mostly personal, notes on the road
Bumblebee house
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
My birthday present this year: a bumblebee house. With its small colony of “kontukimalainen” (wonder what that species is in English?) these busy new neighbours of us will hopefully take care of visiting all the flowers in those fruit trees and berry bushes. Search for “pörrinpesä” if you are interested in getting your own.
Keeping your gaming PC up-to-date is always pain; tech is entering and exiting the market at such speed that state-of-the-art machine bought in January is out of date as the autumn comes. Investing into more memory and new generation graphics cards may help for a while, but eventually the entire system needs to be upgraded, again.
I used to build my own PCs; starting from the AT/286 generation (the first PC after leaving the trusty Commodore 64), tweaking memory in various varieties of 386 and 486, I have had my fair share of IRQ conflicts, motherboard-memory-processor compatibility issues, driver issues, overclocking and processor-burning experiences. No time for that any more.
Yesterday I did finally put in the order for my next PC. After not-so-thorough review round, I ended up getting the “Jimm’s Pro Gamer SE” setup from Jimm’s PC Store, who has profiled themselves as a gamers’ PC shop. The specks should be enough for a while at least: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2 GB of DDR2 memory, 500 GB disk, nVidia 8800GTS graphics card. The chassis is Cooltek Storm, with a 25 cm fan in the side — hopefully a silent and efficient cooling solution. At 1199 euros it still fits my budget, but I need to prepare for numerous software and possibly peripheral updates as well. The new primary operating system for this set will be Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (due to the gaming and media editing use), but a multiple OS setup is also an option. The delivery time appears rather slow though; they promised 1-3 weeks, and it might be that they are out of parts, so lets see how this finally works out.
Hermanni
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
This is Hermanni, a living cake that has been in our care for the last 10 days. My version was in the end spiced with banana chunks, hazelnuts and hazelnut chocolate pieces. Tasty! But I must admit that the principles behind this kind of chain letter cakes escape me — the dough is distributed from friend to friend, fed with sugars and then divided and fed again. And eventually you can put it in the oven and bake it. And eat. Supposedly it gets its yeast directly from the air or something?
Stiga Collector
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
One practical thing to consider in gardens is the lawn. Our aim is to have less grass and more “woodlands” or natural look in our yard, but still there will be more than enough grass. This morning was spent setting up Stiga Collector 46 S Combi, which we got after a lengthy comparison process. This is a compromise, of course. The professional, solid-body lawnmowers can cost 1000 euros or more. This one is not as sturdy in its construction and materials, but it has the right feature set: 3-in-1 cutting, collecting and bio-slicing functionalities. And since Stiga is coming from Sweden, you can trust Finnish stores providing spare parts and service for it also in the future.
Pinsiön taimisto
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.Another extremely busy week behind, and time to relax by doing something physical. This weekend we traveled to Pinsiön Taimisto, a nice plant and garden sale c. 12 km from Tampere. They have rather good collections of trees, bushes, various flowers and also garden path stones, gravel and sand. This is important as we move towards the next stage in the garden project (albeit planting all these trees requires some serious shovel-work, and we have much to do in the house project, too). Keeps you busy, and also better fit, I hope. Gardening is a nice counterpart to the digital life.
A new Angel in our aquarium
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Vappu was too cold to be outside, mostly. So we fixed places inside instead. We got some new fish, including four natural-coloured Angelfish in our aquarium and seeing how they took the moving (rather well, and in good spirits) was fun. More photos of fish, butterflies and babies in: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2007-05-01/
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
New owners of a garden, we are eagerly visiting greenhouses — this week in Honkasen Puutarha in Kangasala, which proved to be a real plant paradise.
One of the interesting things I have been playing with recently is the new Joost tv: an online, on-demand television style video service. It is rather easy to use, and even my old PC in downstairs almost manages to run it (time to upgrade, yep), but the content is the actual king here, of course. It has some anime, some very B-class science fiction, but the diversity seems to be increasing, so this system actually might have a chance. We’ll see.
Transit
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Location: Stockholm airport. I have written earlier about airports as particular kind of transitional spaces, comparing them to Limbo from Dante’s Inferno, among other things. This has been a busy day, starting with short talk about games and virtual worlds as “mafufactured realities” in a professional seminar in technical documentation (wonder how much the audience really got out of my talk, though?) Then I was commenting on Olli Sotamaa’s PhD thesis chapter in a graduate seminar in Media Culture. After that, busily to the airport, and happy to find that the SAS strike had not affected my connections, I am now on the road to Malmö in Sweden. We are having the kick-off meeting with some Nordic partners about a new games research project, titled Mobile Learning Environments (MLE). The use of games in learning is an interesting field, of course, even if I wonder how long it will take to really have the constructivistic spirit and emphasis on creative problem-solving that games excel in to take over a typical institution of formal learning — not to speak about things like using games to learn about games cultures, games literacy and games design, that they would be most immediatelly suitable for. My main concern currently is that structurally MLE is a typical contemporary response to the demands that this much-touted increased competition and international collaboration is bringing us: a large international and interdisciplinary consortium with a very moderate research grant and ambitious goals that quickly turn into the reality of tiny fragmented resources that are not enough to hire a full-time person (or not even a half-time one, in this case!) — and then there is the real threat that organising inter-partner communication and the administration will end up eating all resources the funding body (NICe) has granted us. Sad. Lets hope we can find ways to join this kind of interesting research extensions of our pervasive gaming work with some other initiatives to pool resources
Working on some book project deadlines this weekend, listening to ambient electronica — wonder if this Last.fm embed code for Air-type music would work here?
frans goes blog 
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