Only slightly bent

And pretty sneakily, too. When reading a Forrester Research report which pointed out that more and more people rely on webmail (as opposed to the e-mail provided by their ISP) as their primary e-mail, I suddenly realized I had long since made the transition without really being aware of it. I think it was back in 2002 that I last used my personal e-mail account(s) with a client-side e-mail application. Moreover, it has been over 5 years since I’ve used the ISP account for anything. Even when accessing my domains’ e-mails, I use webmail.

And why not? Using a desktop e-mail client, you’re often tied to one machine. Webmail, instead, moves with you wherever you go and is available from any machine, anywhere in the world. Nothing disappears when your laptop breaks. It’s not tied to your broadband provider. It doesn’t change when you switch employers. It’s not affected by academic affiliations. And the most critical aspect, usability, has advanced in leaps and bounds in the past years.

The next question is when will it go mobile without asking me?

The summer is over and fall is now on us. We’re approaching the best part of this season, with all the deciduous trees and plants turning from green to all hues of orange and red – and now when we still have daytime highs approaching +20C, the weather is really perfect fall weather. Of course it won’t last, but it’s nice to see that also September can be a thoroughly enjoyable month.

Below are some of the first impressions of fall from Helsinki:

There is also another, not as beautiful, sign of the changing seasons that will become more apparent in the coming weeks and months. It relates to the Finnish psyche and how the mood drastically shifts from the happy tones of summer to collective melancholy as the winter approaches. More on this when the time is right.

The fall is always a little quieter on the movie-front when other things start taking too much time. Nevertheless, a movie can be slipped in as relaxation every here and there, so below is the latest review round.

Kissing Jessica Stein: Jessica is a somewhat tight-assed single, straight and marginally sucessful journalist who decides due to various reasons that she is, in fact, attracted to women. This leads to a date with a woman who ends up being perfect for her – except that Jessica is quite heavily loaded with inhibitions as to what it is that she’s doing. Tearing down those and eventually “coming out of the closet” is a Big Thing for her and patience is asked from all other parties involved. One could’ve made a pretty good movie with the plot, but it didn’t quite reach the level it could’ve. It does have interesting scenes and produced a few laughs, but was lacking something. Maybe it was the overly neurotic role & acting by Jennifer Westfeldt as Jessica or something else, but all in all I’d give this one 2½ out of 5.

Our Italian Husband also had a promising plot: a man is discovered to being married to two different women and they suddenly learn about each other. I mean cases like this pop up every now and then in real life too, so there was potential.

But instead of fulfilling any of that potential, the movie was really quite bad. Shot and acted in a very restless fashion, the plot never really reaches any depth and the characters all really seem very simple in their unique ways. With acting and the plot sub-par, nothing exciting came out of the movie. 2- out 5.

Hauru no ugoku shiro aka Howl’s Moving Castle or Liikkuva Linna in Finnish was a pleasant change of genre compared to the above and I hadn’t seen any Japanese animation for a while. I got some tickets to the Finnish premiere a week ago so I obviously had to go see this one, despite the fact that it had, of all things, Finnish voiceovers! Not that it makes that big a difference for me as I can’t understand more than two words of Japanese, but still.. Anyway, the movie was introduced by the director of the dubbing effort and I was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Anyhow, the movie itself was very good. It’s a story about a magician, Hauru, who lives in a moving castle which is powered by a quite funny fire-demon and a young girl, Sophie, who ends up living in Hauru’s castle. At the core a love story / drama, the movie is guaranteed good work from Miyazaki. The sceneries are beautiful and the story-telling exquisite. The plot itself is quite easy to follow and at it’s core, nothing to write home about. But the end result is still great and the moral of the story, if you can call it that, quite appropriate. Definately recommended & I’ll give it 4 out of 5.

(Amazingly, Finnkino again manages to completely screw up the plot description..)

Heavenly Creatures is a strange story based on real events that took place in the 1950′s New Zealand. Two girls become friends and soon their friendship causes both to slip dangerously deep into the world of fantasy.. Not much more can be told of the plot without revealing too much, but it’s clear that neither the girls’ parents or the girls themselves are, well, playing with a full deck in all situations. Reality and fantasy eventually collide in more than one way. An interesting story that could’ve used a somewhat happier ending. 3 out of 5.

