mostly personal, notes on the road
stuck in snowstorm
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Even though Finland is a northern country, our climate is one of the steady ones. Thus, when a snowstorm hits the country, it is something of a spectacle. Irritated, bemused, thousands of Finns struggle today to access their meetings or seminars (me supposedly heading for Ubicom in Espoo) as the physical infrastructure suddenly stops functioning. Nature strikes back?
I have recently updated my dear DVD movie collection pages (maintained with Collectorz.com Movie Collector software, handy for its Internet database integration search functions), and the public index is here:
http://www.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/movies/
Having some kind of search in this folder is important when I try to check some details of my collection while on the road, but it appears that search is not easy, at least, not in this case. I have attempted using some javascript search functions, and then moved to use the Google search, which almost always works, more or less. But now, for some reason, this folder remains outside Google’s index (even if their robots should reach it just fine), or then there is something else wrong in my search page…
Edit: I worked with the Movie Collector and the Aqua Frames template a bit more, and now the javascript version of search is working. There remains some issues with the template, though.
Some nice wine (L’alpha du Château Peyfaures, Bordeaux Supérieur Rouge 2002) and a dinner at home tonight. There has been also a board game evening over here, sampling some classics, ranging from the ancient African Kalaha to Blokus, a board game variant reminiscent of games in the Tetris family. Quite nice; even if I continue to have some issues with this WordPress install (it insists on making internal references of uploads into /blog directory, rather than /fransblog — an irritating configuration error that I am not able to track down right now.)
This Saturday we did an improvised trip to the Ähtäri zoo. Generally zoos can be rather depressive places with all those animals kept in captivity, but at least in Ähtäri there is a rather vast forest area to explore (for all those tourists, at least). You can even spend a night with animals, since apparently if you go in and get your ticket before 4 pm, you can stay there as long you want to, eat your provisions, and wait and see how the daylight-shy animals gradually wake up and come out. It was a fascinating spectacle to follow. This shot is a close-up of a baby snow leopard we met (the parents Väinö and Shakira got a litter of two this spring) — a rather playful little fellow, and unquestionably one of the cutest things on earth.
harvest moon
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Thanks to my sister, I became a farmer, growing a blackberry bush on my balcony. Hot summer, but it survived – harvest time!
After some weeks of installation (this has not been exactly a simple process), I decided to replace my old Blogger blog today with this shiny, new WordPress one.
There were numerous curious (read: linux-esoteric) traps in the my WordPress installation, many of them related to the half-documented manner WordPress is currently integrated with the Ubuntu Linux distribution I am using. So, even if this has many advanced features and is very expandable with numerous different themes and plugins, I am still uncertain whether I can recommend WordPress for a more casual user. Certainly, having an account in www.wordpress.com should be straightforward enough, but if you consider setting up WordPress into your own server, with the associated Apache, PHP and MySQL configuration issues, I recommend you consider once again. (Many thanks for Nikke in sorting my troubles out!)
The UPS courier brought today my FON router (I think the price of shipping was actually more than double the price of the €5 router), and after some tweaking, this is now written wirelessly, as a proud member of the world-wide FONero community. Cheers! However, more fellow Linuses would clearly be required to make this genuinely useful, rather than just philosophical or ethical investment. 475 users in a country as large and sparsely populated as Finland is not much. But now there is 475 + 1. See: fon maps: Finland.
One of my recent uploaded pictures in Flickr of summer travelling with TomTom GO 710; and related to my considering whether to install WordPress, or to continue using Blogger.com — the other has more features, but can you achieve similar integration with Flickr and other services? Don’t know, have to study.
Vising the 2006 Housing Fair in Espoo during the week-end, I almost got an overdose of expensive, modern design. It seems that a modern house is build around kitchen and home theatre with a flat-screen television or video projector. It also appears necessary to have a working room in the home so that work life can continue also when not officially in work. Tells something about the direction our lifestyles are taking?
I am spending most of this summer immersed in a book project, so there are few notes into this forum. I hope though that during the fall I am able to post more information about its progress; now just the title: “Introduction to Game Studies.”
frans goes blog 
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