Weeds

Just a little update here, nothing much to say. I probably won't be posting much in the next few days because I'll be busy either guiding the freshmen (during week) or moving back to my student crib in the weekend.

Oh yeah the post title. I found out about this new TV series called Weeds today. I can't even remember why I picked it up but from the opening sequence I knew this would be good. It's basically about this single mother (Mary Louise Parker) selling marijuana to support her family as her husband has died suddenly. There's just something to the sometimes rather dark humor and twisted characters. It reminds me of Six Feet Under for some reason. I love SFU too and I'm waiting for the fourth season to start here in Finland.

I'll keep this short and end here, until next time.

Still alive

Uh oh, I wonder if the magic is wearing off as I didn't post anything yesterday. I don't have much to say today either, the last few days have been a bit uneventful.

There's the hurricane Katherine but I'm a bit disappointed with the local media as it hasn't been covered much. It's "marketed" as the "hurricane that will annihilate the whole New Orleans" but then they don't talk about it. Last thing I heard was that it wasn't as bad as people feared and is weakening, which is good. I don't know if casualties were avoidable but I hope the number is at least low.

The thing that seems to interest our media way more is that the first ever Finnish Big Brother started today. That would be the reality TV format. I don't know, I hate to admit that I was expecting it and will probably follow it quite a bit at least in the beginning to find out if it's any good. We had a Finnish version of the Survivor some time ago and it was pretty boring, I guess Finnish people really lack the drama that's required for Survivor to work for me at least.

So the school is starting soon, I have to go there tomorrow and Wednesday some lectures on the freshmen guiding thing I'm participating in. The freshmen actually arrive on Thursday so the next two weeks after that will be pretty much hanging around with them around the campus and in several freshmen events. I'm sure it will be nice.


There's a pretty cool event in Wednesday night. The release party of an independent Finnish amateur scifi parody Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning will be held in the Tavastia Club in Helsinki. It's really interesting as the movie has been in the making for.. I don't even remember how many years and it has turned from a pretty small thing to a rather large, almost professional production. The movie is a parody inspired by series like Star Trek and Babylon 5 and its actually the sixth movie in a series. The first ones were pretty crude animations made with almost ancient hardware and software and the fifth one was the first one shot in video, but In The Pirkinning is really in its own league compared to the previous parts. All the movies, including the upcoming one are and will be available for download from their web site and you can also support them by pre-ordering the new movie on DVD. I almost forgot to mention, I think the main man behind the movies, Samuli Torssonen, has funded the production almost completely out of his own pocket. Although I think they might have received a lot of sponsor support lately, he has nevertheless put a lot of money and effort into this. Hats off.

Gamers' Bill of Rights

A friend pointed me to this interesting piece of text. It's basically a list of demands for the game developers to adhere to, things that gamers are supposedly entitled to. I'll list a few examples:

• The right to be able to play a game without having received a PhD in Computer Science. Games should be fun, not complicated. Game designers should not assume that the consumer of their products knows how or wants to perform lesser-known tasks just to be able to play the game.
• The right to enjoy a game without the fear of crashes, lock-ups, damage to or interference with other programs on the computer or the computer itself, or other such glitches.
• The right to have our voices and opinions listened to and respected by game developers and producers, so that we - not they - have the final say in quality-control.

This actually spawned some thoughts in my slightly intoxicated mind last night. At first I was a bit aggravated. It seemed incredibly annoying that the gamers, customers start throwing out demands to the game developers who work their arses off to make these games. Nobody forces you to buy the games, they're out there for entertainment. Don't like them? Don't buy them.

Then I realized that you can't compare games to movies and music for example. When you go to the movies or buy a CD, they work, it's another thing if you don't like them. If the audio CD is scratched and doesn't work you can return it. If you don't like the music or the movie, I think you can unfortunately return the CD or get a refund for the movie ticket, but I think that is bullshit. Although if you buy a CD as gift to someone and it turns out he hates the Foo Fighters or whatever, it's good that it can be returned.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked again. Games are obviously more complex products than a movie or an album. I'm forced to compare them to household appliances in a way that you expect for example a coffee maker to work straight out of the box and always work the way it should as long as you operate it correctly. It should never just stop in the middle of the process or it shouldn't take 10 hours to complete the process. If it acts like that, it's natural to return it to the store and get your money back. When you think of buggy games like this, some of those demands do make sense. I think it's ok to demand that the games really work and don't contain the kind of bugs that will make the gaming impossible or intolerable, it should work as it is meant to be.

On the other hand, demands like usability of the interface.. As much as I do hate cryptic illogical user interfaces, I don't feel comfortable demanding for better. It's part of the game, a feature as bad as it might be.

