Only slightly bent

Yeah I know there’s been some stagnation in the air around this blog lately.. that’ll be fixed soon as vacation nears and thus more a) interesting stuff and b) stuff I can write about will start happening. Meanwhile, here are a couple of random thoughts from the past few days:

I don’t think that’s how they’re used

One day walking from the local railway station I could hardly believe my eyes. A guy in a wheelchair was happily rolling along – on the road and going against the traffic. Luckily there wasn’t much traffic, otherwise it would’ve ended badly. But still, the sidewalk was in perfect condition and he could easily have taken that instead of going on the road.

Maybe powered wheelchairs should also require driving licenses.

Instructions for dumb dog owners

A picture of a kiosk/cafe door in Katajanokka. One would think these signs are not necessary, but apparently – and sadly – they are.. The sign basically tells dog owners not to let their dog pee on the door but instead use the (nearby) dog park.

Here I was thinking that we “only” have a problem with people peeing in various improper places.

Big also in…?

This Peugeot car ad poster (no enlarged picture available, sorry) has got to be one of the dumbest ads I’ve seen. The tagline is “Suuri myös kooltaan”, which roughly translates to “Big also in size”. Also?! What else is big about it, the price? ’cause that’s the first (and only) thing that came to my mind..

Maybe it’s linked to some TV ad that I haven’t seen or maybe it’s some kind of sarcastic thing as the depicted car looks like it belongs to the compact-class..

Quality and Sodexho do not mix

Summer is a nice season for many reasons in Finland. One of them is that you can actually get good-tasting fruit at reasonable prices, many of them even domestically like strawberries etc. Bananas, however, come from elsewhere but the good thing about bananas is that you can get good bananas pretty much year round.

It seems our lunch cafeteria, Sodexho, has not been informed of this fact. This is what their selection looked like the other day – appealing, huh?

The above image is the weather forecast for the following few days in Helsinki. The weather has been great for the past week or so and it looks the same will continue. The forecast above is a more boring, but more informative, representation of the fact that summer has (finally) arrived to Finland than the below shots from the past couple of days:

Summer, at least when it’s as good as this, means that any time spent inside (like sitting at a computer and writing a blog) is officially put on the back-burner as activities like enjoying the weather take priority. It’s one of the curses of Finland – a moral imperative to be outside every single minute when the weather is good.

Whether all this has any effect on blogging frequency is uncertain; on one hand it reduces time available to write anything, but on the other hand being “out there” greatly increases the chances of running into anything noteworthy. In any case it seems that I’ve gotten lazy with writing this year. It used to be so that whenever I thought of something to write about, I wrote down a sentence or two immediately and then sometime later, when I had time, finished writing the actual blog post. Now it seems the sentence or two is as far as I get in the process, with ever-increasing pile of ideas but no time to write an actual post – and no one else to wrap them up for me either

And finally, the point of this otherwise entirely content-free post is to wish a happy summer for all the readers on the northern hemisphere!

By now everyone has probably noticed that Finland won the Eurovision song contest with a somewhat different performer than has been the case with the pop-competition earlier; Lordi.

Sadly, the advertisers have also noticed it and are now rampant in creating supposedly funny spin-offs of the winning song title Hard Rock Hallelujah. The first I noticed was Pepsi, who came out with the slogan “Hard Drink Hallelujah”, as can be seen in the photo here.


The next I saw was Esso (Exxon’s Finnish fuel station chain, of all places) with the ad here on the right. I’m not actually even sure what it referes to, but I guess it’s about hot dogs.

I wonder how many more are coming up before the advertisers and/or the companies realize that it’s a pretty lame idea.

Of course, if you believe the any publicity is good publicity-argument, the ads obviously work – and by writing this I’m adding to the success. If, on the other hand, they are actually trying to get some sales for their products, I hope they fail as miserably among the wider audience as they have failed with me.

After a bit over two years, it was time for a phone change. My previous phone was a Nokia 6600 sporting an early release of the Series 60 platform. I’d been relatively satisfied with it and as I’ve written earlier, lots of great software was available for it. But as time went by, it started lacking what was needed to be even near the cutting edge in mobile devices.

The new phone, Nokia N80, complete with WCDMA, WLAN, 3MP camera, a gigabyte of storage space etc. should bring me back a bit closer to that ever-elusive category of high-end mobile devices. Quite a few full-fledged N80 reviews have been written, so I’ll skip to things I consider good and not-so-good. With a few weeks of usage, the following are some of my main observations:

What could be improved

• Battery life is on the short side; it survives one day of normal usage, but not two – this is not a phone to take to places where you can’t plug it in for the night.
• Being an S60 3rd edition device, not much software is yet available for it. This should improve in time though, and most of what I need is already out there. The lack of good navigation software is however annoying.
• The camera, while 3MP, doesn’t have quite that many usable pixels, there is no autofocus and no zoom. And let’s not even get into the “lens” quality.

What I like

• The display. I simply love the high-resolution 352×416 screen which is easily readable under all lighting conditions.
• The new web browser; it does the job amazingly well and handles most websites very nicely. I think the mobile version of Opera has met its match.
• 3G and WLAN; it’s quite convenient to be able to surf the net over WLAN without having to rely on the cellular networks. On the other hand, when WLAN is not available but 3G is, things are quite nice over that, too. Definite improvement over GPRS for sure.
• The camera. Despite the shortcomings, it’s very usable for web-photography in particular. Having a decent camera like this always with you is a really, really good thing. The video quality, as you can see below, is not good enough for anything serious, but for a phone it’s not all that bad either.

Overall, it’s by far the best phone I’ve had and is something I’m quite excited about. While I already lust after the image and video quality of some of the upcoming models (like the N93), N80 should be “perfectly adequate” for some time to come.

Below are a couple of example images and one video clip taken with the phone. Clicking will open the full resolution version.

Disclaimer: I work for Nokia but the views expressed in this post or blog in general do not represent the views of my employer etc blahblahblah.

To get a running start to summer, we went to Paris for a short vacation a short while ago. During our time there, lots of myths were broken; for one, the French were not at all unfriendly or arrogant. And while Paris is seen as one of the fashion centers of the world, I found Parisians a lot more liberal and tolerant in terms of fashion than, say, the Milanese.

Relating to the previous post, we probably missed a lot of must-do and must-see things, but managed to fall in love with the city anyway. Besides this quick photo-tour, expect one or two posts about the food & such a bit later.

Returning home is often great regardless of how wonderful the trip was. Right now though, with no hot water and our inept maintenance company falling over itself and upcoming domestic minitrips, I wish I was in Paris.

Some more photos can be found from under the appropriate section in Photo galleries.