Lavonardo

Went to two good friends’ wedding in Suitia, about 60 kilometers from Helsinki.

The party was hovering on the edge of perfection for 10+ hours:

The resurgence of summer we’re currently undergoing hit perfectly. Daytime temperature up to 24, with enough of a breeze and cloud cover thrown in to ease the heat.

The old castlehouse of Suitia, was a truly well-chosen location - high halls, a verdant garden, a patio lit by the evening sun, and a big cellar for the nachspiel.

The ceremony itself was short, pointful and surprisingly touching. Clearly a big margin over the “by the numbers”-occasions so common. Soap bubbles replaced the ubiquitous rice, which was an unexpectedly bright idea.

Food and drink were liberally dished out from a virtual cornucopia.

And most of all, the attendees were in good spirits. This was definitely a warm wedding - where people were loath to depart. Partly due to distance, but the mood was also a big contributor.

Last wedding of the season, it appears. Managed to forget about the tie clip three times out of three, and now’s an appropriate time for dry cleaning the suit.

EDIT 24.8.2008: The Suitia manor is privately owned these days, and no longer available for occasions. URL changed, status sadly noted.

Figured it’d be good sport to buy a firefox t-shirt. Got dissuaded quickly, as the Mozilla Store, is nothing but expensive when it comes to shipping stuff out. The freight charge for a single shirt is a staggering 54 dollars. Luckily, the organization is opening an European location this year. I’ll be keeping my money until then.

Seems that Christopher Walken’s bid for 2008 presidency is sadly false. Too bad. Compared to the other actors-turned-politicians Walken seems to be head and shoulders above them intellectually. Probably just the reason to be avoiding the DC circuit…

Even more SVG brouhaha. Looks interesting - and with Mozilla browsers moving to include support by default, now’s an appropriate time to get familiar with the technology. Proceedings not out for this year’s conference, but bound to appear.

New blog on the roll (mine, definitely not quick on the uptake): Life with Alacrity. Quality over quantity.

Greg Costikyan has released Violence under Creative Commons-license. A gag game that applied the “kick in the door and slay the inhabitants”-style with fully automatic weapons and dropped the characters into a housing project. Well-written and laid out, provocative to the extreme, and bound to throw anyone with a conservative mindset into dramatic convulsions. And sure, the Wednesday Emperors will try this out. Once.

As a surprise sequel to last year’s set of ridiculed metalheads, here’s a brand spanking new half-a-score.

Apart from the last image the collection is safe for work, consider yourselves warned. Seriously.

Finland gets a traditional suckerpunch. Deservedly.

[Via Shrike.]

EDIT 24.8.2008: This batch is gone, as well.

As noted by Roklintu, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has started blogging. His production thus far has not included any tidbits of the forthcoming album. Nor any lucid sentences, to tell the truth.

To offset the frighteningly dry previous entry, here’s a couple of absinthe-related links thrown in for good measure.

Remember, however, that possession of the wondrous green liquid is still illegal in the states…

And that you can get a variety of stuff almost everywhere else.

EDIT 24.8.2008: Laws have changed, and so have the URLs.

As noted below, O’Reilly’s conferences are indeed cool. Too bad OSCON Europe in Amsterdam is really really expensive (or am I just being cheap at 825 euros).

Never played around much with Scalable Vector Graphics - the early SVG-enabled mozillas were not paragons of stability, and Adobe’s implementation didn’t fare much better. The technology seems to have come of age, and future looks interesting.

TheFeature seems to have gone bust during the summer. One of the heralds of the bubble, it survived surprisingly long. Archives are available. Never was a big fan, don’t intend to leap in and scrounge for treasure.

MMORPGs are obviously big these days. Never tried one, so am not dissing them outright. Their existence and continuously up-ramping user numbers mean that a lot of changes in the games industry are bound to happen.

Another conference with interesting proceedings is the Linux Audio Conference. The realtime stuff is understandable, the acoustic less so.

And speaking of conferences, I’m horribly behind my original plan of providing a decent travel report from OLS2005. One day (soon) the rest of the event will be covered, till then the entries will stay fallow.

Hockeyblog, a dedicated single-topic entity that started as an extension to a small-press magazine has gone into pure-blog mode.

EDIT 24.8.2008: All gone. Both URLs point to hyperspace.

Stumbled upon Behnford’s yesterday. A smallish shop located in the Helsinki WTC, and stocked with a good selection of american foodstuffs. M&M’s, Newman’s salad dressing, Bacon bits crafted of soya, Jell-O - it’s all here.