Ok, I'm exhausted and don't think I've covered the topic completely. I might write more on this later, but this is enough for now.

Bottom line:

• demands for working, relatively bug free games - Totally agree, that's way it should be.
  
• demanding the games to have certain features and other feature-specific demands - It's a pretty idea but something that won't happen, I don't see a point in these demands.
• there are other reasonable and unreasonable demands in there that I didn't cover.
  

Update on the Doom movie

Okay, so I just checked the new Doom trailer and the movie has scenes shot in the first person perspective just like in the games. I can't tell if there will be just a few of these or will they be a major part of the movie but I have to admit they made me smile and definately look fresh. Still I doubt this will be enough to save the movie. And hey, what's the point of a first person view when you can't control where to move and what to shoot at ..

Spark of interest in XML

I did the cycling trip today. We started at 11:00 am and I was back home at 12:20 pm. It was pretty cool to be wide awake and refreshed so early, usually I'm all groggy from waking up at that time.

I also noticed a really nice introduction article to XML on Sitepoint. Its an excerpt from Sitepoint's Tom Myer's new XML book and I was actually so impressed by it that I ended up ordering the book. I have such a bad habit of getting all excited about some technology but then dropping it after I've grasped the basics and moving on to a new one. I wonder if I have some sort of an attention disorder? Well my studies are going well so far so at least it's nothing serious, if anything at all.

The title of the article, "A Really, Really, Really Good Introduction to XML" caught my eye, as I had tried to learn XML's concepts about a year and a half ago from some O'Reilly book but I found the book really dryly written and soon lost interest in it.

Again I'd love to be able to really immerse myself into studying these things and not to lose my interest so easily. Let's see, I'm going to make a written promise here to really dig through the Sitepoint book and pick up everything it has to offer. Okay, getting sidetracked here..

Back to the article, I read the first part of it in one sitting as it was written in such a great fashion. I really hate the articles and books written for people who consume several hundred page RFC documents as a bed time reading without a yawn. Tom Myer's article is written for the (relatively) regular people like me. :) And that doesn't mean it's someway lacking in the content, it tells what you need to know at the time and doesn't throw the whole specification in your face on the second page.

I'll read rest of the article series tomorrow and start planning my own PHP and XML driven content management system.

By the way, I'm in no way affiliated with Sitepoint, Amazon.com or any of the other places I link to about books or other stuff, I don't get any money if you click them and end up buying, they're just my recommendations. If I do join some affiliate program, which I doubt, I will mention about it.

More tomorrow.

Planning studies

Wow, I've been sporty this week. Running on Monday and Tuesday and today I cycled to the (now former) work place to get some stuff I'd left there. The trip took almost two hours in total so I was pretty beat afterwards. Tomorrow I'm going to cycle around a local lake with a friend. That's going to be a pretty long ride too. Feeling good, feeling good.

I've been trying to plan what courses to take this Fall and trying to fit the lectures and exercises into the weekly schedule. The Finnish universities and polytechnics are going through this reform of the examination structure due to the Bologna process which is an attempt to create some kind of a common Europe-wide higher education system by creating a standard degree and credit system to be used everywhere. Anyway this complicates my planning a bit because due to the reform, all the courses are going to be renewed. Most of the courses will just have their course codes changed (why is that even necessary?) but many will have their names and content changed, some courses will be merged to a new ones and some will be split to several. It gets frustrating because there's a transition phase with the old and new courses organized concurrently and all kind of confusion.

Well I'm trying to figure this out and write more about the courses I'm going to take.

Doomed movies

It's been pretty uneventful the last few days. I rarely manage to do anything interesting if I don't have anything (school or work) to do. At least I went running on Monday and today which is all good. Monday was pretty tormenting but today's run went just fine so I guess physical condition doesn't deteriorate so easily. I should probably take a break from running tomorrow, maybe do some weight lifting instead.

I went to see George Romero's Land of the Dead yesterday. I used to be a lot more into horror / splatter movies so I have some nice memories (that's a bit twisted?) of the previous Romero flicks and wanted to see this one although I was pretty sure it would be bad. Well I had no high hopes for it, so it was ok. The idea of smart, learning zombies was pretty bad in my opinion but who's looking for an intelligent plot in a zombie movie? It was kind of an ok, disposable movie, no surprises whatsoever.

All the horror movies of this type seem to be way too similar lately, the Resident Evils, Dawn of the Dead remake (I liked that one though), Land of the Dead and then the upcoming Doom movie. When they can't even make the trailerlook interesting, it can't be good. I mean, does this movie have anything to do with the games expect the name? It looks like a totally generic "let's shoot some monsters in a scifi environment"-flick. The whole Hell-theme seems to be gone and instead it's just this Resident Evil in a base on Mars, sounds so fresh. But then again, a movie based on a game like Doom is pretty doomed to begin with (har, phunny pun).

