mostly personal, notes on the road
Beneath
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
This has been an exceptionally warm winter over here, after an exceptionally hot and dry summer. Today, walking in Hatanpää area I took some photos, and as you can see here, the power of cold is returning. I like the visual qualities of ice, and looking through it, into the frozen world that is waiting, trapped, until next summer, is somehow magical.
The first Wii experiences have been predominantly positive: the physical play style and basic sensory technology actually seem to work well. The remaining troubles have been either technical limitations or user errors. I will explain here one of my own from the latter category, so that others with same issue might get help quicker than I did.
Wii manual explains how to connect your controller (“Wiimote”) with the console by pressing the sync button simultaneously both in the remote and in the console. The trick is to press both buttons only once; somewhere I had got an idea that you need to keep those two buttons pressed down until the controller tells it has synced. That is wrong, and a bad idea. I ended up spending one or two hours pressing buttons for minutes without successful synchronization. The Wii console was of course inaccessible for all that time, which was not very happy situation — I was already calling help lines and was ready to send my brand new console back and order a new one.
Laura saved my day by pointing out that both two controllers sync perfectly if I just stop my futile attempts in keeping the sync buttons pressed down, and just press them once. Oh dear.
Another irritation is the lack of S video or component video cable from Wii (coming to Europe some time next year; out of stock in Japan). And I cannot get Dolby Surround sound out into my amplifier, even when both console and game (Zelda) advertise to support surround. But Wii Sports was really enjoyable, even sweaty. And Zelda Twilight Princess has the right kind of magic in it. It actually reminds me from both WoW, Fable and Beyond Good and Evil, which are among my favourites as far as contemporary RPG style adventures are concerned.
(I discuss this also in the global group blog I participate in: http://topics192.blogspot.com/2006/12/finnish-independence.html). There was again some really great fireworks in the central square of Tampere today, to celebrate the Finnish Day of Independence; this is also my first YouTube video — what a masterpiece! 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiHWn7OoNQM
(YouTube video embed code does not work with WordPress, but I attempted to install “MyTube” plugin, and embed the video below using it:)
TiHWn7OoNQM
SingStar performance in Pikkujoulut-2006
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
SingStar is a karaoke-style, singing game for PS2 that fits perfectly in a party or other social settings. Our department staff had the “Pikkujoulu” (Pre-Christmas party) night yesterday and this game was of course part of the fun. Other photos can be found in Flickr at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/tags/hypermedialaboratorio/
I have been trying to tie in all the various areas of digital media, games and online services where I have invested portions of my digital identity. One step to such a direction would be to have a working photography–blog integration, that I have been trying to achieve by installing FAlbum (by RandomByte). As you should currently see from the main page of this blog, the “Random Photos” sidebar element should now work (“Recent Images” function did not really work; it seemed to skip most of my photos). And in the /photos/ sub-page also rest of the Flickr integration is otherwise functional, but the WordPress theme that I have breaks apart — the stylesheet does not work, and the FAlbum installation instructions do not exist for fHeaven template that I have based my design upon. Take a look at:
falbum:installation_instructions [RandomByte]
Flickr Tag Cloud for all my photos
(the Scandinavian characters break down, for some reason…)
Mikko Lehtonen’s half-centennial seminar
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Professor Mikko Lehtonen, one of the leading figures in Finnish cultural studies turned recently fifty (congratulations!) and the network of colleagues and students had edited a book (Tutkimusten maailma – “The World of Studies”) and organised yesterday a seminar to congratulate him, and to stop for a moment to celebrate the growth of this interdisciplinary field. In the attached shot professors Hanna Suutela, Anu Koivunen and Seppo Knuuttila ponder; other speakers included Kaarina Hazard, Sanna Kivimäki and Teemu Taira. And of course Mikko himself, who decided to confuse everyone in the end by reading a work-in-progress paper that discussed the need for non-substantive, more process-oriented cultural studies (if I understood him at all correctly).
Today was another busy day; meetings and then a quick trip into Helsinki, where I presented with Sonja Kangas on the social dimensions of digital gaming. The event was organised by the Finnish importer of PlayStation, and thus the PS2 party games (SingStar, Buzz etc.) were on the main focus in that sponsor part of the presentations. SingStar is actually rather fun: we tried that out some time ago with the Finnish “Legendat” version. I proved to be even worse singer than I had suspected. In Finland the pre-Christmas party tradition is quite active and this kind of performance oriented games are at their best in such (suitably relaxed) party setting. Pikkujoulut, here we come…
There were some serious problems with the network settings of unet.fi server — hopefully this temporary connection will work for now. I have ordered a new, business ADSL connection from a small local ISP (WLANnet), hopefully I can actually get from some service from them (knocking wood). But since they need to order the copper connection from Elisa, it can take three weeks before this transition happens.
dark falls
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Now that rain has melted away the snow cover, it is apparent that we have entered ‘marras’, the season of death. Dark falls, tiny lights are set up to fight its domain, only accenting its depth.
window into winter
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
I was invited to participate in this global blog where people around the world write about their daily life:
http://topics192.blogspot.com/
In classic Finnish spirit, I used the opportunity to nag about the weather (only the British compete with Finns in their passion to discuss weather, as far as I know). And with this apparent climate change, there are obvious reasons to pay attention to what is going on in this blue-and-green planet of ours.
frans goes blog 
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