Once more: a great party. Tonight the University of Tampere celebrates its graduates. Evening in the great hall now has a distinctive feeling of a family event, academia opening its doors once for families and the surrounding society in general. Congratulations, Laura!
Category: personal diary
mostly personal, notes on the road
tv trip, thunderbird config
Another night in a hotel. At some point it was actually fun to be in a (relatively) clean room, where someone else takes care of your laundry. But the anonymity and rootlessness finally gets you. I am supposed to talk about games and simulation in national television (MTV3 morning show) tomorrow, and for those five minutes it was necessary to make two two-hour train trips, and spend a night in a hotel. (Added irony, BBC World show ‘Business Traveller’ just displays images captured from Rovaniemi, my old home town at the Arctic Circle. Things and people displaced, in a complex dance of matter and some mind.)
I am currently trying out Mozilla Thunderbird as the default email program at my work laptop. After years of working with MS Outlook, the simple act of transferring my contacts, mails and filtering rules into this other program is not so simple. Thunderbird crashed almost at the very start. After sacrificing perhaps 95 % of my correspondence archives (I still count on having a backup copy at my home PC), I got this Mozilla thing running. It has its benefits, I admit: it is not as heavy as that enourmous bloatware of Outlook, and it mostly does well those things you expect from a mail program. But there are some stupidities, too. Everyone with a laptop inevitably will also have to use several outgoing mail servers (SMTP). There appears to be no drop-down menu in the compose new message window that would allow you to select among those you have; there is only the tortuous process of going into the advanced mail account settings – and you have to do this every time you move from context to another! I am currently looking into Thunderbird add-ons (extensions), whether someone in this happy family of open-source software would have come up with a solution to this issue. But during the Tampere-Pasila train travel, Thunderbird was having numerous hiccups (endlessly trying to copy all sent messages into ‘Sent’ folder, without success, perhaps because of the breaky GPRS connection, even if it should be able to work off-line perfectly – and I even do not want to have outgoing messages copied into the Sent folder: I want them in those project folders I originally started to write that reply message!)
This is perhaps again one of those boring techno-rambles, sorry; but for a person whose work is extremely dependent on online tools, and email most of all, the decision over the email program is something that will have a major impact later on.
birthdays, parties
Yesterday, I escaped for a moment, skipping the second day of Kulttuurintutkimuksen Päivät, and took a train to Jyväskylä. Kanerva had a great party, fine gifted people with impressive music and theatre — million thanks! There are far too seldom
moments that are just dedicated to being together, and enjoying life. If you have some opportunity, anything, to throw a party, to yourselves, family, friends: grasp it! 
pot of honey?
Lagavulin is one hard whisky to find, for some reason. Similarly, it appears that a mobile data application that actually works is a rare beast indeed. This is sent with a Nokia 6600 cameraphone with its internal email client, via Saunalahti (operator), into Flickr mail-to-blog service, which automatically posts it into Blogger, which uploads these pages into my personal server via SFTP. Still cannot really believe the damned thing works…
home again
Today is 6th of December, Day of Independence and public holiday in Finland. It feels really good just to be home, see the snow-covered landscape. We even have a small christmas tree already. There are also some pictures from the IPerG Commission review in Bonn, and DAC 2005 in Copenhagen that are now online.
stopping for a moment in dac
Another busy travel week: trains, airports, cars. Lecture halls, computers, sudden flash of blue sky and then again, underground. Sounds of trains, receding.
Some thoughts were passing by, around mid-week. Now there is flu, ache in joints. Articulations never really fully meeting with their function.
Digital Arts and Culture 2005 conference in Copenhagen has its own wiki, it is interesting to sit here in this event, and see it being adapted (translated) into words and images, collectively, as moments pass.
Very fitting to the themes of the conference, digital aesthetics, experience, design and practice. But I found myself thinking about how this kind of developments will lead into increasing multitasking. Already, many are reading their emails in meetings rather than sharing the same thought-space (even if nominally the physical space). But I am also hopeful, paradoxically, as people not interacting with each other in face-to-face level might actually learn about something about each other in these alternative layers of (non-)presence with these familiar strangers. After all, blogging or making wiki notes during an event might create a larger collaborative space, make some links between interests, ideas, individuals and institutions more visible than would otherwise be likely. Or not?
gonzalo roadshow; picoblogger failing
This Tuesday, Gonzalo Frasca visited us to make his Games and Storytelling lecture on serial micro-games. I even took a nice picture with my Picoblogger of our Game Research Lab team with him, before the local Eastern Orthodox Church. But but: this time it is Picoblogger failing me. And despite installing new Bluetooth software and trying to hack into the memory of my Nokia 6600 camera phone, it seems that I am unable to get into that picture before Picoblogger decides to work again. And they do not answer my mails or web form inquiries — is there something wrong with them, or is this just normal?