On running

Oh boy, do I hate hangovers. They always last the whole day, but who can I blame?

Thank god the job is over. I have about two weeks of free time now before the school. I have to start running again, it's been almost three weeks since I last went for a run. It rained for almost two weeks in a row and then I got sick so I'm probably in a pretty bad shape now.

I initially started running three years ago, one year before my military service because I was a total couch potato and figured that being in a better physical shape would make the service easier. Well it turned out that there wasn't that much running in the Signals Regiment, it was mostly dragging heavy equipment around and being on guard / spark / signal duty at inhuman hours. Still I'm sure the combat exercises and such would have been much more tougher if I hadn't taken up running. Anyway I guess I got addicted to running and started it again after the service and I've been doing it ever since. Nothing fancy, about 6 - 9 kilometers (3.7 - 5.5 miles) three to four times a week. Sometimes it's easy, sometimes a goddamn torture but it always makes me feel great mentally and physically, that's really the reason I do it.

Flickring

Sunshine 2
Originally uploaded by biocci.

Ok, I'm just testing out Flickr and it's "Blog this"-feature. Seems pretty cool, the photo is just a random shot of rays of light coming behind clouds I took once on a outdoor boozing trip.

Fireworks

I went to the capital (Helsinki) with a friend last night to check out the Finnish championships in fireworks. There were a lot of people on the move, mostly drunken teenagers. The train was so packed I didn't have room to turn around. The fireworks were pretty awesome, better than the New Year's fireworks. I was a bit hung over this morning because I totally forgot all the anti-hangover tricks (drinkin water etc) before I went to sleep. It's easy to spot the dehydration when you wake up to a massive headache.

Back to work

As I'm no longer "unfit for work", the alarm went off at the usual 4:45 am this morning and I had to get to work. Thank god this is my last week and there's only two working days left. After that I'll have about one week of free time. The university basically starts on the first day of September but the first two weeks are basically an introductory phase for the freshmen, the actual courses begin on the third week of September.

I've volunteered to be a guide for our department's freshmen so in theory my school starts on the first too. In practice it's probably going to be just some light tour guiding around the campus, answering common questions and boozing in the "let's get to know each other"-happenings.

I have a student apartment near the university campus but I had to move out of it this summer because the Wolrd Championships in Athletics were held in Helsinki this year and the athletes were accommodated in our apartments. So there's going to be some annoyance as I have to move all my stuff back there.

Crocodiles to the rescue

I ran into a post on Slahdot telling there's a story on Reuters about researchers that've found out the crocodiles' immune system fights and kills HIV a lot better than the humans'. Now they believe the crocodile blood could be used to develop better antibiotics against HIV and such. Sounds good but as usual it might take years to actually get something out of it. How do I get this feeling that there's often news about new ways to fight HIV or cancer but then nothing's heard of them after the initial news. Well I can't say I've followed the news of that area closely at all so maybe there really is progress happening, it's not like there will suddenly be some universal antidote to cure everything.

Nothing important happened today (to me)

I'm going to keep this short, just about to hit the bed. Had a most uneventful day, I stayed inside the whole day, still on sick-leave, which is good because I'm not feeling that well after all yet. I watched Garden State on DVD, it was pretty good, cheered me up.. I'm in love with Natalie Portman. I also finished the Monster-book I mentioned yesterday and started to read Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld which is this beautifully illustrated and laid out book on the history of Macintosh and the people involved in its development. I've basically never used a Mac or an Apple but after the release of OS X I've become more and more interested in getting one but so far the prices have kept me away from them.

I haven't really done anything productive during this leave, I always feel kind of guilty if I don't do anything useful or productive, which is a bit irritating, would be nice to just relax once in a while. I think I'll try to figure out which courses and such to take in the university this fall tomorrow.

Reading up on gangbanging

Still had a little fever last night before going to bed and spent several hours rolling in the bed sweating and shivering in turns so I decided to skip work today and make an appointment with the "company physician" or the medical center that the firm has a deal with. Anyway I got two more day sick leave even though I don't have fever anymore. It's pretty nice because I'm still not feeling exactly healthy and I now have a doctor's proof that I'm "unfit for work". There's a funny foul up with the health certificate that the doc printed out. The form was a bit off in the printer and it ended up with the Yes-boxes checked in "An aide was required on the way in" AND "on the way out" instead of the No-boxes. The boss probably thinks I was dying or something.

I've almost finished reading Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member by Sanyika Shakur. It offers pretty grim but interesting insight to what the whole gang scene really is after all the Hollywood movies and series, totally out of control. Wouldn't want to be born there but then again, there's no much control over that either.

