Lavonardo

This week’s photo thursday challenge subject is to continue the story from an image provided by the team (and shown here, cropped - original is available on the challenge page).

My take on the subject is the following image, where the text of a sign violates the finnish language in a way not often seen. The poor grandma in the image is checking the classic grammar book to see whether there is such a word she saw on a trip to the book fair in the Helsinki Exhibition Hall.

The photograph is available in full-size (but not very good quality) by clicking the image.

The photo thursday archives are in a bit of a disarray following the engine change from homebrew to wordpress. They are available, but badly outdated.

And I certainly hope the sign has been fixed - I’ll report after visiting the travel fair this weekend in the very same location.

It’s mid-january, it’s time for Macworld, the regular parting of the reality distortion field, when Steve Jobs shows which products are going to line his pockets with cash.

The show did not disappoint this time around either.

This time the star of the show was the next-generation laptop, MacBook Air. Whose most remarkable feature is its positively anorectic depth - at its thickest the laptop is less than two centimeters thick, and correspondingly, its weight. Software-wise, the biggest innovation is probably the introduction of iPhone-originated multi-touch gestures via an over-sized trackpad.

The new features come surprisingly cheap, and the battery life (at five hours) isn’t anything to scoff at either.

As a recent buyer of a new laptop, the excuses not to utterly covet this baby are few, but not insignificant. It’s brand-new technology, and Apple has had serious release1.0-issues in the past, so stability might be an issue. The lack of software that’s aware of the multi-touch capabilities will take a while to arrive. The sales volumes will overwhelm production, and the availability will be an issue. On-board HD-capacity is really expensive. There, there. Feel better already. A little.

Two revelations:

1. Doing away with the “recent posts” widget no longer exposes the name of an individual entry (and its not shown in the “archives” either). Yay.
2. CSS hacking is far more pleasant when the fabulousistic Firefox Web Developer extension is employed. Yay squared. And Chris Pederick, I’m so going to buy you a beer if we ever meet.

Things are not perfect, however. The RSS-feed for entries mishandles the title-less asides, and needs some attention in the future, and a separate feed dedicated to just the links might be an idea as well.

Ok. It looked like mistylook, the theme used here, would offer an easy way of using asides (or pure links) out of the box, but it sadly does not upon a more careful glance.

The “recent posts” does not omit the entry, and to add insult to injury, calls it by its numerical ID.

Time for some more serious hacking. Or an ever tighter coded theme.

But not now. Things are pretty much OK as they are now.

In other news, managed to tidy up the sidebar a little - the longer elements have now hanging indents, which makes discrening between the elements far less painful than it used to be. Uncovered a bug in the CSS related to the treatment of the blogroll - it would have taken ages (and intrusive changes) to correct, so I replaced it with a hand-rolled list.

Tony Dungy won’t have to dread getting drenched in Gatorade this year.

Colts put up a good fight, but turnovers cost them the game against Chargers. Even when an interception returned for a touchdown was cancelled by a penalty, two picks and a fumble proved too much of a leash to give to the San Diego team.

The Chargers will now face 17-0 Patriots, and today’s game exacted a heavy toll on them - hopefully both Philip Rivers and LaDainian Tomlinson will be active next week. Otherwise the New England team will have it too easy in the AFC championship game.

Showing that there’s no keeping down a combination of ichoric horror and pun-infested humor, Munchkin Cthulhu, the game returns with a second expansion, this time co-created with Francois Launet’s Unspeakable Vault (Of Horror).

Silliness galore expected.

Bought a month’s pass to Viasat Sports, pretty much solely to watch the post-season of NFL football.

Watched a good-sized slice of Green Bay’s dismantling of the Seattle Seahawks yesterday, but called it a day at the halftime. The snowy conditions on Lambeau field made passing game tough, but it was the heroics of Ryan Grant that won the football game, not missteps of the Seattle air attack.