And while the soda supplies were currently running low, there’s promise of getting a steady supply of Vanilla Coke in Helsinki, both diet and regular. And there was much rejoicing.

Went looking for Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta on saturday. Didn’t find a copy, the publisher must be shooting for getting new stock out to coincide with the release of the movie. Which does look good, but seems to add a lot to the bleak and rather limited world of the original. Or maybe the shops were just short of supplies. Finnish release date is up in the air, but the fifth of november would be much appreciated here as well…

Anyway, couldn’t locate a copy, and settled in to read a borrowed copy of Neil Gaiman’s 1602. It’s an eight issue mini-series that relocates some of Marvel’s best-known characters into the Elizabethan age.

Of course, with Gaiman on the helm, it’s not your usual “what if” story, but a well-imagined fable of its own. While the slightly renamed characters resemble their future selves, they do have decent stories of their own to tell. Appropriate liberties have been taken with the universe, and it’s far more than just the normal marvel-versum with clock turned back a couple of centuries.

Andy Kupert’s art is detailed, but far less gustavedorean than the cover images (with their rich engraved style) promise. The coloring is done digitally, and I found it to be definitely too clinical of nature.

The eight issues are gone quickly, the story wrapped up nicely, with enough loose threads left hanging on the final few pages to promise that the barely begun 17th century won’t be exactly like our own.

While browsing for an appropriate link for 1602, happened upon Continuity Pages, a huge site that provides annotations to comics. Which came in handy here as well, as I’m not fully versed in golden/silver age stories, from which some of the characters hame been drawn.

As evidenced by half of the top of the pod-list… Not really proud of Chicago or Def Leppard’s entry there, they just tend to sneak into getting played. And with content that polished until absolute sheen, it’s hard to fault these two “best of” collections.

And I think I’m pretty much the only one cheering for the arrival of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on dvd.

EDIT 24.8.2008: Obviously the referred sidebar content is long gone, but the Indiana Jones-box sets are still valid.

And they say there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch…

First up is O’Reilly’s conference archive. Which contains tons of presentations from past four years. And the presentations are added immediately after (if not even during) the actual conference. Not dripped when one year has gone by, and even then if somebody remebers to twiddle a bit somewhere (yah, this is dissing USENIX).

The Escapist magazine is a weekly twenty-pager on games. On many kinds of games - be it computer, video, board, role, card or whatever, this is a good home. Layout a bit too flashy, and definitely a magazine to read online only.

Went to the Helsinki 2005 Athletics World Championship Games on their very last day.

Was good, even great. Had excellent seats under roof, but fortunately weather did not act up, the games were finished in clear early autumn evening.

Saw one world record made, and was semi-thrilled by some of the competitions. Women’s javelin, where the world record happened, was pretty much a one-woman-show from the first round, and the finns unfortunately did not rise to the challenge in the competition. Tommi Evilä’s prize ceremony (bronze, Finland’s only medal, which put us in the 33rd spot in the medal statistics) was cunningly the very last event of the evening, thus preventing the domestic attendees from skipping out too early.

Stadium was more than half full, but a lot of the space had been wasted on media seats and an extra video screen. Despite that the noise was at times encouraging, and surprisingly many waves were created. All this despite a severe lack of competing finns. The much-admired Helsinki audience does not get its reputation from nothing, obviously.

The stadium is definitely showing its age - it’s incompatible with modern media it seems, and the hallways/toilets/sales area definitely could do with a heavy renovation effort. But that’s likely not gonna happen, since the invincible Museum Authority is bound to take a dim view on any that attempt to modernize the crown jewel of functional architecture.

No chaos at all upon dispersal from the stadium, and even got a seat on the bus on the way home. Hardly an expected result, with tens of thousands of attendees. Perhaps I’ve been badly led astray by experiences in various rock’n'roll-related occasions to expect anything worse. No fireworks which was a pity, would’ve been a nice addition to the walk in the rapidly darkening Finlandia-park.

Pictures to follow. Only had my phone camera with me, and the computer at home is missing a crucial bluetooth dongle right now.

Cleaned up the left column. Slightly. By ripping out all blogs I read via blogilista.fi - too lazy to set up multiple aggregators, and I don’t think the non-domestic blogs would even be available via one. Trivially at least.

Kept a few local blogs that deserve more readers.

And added Allan’s, who seems to be back for the third inning.

Noted that this baby has slipped away from valid XHTML, needs to be rectified with next upcoming shakeup. Don’t hold your breath waiting, you know it’s not safe.

Woohoo! Evilä came through! And took bronze (in finnish only). Attended a wedding yesterday so no idea what kind of a match it was. And no idea whether he abused the powers that be. Hopefully he did. And it was indeed a good wedding, too.

