Lavonardo

The 2004-2007 restoration project has now gone on for about two weeks. And it has thus far accomplished a year’s retrieval of posts from the lost bookshelves of history.

The first year requires the least amount of manual work - there’s not that many photographs, cunning visual effects or pretty much anything beyond good old plain text and links.

Hopefully though the forthcoming years submit to being semi-automatically imported. Even if the engine is able to gulp an RSS feed of appropriate entries, there are still details that need to be edited (like categories, which the mechanism doesn’t seem to be able to convert on the fly).

There’s been a considerable amount of broken links in the first 320-odd entries. I’ve fixed some, but some seem gone forever.

In addition I thought about adding a director’s commentary-equivalent sidetrack to some of the entries. Though on some I find it rather hard to figure out what exactly I was thinking (and those are not only the entries written under the influence of hefty medication during the epic flu of february 2005).

So, twelve months in, 34 to go. It’ll be a while.

My trusty n95 all of a sudden has lost all functionality in four of its keys, which pretty much renders it useless when it comes to writing messages.

While the “left” and “up” can be replaced by careful applications of the other directions, the losses of the “1″ and “8″ are quite daunting.

Considering that it’s a rare message indeed that sports neither “t” or “u” amongst the letters used, it’s likely that this phone will need professional attention tomorrow.

I should obviously be reachable using the old number, no matter which phone is used, but no communication latency-barriers are likely to be broken unless I get a decent replacement.

Noux (or Nuuksio, as it’s known in finnish) is the nearest national park to Helsinki. It was established in 1994, and embarrassingly enough it took me fourteen years to visit it. The day spent there was pleasant indeed, and I’m willing to bet that the next visit will happen with a much shorter interval.

The day was pretty much clouded over. Which was good temperature-wise, but not so good when it comes to photography. But it didn’t rain at all, which was a definite bonus.

There are three paths of varying length in the park, but we pretty much ignored all of them, and just walked randomly (unlike me, the others were veterans of the park). The lake highlands were good for variety - from trampling through mossy marshland to crossing faster by walking on the crest of a cliff.

Didn’t spot the emblem of the park, the rarely sighted flying squirrel, but saw my first ever red-throated divers (that’d be kaakkuri, the closest relative of kuikka, in finnish). Also sighted and shown here: plenty of lingonberries, fancy looking lichen, and a really big and bright green grub.

The ever-mutating quick-loan ads are a constant menace in media and public transport.

I just never realized just how many of the companies are currently operating in Finland. And considering that this is not an authoritatively official list, the truth is probably far uglier.

Just stay away, unless the idea of 20%+ interest rate actually appeals.

Tommi Evilä failed to qualify.

Meh. I was looking forward to a decent show of defiancy later on.

Participated in A List Apart’s Survey. Not that I’m actually working in the target segment or anything, but this time they catered for hobbyists as well.

Upon somewhat well-deserved abuse heaped on to this blog due the heft of the previous theme, I changed to a more minimalistic affair.

The main visible change is the lack of a randomized header image, but I’m pretty sure that the selection wasn’t really attracting anyone here. The other big change is the fluid nature of the layout - certainly a change from the exactly 900 pixels wide design previously.

This is Fluid Blue by Srini. The CSS seems to be simple and pleasant, and only a couple of changes were needed to facilitate the layout choices undertaken previously.

The theme doesn’t contain support for asides, so installed asideshop to take care of the shorter posts. I’m not truly happy with their layout yet. And all in all, I’ll probably get rid of the entry-specific timestamps.

Please report mistakes, design oddities and any resistance to change as comments or via e-mail.

EDIT 16.8.2008: OK, so the asideshop is not really working. Time to fix the aside-ness of an entry within the theme itself.

EDIT 16.8.2008, like, later: The asides should now work as expected.

I’ve written many articles about the forthcoming Guns n’ Roses album.

Its arrival has moved towards believable a couple of notches lately:

• Shackler’s Revenge, a song to be featured on Rock Band 2, has been leaked.
• A believable cover image has also been leaked.

Whether these leaks mean that the album actually will be released any time soon is, as usual, completely unknown.

[ via Schizoblog. ]

Frotz is now available in the App Store. Not yet enough to push towards purchasing an iPhone. But definitely an additional attraction factor for iPod Touch. Which is good, since the nano’s center button started to act up today.

My Cup of T is a blog-savvy new t-shirt shop in downtown Helsinki.

Which is so going to get checked out soon.

Step one towards recovery is acknowledging your addiction.

And man, I am addicted to the finest show on television, the Wire.

Having just finished off the fourth season off a dvd, it’s time to bite the bullet and buy the last season on its day of arrival. Obviously this means that I’ll break my habit of buying the scandinavian releases, but the publisher already changed the format of the box, so the layout of the shelf is already ruined.

The fourth season adds yet another aspect of the city into the volatile mix. Schools. And schoolkids. And while the introduction feels awkward at first, it’s woven into the arcing plotlines excessively well.

But what on earth has happened to McNulty, the guy who basically wrote the book on epic bingeing. Domesticated? Or just biding his time for a display of drunken disorderliness that reaches biblical proportions.

And do check out the three “prequels”, various characters seen before maturing into the forms on the show: Proposition Joe, 1962, McNulty and Bunk, 2000, Omar, 1985.

A month before the release of Death Magnetic, Metallica played a new track at Ozzfest. Unsurprisingly, youtube is full of amateur takes.

Here’s one:

[ via roklintu. ]

Jari Litmanen, the greatest player ever to wear the finnish jersey, is back.

And with two goals scored in the massacre of KuPS, this bodes well for an interesting tail end of the season.

Cosmic Variance has published a nice list of things the soon (official word is 10.9.2008) to be started Large Hadron Collider in CERN may discover and/or cause.

The Higgs boson weighs in at 95% probability, while proof of string theory and generation of black holes are not so likely.

Saw Neil Young in Hartwall Arena on thursday.

I’ve seen the artist previously once, in 2001, touring with Crazy Horse. Based on the name of the band on this tour “Electric Band”, I expected the same kind of growling guitars and harsh treatment of the audience’s ears. That didn’t happen, the proceedings were on the mellow side, with song selection avoiding the rockiest bits.

As far as I know, the thursday’s concert served as the launching board of a completely new song, which was not named, hence the quotes below.

The set list (courtesy of Sugar Mountain):

Love And Only Love
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
I've Been Waiting For You
"Singing A Song Won't Change The World" (?)
Spirit Road
Cortez The Killer
Cinnamon Girl
Oh, Lonesome Me
Mother Earth
The Needle And The Damage Done
Unknown Legend
Helpless
Heart Of Gold
Old Man
Get Back To The Country
Words
No Hidden Path
//
A Day In The Life

The stage setup was simple, the only surprising element was the use of song-specific paintings on an easel on the right edge of the stage.

Apart from the No Hidden Path, the songs were executed quickly - the last song of the regular set turned into a fifteen minute jam. The encore was a new take on a Beatles classic.

The concert was fully seated, even the people on the ice had benches. Unlike the 2001 gig, the ushers seemed to enforce seating, and there was no rush towards the stage.

von Hertzen Brothers served as the warm-up act, and filled their thirty minutes effectively.

T-shirts were expensive at 30€, and the vendors had a hard time dealing with people paying with plastic. The lines stretched almost unbearably as the machinery slowed down the transactions.

Missed the annual Hiroshima anniversary on Töölönlahti this year completely.

So no pictures of pieces of styrofoam holding candles that sail into the dusk this time around.

Finally went ahead and updated the engine to the newest version. Complain in comments or via e-mail if things seem wrong, misplaced or uglier than usual.