I have personalize this blog a bit, maybe just a self made header image but something that makes it more mine. If I can gather the motivation..

Down with the sickness

So I did get sick. I went to sleep soon after the last post and woke up in the the middle of the night to some extreme pain everytime I swallowed. This went on for a while and then relieved a bit but I could already feel the fever hitting me, starting to freeze and sweat in periods. I got up sometime after noon to get at least some nutrition but basically fainted and collapsed, I'm guessing due to low blood pressure. Not a pleasant experience.

So I didn't go to work on Saturday and I'm now wondering if I'm healthy enough tomorrow or should I go see a doctor to get some sick-leave.

Enough about me. I found this post about a cool automatic door technology from Japan on Gizmodo. The door is composed of numerous horizontal strips which all slide open individually just enough that the person walking in can fit through. This is supposed to keep the dust, bugs and such from getting inside. Check out the pictures and the video to get a better idea. Looks really sci-fi. Wouldn't try to run through one very fast though, as you can see at the end of the video, the guy has some trouble getting his head through it.

Really witty title here

Damn, my sleeping rhytm is really twisted now and on top of that I feel like I'm getting a cold or something. Woke up at around 3:00 am today because we'd planned to work a bit overtime with a workmate to make up for this week's lunch hours in order to milk every cent off this Satuday's work. This weekend is the only one this summer to have work, there used to be much more in the previous years. Anyway the day went surprisingly well but as expected, as I got home the sleepy bug hit me.

It's funny how time on the other hand flies really fast when you're sleeping but on the other hand as I set my cellphone to wake me after an hour but woke up to some noise after about 40 minutes of sleep, it felt like I'd slept for hours. Anyway I ended up sleeping for about an hour and a half, always setting the wake up call a bit farther. After waking up I felt more dizzy than usual if possible, now my nose is running and I'm having that that nasty feeling you have before the flu or cold really hits.. just great. Wonder if I'm gonna be able to go to work tomorrow.

Not much to say today.. well I do but I'm really lacking the motivation due to the above, I'll try to post more the following days.

Work from six to two

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have a pretty lousy summer job. I won't go in to the details but it's basically order processing ie sitting at a terminal and typing in what customers want. It's extremely repetitious and boring. My biggest dislikes are the early wake ups and that the job is so simple that there's no room for creativity, I'd really like something to keep my mind sharp.

The regular morning shift starts at 6:00 am so I have to get up at about 4:45 am so that I can take a shower, eat breakfast and get to the train in time. For some reason the train schedules are really stupid so a trip that would normally take about 15 minutes, takes more like 35 minutes of which 20 minutes is spent sitting in a stopped train car. The schedules were just fine last summer but for some reason the rail company changed them at least on the route in use, but I guess they have their reasons and it helps some other routes.

Anyway I'm not really built for waking up so early, I go to sleep reasonably early (around 22:00-23:00, that's 10-11 pm) and although I manage to get up pretty easily in the morning, I get incredibly tired at home after work. This leads to taking naps after work which really fucks up my head and I can't really function for about an hour after waking up which consequently ruins the rest of the day.

The job is not all pain and misery, my boss an coworkers are all great people, pretty much the reason that keeps me there and there are probably way worse jobs out there. I'm also really in no position to complain because I'm there due to not seriously looking for a better summer job earlier this year. I initially got here in April of 2004 after my military service and worked all the way to September until my school started. Getting a summer job here this year was just a matter of e-mailing the boss so I had kind of unconsciously decided to slack off with the job hunting and come here. I've promised myself to really look for a better job next year..

I'm blogging this - so it begins

Perhaps I should introduce myself first. I'm a 21-year-old guy from Finland. I've always been interested in computers and have been studying computer science in Helsinki University of Technology for a year now. I have a crappy for the summer job that has nothing in common with my interests so I'm pretty anxious to get back to school, which is something new. I've always hated the idea of going back to school after the summer, but university is finally something I actually like.

So I finally started my own weblog like so many others. I've been thinking about starting one for a while now but never really got to it before. I've worried and still worry that this will just denegerate to a boring "wen't to work / school, ate dinner, watched tv"-diary or that I'll soon lose interest and stop posting after few weeks or even days. Also one of my motives for blogging is to improve my written English because I haven't written in English much since grammar school (upper secondary school) and matriculation. So if someone actually reads this, feel free to point out errors and better ways to express what I'm writing.

My intent, at the moment at least, is to write about things in my daily life, mostly about my studies at the University when the fall term starts in September. I'll also be writing about miscellaneous news and stuff, mostly tech oriented, that interest me.