the country with the most zero point scoring entries in the Eurovision song contest has won, courtesy of the band Lordi and their hard-rockin' "Hard Rock hallelujah" - lets call it an homage to 1980s metal.

In a sea of sound-alike, stunning but shallow performers, they stood out with their originality, musicianship, and ok, bonkers monster costumes. The Eurovision used to be a tedious joke (except when Ireland won of course), and it's been tending towards irony as our cynical generation rises to ascendancy (check out the ~~Latvian~~ Lithuanian entry - "We are the winners (of Eurovision)") - so it could be said that were engineered, that an entrant that was good, and yet opposed everything the contest stands for had a good chance. I say that's us being cynical again - the band are scarily representative of Finnish musical tastes and output (HIM, Nightwish, Apocolyptica, et al), and the performance was fantastic, so fair play to them.

Unfortunately it seems like Finns aren't quite sure how to celebrate. Our brainwave - head down to a square in town with a big-screen - backfired when

a) there was nothing special on the big screen
b) the square was full of some crazy XBox promotional shite, and...
c) nobody was celebrating outside.

We wandered onwards to a club, but the atmosphere was par for a Saturday night: a slightly disappointing end to a great night. Of course this means there's the chance to actually attend the contest in person next year, assuming I'm still here...

A post

2006-05-20T02:12:00.000+03:00

I was taken to task for the lack of own-brand excrement emminating from this here interweb sewer pipe earlier, so it's been on my consciousness, if not my conscience.

I've been out with friends, I'm horribly, yea, bitterly tired after a night spent pondering great mysteries, dis- or mis-remembering the conclusions, and fighting off sleep-deprivation induced paranoia, chronologically. The latter mostly involves trying to restrain my imagination. I worried that someone will try to kill me.

I decided I am mostly afraid of the pain.

I remember recognising there really were evil people - people whose drives orient them against society - and finding it a depressing, disheartening thought. I puzzled over how to deal with this kind of person, without stooping to their level. I decided that punishment should have an educational component, a chance for redemption, or else it was just vindictiveness, retribution. I decided that if a punishment's purpose was to make an example of someone, that wasn't fair. I can't remember the exact reasoning.

There have been *things* back home lately, things with more gravity than normal. When I'm unoccupied my thought tend towards bigger questions. The big questions don't have answers, only opinions, but the opinions have repercussions - they challenge perception of self, the world, and everything in between.

I worry I'm purely cerebral, emotionally numb.

Then today, at lunch, we talking about writing, blogging, language skills. It's held amongst some friends that this is a space for me to vent my circumlocutions safely. I'll freely admit my style tends to the verbose, but I've always been like this. My english teacher likened me to Polonious. I like words and language, I think of the more esoteric as rare, precious.

I'm not sure if this is merely egotistical.

Anywhoo, somehow all of that conspires to put me in the mood to write a little.

I wonder if pressing "post" is exhibitionist.

Being me

2006-05-06T13:19:00.000+03:00

A massive thank you to all who made my birthday so memorable. For those of you who had to miss the goings on, what with prior engagements, geographical problems, what have you - the scarily creative Helsinki bunch printed masks of, well, me. Very *very* disquieting to come home and find you have an androgynous clone cohort. I feel a rapport with John Malkovich. Thanks again, it was really rather rare and wonderful, and I hope I can reciprocate on the relevant dates.

For now, I'm off second hand bike shopping. I've decided that this is going to be one of those feel-good dramas - I'll look at plenty of shiny bikes with sparkly chrome fenders, but I'll leave them behind knowing other potential owners will snap them up. In the back I'll see one neglected, shy bicycle, stout frame but careworn parts, clearly in need of some TLC. The going will be rough in the beginning - it'll have problems sleeping at night, and then there'll be the phase where it attacks people it doesn't know, but eventually we'll all learn a valuable lesson.

Blimey, this whole anthropomorphisisation (say that ten times quickly) thing has changed my perspective... you don't suppose the last bike... ran off?