What if you…

• Enjoyed the good weather when we have it instead of complaining about the lousy weather?
• Tried to see the beautiful nature all around us, not the trashes?
• Bought a present for your friend instead of the newest vanity item?
• Thanked someone when getting good service instead of (or, hey, at least in addition to) complaining when you get bad service?
• Tried to enjoy the present, this day, this moment, instead of planning how great something will be when…?
• Were thankful for the big things that are good instead of whining for the small things that aren’t?
• Smiled at the next person you pass by instead of avoiding the eye contact or just looking depressed?

What if all this was not just wishful thinking?

What if doing all that for more than a moment was not so damn difficult?

I never before really caught on to the various circulating memes, but now that Heather specifically tagged me to do one, I suppose it’s only polite to answer the challenge. The original idea was to come up with seven things on different themes, but I figured that was too many so I reduced it to three things. (It’s like rule #1 of software engineering to change the specs if something is too hard to do otherwise..)

3 Things That Scare Me

• Letters from the Tax Administration or KELA
• Riding in a car with a reckless driver
• Human capacity for various kinds of destructive activities

3 Things I Like The Most

• Family and friends
• Most things having to do with water, especially large bodies of it
• Traveling and experiencing new things

3 Important Things In My Room (well, home)

• Connection to the Internet
• Cooking facilities
• Books

3 Random Facts About Me

• I haven’t owned a TV for years
• I’ve never been in Africa or South America
• I like to wake up strangely early nowadays

3 Things I Plan To Do Before I Die

• Travel to all the interesting countries in the world
• Learn a couple of new languages
• Change something for the better

3 Celeb Crushes

Hey, I’d have a hard time just naming three celebrities.. so crushes? No way.

3 Bloggers Whom I Wanna Pass This Thingy to

• Sarita
• Rowena
• IrieWoman

Surprisingly, the answer to that question is: the same amount as fits into your €0.001 MB that you pay for your broadband connection. Also, the second part of the answer is: not a lot.

Welcome to the bizarro-world of mobile packet data pricing. The vast majority of operators in the world still employ volume-based charging on a service that normal users have no way whatsoever to tell how much it’s going to cost: mobile packet data. Not only that, but compared to the real costs incurred, the prices charged in e.g. Finland are outrageous. While the call prices in Finland are among the cheapest in the world, data prices don’t exactly follow the same trend.

Trying to find something positive, at least in Finland the operators haven’t been restricting your access to the Internet for a while; they are content charging “only” the outrageous fees. But in many other parts of the world, this domain of mobile data is even more screwed up. This is a world where simple ideas such as – oh horror – letting users browse the Internet have been considered dangerously futuristic and unrealistic. Slowly but surely the walls of this strange behaviour are coming down, as witnessed by 3 UK opening up access to Internet web and wap-sites. Of course it’s still only the sites they want you to see, but still. On the other hand we’ve still got operators like T-Mobile who are having a very difficult time understanding that something as simple as open e-mail access is not evil.

The walled garden model of mobile operators is like the ancient BBS model, only without the regular links to other BBSs. It’s a model that even companies like AOL abandoned years ago. It’s about time these walls came crashing down.

Anyhow, when we finally do have unrestricted access to the Internet in addition to the walled garden services, a problem remains in both domains: pricing. And it’s not just about the high prices but also the understandability of pricing: the average subscriber has no clue how much different activity consumes data and thus, how much it costs. So below are some examples of just how much data various things consume and what the transfer charges alone would be at an illustrative €5/MB:

• Visiting a mobile-optimized text-only page such as http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/teksti/: 28KB, €0.14
• Visiting a single web page, for example http://www.mtv3.fi/uutiset/: 230KB, €1.12
• Downloading an mp3 song or watching a streaming news transmission for a few minutes: 3-5MB, €15-25
• Downloading a simple Java-game of which, btw, you’re also charged separately for the game itself: 500KB: €2.5 just for the joy of getting the thing you just bought.
• An e-mail with a simple attachment: 300KB: €1.5

Now if the operators advertised the 3G services like that , I wonder if people were so interested in the new services anymore..