Right now Indianapolis faces San Diego, which is nice - I thought this would be the second game of the day and thus televised at night. Peyton Manning looks formidable in the first quarter, and only a fumble of the recently returned Marvin Harrison kept Colts from scoring twice.

The game being slow by nature (though moving fast, on account of the clock running with the passing game), and Viasat having a very limited set of jingles / commercials and even more limited access to any studio analysis, an alternate source of entertainment on the sofa is a necessity. Been reading to cover the inactive bits. Which has resulted in quite good progress through a couple of books.

Attended the regular gamenight yesterday despite having the beginnings of a flu picked up. The sniffles were not enough to deter me from seeing what new goodies had arrived - as I’d missed the previous session, I was pretty sure that there was something new to see.

And there was… The count of pinball machines had increased to a grand total of nine, with the additions of Revenge from Mars and another Pat Lawlor classic, FunHouse. The former new arrival was an unknown to me, but a couple of games proved that it’s a worthy table all right. As the first Pinball 2000 game I’d played in an age, the presence of a projector on the playfield took some time to get used to. FunHouse was its familiar unyielding self, and like Lawlor’s followup game, Addams Family, merciless with its lack of a ball-saving grace period. With the new arrivals, most of the time given to pinball was spent on these two, though I did enjoy a duo of good games on Safecracker, netting a name on the list with both a regular game and a subsequent assault.

Videogames-wise, the festivities were muted by the x360 succumbing to a hardware fault. Wii, good old PS2 and Xbox were used instead. Was still bothered by the lack of precision in putting in Wii Sports, the game has golf pretty much turned on its head - drilling home long shots is almost trivial, whereas the near game remains unpredictable due to the imprecision in controls. Managed to suck so bad at the xboxified Moto GP that an exit from the sport was advisable. Scored a single goal in half a dozen PES games, but set up lots more with assists and blew some certain shots. When the Wii version of the Big Brain Academy was brought out, I took it to be an exit cue, as flu-induced grogginess would’ve neatly added an extra layer of difficulty in the game.

All in all, yet another great evening with electronic entertainment.

Finished watching the third seasons of two very influential shows, and neither Deadwood nor Lost disappointed. But neither was a complete success.

Deadwood, after finishing off strong with its second season, meanders towards an ending, not a conclusion. Despite HBO’s reluctance, the planned two movies to cap off the early days of the South Dakota town, would be very much appreciated. Right now the storyline has no closure, only more or less vague of what is forthcoming. The twelve episodes are entertaining, and the Touretteish drama in frontier trappings remains convincing, as does the wide cast of characters.

With Lost I expected no closure either, this being only the third season of the planned six. While the plotlines shifted and twisted as much as expected, the core mysteries of the south pacific island are nowhere closer to being resolved. And with the addition of even more characters to the troupe, all with their own subplots to advance, the show runs the risk of getting to busy for viewers. Despite a couple of weak episodes in the mix, the series remains entertaining enough to retain interest, and with the whale-sized spanner thrown into the gearbox in the two-part finale, the season again ended with a cliffhanger.

(Oddly, while watching the last few episodes of Lost, noticed that there’s not one, but two actresses that are featured in both shows, although both are only very irregularly met in the flashbacks in Lost. Calamity Jane = Juliet’s sister and Joanie Stubbs = Cassidy.)

Saw Pohjannaula on their tenth anniversary concert in Tavastia on wednesday, and came off impressed, very impressed.

Tavastia made a brave decision and the gigs begin earlier on weekdays. Thus, due to a clashing commitment, my arrival around ten meant that I missed most of the warm-up band. Kivireki’s final song lasted for ten minutes and was odd enough a experience that there the purchase of their first self-published CD was mandatory.

I hadn’t seen Pohjannaula in a couple of years, and wasn’t too fond of their latest album. Fortunately, the evening was a retrospective through their entire career, and the song selection was wide indeed. The band played over two hours, to a good reception in the audience. Having played in the warm-up band, the original drummer and bassist returned for a couple of songs, and for one more the stage was shared between both incarnations of the band. This time there was no scythe-sharpening on stage, but traditionally both sahti (finnish prototypical beer) and a couple of vihtas (fresh birch branches used in sauna) were distributed to the front rows. Soap bubbles were a new arrival on stage. Didn’t jot down a set list, but the song selection was good indeed, and included one (thus far unnamed) new song.