Fixed the setlist of Coop’s gig to adhere to the one in Imperiumi (as nudged by Pekka).

Dredged up an imaginative and impressive backlash at current state of blogs, and especially on the ever-growing list of terms used to describe them. I know I’m guilty of some (”some” hopefully equals a very small integer number) of the cardinal sins described therein, and will do better in eliminating them in future. (And yeah, Maddox’s site has a big bunch of other very read-worthy articles - updates seldom, updates well).

And this collection of custom arcade tokens is almost enough to wake the latent numismatic within. But getting hold of these would be bound to be hard and expensive, so I’ll better stick to the US state quarters for now.

Cheap-o! The fourth instance of the beloved SSX-franchise is on sale for 8 euros in verkkokauppa. And you get a bonus dvd thrown in as well.

Here goes, interesting detritus scraped on the very bottom of the web:

• Doom has been ported onto iPod.
• There are never too many self-defeating oxymorons around.
• An interview with Tim Berners-Lee on blogging (among other things).
• A soothing non-photorealistic driving thing. It’s not a game, yet. And would benefit from having a Queens of the Stone Age soundtrack.
• And if “intelligent design” is to be featured in US schools in equal portions to evolution, the least I can do to the flyingspaghettimonster-theory is to include it here.
• Cruel double-hoax involving an escrowed shipment of a powerbook. Character-building stuff.
• Don’t know Ruby at all yet, but this definitely looks interesting. Or well-hyped. Without a careful inspection it’s hard to say which.
• Fingerprinting paper seems to be a surprisingly robust technology. At least in theory, practical applications and deployment would take ages to implement.
• Gone gaming has gotten off to a good start.
• Complete Inspector Morse, on 33 discs; just requires application of some money, and some more for VAT, but I’ve got to have this. As soon as the current backlog subsides somewhat.

“All work and no play…” - you know the rest.

First week after vacation is usually bad. And this year’s was no exception. Did get a ticket to Motörhead-gig though when the reservations expired. And it also turns out that I’m not thoroughly hopeless at deciphering ebonics, mr. Chappelle - sans subtitles, makes mostly sense.

Hence the lack of entries.

Visited restaurant Mecca, and had a pleasant stay there. Clearly non-classical kitchen, which combines tastes fearlessly. Had cod brülé with olive oil ice cream for starter which pretty much says how far off the left field the menu really is… Effortlessly functional place, attentive waitresses, and very much on the affordable side (main courses hover around 20 euros). Will be back, but not immediately - though the missed bloodymary-sherbet is definitely on the agenda…

In the mecca-aftermath discussed the finnish athletes’ lack of success, and came to the conclusion that if anyone’s going to take a medal it’ll be Tommi Evil� in the men’s long jump. So our brave proclamation was not only that he’ll have the bronze medal, but that he’ll abuse the finnish sports unions head honchos in post-ceremony interview. Would be good if one of them came through, perfect if both.

It’s always good when you hear the thunder before the lightning’s afterglow has disappeared from your retina.

No pictures. Too bad, but neither my G3 nor yours truly just isn’t fast enough to capture the lightning stroke on the fly. Wasn’t the most spectacular thunderstorm I’ve seen, but comes close to top 5.

The already in quite bad shape ice sculpture (picture from last friday) will be nothing but a puddle after this.

Didn’t get wet. Much. The first bout occurred when I was downtown, and the appearance of very wet people and cloud-induced darkness outside was sudden indeed. By the second bout I was already sitting on a glassed-in balcony, ready for the fireworks.

• 200 household secrets.
• What’s wrong with the shuttle.
• *****’s death from Harry Potter, as written by other famous authors (obvious spoiler alert).
• A lengthy interview with Joss Whedon.
• Designer-modded legos, all related to Apple. Limited editions indeed, as every product seems to be sold out…
• mozilla.fi has a blog.
• ScummC-compiler.
• And a lengthy analysis of state of the adventure game-genre to complement the previous.

And a moral bonus point for anyone who picks up the reference in the entry title.

Turns out that going to work after a long vacation, especially early in the morning, is traumatic.

Just plain forgot that Motörhead’s 30th anniversary tickets went on sale today. And were quickly sold out thankyouverymuch. Bastards.

Just realized that I played no video games at all during the vacation. Good enough weather and getting stuck in the flight school in San Andreas are to blame. Computer games do not count. And even they were enjoyed in very small amounts: couple of games of civilization and the java-version of Formula De.

Back to San Andreas, definitely. And the demo of FEAR just came out. And all in all, the backlog is frighteningly long.