Meta-note: I have been told that inordinate amount of my blog space is dedicated to whining about dysfunctional technology, and I do agree. The point being that as long as these tools, hardware and software, do not work even in the hands of a one who actually even enjoys some minor tweaking with one’s systems, how can it ever reach out and become a truly popular and mainstream phenomenon? The problems are still just too large: unreliability, non-compatibility and un-usability are there, to counterbalance all these fascinating possibilities new technologies and media offer us.
life, and life in WoW; Blogger failing again
My working life and other such trivial things have been getting into my way, and keeping me from spending all my time in World of Warcraft, like any proper MMORPG addict should do. I have realised that you actually do need some hours of sleep too (at least if you are closing on to your fortieth birthday, like I do). But the design of WoW is not ideal for such concerns. Many quests are structured to be achieved by teamwork, and social collaboration and joint adventuring with your friends is that little thing which makes all the difference between mindless grinding or endless running through of FedEx quests. But what to do, when you are falling behind in experience, due to spending less time in that achievement-rewarding environment? At some point it becomes apparent that you are so much lower in levels that it is not worth hanging in the same adventuring party any more.
We have been investigating “socially adaptable game design” within IPerG with Interactive Institute, Nokia and other partners, and the ability to stop and return to game as needed, without social punishment is one important criteria to consider.
And now I just have to run; I am severely behind in all those 20 quests that my quest log can hold…
Edit: Actually my Saturday night was spoilt by Blogger.com. I tried three hours to post these notes, reloading the screen, and only getting message “Error. We apologize for the inconvenience, but we are unable to process your request at this time. Our engineers have been notified of this problem and will work to resolve it.” Or the even more common variant: “Not Found. Error 404.” And I had only reserved three hours to use for online access, total, so there was my adventuring time, gone. Apparently they are upgrading their network access in Blogger.com this Saturday; it is just unfortunate that you get no such explanation when you are trying to use the service. – I have just got so tired of Blogger, there has been too many of this kind of incidents lately. But the move into Movable Type or similar system would in practice mean that I’d also have to do the transfer into a Linux server (because of PHP, Perl, MySQL, and similar basic services, that I can currently do without, running all from this Windows XP Pro machine). Surely, that could be done, but I just do not have the time; already, the hours used for debugging technology and these unreliable network services are just taking way too much time. (Update: It is now 4 am – the case closed.)
greyness and colour in november
Autumn is getting very gloomy here, indeed. We were out today, and at early afternoon in Armonkallio (a nice, old district in Tampere, really), it was as dark and wet as you can see in these pics. Luckily, there was Emma’s second birthday party also, so we got some colour and cake in our life from there. Some of the birthday pics are in here.
epos experiments, nvidia power trouble
My curious experiment in connecting a pair of hi-fi speakers with really cheap amplifier moved forward today, as I got my pair of M5s. With their polished cherry-tree, hand-made feeling they are easily the most beautiful thing I have possessed. No doubt serious high-end is something else completely, but I am happy for my ignorance. Experimenting with some nicely produced CDs (Pink Floyd, Chris Rea, some classics and other acoustic music), I finally conclude that it is not so much the T-Amp (which seems to be doing surprisingly good work) but the portable CD player I have hooked up in this bedroom extravaganza. Finally, I will give up and dig my old “heavy” system out of hibernation and plug the M5s with a decent mid-range amplifier, and hi-fi LP & CD player set (NAD & Sony). It is not only the sound quality though; the mobile equipment are designed primarily for battery use, and using them regularly indoors will conclude plugging in couple of power converters, and without remote controls, the usability just isn’t up to it. Nice experiment, though.
My other week-end operation was replacing my old PC power source with Antec TruePower 2.0 ATX 430W. But I ran out of power connectors: the Nvidia GeForce/3D Blaster 5600 FX Ultra I use seems to require its own dedicated 12V power cable, and I ran out of 12V connectors – the other free cables in Antec are SATA connectors, I suppose. Wonder if there is an adapter to use them for connecting regular 12V CD-ROM and DVD-ROM units? And the original problem remains, despite this power source update: I am constantly kicked off from WoW and other games by the Nvidia “sentinel” which claims to do this to protect the graphics card, “because it cannot get enough power”. Well, it got its dedicated cable from Antec now, and I have even plugged off all CD-ROM and DVD-ROM units for debugging this — how much more power can it demand! I am coming to suspect this is some kind of bug. Perhaps the 5600 Ultra’s bios needs to be flashed… but where to get a new bios? Questions, questions. And this is just a weekend in a life with IT.
frans goes blog 
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