An excellent start for the year, and a good reminder that Lauri Tähkä’s by no means the only folksome artist in the country.

Following last year’s take on the meme picked up from Jason Kottke, here’s where I laid my head last year.

• Helsinki, Finland*
• Vantaa, Finland*
• Tampere, Finland
• Nivala, Finland
• Turku, Finland
• San Diego, CA
• Boston, MA
• New York, NY
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• ’s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands
• Brussels, Belgium

Some locations might be missing, ping if you spot any such.

* = denotes multiple visits on non-consecutive days.

(I promise, the 2007 retrospect-o-rama will draw to a close soonest.)

Sony actually backed the right horse in the high definition dvd contest. Unlike any of its previous massive intelligence failures on ATRAC, minidisc, Betamax and the like, Sony’s choice looks like it’s going to dominate the market.

With Paramount following Warner Bros. annoucement, the list of HD-DVD is short indeed.

I don’t own either. Yet. And looks like I’ll only be picking Blu-Ray once the television upgrade is complete.

(And yeah, we did.)

Drew Karpyshyn’s Revelation, the prequel to Bioware’s Mass Effect is not actually altogether horrible, nor spoiler-ridden - thus proving in one fell swoop that game-fiction is a survivable genre.

(And yeah, there’s plenty of good American beer in the world, just stay away from the mass-produced poison, and Eric Idle’s famous quip on the subject remains unproven.)

Back on Halloween ‘05, I lamented the lack of a collected edition of Derek Riggs artwork.

The pleas have been answered, and Run For Cover is available.

At $50 (+ an additional thirty for shipping), the book is not exactly on the cheap side, but would be a nifty addition to the coffeetable-section of the straining Lundia.

Continuing on the boring “let’s just list things”-category of posts…

This time focus firmly on new blogs. Just two of them, in fact - haven’t been that busy picking up any lately.

• Sleevage, analyzing classic album covers for hidden and not so hidden treasures.

• Magazineer, a blog about, erm… reading magazines, kicks off with articles on Wired and Monocle.

Jack Bauer is back, for his sixth work-filled day saving the american way, apple pie and the rest of the world.

Have meticulously avoided spoilers of the new season, but haven’t escaped the rumors stating that this is the worst thus far.

The show kicked off with two first episodes today, and they featured pretty much what is familiar and expected: bad intelligence, CTU office dynsfunctionality, weaselly politicians, racial stereotypes and worrisome amounts of torture.

While the seventh season avoided troubles on account of Kiefer Sutherland DUI-conviction, it has been sidelined by an enemy even more insidious than terrorists: 24 is by far not the only show that the WGA strike has indefinitely postponed.

Haven’t yet figured out how to do links in the blog effectively - collected in entries, in the sidebar or as asides inbetween full-blown articles, so I’ll stick to what I know, the first alternative. This batch is heavy on the retrospective, as the “… of 2007″ references are prevalent indeed (and while I’m at it, I’ll just quickly mention Rex Sorgatz’s definite master-list of such.)

Mainoskupla, nice selection of domestic counter-advertisements.
• BBC has provided its annual list of 100 things we did not know last year.
• Matt Webb has a lot to say about microformats (and many, many other things as well).
• Lake Superior University has again put together a list of the ‘useless’ words
  of the year.
• A handsome image explains why high heels are bad for you. ‘mmkay.
• Warren Ellis’ take on laws of robotics manages to hit the highest take on profanity-meter in a while. Which probably means that my reading habits are on the boring side.
• Wired’s vaporware awards do not disappoint this time either (with bonus points for including Guns n’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy).
• SCO, the originators of the ugliest open source-related lawsuit, have been unceremoniously
  delisted from NASDAQ.