mostly personal, notes on the road
Here are some of my speaking engaments in November / luentovierailuja marraskuussa.
• 19.11. 20 min esitys ”Informaatiokone ja ihminen” Turussa
• 22.11. 45 min esitys, johdanto ”Pelien kulttuurit”, Pelit ja sosiaalinen media-seminaarissa, Tampereen yliopisto
• 25.11. 1h luento ”Pelikirjasto vai kirjastopeliä?” Fellmanni-keskus, Lahti
• 29.11. 2h luento ”Muuttuvat muodot: Digitaalinen pelaaminen kulttuurissa ja yhteiskunnassa”, Pasilan kirjastossa
Näkemisiin, näissä tai muissa yhteyksissä!
Sure sign of summer: our garden work has begun again. I have e.g. operated our overgrown apple trees with a chain saw, washed away old paint and repainted (a bit hastily) all our wooden garden furniture, plus the terrace, then delivered sand, gravel and flagstones required by various paths and other constructions that look like becoming the main garden project of this summer. Here the foundation for a swing.
I decided to let go of the idea of using the Articles page as a work-in-progress writing platform (I never seemed to find that extra time to work on those article drafts). Instead, I have now included links to some recent published articles by myself and those co-authored with others in to this page (https://fransmayra.fi/articles/). There is a longer list available here: http://www.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/publications.html
(This event will be in Finnish.) Puhun tämän vuoden Tieteen päivillä kahdessa eri sessiossa, molemmissa “arki” yhteisenä nimittäjänä:
WordPress.com is appararently automatically generating this kind of status reports at the start of a new year of blogging:
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 9,400 times in 2010. That’s about 23 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 64 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 762 posts. There were 17 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 11mb. That’s about a picture per month.
The busiest day of the year was December 21st with 241 views. The most popular post that day was The most amazing 450 page presentation ever.
The top referring sites in 2010 were onegiantmedia.com, networkedblogs.com, unet.fi, uta.fi, and facebook.com.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for baby snow leopard, ipeng spotify, dr-bt50, digiscoping, and baby snow leopards.
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
The most amazing 450 page presentation ever December 2010
Enable Remote Desktop Connection on Vista Home Premium August 2007
593 comments
meeting with a baby snow leopard August 2006
8 comments
iPeng. iPhone. Spotify. And Squeezebox. August 2010
5 comments
Samsung N220 March 2010
14 comments
Year 2010 has been a truly busy one (I cannot really understand that it is almost over and that we soon will be living 2011 already). Apart from all the research activities (some of which we try to mention in gamelab.uta.fi), and the usual upheaval in university administration, law and organization (we are no longer part of the Finnish government), this year will go down in history as the one when the first graduates of Interactive Media finished their studies. Here are the names and the titles of the first three pro gradu theses that we accepted this fall:
Congratulations to everyone – three very good and interesting works!
Here are some random words, taken from the xml dump of this blog site. This looks pretty technical, eh? (It is the meta terms that repeat the most.) Looking back, it was in April 2004 when the first posts into this were written. So it becomes – what – seven years next spring? Seems I have missed the five-year celebration already…
There will be some game studies program in ‘Taiteiden yö’ event in Oulu this year. My own talk in Thursday Aug 26th will deal with games, ethics and effects (dealing with both the claimed positive as well as negative effects of games). The program is here: http://www.ouka.fi/kirjasto/Tiedote.asp?ID=15411
The academic year 2010-2011 starts officially only in September when the teaching starts. However, there is much going on already in August. I made an early start last week by lecturing in ‘Äidinkielen ja kirjallisuuden opetuksen foorumi 2010’ event (the literature and Finnish language teachers conference), where I argued (among other things) that we are moving in media technological terms more complex and ‘messy reality’, but that does not mean that traditional literacy skills and contents would suddenly become worthless. There does not really exist a separate and isolated thing called ‘multimedia literacy’, but rather an intermeshed complex of different skills, some of them related to images, some to text, but the skills of actively making media (and other materials our world offers us) our own, as well as interpersonal & communicational skills, become increasingly central for the future. – Link to the conference page: http://db3.oph.fi/koulutuskalenteri/ophtilaisuus.asp?ID1=1039
Television has its limitations, but it still remains unsurpassable as the big screen, social media for the living room. Television is also changing. It is perfectly possible to use your computer (even mobile phone) to sample video content from the internet, and the variety and quality of internet video is evolving all the time. Yet, combining lean-forward interactivity and lean-backward broadcast media experiences is not completely without its problems. It was interesting to notice that the first televisions with integrated internet video services have started to enter the market. Our choice was Sony KDL-40NX700 model. It is not one of the latest 3D models (Sony brought also some of those out during the summer), but it has rather decent image quality and I really like the way Sony has implemented the user interface. The best improvement to older televisions has proved to be Bravia Internet Video, which is Sony’s implementation of internet video into television. It provides Youtube and a load of other video sources (even one key Finnish one, YLE Areena) in an easily browsable, unified interface. Even HD video works fine, but a full HD video stream might lag and stutter for a moment if not paused for a moment for buffering the download. (We have a 8/2MB DSL connection, and television is connected using Wi-Fi, n+ standard modem.) Otherwise, with lower quality bitstreams, the video works surprisingly well.
The television was bundled with a blu-ray player, BDP-S470 model. These things have improved as well. Unsurprisingly, KDL-40NX700 and BDP-S470 work together excellently. Also, the player upscales DVD disks so fine that the difference to blu-ray is not so great. Happy for that. Shame though that it was impossible to get all key features in one device. For example, Sony has omitted a “presence sensor” system from NX line, even while you can find it from the EX models. Weird choice.
frans goes blog 
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